I wrote this as a sample for an AI program to use to make a video.

I thought it was pretty good, so I am preserving it here.

File it under the further adventures of my gay hardboiled detective.

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It was a hot thick drizzle that slid down the window pane in obscenely bloated drops and clung to the underside of anything horizontal as if daring gravity to try to make it drip onto the greasy pavement below.

It was the kind of hot, wet weather that makes you feel like you’re too large an animal in too small a cage and even the slightest of annoyances make you want to yowl like a baying hound at anyone or anything daring to come near.

The city was on edge. So was I. It often works out that way, somehow.

And that’s when he came in. Impossibly and immaculately beautiful, like something painted on a church ceiling by an exceptionally homosexual Renaissance artist. There was a otherworldly freshness and untouchability about him like he wasn’t really here with us in this filthy old world but just appearing to us in a vision to warn us about the latest candidate for American ‘s Top Messiah. He was blonde, and beautiful, and softly feminine like a lamb or a fawn.

In other words, he was exactly my type. And that made me suspicious.

Time for a month that sucks.

I thought I’d complain about it in the day’s video because you lovely readers are probably sick of me writing the same old stuff every time this happens.

You know, this sucks, unfair, easy to fix, crazy to expect us to live for five weeks on what normally only has to last four, and so on.

It’s all in the vid.

Hopefully I will get some $$$ for my birthday. That would help a lot.

Of course, being the prudent type, I’m not gonna spend like I usually do assuming that I will get enough money to pay for that final week.

That would just be silly.

But I did spend like usual in this last week because it didn’t occur to me to check whether it was a five week month until yesterday.

They sneak up on me. It’s like they come along just at the moment when I have finally let down my guard after the last one.

What I really should do is go through the whole list of deposit days for the year to identify these five week fuckers so I can plan ahead or at least so they don’t come as a shock each god damned time.

I crunched the numbers and I am not in too bad a shape. I got $150/week or so to live on, which covers my stable expenses.

1 trip to Denny’s, $30. Two McDonald’s runs, $40. Groceries, $70. 30 + 40 + 70 = 140, leaving me with a whopping $10 in leeway.

Time to paint the town red! Woo hoo! Bonanza!

I have a small problem : I have two days to cover and only one entrée. I did my grocery budgeting last week assuming I would be ordering in tonight and as I probably shouldn’t order in at all this month that leaves me in a bit of a pickle.

So I might end up ordering in tonight anyway, but with a real eye for value. Maybe look for a good high yield two for one deal so I can cover a meal for Friday night as well and thus avoid one McD’s run.

My clever foxy brain is working on it. I can play with the numbers and make it all work out. Trust me.

Otherwise, things are going fine. I continue to try to get the gas giant that is my cold and bloated soul to ignite into the big shiny star it’s supposed to be.

I feel like I’ve hard partial ignition. Didn’t last long as the flame didn’t really “catch” but I am sure that I am on the right track and it’s only a matter of time.

Heck, maybe I’ll get the Onion job and my life will be transformed. I’ll be able to rent a house and decorate it and pay someone to keep it clean and maybe invite the occasional gentleman caller over to dally with me in the drawing room.

And then fuck me up the ass.

I was reading the job listing and it mentioned “being familiar with the Onion editorial process”, so I decided to look up just what the heck that meant.

Basically, quantity. All the writers are expected to produce a lot of everything – story pitches, headlines, full stories, video ideas, and so on.

And I was like, HELL yeah. Demand much of me and WATCH ME GO. I will blow your god damned socks off.

I sure as fuck wouldn’t want a job where I am only expected to do a little. I’ve not been developing my writing muscles through blogging for all these years to just submit one little story a week or something.

Pretty sure they wouldn’t be paying me $100K CDN/year for that either.

So the mystery of how they can be so sharp and funny all the time is solved : they have an enormous amount amount of all kinds of inputs and from there they choose the best stuff and presumably combine, refine, polish, and so on in order to create the incredibly high standard of satire for which they are known.

And I could one day be a part of that.

They’d be fools not to hire me!

More after the break.

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I ordered in

I probably shouldn’t have, but I did.

Got myself some lamb shawarma from Uncle Sal’s Shawarma and so far it tastes great. Has that “grilled” taste I love so much.

For some reason, I like slightly singed food.

And it is, of course, lamb. If lamb is an option, I get lamb, 99 time out of 100. There is just something about sheep meat that makes my soul happy.

Eh, it fell apart. Probably my fault. Uncle Sal is blameless.

But if I get this again, I am going to make sure I have a clean, empty bowl handy in case this happens again,

Right now my shawarma wrap is in a bowl all right, but it lies atop a layer of trail mix left over from my lunch. And I am eating it with a spoon.

Such are the small indignities of life.

Otherwise today has been typical. Video games, meals, video, blogging.

Another day ticks by while I sleepwalk through life.

Actually, that’s not fair.

Sleepwalkers actually get somewhere.

But I am, in my own intermittent way, striving to change that. When I find myself in a moment when I can push against the walls of my enclosure, I do.

And for the rest of the time, I lie there, plotting my escape, and saving up the energy for my next big push.

Big changes are coming. Transformational ones. Ones that will finally unmoor this barnacle existence of mine and let me find a real place in the world.

Maybe it will be the Onion. Maybe not. Maybe I need to get back to the world of freelance writing. Get myself a cheap smartphone so I can sign up for UpWork or the like again and get myself out there.

I would be so much more sane if I could earn money.

And I know it’s possible.

It’s just a matter of making myself do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am still just a..

Thought I would vent some of my life frustrations today in order to :

a) Let out some of the steam so I can face my problems more calmly, and
b) Make them more “real” by putting them out into the world where I can’t just suppress them all over again

It’s called “externalization” and it can serve many purposes.

On the face of it, finding remote work for myself does not seem like the craziest idea in the world. I’m sharp, I’m resourceful, I am hardworking, I am determined. There’s all kinds of remote work type jobs I could do.

So as is usually the case with me, the barriers are 90 percent internal. It’s that classic problem of mine that I don’t want to face the maelstrom of possibilities and options and potential risks and hazards of the world in order to pursue that goal.

And I know that’s mostly madness. I mean yeah, on some level, that means choices have to made from all the stuff the internet has to offer, but there’s nothing wrong with just going with whatever tops the Google search and giving it a try to see how that works out, and if it doesn’t work out, I just try the next one.

All of that is perfectly sensible and logical and in many ways obvious but that doesn’t keep that scared little animal inside of me from scrabbling at the walls trying to get away from the idea.

Because I know it’s going to hurt. Busting out of this cage is going to require a degree of self-overcoming that cannot help but be very painful and that scared little animal (SLA? Nah. ) is, of course, afraid of that.

But pain is just pain. It sucks but then it’s over and you got what you wanted and stopped letting a very temporary sensation keep you from getting it.

Avoiding pain at all costs is not only childish, it’s life-destroying. Being a grownup means understanding that sometimes the pain is worth it. Some deals are genuinely worth making. Sometimes the reward really does justify the effort.

And in order to find those sufficiently rewarding things, you have to be willing to try stuff that might not pay out.

That’s why it’s best to do all your trying stuff when you are young and energetic and resilient. But the next best time to do it is now because you will only get less capable of it as you get older.

Easier said than done, I know. Consider it a stretch goal. Something to reach for.

I feel like I still have a lot of stored trauma and deferred life-grief and despair at my situation to work through. A lot of my psyche is still invested in this hypnotic loop I have been in for 30 years and that part does not want to have to wake up and activate and deal with reality any more than it already does.

Which is, of course, as little as possible.

So it’s a slow but inevitable process of blooming as a person. I will apply for that Onion job and go looking for other opportunities and slowly I will open the door of my cold dark vault and let the sunlight and the pure waters and the sweet smelling breeze into my life and my soul.

I am not filth. And I can be clean. The filth is just something that has happened to me over time and I can shake it off like a husky shaking off snow when I want to.

Underneath it all I am a shining, wonderful, scintillating star who can’t wait to finally get up out of the mud to climb into the sky and shine for everybody.

But first my light has to burn away all the sick miasmic fog clinging to me.

And that will take some time.

Go, sunbeam, go!

More after the break.

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Burn, burn, burn

Of course, shining stars don’t just shine. They also burn.

And that’s how I feel lately. Like the raging fires within me are finally rising to the surface of my soul and burning all that accumulated mulch and gunk away.

And that does hurt, though maybe not as much as you’d think. The fire does burn but it also cleans and purifies, and that feels great, so the net pain is not so bad.

And I am actively stoking that blessed flame. I want it to burn hotter and hotter until it bursts free of my funky grotto and burns all my limitations away and sends my demons and my ghosts screaming into incinerated oblivion.

You know. If that’s an option.

And it is.

I’m still “learning to fly”.

That is, learning to transcend the limitations of what reality decides to give me in order to simply give myself sufficient buoyancy to stay out of the depths and establish a minimum mood level that allows for hope no matter what.

But reality is a hard habit to break. I have spent too long taking cold, concrete, cruel comfort in not being “deluded” and focusing solely on what I “knew to be real” for me to have any level of comfort with leaving that logical, provable, “sensible” world behind.

At some point in the process, I will have to accept as real that which I cannot prove or deduce or verify to be real, and that seems impossible.

Maybe it is. Maybe I am too old to learn faith now.

But I have to try. It’s my best bet for replacing that piece of me that has been broken all these years. For closing that gaping wound at my core, the one so deep that at times I can feel a cold hard wind blowing through it.

Reality can help. If I improve my life so that I am not so locked into this hypnotic loop of mine, that will help shrink the wound or at least remove impediments to its healing.

But I know in my soul that it will take more than that to actually close that damned wound. And merely intellectually accepting the need for faith does nothing.

It will take being willing and able to believe it to be closed without needed to justify or explain why or how to really complete the healing process.

Believing in things unseen. Denying the need for evidence and proof in order to preserve belief. The power to make something true by believing in it.

That’s what faith is, and I am finally learning that it is not optional.

Even people who have angrily rejected the faith they were raised in and consider themselves to be total atheists still retain that all important seed of faith within them that closes the gap in their soul that people like me fall through to our doom.

There are worse things than believing things that are not “true”.

But it’s not going to be easy to get myself to accept that.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, here’s today’s vid.

My friends have already heard this story but it’s too good not to share with the world.

I swear to God that really happened. I had been listening to those ladies converse because as it turns out, the conversations of stupid people can be quite fascinating in a sort of psycholinguistic way.

Like, what nonlinear thought processes led to that conclusion? How did we get from the previous subject to this one? How does one communicate despite a limited IQ?

Because no matter how poor a student you were or how much you struggle to deal with the complexities of modern life, there’s still a certain amount of information you have to somehow get across.

Even just to socialize.

Anyhow, that’s not the important thing today. The important thing is that after I made the video above and uploaded it to YouTube, I then uploaded it to TikTok too.

And that was painless enough that I then uploaded a bunch more of my vids to it. Not all of them, not yet, but a whole bunch of them.

So I have done it. I have put my stuff out there on TikTok where the people who follow me there can take a gander.

And let me tell you, TikTok is sooooo much easier to use on Windows then on a stupid Android tablet screen.

On Windows I can just make the vid and upload it. On tablet it was way more of a pain in the ass, and as for editing it after recording it, forget about it.

There’s a video editing program for mobile devices the kids use called Cap… something but I tried and tried to learn to use it and it was just too different from what I am used to for it to make a lick of sense to my old brain.

Too much to unlearn!

I mean, there is a reason I paid $80 for the video editing suite I actually like. With it, I can do all kinds of stuff.

I currently only use it for simple linear editing, but I know how to do more.

I was especially sure to upload my political provocateur stuff to TikTok in the cheerful but probably vain hope that I will stir shit up and maybe even provoke a bunch of nimrods into launching reams of incoherent vitriol at me.

What fun that would be!

Yeah, I know I’m weird. And possibly a tad psychotic.

But in some ways this is my very weird way of trying to get the other kids to play with me on my terms. Grappling with others verbally and challenging their opinions and making them think about what they believe and why while dodging their slow and clumsy attempts to bash me into silence brings me enormous joy.

Basically, I am a verbal-only Spider-Man. And I love it. Give me some verbal sparring partners and I can truly express my combative side that just wants to get in the ring and go’er without having to hold back.

I could totally imagine being one of those guys who goes out to bars looking for a fight if I had gotten a different start in life.

But instead I keep it to video games. One of the factors in my video game addiction is definitely that they give me an outlet for my craving for feisty fisticuffs.

I shudder to think of what I would be like if I didn’t have that outlet. Way harder to get along with, that’s for sure.

I’d probably get increasingly volatile and quick to anger before blowing my top over some stupid little thing.

Or I would just embrace my destiny and become a raging arsehole most of the time. Sarcastic, arrogant, superior, dismissive, obnoxious, pushy, and selfish.

God, I would be such a nightmare.

Good thing I got video games!

More after the break.

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Take a deep breath

I would if I could.

Often, when I wake up, I am already out of breath. That’s what happens when you have obstructive sleep apnea, it’s completely untreated, and you smother dozens of times an hour while you sleep.

I suppose it could be worse. It could wake me up every time it happens. Then I would barely be able to sleep at all.

I shudder to think.

I am getting better at recognizing that I feel crappy when I wake up because there’s a lot of used air that has accumulated in my lungs and if I want to feel better and beable to breathe properly, I need to empty my lung to make room for fresh air.

The kind with oxygen in it.

And I know that this is bad. That I really, really should make yet another attempt to make friends with my CPAP machine so I can sleep and breathe at the same time.

It seems impossible but it’s true.

And I am trying to work up the nerve to do just that. Give it another try. I know that, obviously, not asphyxiating in my sleep all the time could make a huge, huge difference in my quality of life by improving my quality of sleep.

Not to mention my blood oxygen levels.

And I think it’s been long enough since “the incident” where a kink in the CPAP hose made me wake up completely unable to breath until I ripped the mask off that I am at the very least no longer terrified of trying again.

Just very, very nervous.

It’s a hill worth climbing, that’s for sure. But a tough one. Getting used to having the mask on my face and that rather loud machine near my bed and a hose connecting the two that makes it so I can’t just roll over onto my other side without yanking the machine across the room – PLUS the worried about the hose getting kinked – makes for a daunting challenge, especially for someone as flighty as I am.

And as lacking in self-discipline.

So for now, I will just think about it, and wait for the next parting of the clouds in my internal weather system that leaves me feeling good enough to really push myself.

Until then I will just keep sleeping as badly as ever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the usual rattling on.

I really need to find the energy to do more ambitious videos because my usual talking head bullshit is beginning to bore me. It doesn’t scratch that creative itch very well and I want to have more fun with the whole thing but by the time I have edited the video I am pretty much done in.

But less so than before, which is encouraging. As I exercise my video editing muscle every day, the editing of that day’s vid wakes less and less out of me.

So hopefully it will become a minor enough thing that I can take on trickier and more fun kinds of projects.

Daddy needs to fly.

I’ve been feeling especially restless lately. The sort of mood where nothing really satisfies you and you end up grumpily switching between activities in a vain search for something that doesn’t bug you.

My crappy mood started last night. See, I ordered pizza. Pizza did not arrive. I checked the Pizza Hut site and it said the pizza had been delivered. But the phone never rang.

So I went to call Julian to ask that he pick up my pizza when he and Joe got back from Joe’s parents’ place. Only to discover my phone was not working.

Ah. So that’s why my phone didn’t ring. I guess the delivery person tried to call but my phone was out of service so all they could do was leave it outside the building.

Not fun. But that’s not what put me in a bad mood.

That came when Julian reported that there was no pizza waiting for me down there, meaning that someone took it.

Son of a bitch. Now I am out $22 for a pizza somebody ELSE ate.

The weird thing is that I never heard the phone in the kitchen ring. Now I was very deep into my video game so I might have simply missed it.

But it’s also possible that my delivery person decided it smelled so good they would help themselves to it.

Unlikely, but possible. It would be a neat if ultimately doomed scam. Report it as delivered, wait for roughly as long as it would take for a porch pirate to show up and take it, then dig in. Bon appetit.

You’d get caught pretty fast but for a time you’d dine quite well.

Knowing I paid for something some thief got to eat really pisses me off. It sticks in my craw something fierce and I know it will take days for me to get over it.

It’s a Taurus thing. We have strong feelings about our money.

There’s no solution, either. Pizza Hut held up their end of the bargain. It’s not their fault some evil person helped themselves to a pizza they knew was not theirs.

Even if we had CCTV footage of the crime, we wouldn’t know who the hell that person was, so what could we do about it?

It was the perfect crime. With MY FUCKING PIZZA. Grrr.

And all because my portable phone was on the fritz and I didn’t know that until it was too late and my pizza was gone.

Talk about being fucked over by fate. AGAIN.

Anyhow, since then I have felt cranky and out of sorts. And that has made me restless and irritable and I am choosing to see this as a very good thing.

It’s when I am pissed off that I become capable of serious change. Hopefully this little incident will help fuel my attempts to rise up out of this pit I’m in.

Oh, and I have completed my list of 30 potential Onion headlines. Now I will spend some time polishing them before I send them off to The Onion for evaluation.

They really are quite good. God damn am I clever.

They’d be fools not to hire me. I’m amazing.

More after the break.

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As the wheels grind on

I feel like I am going through the wringer lately but that’s not a bad thing.

Because means things are moving. Emotions are being processed. The wheels of this bus are going round and round, albeit slowly and reluctantly, and all the gunk that has accumulated in the engine and the fuel line and so on is being burned out of there by the motion and the heat, and things are beginning to move forward.

Now all I need to do is avoid the temptation to slam on the brakes and crawl back into my deep dark garage when I start feeling like we’re moving too fast.

No, we’re not, we’re just not used to moving at all. It is true to say that our rate of speed has gone way, way up relative to what it was before.

But that’s because my speed before was zero. Everything is infinite compared to zero, even the tiniest increase of all.

So like I keep telling myself, I just have to hang in there and not freak out and run away so that I can adjust to the change and maybe learn not to be so damn flighty.

That’s a word I have been testing out applying to myself lately : flighty. It really seems to fit me. What else do you call flying off in a panic at the slightest provocation? Giving up on and abandoning things entirely when I encounter the tiniest of problems? Returning games on Steam when I don’t instantly fall in love with them?

The urge to flee is strong in me and it’s got to stop. The ability to stay and fight and deal with things has to be there too. Being skittish as a deer in hunting season all the time is deadly. So much of life can only be experienced if you stick around.

So I am working on developing my “stick it out” muscles. I go into situations knowing I will probably have the urge to flee and I am therefore ready to delay my flight instincts long enough to at least start to enjoy myself.

Delay is the right word. Directly opposing the urge to flee only makes you panic even more strongly. But saying, “Yeah, yeah… in a minute… ” works because it doesn’t make you feel trapped.

This is all part of my trying to stop being such a scared little animal.

If I stick with it long enough, I might even become a real little boy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, a few things I got off of TikTok recently.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to embed them, so links will have to do.

How very Web 1.0! Anyhow…

First. a most excellent overview of biological sex. The combination of her accent, her earnest approach, her academic acumen, and her cool British beauty really makes her presentation powerful to me.

I don’t know if it would convince any gender skeptics or other transphobes. Those kinds of people probably slammed the steel doors of their tiny minds shut the moment they realized someone was trying to put knowledge in there.

But I found the whole thing delightful.

The other thing is a piece by the incredible poet Ren.

The dude is a wizard. The words, the style, the presentation, everything. It all combines to make his work mesmerizing and compelling every damn time.

God did I miss TikTok. You know how you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Well sometimes you don’t know how much you missed something till you get it back.

And I plan on being active on the Tok again too. My webcam is right here 24/7 and so it should be easy to record replies to vids and so on.

Oh, and I will eventually upload my current vids there too, or at least the ones that I think might be of interest to people.

Time to see if my charisma really works!

Anyhow, here’s today’s actual vid :

Some of that is actually from as far back as 2008!

And it was nice going through the clips and remembering, though of course, nostalgia is always bittersweet and so it made me a little sad too.

I seem so young and energetic and full of life compared to now. And yet, the weird part is that I know I was actually a lot more depressed back then.

As nice as it would be to have the energy and hope back, that would be too high a price to pay. I was often suicidal back then.

But way more socially active.

I don’t think the two things are related.

I had to include what I consider to be the stupidest thing in a movie ever, the whole “removal all numerals except six” thing.

That’s so gobsmackingly dumb that it beggars the imagination. There is no way that I, as a very talented comedy writer, could have thought of something that amazingly, beautifully, thuddingly stupid.

Other than scouring the backup I made of the HD I had before this one, today has been pretty routine. I am happy that I did a video that was NOT just me talking into the camera for once.

I started off thinking I would maybe do a karaoke. But I tried a few songs and I did not like the sound of my voice, so I decided it was not a good voice day for me and went looking for a better idea.

The point is that I did something new (ish) and had a lot of fun doing it. I let myself go in an unexpected direction and it turned out great.

I went exploring for once in my life! In a pretty minor way, but still.

And I have going back on TikTok to thank. And to think, I went years without it because I thought there was no way to access it on a PC.

But there totally is. There’s a Windows TikTok app. All I had to do was download it from the Microsoft store. It was crazy easy.

I feel like such a fool! But whatever. It’s good to be back.

Time to make some waves. 🙂

More after the break.

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What is dis praxia?

For me at least, dyspraxia is a barrier.

One that has been there all my life and lies between myself and whatever motor skill I am trying to learn like an invisible force field and keeps me from being able to do it.

The motor acquisition center of my brain is just plain broken. For all I know, it’s barely even there. It certainly feels that way.

Any attempt I make to learn to do a physical thing has to go through the conscious rational mind and that is just plain not good enough. We human beings are supposed to have mental hardware dedicated to that kind of thing. Society presumes it is there.

But mine ain’t.

So it’s a learning disability. One I wish I had been diagnosed with a very long time ago, like say when I was in elementary school, where the right kind of intervention might have corrected it.

Or at least I would have been officially designated as a person with a disability (albeit an invisible one) and I could have been better understood by the world.

I picture myself carrying business cards that explain my condition like some deaf people do. They’d say, “Hi! I have dyspraxia! Here’s what that is… ”

The thing is, not only is it an invisible disability (like depression), but I can go long periods without it having much of an effect. It’s not like we learn new motor skills all the time. It’s actually pretty rare.

What it would mostly do is explain to people why I’m such a spaz.

If I was a kid today, I would probably have one of those individual learning plans (forget what they are called) and that would explain the problem to my teachers and give them tips as to how to help me with them.

Not that I would need a lot of assistance. Despite all odds, I did manage to learn to write and type and dress myself and so on.

But I’ve heard some kids get someone to take notes for them because they can’t write fast enough, and I’d be all over that.

AI can almost sort of kind of do that now. The auto-captioning on YouTube is getting better and better and there are programs out there that claim to be able to transcribe what people are saying accurately.

Honestly, I would probably just record the whole thing with a smartphone. That way I would get the prof’s body language and tone of voice, too.

Maybe I should be taking some online courses…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It shall be a Day of Reckoning!

My biggest worry about tomorrow is that people will think, “Meh, big deal, we already did that. And he paused the tariffs, so we won, right?”.

I don’t know how likely that is. I am too anxious to rationally assess that, and I supposed that even if I was on a triple dose of Xanax, that can’t be figured out anyhow.

I mean, there’s millions of variables, and they’re all human beings.

But obviously I hope the turnout is simply massive. People on BlueSky are saying ten million, which would mean that everyone from the first one would have to bring a friend.

The positive forecast, as I see it, is that the first protest caught a lot of people off guard, seeing as it was organized in like three days, and a lot of people who wanted to go could not because of work, family commitments, logistics, or just plain not hearing about it or not being able to make up their mind about it until it was already over.

But now they’ve had two weeks’ notice to get their act together. They’re arranged sitters, watered the plants, packed a nice picnic lunch, and are ready to protest.

Heck, even if you don’t care about politics, you might want to go just because so many other people are going and you like to be where the action is.

Or maybe you just want to sell food there. No judgement. This is a capitalist society and the reason we have all that we have is that someone can make money doing it, whether it’s running a pizzeria or a hardware store or a dry cleaner’s.

Wanna change the world? Do something profitable.

Anyhow, that’s my hope and my fear about tomorrow’s protest. My fear is that it will be smaller than the first one because people are all, “been there, done that, whatever.”

A very Gen X fear, now that I think about it.

And my hope is that the protests will be so huge they can be seen from space and some aliens will be like, “What’s going on down there?”

Just in case, let’s play this on a loop :

But if they ask, maybe we should skip the whole “take me to your leader” thing, at least if you are an American.

Take them to our now and future PM, Mark Carney, and tell them he is the President of Earth. I am pretty sure he could pull it off.

Anyhow, like I say in my vid, I want the powers that be to be scared. As scared as it takes. Historically, big change only happens when the people in power feel like the alternative is them getting strung up on a fucking lamp pole while mobs cheer.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. But it might have to get close. I have little faith that the billionaire tribe actually knows what is good for them and understands that millions of people beat billions of dollars and that if we decide to come after them, all that money won’t mean a god damned thing.

Hell, if the people are mad enough, we can make it illegal to buy from or sell to them, and go after any “friends” helping them out, too.

Luigi Mangione’s killing of that health CEO was just the opening shot.

Sometimes has to be done to show these people that they are not untouchable.

I’d much rather that was done via law enforcement. And that’s a real possibility. The legal establishment is super pissed off too. Especially judges.

But I am open to other possibilities as well.

More after the break.

---

An average Friday

Normally I would resort to personal reportage right now but I don’t have much to report.

Had Wound Care this morning. Somehow screwed up setting my alarm so I woke up at 9:35 am for an appointment at 10 am.

Had to get dressed real quick. Didn’t even get to eat first.

That tiny burst of excitement aside, the only faintly interesting part of it was that, because it was Good Friday, the health center wasn’t actually open and I had to ring the doorbell so that one of the nurses could let me in.

Oh, and when I was waiting, I heard someone say my name, so I got up and went into the usual room only to have a nurse stop me and say, “I don’t think she’s ready yet!”

To which I said, “Well then who called me in here? Because someone said my name. ”

Luckily she was close enough to ready that I could just sit on the examining table and wait for her to finish getting ready.

I’m kinda glad I got cranky about it, though. I rightfully asserted myself.

Don’t make me get up then go back to the waiting room then have to get up and come back to the clinic AGAIN.

I’m already in pain.

Let’s see. Oh, and after that I wanted a vanilla cone from McD’s, so we pulled into the drive thru at our local McD’s only to be told “we’re not doing ice cream today”.

Today? What the conceivable fuck? No ice cream for an entire day?

Luckily the other McD’s, over near Lansdowne Mall, had ice cream.

I guess our local McD’s ice cream machine was broken?

After that I came home and ordered groceries. It would have been convenient if they had arrived super early again this time, so of course they were on time instead.

Got everything I ordered, which is always a plus.

Then I made the video you see at the top of this entry. Which was tricky because I was so sleepy I was nodding off in the middle of editing.

Oh well. Got the damned thing done and took a nap.

And for everything else… you were there!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or was it the other way around?

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

So yeah. I think I am ready to start living for fun. And not just the sad, weak fun I can get from video games. Real fun, the kind that comes with thrills and excitement.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of video games over the years, and some of them have been truly great experiences, but they were still safe, tame, controlled experiences with very little in the way of real, physical stimulation.

Which was kind of the point, in a way. No physical, all cerebral, nice and cozy and contained and guaranteed not to upset the status quo.

Said quo being “do nothing but play video games all fucking day”. Every day. All the time. For decades on end. Like I was in a prison cell for fuck’s sake.

Well that’s not good enough any more. Fuck that shit. I’m not in prison, or cold storage, or suspended animation, or the witness protection program.

I’m a living, breathing mammal who is finally ready to increase his stimulation level.

Shake off my lethargy and do stuff. It doesn’t have to be some kind of world shaking megaproject or magnum opus or anything.

It can just be me fucking around with some AI tool or another. For example.

It just has to be new and fun and exciting. The world is a toy chest right now and I can’t wait to find what wonders this new age of AI will produces in the future.

Because this shit’s just getting started, folks.

Speaking of which, I made another little thing with Vidu that I like.

It’s just so wholesome that you’d suspect Vidu had a lot of restrictions. 😛

Just for the heck of it, I tagged it as being made for kids. I mean, why not? Kids might well enjoy this lovely little snippet.

I just wish they would rephrase the question. No, it’s not made for kids. But it is safe for kids. It’s as G-rated as it gets.

Heck, most of my vids would be SFW if I didn’t swear so much.

But I express myself in the manner of my people. I grew up in a swearing culture back on Prince Edward Island, and I am proud to carry on that tradition, for fuck’s sake.

I will consider stopping my swearing when and if I get the requisite 500 subscribers necessary to be able to monetize my videos.

Which would presumably involve promoting them somehow, and oof. That is not something that comes naturally to me at all.

My instinct is to just put things out there and people can decide for themselves whether they like it or not.

But of course, they have to know it exists and see it first.

The other unappealing solution would be to work really, really hard to make videos so damned good that anyone who sees them not only loves them but absolutely must get all their friends and family to see it too.

That does not currently seem likely. Though my discontent with how plain and boring my videos are visually continues to grow.

Which reminds me… I found out there’s a Windows TikTok app!

So I am back on TikTok. Most of my vids would fit in there quite well. Most of the videos on TikTok are just people talking.

It’s what is expected there.

I dunno if there’s a time limit on videos on TikTok but I am pretty sure there is not. I recorded some fairly long vids back when my tablet was working.

I might even start uploading all my current vids to TikTok. I mean what the hell, I technically have a following there too.

I am just happy to be back on the Tok. I really enjoyed my time there.

Who knows, maybe I’ll become famous that way.

More after the break.

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`In the middle of a thought

That’s how I feel right now.

Like I’m a CD that got stuck between tracks. My brain is looking for something to say but it’s not coming up with anything. I feel alarmingly blank.

Oh well, I know this too shall pass. Just like my attack of mental thickness last week. it seems upsetting now, but once I am rested up and hydrated, I’ll fine.

Slowly I am learning not to freak out about stuff.

But that means finding other uses for that energy. I had another “bad moment” earlier where I felt like could jump out of my own skin out of sheer frustrated nervousness

This time, though, I was able to really focus on the “what would make things better right now? ” question and I got an answer :

Running. What would have made me happy would be to go full tilt running across a grassy field that stretches out infinitely so I can just run and run and run and not have to worry about turning or slowing down, just running as fast and as hard as I can for the sheer exuberant rush of letting all that pent up energy out like a wild stallion.

Not an option, obviously, but it gives me a clue as to what the problem is.

If the goal is to release energy, there are probably ways I can do that which fit within the confines of my disability.

I am still worried about hurting myself via my undiagnosed and apparently uninteresting muscle disorder. But I am weighing that against the benefits I would undoubtedly get from exercise, such as tension relief, mood elevation, better vascular health, and so on.

There has to be some form of exercise I can make myself do that won’t make my condition worse and will give me some form of relief.

Pity that the physiotherapy place hasn’t gotten back to me yet.

I really want to consult a professional about this.

But I guess they don’t find my case interesting either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or maybe that should be “the feelers”, or antennae.

I got onto the subject of empathy by way of one of those “when was your gut feeling about someone right?” Reddit videos I am so fond of.

Being a strongly intuitive rational materialist, those things appeal to me.

Like I said in the comments, I use my empathy and/or intuition (my “gut feelings”) to give me leads about people. If I have a bad gut feeling about someone, I then investigate the people to see if it’s right about them.

It usually is.

And I am quite good at sussing people out. I can ask perfectly innocuous sounding questions that will nevertheless tell me a lot about someone just by how they react.

Man, I really am creepy.

Oh well, this is the soul I got so that’s the person I am.

C’est la vie.

Being science minded. I sometimes wonder what, exactly, it is I am picking up from people. What could be traveling between them and me?

To me, it feels electromagnetic. Like my nervous system acts as a receiver for some kind of broadcast from other people’s nerves.

And that’s not completely ridiculous, but it’s not too likely. The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the live electrical system that is our nervous system is pretty small so that “antennae would have to be quite sensitive in order to pick up that transmission.

But like I said, not impossible.

My only other idea is pheromones. And those seem even less likely.

I am sure there is a whole galaxy of things we don’t know about how pheromones work and how they affect our minds and our moods. Indeed, they could be the source of the very “bad gut feelings” I mentioned above.

And they must surely be how dogs sense our moods. And be why I sometimes get a bad feeling about places, too.

There were houses I delivered papers to where I am sure some bad shit was going down. But you can’t very well call the cops based on a bad vibe.

But my experience of empathy is too immediate and dense with information to be something that wafts over to me whenever.

Pheromones are definitely part of the equation but they can’t be the whole thing.

And with that I am out of theories. The fact that my empathy reflects people’s real emotions is attested to by the very “creepy” things I mentioned in the vid.

I would not have been able to freak out my siblings by casually mentioning things I saw in their heads if my strong empathic powers were delusional.

And of course, my own subjective experience is really all I need. Like I said in the vid, other people’s emotions are just there for me.

I suppose I could have followed some career path based on my empathy. That’s basically what I would have been doing had my life gone as planned and I would have become a practicing psychologist.

I really want to help people, and with my natural abilities augmented by a college degree plus whatever other education I’d need, I would have been a very good one.

But my parents wanted early retirement instead. Fucking Boomers.

I suppose I could try to become one now. The psych courses would be a breeze for me and my aptitude for the subject would be more than evident.

My handicap would make things tricky. Probably best to take the courses online.

It’s a possibility I shall ponder. Spending my days helping people with their darkness and their demons by shedding some light into their worlds sounds so good to me.

And talk about good karma!

More after the break.

---

Ooh pretty horsie!

I made this here in Vida and I love how it turned out, so here it is!

I’m jealous of both of them. 🙂

---

The spooks in the shadows

Got that “haunted” feeling again.

Oh well, whatever. Shit happens. Excrement occurs. Sometimes I feel spooked and strange and alienated for no apparent reason. Big deal.

A mind as powerful and unique as mine is bound to have some eccentricities.

It could be sundowning. That’s something people at eldercare facilities discovered about the elder they care for that some of them are fine all day but when the sun goes down they become fearful and/or difficult and/or just plain nuts.

Same thing happens in mental health wards too.

And I have noticed that a change comes over me when the sun comes down lately. And it seems to match sundowning. I feel twitchy and nervous and spooked. I feel like I am one sudden loud noise from shrieking hysteria.

That might do me some good, come to think of it. Blow through a bunch of latent emotions all at once. Clear out the cobwebs.

But I am too damned stable for that.

Sad. But stable.

So I just trudge along my therapeutic path like I’m a tortoise hoping to outrun a particularly stupid hare.

Only in my case the hare is death.

The truth is that I am unwilling to abandon the safety of stability for the potential of renewal. I fear the chaos that lies in the darkness of my mind too much for that, and I have no faith that things can be okay unless I consciously and logically make them OK.

I’m too old and broken and poor to go off on any sort of life adventure where I get to find out who I really am by dealing with novel situations that teach me to rely upon myself.

The only way that’s going to happen is if I’m rich, or marry someone that is. Traveling when you’re disabled pretty much requires assistance that ain’t gonna come cheap.

Though from what I have seen, people are quite nice to us cripples. So there’s that.

Still, I rather like the idea of traveling in the lap of luxury, with porters to carry things and fancy little staircases to help me get in and out of vehicles and a handsome nurse/assistant to keep me alive and happy.

I could see the world if I had that.

But I kind of need to get rich first.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Today, I gave storytelling a try.

And the video turned out fine. But I’m not happy with it.

I could have sworn that the story I tell in the vid was a lot funnier. But somehow it doesn’t seem all that humorous to me now.

Perhaps I’m too close to it.

Or maybe I need to add a laugh track.

Still, I have loads of anecdotes so I am glad I broke ground on telling them. I’ve never done much comedic storytelling but the internet runs on stories so there is definitely a market out there for funny stories told well.

Heck, maybe I could just record myself reading one of my short stories out loud.

It would be the closest I’d ever get to working from a script!

Today has been mellow. Did Wound Care this morning. Everything went smoothly as usual. The wound on my right foot remains closed.

I am supposed to be painting it with iodine once a day. Such a charmingly old fashioned kind of treatment. Like applying a liniment or taking headache powder.

So far, I have not remembered to do that even once. So if the dang thing ends up infected, I will have only myself to blame.

Well, myself and the germs, but they can’t be held legally liable.

Mood wise, I am doing okay. I still have moments where I feel scared and/or lost and/or like I wanna scream, but my brain is struggling to rewire itself so these things are to be expected, I suppose.

Which reminds me…

The way up

That’s what I am looking for, in my own way.

I’m searching for a way to raise my mood and I think the first step in that is convincing myself that it’s safe to be up.

Or if not safe, then good.

That’s how seized up my internal engine is in my ego’s quest for “control”. Being up might lead to doing unforeseen things on impulse, and that’s strictly verboten.

It’s like my mind has been occupied by a fascist regime that oppresses and suppresses me in the name of “national security”.

Safety uber alles. It’s a terrible way to live.

And it all leads back to that primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 and that convincing me that the world was a horrible place that I should have as little to do with as possible in order to not disturb the big part of me that went to sleep back then.

And it’s still sleeping now, the poor thing.

The bullying was the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with reality. Especially when it happened outside of school.

That’s when I concluded that the only safe place was home, and the only truly safe place at home was alone in my room, reading.

That way I wasn’t in anyone’s way and nobody would notice me and I wouldn’t feel ignored, dismissed, neglected, or like I was getting on someone’s nerves.

It’s always better to feel alone when you are alone that to feel alone when you are surrounded by people who technically love you.

Man I’ve led a lonely life. No wonder I’m so god damned weird.

And even now, I only feel safe when I am alone. That does not, sadly, keep me from being lonely. I want to be with people. I’m happiest when I am around the right people.

But I still isolate myself because anxiety doesn’t give a shit about happiness and it’s going to enforce the edicts of my inner regime come what may.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

I finally did it

I bought a new game!

It’s called Rogue Trader and I mostly got it because it’s by Owlcat Studios, who made the two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, that I absolutely loved to bits.

Plus the reviews are good and it was on sale for a non-insane price of around $40.

So far it’s pretty cool. They are really leveraging the awesome “fantasy meets science fiction” vibe of the Warhammer 40K^[1] universe on which the game is based. The setting reminds me of Dune that way.

Plus it is that rare thing, a science fiction (ish) RPG, and I am enjoying the hell out of that. Finally I can play a turn-based isometric RPG that doesn’t rehash Tolkien.

I have nothing against elves and orcs and stuff but it’s EVERYWHERE in my preferred genre of game and I am sick of it.

And I am very, very definitely a science fiction guy deep down. I’ve read a fair bit of fantasy too but science fiction is and always be where my heart is.

My character is a close combat specialist. I figured I might as well do something different that my usual wizards and sharpshooters/archers.

Though I dunno. In a universe with guns, melee skills might seem a little quaint. I assume I will have abilities to compensate for that.

Like deflecting blaster bolts with my light saber or something.

Do you suppose that there’s such a thing as a heavy light saber?

I’m just glad I finally frigging picked something. I’ve been dickering and dithering for weeks with like $60 sitting there on my Steam account waiting for me to make up my mind and find something!

I’m also glad that, if I want to, I can stop playing Tyranny. It’s not a terrible game but I don’t find it very inspiring to play.

Part of that is the dark and semi-evil tone, part of it is the lack of an overall noble quest, and part of it is the drab and depressing brown and grey art design.

I might keep playing, I dunno.

But Rogue Trader is turn based and Tyranny is “real time with pause” so it’s not really a fair fight. I’m a thinker, and thinkers prefer turn based.

In fact I wish the real world was turn based.

I’d be so good at it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.