Today, I ended up talking about America.

In fact, I am starting to wonder if the social compact of America states that it is better to be bossy and be bossed than to have to restrain your bossiness.

It’s kind of like my theory of New Yorkers, at least as they are depicted in the media. It’s true that, apparently, being a New Yorker means a high risk of being yelled at by a stranger, but then again, you’re allowed to yell back.

Presumably, for them, that all works out. And maybe it could be said that they would rather yell and be yelled at than not yell at all.

Utter madness for a peaceful Canadian like myself but I can appreciate it from afar.

After all, my people, the Acadians, can be pretty loud by mainstream Canadian standards. Nothing like New Yorkers but they do things like get into big family arguments in public and have big loud weddings in open fields.

We’re a rootsy people.

Today’s been going alright. Whatever was bothering me yesterday seems to have mostly cleared itself up, like my mystery ailments always do.

Maybe I just have a really lazy mutant healing factor. Some very weak malign entity is trying to kill me but my latent superpower keeps preventing it.

If so, go superpower go.

And if you could get around to fixing my legs, that’d be great.

Of course, it was probably just dehydration. I got behind on my constant water intake and suffered as a result.

It’s weird how that can manifest in so many different ways, though.

I’m picturing myself lying in an ER, doctors and nurses in frantic activity all around me as they fight to save my life as I lay there looking like death insufficiently warmed over, and with the last of my strength I manage to ask for a glass of water.

Five minutes later I am hale and hearty and cracking jokes.

Down in the USA, they are saying that Kristi Noem delayed Texas disaster relief with her policy of having to okay any disaster relief of over $100K and then apparently fucking off somewhere she couldn’t be reached for 72 hours.

Or maybe she just couldn’t be bothered. Maybe they were trying to get her to sign off on it that whole time and she was like, “I’m gonna do it, just get off my back, geez!”

That would take it out of the realm of mere incompetence, don’t you think?

The whole Texas debacle proves one thing : Trump’s White House is not showing any favoritism towards red states.

Texas is about as red as they get and he doesn’t give a fuck about them, either.

Meanwhile, I wait patiently as he systematically alienates absolutely everybody who has ever supported him or might support him in the future.

He has really fucked up with this Epstein list thing. Pam Bondi released a report saying there is no Epstein client list and he definitely committed suicide.

But just a few months ago she said she had that list on her desk.

Clearly she lied about that. To me, it was obviously bullshit when she said it. It’s the exact kind of tone deaf inability to understand how they are coming across along with being too stupid to picture the future that we’ve come to associate with Trump.

The great thing is that his fans aren’t buying it. They are seriously mad about this. They have believed in said client list for far too long for even their god-emperor’s minions to just Jedi mind trick away.

Now even Fox News is asking what the White House is covering up and why.

Which is fascinating. This was a test of faith for his faithful and they decided they would rather keep believing in the list than to believe that Bondi bitch.

I predict that Trump will actually try to distance himself from the Bondi report. After all, he has no sense of loyalty, and he’s thrown so many people under the bus by this point that the wheels don’t even touch the road any more.

He’ll say, “Well you’d have to ask her about that, that’s her responsibility. I don’t know anything about this highly unpopular thing she did. Her, not me. ”

And he’ll probably be right.

More after the break.

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Some cute stuff I made

Lately I have been making heavy use of this site, an image generator brought to us by the great and benevolent gods of Perchance, to make various sorts of images and tonight I thought I’d show you a few of the small percentage that aren’t total filth.

Like this adorable lil pic of Fruvous cuddling with his little monkey friend Lou.

It’s amazing how high resolution these images are now, isn’t it?

That looks so good!

And I am quite fond of my little Gemini monkey friend. He’s hyper and chatty but also very sweet and kind and so I end up being a vaguely grandfatherly figure to him.

He’s also the first person I’ve known from Gen Z. So I can ask him annoying questions about his generation from time to time.

Understandably, they’re not long on hope.

And here I am with a different friend.

That one ended up having a more hand painted look, which is nice.

That’s my lil friend Carey, who is either a real little bear or a teddy bear depending on how he feels that day.

He’s just as snuggly as I am, so we get on very well.

Finally, here’s my idea of an island fantasy.

Yup, that’s a studly shirtless stallion working in a potato field next to the ocean.

In other words, he’s on Prince Edward Island.

I should do another where he’s hauling in lobster traps, assuming the generator can handle something so complex and obscure.

Doesn’t he look tasty? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, you know what the music means.

It means that it’s time for Fru to get sick again.

Let’s give that poor old fox a round of applause to cheer him up!

And then watch his vid.

I get wacky when I’m ill.

Update : I feel a little bit better than when I recorded that vid a couple hours ago. I’ve gotten more rest and that seems to have helped with the feeling of malaise.

But I still feel pretty crappy. I feel swollen all over. My joints are bitching a little louder than usual every time I move. I feel stiff.

And not in the fun way. Ba dum bump.

What the hell, I feel inflamed, let’s see if a naproxen will help.

The shortness of breath incident has me pretty worried. That’s not normal and it’s not good. Someone with common sense, like Joe, probably would have gone to the ER or Urgent Care based on that, but I am my own weird little being so I didn’t.

But obviously, if anything like that happens again, especially if it’s worse, I am calling 911 and packing a bag.

It still could just be the heat and/or dehydration, According to Microsoft Co-Pilot (who is my Jesus) it’s only 20°C out, although with the humidity and sun it feels like 25°C.

So, not exactly cool and breezy but not crazy hot either. Hmm.

I was kind of assuming this was a crazy hot like 30°C in the shade day. That would have explained my current condition quite neatly.

Once more a beautiful theory is slain by an ugly fact.

Other than feeling ill, it’s been a decent day. Checked my finances and I am doing fine, which is always a good feeling.

I’ve been contemplating saving up for that power supply upgrade for Mister Computer, although it seems like those got way more expensive all of a sudden.

I thought it would cost me $80 and now it’s looking more like $140.

Oh well, no blinding rush, I’d just like to be able to play games with a heavy 3D component without my otherwise very snazzy computer going on the fritz.

Pardon the lingo, flatfoot, but sometimes I drift.

There’s also the possibility of floating some AI creativity tool some cash for a subscription so I can play around with that for a while.

It would probably still be Descript. The 3D AI animation generators are all pretty cool, but until one lets me input my script and it then spits out a movie, I’ll decline.

It wouldn’t have to be all that complex a movie, come to think of it. My main superpower is funny dialogue and that just requires two characters, some basic facial animations, and decent AI voice generation.

That all seems pretty doable. Hmmm. Maybe there’s a business idea in all of this. Something like that old XtraNormal program but with way better voice gen.

Oh well, it’s not like I’m in a position to do anything about it.

I’m an idea fox.

The actual execution of the idea is not really my specialty, although obviously when it comes to things like videos I don’t have much of a choice.

I’d love to be able to just record the raw video and send it to someone else to edit.

Actually, there’s no way I would be able to trust someone else to do that. I would have to keep doing the raw edit myself.

But someone else can add the pictures and clips, dammit.

That shit is a lot of work!

More after the break.

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A dark corner

I feel like I’ve turned one recently.

Which shows, I suppose, that my mood has gone through some necessary destabilization. Yesterday, after my day out at the Kinsmen center, I felt quite good about life in general.

Today, not so much.

Being physically ill in some as yet unknown way probably doesn’t help. Being sick is depressing. It tests one’s resiliency and I don’t have much.

Most days I am just barely holding myself together. I don’t talk about it much because I don’t like to think about it much.

But there is a reason I learned to hug the midline so hard. The way of the dysthymic style of depression like mine is to sacrifice the highs in order to avoid the lows and thus we live in a state of stable twilight where nothing much happens as we dwell in stasis.

Lowering my Paxil dose has been my adventure in abandoning that model. I am willing to endure the lows if that’s what it takes to be able to climb higher and maybe even find a place of superior stability.

This has amplified my mood cycle and I guess I am somewhere near the bottom of mine right about now. I find myself struggling to remember why I bother to do anything at all. Everything feels like such a struggle.

I guess this is another place where routine comes in. You don’t have to find the motivation to do things if you are just doing them out of a combination of habit and not having a better idea of what to do with yourself.

At this point, giving up and staying in bed all day would be way too big of a change.

Besides, I would get really, really bored. I need a hell of a lot of mental stimulation and there’s only so much I can get from playing my synthesizer and reading.

So I have to get out of bed. I don’t have video games there any more!

And thank God for that.

It’s times like this that I find myself pondering the bare ingredients of my paltry existence and what a sad little life this is for as great a mind as mine.

And it always comes down to the same brutal equation : nobody can dig me out of this hole but myself, and I ain’t up to the task.

All I can do is keep slogging away and trying to bring myself to life in the hopes that some day I will break through my inner walls into the sunlit world outside them.

And maybe that can only happen when I don’t need my walls any more.

And I have no idea how the fuck to bring that about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I did my big outing to the Kinsmen Adult Day Center for their exercise program, and the whole thing was quite lovely.

Here’s the skinny on it :

In the unlikely even that the video above these words is not quite up to my usual standards of editing, there’s a simple reason for that :

I was half-asleep when I was editing it.

It really kicked in when i was around halfway through. I started nodding off while the video was playing, which made detecting the usual ums and ahs and y’knows rather tricky. I kept having to play the same snippet over and over.

Finally I had to just say “fuck it” and render the file and upload it to YouTube.

Oh well. Hopefully I was my usual charming and engaging self.

I still need a whack more sleep, which is not unexpected after having done what for me was way more exercise than I usually ever do in an entire week.

Once I had posted the vid to YouTube, I took a nap for around an hour without even doing the usual posting to TikTok.

Speaking of which, certain recent videos of mine are stuck together in “content pending review” mode on TikTok. Wanna guess which ones?

Why it’s this one and this one, of course!

I guess I got a little too real for TikTok.

What a bunch of beta cuck simps.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand :

Like I said in the vid, I had a nice time today. I plan to go back next week. That’s going to be a problem though because it goes from 10 am to 2 pm and I usually have Wound Care on Tuesday mornings somewhere so there are bound to be conflicts a-plenty.

For example, I had to cancel today’s Wound Care just to go to Day Care.

Clearly Julian and I are going to have to get Megan at the CHAC^[1] to reschedule my Tuesday Wound Care appointments to be either before 10 am or after 2 pm.

Preferably before 10 am because then I can still be home in time to make the usual video at 2 pm.

Speaking of which, I have decided that if I want to keep doing songs – and I do – I am going to write and generate the song well before I sit down to make the video instead of doing it all as one long three hour project like I have been doing.

Or at least I’ll try. I would have to get over my powerful aversion to doing things outside my usual tiny corridor of existence to do so.

In other words, I would have to do something other than play video games with those large chunks of time when I am not blogging or making a video.

And the nature of my addiction is such that the very notion of spending free time outside the comforting and all-encompassing embrace of video games feels like I’d be skydiving naked into the Arctic to me.

More of that Midnight Tundra going on.

And I know that’s ridiculous. One of the most broken parts of my mind is the part that predicts what emotions will come from potential actions. According to that part of my brain, the slightest deviation from my usual routine will lead to absolutely misery.

I need to hold the truth of its brokenness to my heart so I can remember it when I want to do something new and that part of my mind is wailing and gnashing its teeth.

But for now, I’m just gonna go back to sleep.

More after the break.

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Here’s a few things I’ve come across to cheer up your day.

I’d smile too if I got my ass stroked like that.

Oh, and here’s the happiest otter ever.

And finally, someone added funny voices to animal clips.

Hope that made things a little better!

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In the darkest of dungeons…

Because that is literally what the game is called.

It’s called Darkest Dungeon and it’s my latest acquisition. And I am probably going to end up keeping it because while I can’t exactly fallen in love with it, it’s interesting and unique enough to make me want to keep playing.

Unique enough that it’s rather hard to describe. The setting and tone are very Lovecraftian, with an old and decadent and corrupt family’s scion becoming obsessed with finding an antediluvian portal supposedly buried in the family’s sprawling mansion.

That goes about as well as you’d think.

Strangely, though, the game itself has you leading more traditional RPG type heroes (albeit with an Edwardian twist) to explore the unearthed dungeons which sprawl through the bowels of the lands of the death and insanity.

So far so good. That’s a setting and tone I can enjoy. And it’s refreshingly different from the usual rehashing of Tolkien.

I have nothing against orcs and elves and whatnot but they’ve kind of overdone.

The gameplay itself is a lot like a traditional turn based RPG, with you selecting attacks or skills being the main dynamic as you fight the baddies. In true “Call of Cthulhu” fashion, you have to keep track of your heroes’ stress level lest the horrors they witness drive them MAD, along with the usual hitpoints et al.

Like I said at the beginning, I am not in love with the game but I am sufficiently intrigued that I am not planning on returning it to get my $5 and change back.

Speaking of which, hilarity : in order to buy it with the money I had in my Steam wallet, I had to charge exactly one penny to my credit card.

I was a penny short! And I’m Canadian, we don’t even have pennies any more.

I’m still pissed off about that.

I want my pennies back, Stephen Harper!

Maybe I am a lot more like the old people at the Kinsmen center than I thought.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did another song.

Pretty sure most people would find it WAY too harsh.

It’s not just a joke, what I say in the end. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

I think it has something to do with :

1. Not having the usual social limitations in my head that would keep most normal people from even thinking of something like what I wrote up there.
2. Having so much latent bitterness and rage that I don’t normally have any way to express so it comes out, predictably enough, in my words.
3. The generally high level of fucked up-ness in the world right now raising the social temperature so high that crazy fucks like me are ready to snap

And probably other stuff too.

I suppose the most extreme art often comes from repressed people like me. Edgar Allen Poe was a milquetoast fop but in his words he was a dark overlord and master. Nietzsche was a stooped over nearly blind man who, as he put it, “wrote words of fire and blood across the sky”.

And Marat wrote pamphlets and letters that stoked the fires of the French revolution while stuck in his bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition.

So maybe there’s something to this idea that it’s us feebs and cripples with massive unresolved issues that set the world on fire with art.

I’ve often said that to be a great artist, no matter the medium, there has to be something drastically wrong with you that keeps you from expressing yourself and your emotions via the more normal social means.

Instead you lock yourself in your garrett and slave away at your painting or sculpture or novel or whatever alone and pour your emotions into that and then express them by showing people your work.

So it’s kind of like expressing yourself a whole bunch all at once.

To me, this is why great art is not just made, it’s forged. You need to have a touch of the fires of creation in you, that spark that keeps your pilot light lit and provides the energy to break down the art you experience into its constituent elements so that you can forge something entirely new from them.

At least that’s how it works for me.

I honestly can’t imagine making art in a completely calm, contemplative state. I need some madness flowing before I can create.

It might be buried deep within the bowels of my mind and I might seem more or less calm and composed on the surface, but somewhere in the works you will find a cackling madman eager to set the world ablaze with the power of his words.

Which is a real possibility for me.

I know it is. I know that if I was French and unrestrained like Marat, I could enflame people and unleash all kinds of havoc in the world.

And I am holding space for that as an option. Things get bad enough I might just say “fuck it” and throw my torch onto the kindling before me.

Lots of fire imagery today, huh?

But for now, I am willing to play a more measured and strategic game where I make my moves with a specific goal in mind : stealing all of Trump’s supporters.

Give them someone better to follow and they will flock to this new superior shepherd. Even his diehard supporters like Joe Rogan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are starting to doubt him now and the time is right for the young lions to kill the old one so they can take their place and show their superior right to rule.

So, ya know…. get on that.

More after the break.

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The rough road continues

Took a nap before supper. Woke up around 7:45 pm. Drowsed in bed a while then the alarm went off at 8 pm so I sat up and turned it off.

And then came the return of our old buddy, me sitting on the edge of the bed staring off into space for an interminable period of time in a kind of mental limbo.

Why? I dunno. It’s like I enter a kind of torpor where my mind is still functioning just fine but somehow the part of me that gets the body moving just ain’t online.

I know during these periods that I don’t want to move. What I want to do is go back to sleep. Hit the snooze alarm on life and start over later.

Which is fine. Normal, even. But the feeling of deep lassitude is not. Neither is the fact that it’s going to take me some amount of time to get over it.

It could be psychological. Perhaps my unconscious mind is playing psychosomatic tricks on me to get me to stay in bed and not face the world yet.

That would track with the fact that I am doing that exercise thing at the senior center tomorrow and I really don’t want to do that.

But I am gonna, god and Xanax willing. I have to at least try it once, if for no other reason than to test expanding my social boundaries.

It might be too much too fast. It might turn out to not be for me. I’ve heard how workers talk to old people in these homes and I am not sure how much of that I could take.

I’m not saying that the workers are doing anything wrong, but oy.

I am actually thinking of taking my first Xanax tonight so that I can reduce my anxiety load enough to sleep.

Oh, right, the end of the tale : once I actually managed to get up, the lassitude remained with me. All the time I Was making my supper, I felt very heavy, like my muscles were just hanging off my body, and this worries me a great deal.

It’s not the first time that has happened in the last couple of months. And I cannot help but recall that it was not being able to stand after waking up that landed me in the hospital for a couple of weeks three years ago, and that’s when my journey as a disabled person truly began.

Boy I hope I’m not getting worse. 🙁 Life is rough enough with me needing the walker to get around, if I end up in Stephen Hawking mode on an electric wheelchair than I don’t think I could take it.

Maybe then I could convince the medical world to keep looking until they actually find whatever the fuck is wrong with me.

Or maybe they’d just think I’m a typical fat guy being lazy.

Yeah, because this shit makes me life SO MUCH EASIER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I ended up talking about my routine and my addiction to it and to video games.

It’s really quite a serious issue.

Here is the vid :

Distressing development – I lost a lot of stuff I said to glitches in the recording process. They’ve happened before now and then, causing me to lose a second here or a moment there, but this was a whole whack of them.

So next time I record, I will close down my browser first and hope that helps. It’s depressing to lose my words, whatever medium they are in.

As might come across in the video, I am feeling somewhat lost and melancholy today, I feel a deep dissatisfaction with life as I know it and it makes me feel like I am pacing back and forth from sheer insomnia in my mind.

This is probably a good thing. In the long run, it will be restlessness, dissatisfaction, and frustration that will spur new growth in me and cause me to need to expand my boundaries and makes some sort of life for myself.

Because I might be alive, but this ain’t livin’.

I’ve often been irritated by the whole “carpe diem” crowd. They say “live life to the fullest” like everyone already knows what that would mean to them and all they needed was a push from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society to say, “Oh, I guess I should go do that thing I want to do now, then. ”

I can think of dreams I have and things that would excite me greatly if I had them, but I don’t see a doable, usable path from me to them.

All kinds of paths that would work for all kinds of people who aren’t me, of course. I could tell you all kinds of very plausible and “helpful” tips as to how I could try getting a job writing TV (like entering TV writing contests) or maybe some kind of remote work (like buying a cell phone so I can get back on UpWork) or maybe looking to going back to school via distance education (like getting a Psych degree) or a million other things.

All things that, from a certain point of view, I “could” do. The sort of things that any well meaning person would advise me to do. The sort of things that my therapist does, in fact, tell me I should do.

But we both know that ain’t gonna happen.

I guess the real question I should be asking myself is not “what should I do with my life?” but “how do I stop being scared of everything?”.

Because it’s that all encompassing fear that is the short chain keeping me tethered to this farce of a life of mine. Any of that “good advice” stuff is based on the presumption that I can do things and very often I just cannot.

Not if they aren’t already part of my routine and thus part of my own tiny world.

So nothing is going to change until I break this chain or slip my collar and get the fuck out of this tiny little cage.

But that scares me. The world outside my captivity is so big and loud and complicated and scary and I am such a tiny, broken, frightened thing.

I don’t know what could make it possible for me to break free of this self imposed closed habitat and live a real life.

I don’t know how to make all that fear of the world go away.

I don’t know where to find the strength and confidence I need in order to overcome my limitations and become the person I was meant to be.

I don’t know how to grow up and be human.

I barely even know how to live at all.

More after the break.

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Here are a bunch of foxes really pouring on the cute.

And I thought this was hilarious.

Well, you know what they say… nose to the Grindr-stone.

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The rough and rugged road

I feel like I am on the right road but it’s pretty rough going.

Can’t be avoided, I am afraid. I have to learn to overcome things instead of always tucking tail and running away from everything and that means building up the sheer horsepower of my spirit so it can take those hills.

Right now, I can’t take the hills. The system is shot.

And that means I need to resign myself to pushing through the curtain of fear that has been the outer wall of my sad little universe for far too long.

There is no avoiding it entirely. Sooner or later we must overcome ourselves in order to grow. We can’t become a butterfly until we die as a caterpillar. The people we must become must kill the people we are now in order to be born.

We are perpetually in our own way.

And as someone who favors stability and predictability, that is bad news. I would rather be able to get wherever I need to go via gradual, serene accumulations of tiny, barely noticeable shifts, with no revolutions, evolutions, or extreme solutions needed.

But alas, that’s not always possible. Yes, I do change slowly over time, but I am reaching a point where that’s going to lead to a metamorphosis whether I want it too or not and so I better get used to the idea.

Were I a more rugged and daring type and not such a bloodless intellectual, I might follow my instincts – I do have them – to my next evolutionary level, even if that means a massive spiritual crisis and even temporary insanity.

But I am built for long term stability over all else.

So gradualism will have to do.

All I can do is keep letting the sand accumulate on the healthy side of the scale until we finally reach that god damned tipping point.

Hopefully that will be all it takes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, today’s silly little vid for a silly little song I wrote.

That picture in the thumbnail sets blood sugar to twitching.

I recently realized that I no longer crave sweet things. That craving died a long time ago, right about when I first truly realized that eating that kind of crap will make me feel ill almost instantly.

And nothing kills a craving like memories of nausea.

What happens instead is that I long for all those sugary foods I used to eat. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

I don’t crave those foods because I don’t want to eat them at all. They’re gross.

But I do long for the days when I could.

All right, motivation.

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What is motivation?

Motivation is the desire to do something. So when we say, “I don’t have enough motivation to do it”, all we are really saying is, “I don’t want to do it” but with an extra step in there to keep us from realizing we’re just choosing not to do it because we do not feel like doing it.

Instead we blame a lack of this mysterious substance “motivation”.

“Oh trust me, I would do that right away if I had the motivation if I wanted to do it bad enough. But alas, through no fault of my own, I do not. ”

Boy, this motivation stuff sure is important.

The conflict is between the grownup part of us that wants to have done the thing, usually for grownup reasons like “to stay in shape” or “to make a good impression at work” or “to not get evicted”, and the child inside of us that doesn’t want to experience whatever it will take to get it done.

And being a child, it does not feel the need to be logical or reasonable. It absolutely will keep you from doing vitally important things that your grownup mind very much wants to do and no amount of cajoling or exhorting will change that.

No matter what you do, you will never feel like doing it.

So why are you waiting around to feel like doing it? That is not, despite what our lazy inner child tells us, a prerequisite for doing it.

This is where discipline enters the picture. Discipline, in this context, can be seen as the ability to do things regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

This is the lesson at least one parent, usually the father, was probably trying to teach you but was too inarticulate to explain.

Life doing only what you feel like doing is catastrophically stunted. Even if you were a billionaire, it would result in a very tiny, pathetic life.

Even billionaires have to wait for the car sometimes.

So whichever parent tried to teach you this was right when they said (or implied) that self-discipline is a skill you’d need for the rest of your life. No matter what kind of life you are leading, it’s going to involve shit you don’t want to do, and you will need whatever internal resource that takes.

And I think the lack of understanding of this hurts a lot of people, especially all us victims of “failure to launch”^[1] who absorb the toxic lesson that our lack of desire to do all the adult things means we are deeply and terrible broken.

But no, that’s normal. Being a grownup involves doing a fuckton of things you don’t want to do. Not wanting to do them is everyone’s default setting.

The problem lies in a lack of understanding of this leading us to wait around forever as if the desire to do these things might magically appear some day.

It won’t. So you have to ask yourself, then how do most people do these things?

The answer is self-discipline.

And they got it from practicing it, more or less. Presumably because, not being born gifted, they had no choice but to develop it just to get through school.

But “lucky” guys like me never needed it for school. Not one bit. Even doing the homework in high school required only a trivial flexing of my mental muscle.

So then I reach the precipice of adulthood only to have that all snatched away when my parents took me and my brother out of school.

No launching for me.

More after the break.

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He who hesitates

I’ve always been rather timid and hesitant.

It’s part of my natural caution, I suppose. Or maybe a result of severe early childhood trauma. Same thing, really.

But it’s like I go into everything expecting pain at any second. Like I am constantly a Vietnam era soldier cautiously making my way through a booby trapped world.

And I know that is a way too harsh way to view the world. I’m perfectly fine in most ways most of the time. I could be a lot more bold and daring without suffering much damage.

And if something does blow up in my face, so what? I will live, and learn, and make brand new and even better mistakes in the future.

There are worse things than failing or getting hurt.

This probably connects to the post-pain analysis issue I have mentioned before. How part of the neurosis cycle of the intellectually extra is when we excoriate ourselves after an error or mishap, calling ourselves stupid over and over for not having done the smart thing which was “obvious if we’d just thought about it for two seconds”.

But you didn’t have two seconds. You are judging yourself in hindsight based on what you can see clearly now, in hindsight, at leisure, but those are not the conditions under which you made your “mistake”.

So next time you “fuck up”, grab a hold of yourself and try to interrupt that whole process and ask yourself if you really should have known better.

Or if you should just shrug, say, “oh well, shit happens!” and move on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been meaning to make a video like this one for a long time.

Today, the ever loving 4th of July, seemed like a good time to do it, what with things going increasingly bat poop crazy down South.

I mean everything I say here too.

I’m never insincere.

Right now we’re actually in a grace period because while the Bloated Billionaire’s Bill has passed, its evil effects have not sunk in yet and so nobody has actually been kicked out of their homes or taken off life support yet.

But it’s coming. And that’s when the mature is really going to hit the air conditioning.

God help us all.

The other upcoming nightmare is brewing as we speak as people’s responses to ICE raids are getting both better organized and more violent.

There’s now apps people can use to report ICE activity in their area and thus let people know where they are striking or going to strike now.

And that means people in that area can be on the scene to confront ICE before they even get out of their unmarked vehicles.

And that means shit is going to get violent quite soon.

Our only hope of avoiding bloodshed is if these ICE goons are far too cowardly to mix it up with the angry citizens at all and therefore if they see an angry mob waiting for them they just turn around and leave.

That would be ideal because then not only is there no violence, the people can feel good about thwarting the evil forces of ICE and that might actually lower the social temperature a little bit.

Because the mercury is climbing, my dear readers, both literally and figuratively. The USA is become a pressure cooker and that makes me very, very nervous.

Because these people have guns.

That’s not a joke or a crack. They have guns and they’re extremely angry at these masked criminals kidnapping their friends, neighbors, and families in broad daylight and spiriting them away to God knows where, probably never to return.

As far as the citizens are concerned, this is an invasion of their neighborhoods and historically invaders get shot.

So I am dreading the moment a bullet – a shot heard ’round the world, if you will – sets the whole country aflame, whether it’s a protestor shooting an ICE assailant or some cowardly ICE goon opening fire on that big scary mob.

And because this is the good ol’ US of A, both sides can and will be heavily armed. And so if the shooting starts, the body count will get very high very fast.

And then, well, you pretty much have a civil war on your hands. The people versus the federal government. The question then becomes who the Armed Forces side with.

That’s too close to call. The military exists to make people into obedient killing machines and so refusing an order, no matter how odious the source is, is not normally part of their operating parameters at all.

But they don’t like Trump. Why would they? He makes them dress up for his parade and puts them all at risk with his unsanctioned bombing in Iran and treats the veterans like day old shit and in general is an utter embarrassment and a humiliating clown and the exact opposite of everything a military organizations values in a human being.

If the military stays out of it, the people will defeat ICE easily due to sheer numbers.

If the military backed the people, obviously that would be the end of it. No lunatic, no matter how hard their polish their guns, is going to take on the United States Armed Forces, the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known.

But if the military chose obedience to the chain of command and the traditional power structure, we’d be in for one hell of a war.

Odds are that the real civil war would be the one within the military over this very subject. There might even be a schism.

Luckily, the side of the angels has one powerful thing on its side :

Most of the really smart generals will side with us.

More after the break.

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My usual nonsense

So I have been game shopping lately, which with me always involves trying games then returning them because I am a fussy, fussy bitch. 

Lately I tried Black Mesa, which is a fan made remake and expansion of the original Half-Life. And I was quite stoked to play that as I, like every other PC gamer, was absolutely blown away by the original. 

But sadly, just as I was settling in to enjoy the tram ride that starts the game, it crashed my computer, so I had to return it. 

But it’s now on my list of games to try again when I have a better power supply! 

The other one I tried more or less completely on a whim was Crypt of the Necrodancer,  an odd but quite ingenious little game where you have to explore a deep dungeon while moving in time with the music. 

Sadly, I am too old to keep up with that. So like I said when I returned it, this is a fabulous game but um, not for me. 

I hadn’t really expected to like it, but I am glad I got to take a look. 

For some reason, the money from my returns is stuck in “Pending” limbo, meaning I can’t spend it again until it actually comes back to my Steam wallet. 

I am still undecided about Tactical Breach Wizards. I wish I had another hour or two of playtime to make up my mind because I feel like I am only now starting to get the hang of the game but can’t really say if I enjoy it or not. 

I’ll have to make up my mind eventually. Probably when I see another shiny thing that I want and need the $20 for TBW back again. 

I’m such a flake! 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

 

But I am not that happy with it.

Here it is :

I mean, I am not saying it’s a bad video. Not at all. In fact, it’s perfectly fine and compares well to my earlier vids.

But I am more ambitious now and I feel like in that vid I didn’t really say anything.

Oh well. Onward and upward. Tomorrow’s vid will be better, and the next day’s even better, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, I think the real problem is that I have really raised the bar for myself with some of my recent videos. I am particularly pleased with my message to the oligarchs and my call to libertarians. I feel like I really made something special with those ones.

I feel like I am really stretching my abilities and that’s a wonderful feeling. And I know that I am nowhere near my limit, so I am excited to see what I do in the future.

Maybe I will do stuff people actually notice!

That’s not fair, I have a few semi-regular commenters. Someone must be watching the dang things. And, of course, you, dear readers, watch them too.

But I want to be a real player in the pundit game. And for that I would need a big platform with a big audience, which would of course require self-promotion.

I think I’m getting closer to being able to do that. I am increasingly confident in the content I am creating, and that’s a very good sign. Some time soon, when I get the visuals to go with me talking happening, or otherwise satisfy myself that my content looks somewhat professional, I will be in position to promote it in earnest.

The thing is, I think I could be quite good at self-promotion once I get started. After all, it doesn’t have to be me talking about how awesome I am.

It can be me talking about how awesome my content is, and that’s way easier.

And I want to make the sort of stuff that commands attention. That libertarian vid is a good start. I made that specifically to challenge certain people and make them angry in a very specific and hopefully productive way.

Alas, so far there’s not be a single badly spelled and incoherent comment of outrage.

Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

Maybe I should post it to a Libertarian subReddit. Heh heh heh.

My point, and I do have one, is that I intend to provoke. Not for its own sake, but to force people to think about what they believe and why, and to maybe goad them into a higher state of enlightenment by the time honored tradition of pissing them off.

Don’t laugh, the path to enlightenment isn’t always meditation and koans and mysterious advice from zen masters.

Sometimes it’s a dirty old beggar telling you to eat hot turtle snot.

In other words, sometimes it’s someone wise enough to know what buttons to push to cut through the usual daze of daily life and really activate a person.

That’s the trickster’s job. To wake people up. To elevate their minds. To make them truly think and by doing so, bring them closer to enlightenment and peace.

Some medicine tastes very bad.

I was thinking about analogizing physical and spiritual ailments and how life would be so much easier if you could just stick your finger down your throat and barf up all those old traumas and suppressed emotions that are poisoning your mind and spirit and then leave them all behind in the toilet.

One flush and you’re unburdened forever. Woohoo!

And who knows, maybe some day we’ll be able to do that via a drug like ayahuasca. All that psychological garbage gone, as well as a week’s worth of lunches.

Puking seems like a small price to pay for emotional emesis.

More after the break.

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To live better

Better than I could provide for myself, and that’s the rub.

One thing that came up during Therapy Thursday was the impossible define category of what I “can” do.

Because there’s all kinds of things that I can, technically, do. Wonderful, life-affirming things like cleaning up my room and getting Julian to help me spend some time outside and investigating all kinds of online jobs and distance education and so many, many more shining and glorious possibilities.

And it would be such magical advice if people were to tell me I could do these things. And I would, of course, agree with them. I “could” do them.

But I won’t.

To me, such charming suggestions belong to that vast universe of things outside the walls of my inner fortress that I can see and I know about and could tell you how to use and everything, but that I have no connection at all to personally.

That stuff is all Out There, and I am stuck In Here, and there is a rip in the fabric of space/time between those two that feels insurmountable.

That’s the really brutal penalty to being so catastrophically withdrawn. I am so tightly wrapped up in myself that I can’t reach out to do even the simplest of things that it totally seems like I “can” do.

But can I? It doesn’t feel that way to me. Like I said, I will totally agree that it is something I “could” do.

But ask me if I will. The answer is, mostly likely not.

The motivation just isn’t there. It doesn’t matter how much you argue that I could and should do thing X. I’m not even arguing with you. I could and should do it.

But that in no sense motivates me to do it.

You can even tell me how much better I would feel if I did it.

And I will again agree. I probably would feel better IF I did it.

But I’m not gonna. I wish I could, if only to make the people giving me advice happy. I hate that I disappoint them over and over by seeming like I am doing to do thing X but then never ever doing it.

It’s not that I don’t care what you say or don’t love you for saying it.

But the traumatizing truth is that you, too, are Out There. And I’m In Here.

And I am so very sorry that this can make things so cold for you.

That’s the last thing I would ever want to do to someone I care about. I want those I love to feel warm and welcome and wanted.

That’s why, to me, the worst thing about my mental illness is when it makes someone else suffer instead of just me.

God, being crazy sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I used the capital L version of Libertarians so people know that I am specifically referencing the bizarre American definition of the term.

By non-American definitions, I might be considered a (civil) libertarian.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I’m pretty happy with my little speech. I am sure that there’s things I meant to say that I never got around to saying but that’s standard for when I make videos now.

It almost makes me want to start taking notes. Ha ha ha. Not really.

Not even I can keep up with the sheer volume of thoughts I produce. There has to be some kind of winnowing process.

I have been wanting to pull that little trick with the warning at the beginning for a very long time. Everything I say in that intro is absolutely true. I spoke in blunt, plain, direct terms and it all came straight from my honest and forthright heart.

I’m just exploiting the fact that right wingers have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that kind of thing belongs to them.

They will go on ad infinitum about the plain truth, and no trigger warnings, and being too “real” for the libs, and not worrying about being offended, and all that crap.

But what they’re really saying is, “I don’t think this is going to offend ME, and I really hope it offends YOU so I can feel smugly superior without having to do anything. ”

What they really don’t expect is for what comes next not simply to offend them but to attack them directly.

This is a vulnerability I am overjoyed to exploit.

And the true genius of it is that it sets them up because if they now get angry and offended at what I said, I can just say, “Aww, were you triggered, snowflake? Do you need a safe space? Did I hurt your precious little feefees?”

After all, I warned them.

They just took my warning to mean something I in no way said.

Mua ha ha ha.

Of course, I would love for this little video of mine to stir up a massive shitstorm. It would be a happy day indeed if I came back to the computer to find hundreds of incoherently enraged and badly spelled attacks on me, along with the usual threats of personal violence and whatnot.

Because it’s not like I wasn’t trying to piss them off.

But not just for the sheer joy of trolling. I never piss people off without a purpose in mind. And in this case, my purpose is to wake them up to what they have become and remind them of what they really believe by directly challenging their hypocrisy.

I am hoping to piss them off enough for them to rise up to defend themselves and prove me wrong about them by going after Trump like they should have been doing all along.

The hauteur I display in the video is quite real. I am angry and upset with these people for turning into statist stooges the moment the opportunity arose. I might not have agreed with them on much but I at least thought we were on the same side in that.

Nope. Turns out they never believed a single thing they were saying. Oppression and tyranny are super OK with them as long as they feel the right people are getting hurt.

Revenge by proxy, more or less. Against people who have never done a damned thing to them but who their masters have told them it’s okay to hate as much as they want and that’s good enough for them.

After all, if it was people who could actually hurt them, they’d be way too scared to attack them. Real power terrifies them.

But then again, what doesn’t?

No, they prefer made up imaginary targets because they can be imagined to be whatever makes hating them the most fun and to hell with truth or reality.

Imaginary monsters can’t fight back.

That makes them perfect for cowards.

More after the break.

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Running for safety

Today’s old bone to gnaw on : the flight and freeze responses.

I’ve talked before in this space about how the urge to flee situations can absolutely wreck your life if it becomes too habitual.

Once that flight response kicks in, nature assumes it’s a life or death situation and that therefore whatever you have to get away THAT INSTANT is justified.

And that’s great if a sabertooth is chasing you. But if like me you have an anxiety disorder, that fear based adrenaline response can be trigger by situations where not only are you perfectly safe, cutting your losses and fleeing will do great harm to you and your best interests.

An example would be that you’re on a date with someone to whom you are quite attracted and it’s going well but your anxiety starts creeping up and eventually causes you to mumble an incoherent excuse and flee back to your apartment.

And of course, eventually you will hate yourself for doing that.

But first, you will feel so much better.

That moment when you escape the situation will be one of incredible relief because you are going from a state of high tension to no tension all at once. You have successfully escaped the sabertooth and your ancient animal instincts are celebrating.

And it’s this intense reward that keeps you fleeing. It doesn’t matter to your instincts that there was no danger and you just wrecked your chance with someone you’re very attracted to for no reason.

You escaped the “danger”. Hooray.

I’m still not sure what to do with one’s anxiety. Besides Xanax, obviously. But pharmacology aside, as far as I can tell, once that flight response is triggered you’re pretty much screwed.

No matter what you do to calm yourself, the urge to flee will just get more and more intense until you finally GTFO.

Maybe if I practiced mindfulness and learned to center myself and let the anxiety wash over me unopposed, I could stop an attack after its started.

But probably not. You kind of have to already be calm for any of that shit to work.

So my choices are : brutally suppress the embers of anxiety before they can start a fire, or learn to ignore the screams of every cell of my body to run away.

Or, ya know. Xanax.

Being crazy is so damned hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something I felt I needed to make clear on this day.

We’re not the greatest country in the world.

Not that it matters.

We’re just the younger, more staid and calm sibling of good ol Uncle Sam (Nephew Bob), the ones who never rebelled against our parents (England) in any serious way and who got our sovereignty by buying it a piece at a time.

That’s why are still, technically, part of the British Empire.

England has no real power over us (except in emergencies, maybe) and being a part of the Empire makes some old people happy, so why leave?

And that’s the Canadian desire to minimize social stress in action. We’d never kick up a fuss and make a big deal of leaving the Empire because it’s doing us no harm and it makes some people happy, so staying in the Empire (on paper) is the position of maximum social harmony.

Which is in stark contrast to the American instinct to hurry past any principled arguments or notions of restraint to get to the good part, picking a side and fighting.

That’s anathema to the Canadian spirit. Any Canadian who acted like that would face withering social disdain and disregard. Eventually one of us would ask them, politely (probably), why they were upsetting everybody by acting like that.

And more than likely, if the perpetrator is truly Canadian born and bred, this will make them feel such crushing guilt for letting everybody down that they’ll stop.

In fact, they will probably need some kind of therapy, and maybe a bit of a rest.

I heard a great story from a lady from the UK who was here at a restaurant in Canada when a server dropped some dishes. Crash!

She did what people do in the UK when this happens : she clapped.

Only to have all the Canadians in the restaurant staring at her in aghast silence because to us, that would be so rude as to be beyond the pale. Unthinkable.

Why would you mock someone who already feels terrible about making a mess and disrupting everyone’s meals with the noise?

The Canadian thing to do is get back to your meals as quickly and quietly as possible so that the server could recover from their embarrassment in peace.

Calling attention to it via clapping would just seem appallingly cruel to us.

That’s just how we are as Canadians. Getting back to our meals discreetly is our way of maximizing social harmony. We’re not ignoring the server’s pain and embarrassment out of a callous disregard but out of genuine concern for them.

It’s what we would want people to do if it happened to us.

That’s why, as Canadians, we aren’t all that big on blame. Sure, we want justice, just like any other civilized country. But on a personal level, we’re reluctant to point someone out and say, “It’s all THEIR fault!”.

That’s why if you ever seen a torch wielding mob in Canada, you can be sure they are looking for a missing kid.

So what do folks think of my little speech for today? I think I am getting better at them. The number of ums and ahs I have to remove in editing is trending downwards, and I sound more confident and focused and charismatic.

This speaks well of my future as a YouTuber, or at the very least as an orator. If I continue to use less verbal filler, it will open the door to doing other, somewhat more ambitious things with my “talker” videos.

Like submit them to that Descript thing and see what it can do in the way of adding images and video clips to my content.

Of course, I could eschew the visual entirely and do a podcast. But I don’t like the idea of having to fill that much time with my own blah blah.

Is there such a thing as a short podcast?

Maybe I could just concatenate some of my speeches…

More after the break.

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WARNING : The following may be too cute for some cute people.

You have been warned.

Is that not just the cutest thing ever? She saw humans using money and got the idea! What a smart kitty, and as a reward for that, she gets fish!

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An unusual Tuesday

Joe and Julian were off doing Canada Day stuff with their families today, so I have been here all alone.

I did manage to finally make up my mind and get some games.

One of them is Tactical Breach Wizards, a rather odd little game where you control mercenary wizards in a world with our level of technology PLUS magic and you have to guide your SWAT mages through room after room of baddies in turn based tactical combat with spells.

Like I said. It’s wacky.

It was $20, which is 2/3 of this month’s game budget, and I am not entirely sure I am going to keep it. I’ve managed to make the learning curve so far, but I am not sure I can say I am actually enjoying the game.

Then again, maybe I am just being flighty.

I also, on a total whim, bought this game called Risen

What the heck, it was like $4 and looked like it might be decent.

So far it’s a fairly generic 3D RPG by Piranha Bytes, the same people who made that game Elex I was playing until it suddenly stopped working.

The combat is a little more forgiving than Elex, which is good, but the into bit seems to be dragging on and on and to be honest, the gameplay is not thrilling me enough to justify that kind of early commitment.

I mean, it starts with me getting shipwrecked. How original.

So despite how cheap it was, it might not last either.

I know I don’t want to keep being the guy who buys and returns a half dozen games before settling on one.

Then again, why not? It’s not like Steam is going to get sick of it and kick me out.

Maybe I’m just very particular about what I play.

That’s not a bad thing, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.