OK, let’s try to assemble a more coherent identity for myself, because right now, I am all over the place and that’s not good.

Q : So who is this Fruvous guy anyway?

A : Oh, he’s great! He’s so witty and funny and sweet. I’ve never met anyone like him before. He radiates warmth and sympathy, and just being around him makes me relax and feel comfortable. And he’s so smart! He is truly one of a kind. I’m happy I met him.

Did I miss anything?

Obviously I was going for a positive spin on everything. After all, if I am going to construct an identity, it might as well be a healthy, self-respecting one.

Now there’s an idea.

And looked at the way I looked at it up there, I am a pretty amazing dude. And I am sure my friends, both fuzzy and human, would agree that I am definitely one of a kind.

And I don’t disagree. Factually. All of those wonderful attributes apply to me and do form a potential foundation for my identity. A good one, no less.

But the facts can only penetrate so far into my mind, heart, and soul and while they penetrate a little further every day, there is still a very stark dividing line inside me where past which the good things stop and everything becomes stark and barren and cold.

And I think part of me – the sick part – likes it that way

Perhaps that line marks the place where the intellectual cage I built around myself to survive being raped as a toddler begins.

I know that there is within me a permanently freaking out critter that screams NOBODY TOUCHES ME and is ready to bite the head off of anyone who tried to get too close.

And that’s bad. Very, very bad.

Because I hate being so alone all the time. And not just on the outside. Yeah, I spend the vast majority of my time alone in my room, but that’s not the part that really hurts.

It’s the inner solitude that feels like it’s killing me. It’s the fact that I have been all alone in my inner world for my entire life that does it. I don’t have any other emotional influences within me – no memories of positive input from others – that I can draw upon to bolster my mood.

I’ve been so heartbreaking alone for my whole life and even now, despite having absolutely marvelous friends in both RL and VR, I still feel isolated and alone on the inside and it’s not hard to see why.

Nobody can get past that line.

That leaves me in a constant state of emotional starvation. And that in turn makes me very, very hungry for any kind of positive emotional input.

Romantic love would be nice. That could help me thaw out. If it was the right dude it might even lead to my finally opening up instead of being sealed inside myself.

Sex could play a big part there. It’s so life-affirming and intimate and joyful.

At least if you’re doing it right.

I mean, clearly this inner famine has to end and that means I need to find whatever I need, inside my head or outside of it, in order to truly open up to the world.

To let the world in. To let people in. To fully commit to being present and alive and real and part of the human race. To breathe free and relax on the inside and end that freaked out little critter’s rage and terror and bring it home at last.

My childhood wasn’t all misery. There were times when I felt good. Sunny days where the sky was blue and the pavement was warm and life seemed pretty okay.

Even happy days spent watching TV and reading.

And I need to remember those days and add them to my inner narrative.

It hasn’t all been bad.

In fact, some of those things were pretty darn good.

More after the break.

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The long awakening

Got another one of “those” phone calls at around 10:45 this morning.

The one where one of the nurses at the wound care place (the CCC) calls me up and asks, “Are you on the way here?”.

And I’m like, “No, because my appointment isn’t till 3 PM!”

And the nurse says, “No, it’s 10:45, man. ”

At this point, Julian shows me the actual printed schedule we were given and yup, it says 3 freaking PM on it.

And this just keeps happening.

They move the appointment without telling me. And then I have to go without a bandage change for another three or four days because of THEIR mistake.

Luckily, that won’t happen this time. My nurse had an opening tomorrow at 10:30 am, so Julian and I will be showing up then.

I am getting rather peeved at this damned SNAFUs.

---

Otherwise I am doing OK. Glad I will be getting my bandages changed after all, although it’s going to be a little weird to have them changed again two days later, at 9:15 am on Friday.

Yeah, you wanna bet we made sure the nurse was on the same page as us THIS time.

I am happy with the depth I have been digging into my own psyche. I am confident that I am slowly mastering the ability to move in the direction of maximum pain and discomfort and thus find the most therapeutically useful insights.

Maybe “insights” is the wrong word. Too intellectual. The real work is all emotional, but sadly the only route I know to the emotional is via the intellectual.

Hence the endless self-analysis. A more emotionally normal person would not have to write thousands and thousands of words in order to heal their own mind.

It would probably just happen. They’d have a big emotional experience, possibly attributing it to their faith, and that would be it.

But us neurotic intellectuals need the help of therapists and journaling and so on.

Because we have to understand everything. We can’t just let things take care of themselves. To us, the very idea seems like madness.

So we’re all at least somewhat crazy.

Ironic, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am definitely feeling rather off right now.

At least I headed off the worst of it. About an hour ago, I started feeling increasingly bed. Headache, nausea, muscles aching.

It was bad enough that thought of the ER or UC danced before my eyes.

They did the foxtrot, of course.

But I took the appropriate measures. I got some hydration and some nutrition into me, then I lay down in bed with the fan on and pointed at my fevered brow, and proceeded to unclog my ears and nose.

That did the trick and I was soon feeling a lot better.

Pretty sure my blood sugar was starting to melt down there but getting some trail mix into me put a stop to that.

Speaking of trail mix, there’s something very weird about my latest bag of it.

It’s President’s Choice’s Almonds, Raisins, Cashews, and Cranberries trail mix. ^[1] It had been on my DoorDash account as an alternate to my usual trail mix(es) for ages and this week it was, as it were, pressed into active duty.

It sounds like a perfectly straightforward mixture, and for once, I can be completely sure that a previously untried trail mix does not contain any fricking candy.

But when I opened the bag, an odor escaped that did not make me hungry, It was not the smell of almonds, raisins, cashews, or cranberries.

It was the smell of dry dog food.

And I have a personal animosity toward that smell because I grew up four blocks from the Sur-Grain (pronounced “sure grain”) Feed and Fertilizer plant and on very bad days the wind would blow that exact scent into my neighborhood.

And I haaaaaate that smell. It’s like it goes straight to my gag reflex. Just thinking about it makes my throat threaten to close off.

So I was not at all happy that this odor was coming out of a bag of what was meant to be Fruvous Chow.

Luckily, that scent dissipated after a while, and I was able to eat the fucking thing.

And that’s when things got really weird. Because, I shitteth thou not, sometimes when I eat a handful of it, it tastes like fish.

To me, at least. Smells like it too. And like, WTF is up with that?

It seems to be something that all four constituents of the trail mix are coated in to some extent. When I eat them separately, the flavour either is not there or is pretty faint.

But put them all together and somehow, inexplicably, things get fishy.

I assume that it would not taste piscine to anyone else. My taste buds are just as off kilter as the rest of me and sometimes I taste things in a way nobody else does.

Luckily, putting some in a bowl and leaving it exposed to the air for a while cuts through the fishy flavour, so I am able to eat the stuff.

But still, what the exponential fuck? In general, nothing that is not fish should taste like fish, and that makes me what the frick I’ve been eating.

And my bladder has been anxious lately. I get the need to pee more often than usual but each time it’s a much smaller amount than usual. As if my bladder shrank.

And that has me very worried because I have experienced this symptom twice before and both times it was a sign that my prostate was infected.

So you can bet I am checking my urine for traces of blood each time I pee.

And peeing hurts a little right in that area around the spot where the bladder empties into the urethra. And that’s also a sign.

I hope it clears up on its own.

I don’t wanna go to the ER or UC!

More after the break.

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On our backs

My back has been bothering me again recently.

It had be behaving itself for a long time. I hadn’t felt the need to take one of my Cyclobenzaprine muscle relaxant pills in months.

But now that spasmodic pain that clutches at my spine and makes me cry out in pain and/or fall onto the bed when I try to stand is back, and that kinda sucks.

The pills do keep it under control, thank God. But I wish I knew what changed both to make it go away and to make it come back.

I want it gone again, hopefully for good.

Otherwise I am feeling okay-ish. Pretty much the same as when I wrote part 1 : not sick in any particular way (except back spasms, grr) but not feeling quite right either.

I’m doing okay emotionally. I have periods where I feel pretty depressed – I am processing a lot of deep changes as I dig myself out of this grave – but I just wait for them to pass and don’t take them too seriously.

It’s all part of my recuperation. Getting better is often a messy and difficult process but I know that as long as I keep trudging along as I unburden myself, I will eventually make my soul light enough to float up into the sky where shiny people like me belong.

Because I deserve so much more than this sad little life of mine. I should at the very minimum be making a comfortable middle class living with my outrageous talents.

Or at least enough to pay someone to come in and clean my bedroom and ensuite. Top to bottom, spic and span, so clean you could perform surgery there.

I’d pay someone $200 for that.

I can’t really do it myself. Not yet. I need to go a lot further down the road of taking responsibility for myself and accessing my true energies before that.

I mean, ya never know. I might suddenly find the ambition to at least clean off my bed so that I can flip the mattress over so the springs don’t impale me so much any more.

And the other side should be a lot cleaner too. Way less sweat absorbed into it.

i wonder if the province would buy me a new (to me) bed if I asked?

After all, I’m not fussy about the color…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, hear me out.

Right now, all the good and righteous people of the world are worried about all the terrible things Trump promised to do.

But that’s where the ray of hope emerges, because look at those two words :

Trump promised. And we all know that, as with all sociopaths, promises mean absolutely nothing to him. They are just words you say to get people to do what you want them to do. The idea that they should have any existence past the point where the person did what you wanted them to do is absurd to them.

And his people did what he wanted them to do : they voted him into office. And now they have absolutely no hold over him because he can’t ever be re-elected.

Luckily, changing THAT would requite a constitutional amendment.

So maybe Trump will do the terrible things he promised them he’d do. But maybe not. We know that he’s even more senile, childish, and impatient now than he was when he won in 2016.

Who knows if he will even remember what he said on the campaign trail when it comes time for his inauguration on January 20th.

So that’s it. That’s the slender ray of hope I have come up with today.

It’s not a lot but so far it’s been enough to stop the spread of the cancerous despair that has been fomenting in my soul since I read the news he had won last Wednesday.

Assuming he really did win. Not that I suppose it matters now as it’s not like anyone is going to be investigating this election once it’s faded from the public’s mind, but I still think there is strong chance that he and his cronies cheated to get the win.

That would be straight from the fascist playbook he has apparently been following. Rigged elections are a favorite of dictators all over the world because they want people to think their people love them but don’t want to leave it up to the people to decide that for themselves. So they cheat.

Hence the “elections” where there’s only one party to “choose” from. And the unspeakable obscenity of fascist dictators celebrating their election “win”.

And we know that his supporters are perfectly willing to rig things in his favor. That’s why they have been infiltrating election boards and other similar bodies for the last four years. They wanted to make sure their guy won.

Because right wingers have never ever truly believed in democracy. Democracy is too complex and chaotic for them. It has doubt and uncertainty built right into it, and they hate both of those things.

After all, the people might pick the wrong party!

Which brings me to my other bridge of potential hope, which is, believe it or not, the members of the Republican Party.

Look, I never said it was a particularly good bridge.

But we will see if the Republicans in the House and Senate and the Supreme Court are as obedient as we fear they will be.

Hopefully we will find that there are some things they just won’t do.

Heck, we know from his first term that his own staffers will absolutely refuse to follow blatantly insane or evil orders.

Now I don’t know what kind of mental defectives he will hire this time around. I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to work for or with him.

But if we’re lucky, the only people who will work for the second Trump administration are either deranged idiots like RFK Junior or, god willing, true patriots who actually do believe in democracy, sanity, and freedom.

And that’s all I’ve got for now.

More after the break.

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The Purple Menace

I was all ready to record a video for today. Basically I was going to talk about all the things I talked about in part 1 today.

But in video form!

However, I remembered my purple problem from yesterday, so I prudently recorded a test video to see if the same thing would happen again.

It did. It was perfectly normal when I recorded it but the moment I switched over to editing mode, the purple was back.

And that really pisses me off. I mean, it’s a brand new webcam and these days, recording video is one of the simplest things a computer can do.

I mean, I am not even asking it to stream anything anywhere.

And it’s such a weirdly specific problem that Googling it did me no good. As is almost always the case with me, nobody else in the known universe has had the problem I am having and so I am SSOL.

Ask you father what that stands for.

Eventually, I gave up on Google and decided to take my video capture business elsewhere (grr) by trying out an el cheapo freeware video capture app I downloaded several geologic epochs ago.

And it worked! Sorta. Not really.

The audio was out of sync with the video and it was capturing maybe twelve frames per second so it was janky as yesterday’s fuck too.

So, no video for today. I will try again tomorrow. I am not quite ready to commit to some specific number of days and/or minutes yet, but once I get the technical issues ironed out, I might just go for it.

My suspicion is that this purple bullshit is not there by accident but that it’s something that was deliberately programmed into my video editing suite by Corel so that I couldn’t keep using Video Studio 2020 and would have to pay to upgrade to CVS 2024.

If so, it’s only $25 or so, and I can spare that. So whatever.

But if I pay them that money and the purple shit doesn’t go away, I am going to be SUPER pissed off.

I mean, as errors go, it makes no sense. I could understand if the video turned into video noise, complete with awful sounds, when the program went to encode it. Or if it recorded nothing, or I saw an error screen or somesuch.

But WTF is with the purple?

That has to be a result of planned obsolescence, right?

It’s so hard to tell when my paranoia is justified.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I did it.

This morning, I arranged an appointment for one of the Skillup counselors to talk to me about what skills I want to up.

At 11:15 on Monday, November 18th, I will have my chat with these lovely people and together we will figure out what the hell to do with me.

That gives me plenty of time to let all my irrational “failure to launch” fears to come to the surface so I can deal with them once and for all.

There’s the baseline fear that I’ve been dealing with forever, which is a fear that I have volunteered to have a big angry hand to reach down and rip me from my nice warm cozy casket and that will leave me naked and exposed to the world and no longer able to dive into my hidey hole whenever I feel overwhelmed.

Which is insane, obviously. So am I.

That’s the thing about mental illness. It’s crazy.

And crazy people do and think and say and believe crazy things. I know that as a “mental health services consumer” I am not one hundred percent in control of myself and my mind and my soul and so on, and that’s a very hard thing to face when you are the product of an advanced democratic pluralist individualist culture based squarely on the bedrock principle of individual responsibility.

So far, the compromise I have used to solve that critical conundrum has been that I control my actions and that’s all society can ask of anyone.

But now I am thinking that, as logical as that sounds, whether it’s a sane thing to do or not depends highly on how many of your impulses to act you are stifling.

With me, the answer has been, “almost all of them”, and that’s way too much.

And all in the name of “control”. Well, to paraphrase m’man Nietzsche, you are not truly in control of yourself until you can control the urge to control yourself.

The ascetic is just as decadent as the debaucher because they are both the product of an impulse running wild, without restraint.

The debaucher has a lot more fun, though.

Anyhow, my supposed self-control has been so thorough and efficient that it’s kept me from doing anything except blogging and playing video games for decades.

And here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all this magnificent talent and personality going to waste because it’s locked behind a gate made of mental illness.

Well, it’s a tragedy, innit?

Clearly I need to learn to ease back on the parking brake and let my wheels spin freely until I can learn who I really am and what I really want.

I know I want money. Duh. And I want to earn that money. It would do wonders for my mental health if I could, at long last, actually support myself.

I mean, I wouldn’t turn down a million bucks. But I would still get a job of some sort.

People take earning a living for granted. We are largely completely oblivious to our social instincts that demand that we serve the tribe.

But that’s where the whole “wanting to be part of something bigger than ourselves” comes from. It’s ancient instincts telling us to find and serve a tribe.

Modern employment serves that role. Your job is your tribe, and if you are disabled, you are not getting that need met at all.

Hence the massive amount of guilt I carry for never having entered the world of work at all and being 51 years old.

That’s a lot of time without a tribe.

And all our instincts insist that being without a tribe is an emergency and we need to find one ASAP.

Unless, like me, you are socially damaged and hence afraid of people.

Then you’re just plain fucked.

More after the break.

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Haven’t been seen

I had hoped to have some more video to showcase today, but I got stuck not being able to think of what to talk about.

Oh well. Perhaps something will come to me as I blog.

Either way, I am not going to let indecision stymie me again. Instead, I will take the same attitude I do to this blog and just talk about whatever is on my mind when I sit down, and if that fails, just start recording and see what the hell comes out of my mouth.

Like with this blog, all I really need is a starting point. A jumping off point where I can get the ball rolling and let my natural loquaciousness take care of the rest.

What can I say? I always have a lot going on between my ears.

Some days it’s a wonder that I can even get to sleep.

I think I am slowly adjusting to the fact that Trump will be president again. And I am bracing for all manner of horrors. This time is going to be so much worse.

For example? Putin just invaded Estonia.

And you know what that means? It means Ukraine is fucked. But Putin is not going to stop there. He will attempt to conquer all the old Soviet republics, and the world is going to face a stark choice :

Either let him, or start World War 3.

Now, given that Putin’s forces can’t even conquer Ukraine, and they would potentially be facing opposition from the entire fucking world, it could be a very short war.

But Russia has the bomb. They could still destroy the world. Out of spite.

Ain’t that a lovely thing to contemplate.

A lot of my American friends are worried about him essentially disbanding the entire FDA and letting food regulations go all to hell.

And that’s just one area of government he could dismantle.

It really is the coming of the reign of the mad king Donald down there. We had better really enjoy our Christmas this year because God knows, it might just be the last good one for a very long time.

I’m just hoping he’s too senile and spoiled to do anything much now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey, check out this YouTube video! It has me in it!

Yes, that’s me in a talking head video. In the future I will add at least a little panache to the vids in case anyone wants to actually watch the thing, but for my first video after a very long absence from YouTube, it will suffice.

Like I said in the caption, I know that is sounds like I’m in a cardboard box. Dunno what’s up with that. I will have to inspect my new toy and see if there’s tape or a sticker over the microphone that I’m supposed to remove.

Still, the visuals are sharp and beautiful like digital video always does, I think digital video looks better than reality, myself.

So cool and clear and stable!

I think it looks better to me because it compensates for all the tiny little distortions to our vision caused by the fact that we live at the bottom of a sea of air and that air moves in current and waves around us that our mind edits out of our consciousness.

After all, it’s not useful information for most of us most of the time.

Digital video does all that for us, thus relieving our mind of the task.

Well, that’s my theory, anyhow.

Like I say in the vid, I’m not sure what I will do with my freshly renewed video capacities. I could embark upon another video quest – two minutes for 20 days, maybe – but I feel a highly uncharacteristic desire for more definition than that.

Could our boy finally be growing up? Is he ready to commit to an actual format? Can he summon the self-discipline to actually stick to a topic?

Maybe. I will at least give it a shot.

Because I want to build a brand around myself. I want people to have some idea of what I produce and while it is, in fact, entirely possible to build a brand around your personality, and have people watch you because they like spending time with you, that’s a pretty risky gambit and I would want to have something that gets people to come experience my personal fabulousness themselves.

Which brings me to the real problem, which is that the various parts of me don’t really fit together. Am I a comedian? A pundit? A laid-back commenter? A deep diving psychologist talking about what lurks in the collective unconscious? A high flying philosopher exploring the very roots of morality?

I am all these things. To my mind, they are all a part of me that expresses some drive or impulse in me and thus choosing which one is the “real” me seems hopeless.

It’s like asking which feather is the real chicken.

But one can’t very well advertise oneself with the slogan, “Watch Fru! He’s a bunch of things all at once. :

Kind of hard to build a public persona out of that.

Given the recent utter disaster down south, I do feel a call to finally mount my pulpit and start sending my words and my truth into the world.

My powers of oratory and my articulacy and my personal charisma could make for a powerfully persuasive presence and who knows, maybe I could attract an audience and build a following and even have some actual impact on the world.

I have a lot of very powerful truths to speak to the powers that be, and my thoughts and my anger could stir the world to action on climate change before it’s too late.

Kinda makes it seem like I have to do it, doesn’t it?

But I am not good at doing what I am supposed to be doing.

So we’ll see.

More after the break.

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I blather on and on

Another video so soon? Wow!

Like the text on the screen says, I dunno where the pink came from, but I did not want ot lose sincerity by redoing it.

Maybe I will export the audio and do a whole new video for it at some point.

Well I managed to do a political polemic. That felt good.

Well, recording it did. And publishing it did. The in between was irritating.

I’d forgotten just how annoying editing video can be. Especially when your skills are as rusty as mine are.

That’s why the above is rather sloppily put together. I am so out of practice! I don’t even remember how to make it center elements on the screen.

And doing it by hand results in something that looks like it was pasted together by an overly enthusiastic eight year old.

Oh well, I will get back into the hang of it if I keep at it. And it does feel very good to put not just my words but my passion and my sincerity and my personality out there for all the world to see.

I am painfully shy yet the idea of that video being seen by others does not bother me.

Well, like Will Smith said, my life is a cage but on stage I’m free. I would be more comfortable performing at Madison Square Gardens than during cocktails afterwards.

If there was a place for me to add tags in the uploading to YouTube process, I missed it. I guess that’s why people sweat bullets trying to come up with the perfect title and the perfect thumbnail to make people want to click.

I dunno. I’m new at this. I will figure it out as I go.

Which is my way. I could never be the perfectionist who could never let anything be seen by the public unless they were absolutely sure it was as good as can be.

Yeah, ick. No thanks. I would never produce anything then because the creative fires would go out way before I could finish and bang would go my will to keep going as well as my ability to believe in what I have done.

So all I can to is make it, shove it out the door, and start on the next thing.

And get better as I go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…the crazy is getting in.

And I don’t know what to do about it. Like I said on BlueSky, I am so used to being paranoid and anxious for no good reason that I don’t know how to handle being freaked out when it’s actually justified.

Oh, and it turns out that the election down south wasn’t the only reason I was feeling down yesterday. I also have a bug of some kind.

Call it a head cold, if you will. I once more have that soreness that goes from my lungs up through my throat and into my ears.

Along with the usual malaise and tiredness that comes with these things. i feel positively drained, and that means I’m either ill or some vampire felt snacky.

Pretty sure I haven’t invited any in lately. Unless DoorDash people count.

Come to think of it, being an old fashioned delivery person – the kind you paid in cash – would be a pretty sweet gig for a vampire.

People invite you into their homes all the time. When you’re hungry, you just drain your next customer. It would totally work.

For a while, at least.

I’m not really depressed about developments down south any more. The depression is in the process of morphing into something else : rage.

And with that rage comes a steely determination to fight Trump on every level all the time. We’re talking total resistance. Give that cancer of the body politic absolutely no cooperation. Make his life as difficult as possible.

Oh, and gather evidence for his next impeachment.

We know the storm of stupidity and evil is coming and now, in the last days of sanity, we have our chance to batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, put up the storm windows, and dig in.

Because we know what is coming. We’ve been here before. And this time, we know exactly what we’re going to get from him and his pet Senate and Supreme Court, so we are in the perfect position to ready ready to rumble.

The next four years are going to suck.

Let’s make sure they suck for HIM, too.

The worst part is that I don’t think Trump even wants the job. He hated being President the first time. Remember, he was born with a silver spoon so deep in his mouth that he farts glitter, so having people keep telling him to do things he doesn’t want to do is like hell for him.

And he is way more senile and thus more cranky and unreasonable than the first time.

Could be fun to watch him humiliate himself on the biggest stage in the world.

My god, is it hard to make the words happen when you’re this tired.

But I do it anyway because I love you people.

And because at this point, not blogging would hurt more than blogging ever will.

Back to Dumb Donnie. Remember too that he is super old and might die at any minute, leaving us with J.D. Vance as President.

From what we’ve seen so far from that weenie, he would promptly soil himself then try to run away to Acapolco.

Would be funny if the Secret Service had to launch a manhunt just to find the President so they can protect him.

I hope that, in our quiet way, we Canadians are stepping up border security. That master moron might just decide to invade.

Oh. And you can forget about Ukraine. It’s gone, baby. Once Trump is in power he will just hand it to Putin. It’s a done deal.

Sure, there’ll be the rest of us, but who in the world would dare back Ukraine when it’s clear that doing so means going against the USA?

The best we can hope for with Trump is apathy.

Maybe he won’t care enough to do anything as tiresome as war.

More after the break.

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Two steps back

Well isn’t this just fucking lovely.

Ordered a new webcam on Tuesday. It took me a long time but I finally gave up hope on finding the expensive one that I know must be in this room somewhere.

So I Googled “best webcam” and found a reputable looking “top ten” listicle.

The number one was $109. Um no. The number two was $99. Nuh uh.

But the third entry was the “best value” one and it was $40. Bingo!

So I ordered that one. It arrived today. I unboxed it, plugged it in, and tested it to see if it was working by recording some video.

Seemed to work just fine. But when I tried to play the video back, no sound.

Well fuck. Apparently the microphone in the thing ain’t working yet. And after I recorded at least three minutes of my priceless ex tempore speech!

But then I had a terrible suspicion.

Which was born out : it wasn’t that the microphone on the thing wasn’t working, it was that audio playback on my entire computer was now fucked.

I have no sound. And I must scream.

And I have been trying to get it to work again ever since. Once more in life, my attempt to make something better results in my desperately scrambling to get back to normal.

I was totally planning to post my bit o’ video here tonight and sort of reintroduce myself to the world of making videos, but now I really don’t feel like it.

I have no way of knowing if the audio recorded or not anyhow.

And I am understandably super pissed off about all this. Plugging in a webcam should not make the whole damn system silent!

I haven’t completely run out of ideas on how to make it work again. I can always uninstall all audio drivers then reboot and see if Windows detects my speakers.

I’ve had the same speakers for over a decade and they have worked just fine. But somehow, when Windows set up my new webcam, that made the system completely forget my speakers existed.

There is no device listed for them in Device Manager.

I could also try to get the speakers built in to my expensive monitor working. That’s the one part of them that has never worked, which never bothered me because I already had speakers that worked.

Not so any more.

And without working audio, I can’t watch YouTube videos, or listen to music, and all my video games are going to be so much sadder to play.

I need to get this shit working again.

And I really resent being put into this position by something that makes no sense.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know. That thing that happened yesterday. Tuesday the 5th of November, 2024.

That terrible, terrible thing.

The whole world weeps. Because we’re all going to be affected, especially us Canadians, because our countries are so intertwined we’re practically conjoined twins.

Joined at the border, as it were.

God only knows what that tangerine Caligula is going to do now. His first reign of terror was bad enough and all signs point to his second term being much, much worse.

He’s going to try to dismantle democracy in the USA and his Supreme Court is going to let him, and there’s apparently nothing anyone can do about that.

He could be the first American president to rule from jail.

Because luckily, his traitorous Supreme Court has not yet granted him immunity from prosecution for acts committed as a private citizen.

Quick, slap his ass in jail before they think of it.

But speaking of acts of treason by the Supreme Court, I would just like to point out, for no particular reason, that according to this Supreme Court, Joe Biden could order the CIA ro assassinate both Trump and Vance with, as a random example, a drone strike and as long as it was an official act, Biden would suffer no consequences.

Just putting that out there.

I have been depressed all day because of recent events. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to write about it because it hurts so bad

Which is why my language is somewhat circumspect.

I feel like I have been taking the news in little doses as my mind is forced to slowly accept the truth of it all, and each dose has made me proportionally sadder.

I still can’t really deal with it all. At best, I have gotten past the worst of it, or at least the worst of it until he actually takes office.

I know, we right-minded liberals should storm the capital on Jan 6. We should also start loudly complaining about how the election was stolen, how Harris is the REAL President, and Trump is an FBI impostor or something.

The thing is, in that case, it would be plausible. He’s put his people into election boards and other electoral roles all throughout the USA and they would be the people, as Trump so aptly observed four years ago, in the best position to bias the results.

And they would do it, too. All while telling themselves that the Democrats did it before so now it’s OK to do it back.

And the American right has never really liked democracy anyway. They love to beat people over the head with the word but their support for the actuality of it tends to fade away rapidly when you mention that Democrats are allowed to vote.

That, they’re not so fond of. They can’t see why it should be allowed.

I mean, why let people be wrong?

I am not entirely without hope. Evidence of voter fraud could surface before he takes office that would throw the whole election into doubt.

I don’t think the American system has a mechanism for a do-over election but I am sure they could figure something out if they wanted to do so.

Trump could go to jail. That might prompt a Constitutional crisis, but one of those is pretty much inevitable with him anyhow.

He’s going to want to do things that even his flying monkeys on the Supreme Court won’t allow because they don’t want their names on decisions that flagrantly defile the rule of law or go directly against the Constitution in word and in intent.

At least, I hope they will stop him.

And there is always rebellion. I do have faith in the American people’s basic ornery and difficult nature to show itself if they feel like they are being pushed around.

We live in interesting times.

And they just keep getting moreso.

More after the break.

---

Thanks a lot, SkillUp!

When last we spoke of SkillUp, I mentioned that they gave me a choice as to whether they would contact me via email or the phone.

I chose email, because email is way less scary for me than the phone.

Email is patient. It waits for you to ask for it. Phone calls barge in on you, ready or not, and force you to function socially.

i have to be ready for that kind of shit.

Anyhow, Monday morning the email arrives, and what does it say?

“Click here to arrange a time for us to phone you. ”

Like, what the everlasting fuck? Why the hell did you dangle the prospect of email communication in front of me when I was going to get phoned either way?

So that’s a whole new level of gumption trap. I will do it eventually but I was not ready for that in the slightest and it’s going to take some time for me to prepare for not just the social surprise involved but also the decision making.

Like, what date and time should I choose? There’s so many possibilities.

So the whole thing involves surprise, disappointment, decisions, and a radical jump in social stimulation levels.

Yeah, thanks a lot, SkillUp!

Oh well, it will all be worth it if, at long long last, I actually acquire some job skills.

I mean, I am qualified to be a writer for TV thanks (?) to VFS, but when the teachers refused to recommend me to anyone in the biz, that left me as my own agent, and that’s not a role to which I am suited.

I could be somebody else’s agent, but not my own.

Maybe I need to find someone else in the same boat and form a mutual agency.

I’ll represent you if you represent me.

Come to think of it, I would need the same thing for editing. Maybe what I really need is a full time collaborator.

As unlikely as that seems with my social issues.

Why does everything have to be so god damned hard?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In all the old familiar place
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

It’s a song.

What I mean by that is that I have ordered myself a new webcam .

Yay for that! I can make an attempt to become a YouTube star who makes money off of clicks every time he posts a video.

That would improve my work ethic substantially.

In fact, honestly, if the business world was really and sincerely concerned with getting the most labour per local currency unit, everything would work like that. You’d get paid for every bit of work you did.

Mop the floor at McD’s? Ka-ching.
Submit that projected earnings report? Ka-ching.
Sit through another tedious lecture from a senior civil servant? Ka ching.

And just think of how much more efficiently your workplace would make use of your time and effort if they were paying you per task.

Employee would work harder and make more money both for themselves and their employer, and everybody would win.

Well, except for peckerhead managers far too used to treating workers like sheep who now have to face the fact that labour is, in fact, valuable, and that wasting employee’s time means wasting the company’s money, so now their power is slipping away.

The more bad things that can happen to those kind of people, the better. Such undemocratic attitudes have no place in enlightened society.

Anyhow, where was I before I diverged into solving the relationship problems that arise between labour and management?

Oh right, getting a webcam.

I have a feeling that my output as a YouTuber will be a lot like my output here : without format or subject matter, just whatever I happen to be thinking about when it came time to make my video for the day.

The best I could do is use tags to separate my different streams of consciousness, or maybe have separate channels for my different subjects or foci.

Tags would probably be easier for me. The channels solution would probably end up where all such categorizing ends up for me : with me ending up just throwing everything into the “miscellaneous” bin because I can’t decide which of two or more categories to put things in.

Which defeats the entire purpose of the categories (channels) in the first place;

And I can see myself getting into the habit of finishing the video creation process by thinking of all applicable tags.

I’d hate doing it at first, just like I hated doing it on TikTok, but if I want my video blog (?) to spread and grow, I have to play by the common rulebook at least somewhat.

Then there’s the somewhat sticky issue of people not liking pure talking head videos. That’s changed somewhat in the era of TikTok and the rise in listenable YouTube content, but it’s still better to give people something to look at.

I mean, I consider myself to be a compelling speaker, but not at like, the Martin Luther King level, where what I am saying is so powerful that people are enraptured by me.

But, ya know, dare to dream.

I suppose I will be experimenting with different kinds of content in order to see what gets me some traction.

I can make long thoughtful in-depth talking head pieces. I can make lighthearted and silly “audio captioning” style comedy pieces. I can do strident political screeds.

Boy, could I do some strident political screeds. It could be epic.

And who knows, maybe I could a the big bad bullshit destroying iconoclast who changes the way people think and see the world for generations to come.

Or maybe I could just make a few bucks being yet another loudmouthed fat dude with a YouTube channel and too much to say.

Honestly, at this point, I would make whatever kind of videos people want, and by want, I mean the kind that generate clicks and therefore money.

I’m just that desperate for financial validation.

More after the break.

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The American election

I suppose I have to talk about it.

Right now, it’s doom and gloom. Trump is way ahead. Things look grim.

But that’s only because the vote moves from east to west, so right now the results are skewed by all those red states in the middle of the country.

The exact same thing happened before Biden’s win in 2020. Hence Trump whining about them “suddenly” finding a whole lot of Biden votes.

Um yeah. Because the Left Coast was never going to vote for YOU, ya cocksucker.

Plus, early and mail-in voting is often not counted right away, and polls show Harris is way ahead with those voters, so do not abandon hope.

I know that four more years of that fucker is a horrifying prospect, but remember that horror and probability are not related.

In other words, the scariness of a potentiality has no bearing on how likely it actually is, just on how large it looms in our mind, which can be mistakenly thought to be the same thing, but it ain’t.

Hence people being disproportionately worried about extremely rare and improbable things like crime and terrorism when what’s a lot more likely to hurt them are things like heart disease and car accidents.

The world would be a much safer place if we could concentrate on the real threats instead of the bugbears of our minds.

I mean, terrorism is so rare as to be almost fictional and yet we waste trillions of dollars trying to prevent it.

Might as well go bankrupt buying werewolf insurance.

And as should be obvious from the name, terrorism succeeds only inasmuch as it makes people scared and causes them to do injury unto themselves out of fear.

I mean really, do you think the architects of 9/11 were sad that they made the whole world crack down on everything everywhere despite their small numbers?

How about we take all that anti-terrorism money and use it to stop climate change?

If only we could convince the world that global warming is caused by ISIS….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m all sleepy today.

It feels subjectively like a bunch of latent sleepiness was lying around in my brain chemistry like a glacier and a big chunk of it calved off and floated to the surface.

If so, it’s probably ultimately a good thing because I presumably really need the sleep and now I will be catching up on it.

Whether I want to or not, apparently.

i know what triggered this iceberg of somnolence : this morning I was having back pain issues so I took one of my muscle relaxant pills.

Hadn’t felt the need to take one in at least a month, probably more. So there’s at least one thing in my life that has actually gotten better.

Dunno what triggered the back pain. Knowing me, the root cause is probably digestive, although I haven’t eaten anything unusual or troubling to my guts lately.

But my bowels don’t need a reason to get cranky. Maybe they’re just bored.

Had wound care this morning. Yes, on a Monday instead of the usual Tuesday. I am on the Mondays and Thursdays schedule for this week for some reason.

Something to do with the upcoming Remembrance Day, no doubt.

Good thing Joe mentioned this change in routine last night at Denny’s because it was the first I’d heard of it.

Eh, nobody tells me nuttin’. For some reason people sometimes find me difficult to approach even though I am super nice and very reasonable and friendly.

It probably has something to do with my big personality and charisma and the way being my audience can be quite draining for people.

Not because they’re bored or anything. Perish the thought.

But because it’s an intense experience of something kind of like heightened reality. And that can wear a person out.

It’s what makes me a compelling orator and performer but it can be wearying on a one to one personal level, I imagine.

Meanwhile, it’s very windy out, which means that my room is cold. For some reason, whenever it’s seriously windy, it sucks the heat right out of my room.

My windows probably need to be insulated. But that would be a huge hassle. I’d have to move my desk back in order to get at the big big window it sits in front of, and that would require getting a whole lot of cords coordinated and stuff moved, and then I would need to be able to stand up long enough to seal things up with thermal tape.

It would not be easy, is what I am saying.

So I guess I’m just going to be cold. I felt it most in my hands. They do not like being cold and they make that fact known in no uncertain terms.

And it’s not like I can type with mittens on.

Oh well, it makes for good hibernation whether. Maybe that’s the real reason I am so damned sleepy today.

My body wants me to go to sleep for the winter.

Luckily, I am not quite that ursine.

That’s not an option for me given how often I need to pee. And while deep, restful, relaxed sleep is very important for mental and physical health, I am still not willing to wear a catheter to achieve it.

Those things weird me out. They’re not painful, it just feels very weird to have something going up into your bladder through your penis and into your guts.

As one might imagine.

Oh well. At least a cold bedroom makes wriggling in under the covers feel nice and cozy. And I am all about that cozy vibe.

It’s one of my favorite vibes!

More after the break.

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On being real

Reality is such a commitment.

I mean, once you’re real, that’s it. You’re stuck with it. You can’t go back to pretending that you don’t exist.

You’re real, you’re there, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Of course, what I am really talking about is not being real but being seen. I’ve spent the vast majority of my lifespan locked away in my bedroom where nobody can see me and therefore I am not around anyone who wishes I did not exist.

In other words, my family. That’s where the pattern was set. It’s clear to me now that my belief that everybody hates me and wishes I would just go away and die and never come back started with a family that saw me as an interloper in my own home.

But it was never really my home anyhow. Just the place I was least unwelcome.

Even now, at the tender age of 51, this feeling of constant unwantedness plagues me even though I know in my mind that it’s entirely baseless.

My friends love me and love having me around. They’ve never given me reason to think otherwise. Yet even sitting here all by myself in my bedroom, typing away to you lovely people, I feel like I am not supposed to be here and that people wish I would go away forever so they did not have to deal with my contemptible pitifulness ever again.

Yes, even now, I never feel like people actually want me around or are happy to see me.

My mind knows that’s not true but my heart still feels that way anyhow.

And there’s no direct way to make myself stop feeling that way. All I can do is keep chipping away at that glacier that sits upon my heart and keeps me from feeling loved and sending love down to my sleeping inner child in hopes of convincing him that it’s safe to wake up now.

And that everyone wants him to be here and is glad to have him around and happy that he came into their lives.

I think he’s maybe afraid to feel that way. Afraid to believe it. Because if he started believing that and then it turned out not to be true, it would kill him.

It would crush his little heart.

Plus, if he started believing he was wanted, then he’d be stuck being real.

And reality is such a commitment.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, let’s go through this vid looking for gold.

Deep, cleansing breaths. Here goes.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am not going to suddenly be yanked out of my comfortable yet stultifying life just because I am watching a vid.

1. Meter reader analysis : I don’t really have the temperament for that kind of work. I could probably handle the number analysis – I am pretty good at spotting patterns – but the work would give me a headache. So, maybe, but probably not.
2. Remote hotel reservation specialist : The job is remote, which is keen, and I love customer service, but I imagine I would have to learn a heck of a lot about whatever hotel I worked for, and that seems like it would be hard to do remotely. So I rate this as a solid maybe.
3. Content moderator : I think I could be content as a content moderator. ^[1] I would have to give myself a crash course on the popular social media platforms – no biggie – and I’m a weirdo who enjoys making lots of judgement calls, plus I’m fairly thick skinned when it comes to content, so this one is a solid lead. Yes!
4. Social media manager : Hmmm. I could probably craft witty tweets, although it might take me a bit of time to get into that particular groove. But managing a company’s entire social media presence sounds overwhelming to me. So I rate this a maybe, but probably not. Plus I don’t have much social media presence.
5. Online tutor : I don’t know if I would make a good tutor. I think I might. Like all nerds, I love sharing knowledge, and I am a kind and sympathetic person who is good at seeing things from other people’s POV. I have no qualifications though and I have no specialized areas of knowledge. So I rate this one a maybe.
6. Customer service representative : I could probably handle this. I’d have to learn everything I could about whatever I am representing, because my biggest fear would be someone asking me a question I don’t know the answer to. But like I said, I actually enjoy customer service. I’m so weird. Put this on the plus side of maybe for me.
7. Transcriptionist : I don’t think I type 65 WPM, though it’s hard to say, because for obvious reasons I type straight from my head as opposed to an audio source, so I have no idea how fast I would type for that. More importantly, though, I can’t see this as being a job with a future because AI is getting extremely good at recognizing voice accurately. So call this a negative maybe.
8. Online survey taker : That’s a job? Of course not. And I have done this gig a tiny bit and they ask a ZILLION questions for very little money. Um, no.

That’s enough of that for now. I will do the other seven in part 2 of today’s entry.

And you know what? It’s been no big deal. Once I got into the actual work of it, that absorbed me enough that I wasn’t anxious and I wasn’t thinking about pressure or change or all the other things my neuroses feast upon.

I can totally do this. And it would be so good for my mental health for me to have something truly productive to do with my time for at least a couple of hours a day.

The extra money would be nice too, and the ultimate would be if I could actually make a living at one of these things, but mostly I just need stuff to do and I am incapable of providing my own structure so I need someone else to provide that.

Online university is still an option too, of course.

---

Part two : the Jobening

Now where were we?

1. Virtual bookkeeping : Today I learned that being a bookkeeper is still a thing. I could probably get accredited as a bookkeeper. I’m the only person to ever get a 100 percent in my high school accounting class, after all. I know I have the aptitude. I would just need to take a few online classes to update my skills. And I suppose I could do the work. I know how to make a spreadsheet. I will put this one down as a positive maybe.
2. Medical coder : Yikes. I am sure I could do it but I’m also pretty sure I would hate it. Learning all those weird (and unnecessary) codes would be such a snooze. I might balance the books and I might even read your meter, but I draw the line at this kind of work. No.
3. Proofreader : I don’t think so. I have an extremely keen grip on the English language in all its minutiae, but what I lack is a fine attention to detail. I could be wrong, because language errors in stuff I read online do tend to leap out at me, but I would honestly make a better editor. I can improve your writing better than I can make sure everything is perfect. So…. maybe?
4. Virtual recruiting : Not sure how exactly this works. I guess it must be like outsourcing your HR work and paying someone to plow through all the applications for jobs till you find someone actually hireable. I don’t think I would enjoy that. Too much guesswork, because it’s not like there won’t be multiple equally qualified people for every job. And being responsible for whether someone’s kids get to eat would be way too much for me. Nnnno.
5. Online ESL teacher : The whole world wants to learn English because it’s now the lingua franca of the world. The internet gave us that. But I get very stressed out around people who don’t speak English well, making this about the worst kind of job for me. Um, nope.
6. Search engine evaluator : Hmmm. Another “judgement” job. I can see myself doing this. I am sure it can be quite tedious but like I said, I like exercising my judgement on large numbers of things. That’s why I used to enjoy sorting through my random acquisitions from Usenet so much. So, positive maybe.
7. Virtual event planner : Another hmmm. I’m not exactly one of the party people but I do have excellent organizational skills. I am not sure about organizing virtual events, though. That sounds like no fun. I suppose real world party planning would be really hard to do remotely though. Yeah, FedEx me those cake samples. I could probably do it but I would probably hate it. So no.

There! Now I can close one of my lurking tabs! Hooray!

Next I will sign up for SkillUp!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.