How could I not talk about the most wonderful thing to happen in my long lifetime?

To add to that : impeachment is pretty much the only thing that can save the oligarchs.

If they make a big display of sacrificing Dumb Donnie and all his goons to the will of the people. said people might just forget who put them in power in the first place.

Or they might not. They might launch such an enormous investigation into that entire coterie of fucktards that every single link between them and the other billionaires is exposed and people will head straight for the puppet masters once they are done with the puppets and their hangers-on.

But it’s still their best bet. They need to push “the good ones” like Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban to the forefront and have them in some way leading the charge to hang Trump et all so that people have some kind of positive image of billionaires to counter all the crap that Trump and his ilk have done.

This WILL require at least a symbolic sacrifice of profits. Both in the form of allowing themselves to be taxed more (Buffet can lead that) and in accepting new worker protections and price controls and all the rest of the New Deal kind of things that FDR ushered in as a way to keep the angry mobs placated.

This could be the beginning of a new era of actual change.

People are seriously waking up to just how bullshit the era of supposed worship of “the market” has been.

The invisible hand job is over. They have seen how unregulated capitalism can lead to atrocious consequences that nobody in the public wants to see happen. They are not willing to accept that the rules of the game say their child must die. The

Capitalism is a game, and we the people are free to change the rules of said game in order to create better outcomes any time we like. The myth that The Market will somehow shrivel up and die if we so much as touch it was always a cocktail of bullshit and wishful thinking and moral cowardice, and people are catching on to the con.

That why the powers that be need to embrace guys like Oren Cass.

He’s going to help usher in a new era of post-capitalism conservatism that stops kowtowing to Mammon and remembers that Jesus said to take care of the poor.

It’s downright perverse that the socially conservative Christians, at least in the USA, somehow got infected with free market mania in the first place when the entire history of Christianity and especially the New Testament itself strongly indicates that Christianity is meant to restrain capitalism and the pursuit of wealth.

That’s why “prosperity gospel” is such a repulsive thing.

So I am glad to see people like Oren Cass pushing back on that BS.

It would be better for all concerned if the Republican elites in the House and Senate followed Ben Shapiro’s lead in denouncing Trump. These tariffs make for a perfect breaking point. You can plausibly say you were a Trump supporter until he announced the tariffs and thus dodge having to ever admit you were wrong.

And that’s vitally important in today’s world of honourless conservatism that has forgotten the lessons of character and integrity espoused in those old sitcoms they seem to love so much.

You know, things like not lying, fessing up when you messed up and taking the consequences, and trying to be a good person.

Where did all that go? Rush Limbaugh killed it, I guess. Or at least what he started.

I’d love to hear his private unguarded thoughts about this era he began.

Bet he wishes he’d been a bit more understanding.

More after the break.

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A little freaked out

I’ve also been feeling a little overwhelmed lately.

But I am pretty sure it’s temporary.

The cause is obvious to me – I have added a relatively major thing to my day, namely making a video, and that has supplanted some of the time I would more usually have to just hang loose, relax, play video games, and revert to my liquid form like Odo.

And my mind is not used to that yet. So there’s times when I feel like I am not getting enough free time, even though that’s still most of my day.

But I remember, way way back in 2011, when I first started blogging every day, and how difficult it was to adjust to that at first, but now I can’t imagine a day without getting to let my emotions out via blogging.

That’s how I know this vaguely hunted feeling that I am “always” busy will fade over time and the videos will become as routine as the blogging.

Speaking of video making, I continue to wonder whether the effort I put into editing the videos could be better spent elsewhere.

Because going through the raw footage to snip up ums and ahs and stutters takes quite a bit out of me. There’s a mental discipline to video editing and a fairly high level of concentration required and by the time I am done with that, I don’t have a single erg of energy left to do anything else.

I was actually going to add pictures and little text jokes to today’s video but by the time I finished editing that was absolutely no longer in the cards.

And all that just to make the video run a little more smoothly. I am pretty sure that my unedited speech is not so full of ums etc. as to be unwatchable and arguably that time would be better spent on something that added a lot more to the final product.

Like the pictures and jokes I mentioned.

I will continue to brood upon the subject. Maybe I will consider doing the record and edit in the early afternoon and then the polish and ornamentation in the evening. I dunno.

I know that I could probably make something really special if I could find the energy.

I know that technically, I don’t have to do a video a day. Not on paper anyhow.

But in reality, I kind of do.

It’s the only way I know how to do things. I have too much creative energy to express for me to really take my time with things.

Maybe that will change at some point, but for now, it’s what I got.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, as always, my vid :

Nothing amazing to report there. Tried to make a thing, followed a method that turned out to be deeply flawed, will try again tomorrow.

Unless I forget. Always a possibility with me.

Then there’s this gem that I got from BlueSky :

And I think that all that Christian hypocrisy is finally starting to catch up with them. Prominent members of the religious right in the USA are standing up and saying. “Hey didn’t Christ say something about being nice or whatever?”.

Yes he did. Y’all need some Jesus, that’s what you need.

Then there is this miracle of language :

They say the best art comes from the worst times and these times of ours are certainly bringing out the wit in people.

Everything about that reply is magic. The turn of phrase, the setup, the rhythm, the way it misleads with the first half to make the punchline all the sweeter… perfection.

That’s not just a snarky reply, that’s a verbal assassination. I only hope to be that good at being righteously bitchy some day.

Nitpick : might have slightly funnier as “by pigeons”. Just a thought.

But the ultimate comedy kill shot came in this form :

And that leads me to the reason why this is actually a great time to be alive : because all over the USA, literally millions of people have flocked to anti-Trump “Hands Off” protests, and it ain’t just Democrats.

Not by a long shot.

In fact, they are on track to have over 3.6 million total protestors today at over 1100 protests in ever single god damned state.

And you know that includes the red ones!

And to put that in perspective, 3.6 million Americans would equal almost 1 percent of the entire population of the good old USA.

I am damned proud of our southern neighbors today. The people of American came out in force today to tell Donald Trump exactly what they thought of what him and Musk have been doing to their federal government.

And here’s the thing : it’s only going to get much, much worse for him in the future.

Because the recession (depression?) caused by the tariffs hasn’t even started yet. Just wait until the prices go up at the same time that people are losing their jobs.

Right now, the protests, while massive, are peaceful. Cops all through the USA are bewildered by the size of the turnout yet they report no incidents.

Turns out you have have millions of people expressing their opinion in a peaceful and respectful way when those people aren’t a pack of degenerate losers.

And nobody even had to poop on anything! Amazing.

And here’s the thing : Americans are primed for a good old fashioned backbencher revolution. All these representatives from the House and Senate that get ignored by the top GOP brass are listening to their constituents and seeing the way the wind is most definitely blowing and while no one of them has the guts to take on Trump alone, when they look around and see everyone in the same pickle, it will give them the courage needed to gang up on him.

And that’s how impeachment happens.

And the top dogs of both political parties better watch the fuck out because if they try to obstruct the needed change like their rich owners tell them to do, they will get washed away by the tide of history and flushed right down the rain with the rest of the sewage.

Get right or get out, motherfuckers.

History is on the march.

More after the break.

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Pangs of anxiety

It’s time for me to admit it : I’ve been feeling somewhat anxious lately.

Not all the time, thank God, just little stabs of anxiety when I am between activities or occasionally when I am trying to relax.

Plus those spooky moods I get now and then. That “haunted” feeling. But that’s nothing new, I’ve gotten those now and then since I was a child.

Back then, they freaked me out. Poor little Fru had no idea what was going on.

Good thing I never believed in the supernatural or I might have thought I was quite literally haunted or somesuch.

I don’t rule out the existence of ghosts, however. But obviously I don’t think they are the souls of the dead roaming the earth.

I figure they are some interaction of pheromones and electromagnetic oddness.

There is a lot we still don’t know about how our nervous system works.

Anyhow, back to anxiety. By talking about these incidences here, I am forcing myself to face them and think about them.

Because I need to deal with this problem before it gets out of control.

Now I knew that a reduced Paxil dose meant a higher risk of anxiety. I am fine with that. There are things worse than feeling anxious.

Like being so numb that you can’t do anything with your life for decades.

That’s pretty bad.

So at least I am doing stuff now. Videos, Onion headlines. Who knows, I might end up writing for the Onion and making a nice living doing so.

Imagine me living in a nice rented house in a pleasant neighborhood. Wow.

I don’t think the anxiety is a problem yet. But I am definitely going to talk with my therapist Doctor Costin in our next session.

Better safe than suicidal.

The thing is, there’s no depression attached to the anxiety. It’s just there. I think I have evolved to the point where I have separated myself enough from my anxiety and depression that I can ignore them as the meaningless noise they are.

I’d rather be calm, relaxed, and happy, but whatever. I will just keep bouncing along regardless and over time I will learn to turn that anxiety into enthusiasm or even just plain effervescent cheerfulness.

So I am not worried about my feeling worried.

It will all work out fine in the end.

I have faith in that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

About the stock market this time.

Decided to really lean in to my heresy today and reveal the truth that I first recognized when arguing with my Economics teacher in high school.

The stock market is made of bullshit, lies, and gambling, and the whole world would be far better off if we kicked the speculators out of the world’s piggy banks and stopped better people’s god damned retirements on a spin of the fucking wheel.

Well, you’ve seen the video now, you know how I feel.

Lately I always end up thinking of things I wish I had said in the vid about ten minutes after I start editing the thing, and thus far I have not had the mental wherewithal and agility to stop editing to record an extra segment and slip it into the vid saying them.

I will get there, though. I fully plan to keep making vids and improving my technique and developing my “voice” and trying new things.

For instance, comedy. I haven’t tried anything funny yet. I am a hilarious dude and I can see people making full on skits all by themselves online so there is no reason I can’t do something along those lines.

But there’s no need to rush. I can continue on my iterative learning journey serene in the knowledge that things are unfolding as they should.

Well, I can try, anyhow. No promises.

Where those late ideas go now, obviously, is right here in this blog o’ mine. It’s easy to use this space to expand on whatever I blab on about in the day’s vid.

Like, for instance, the real nature of the scam of the stock market that I forgot to talk about in the vid.

Say you did give all your money to your friend so he can bet on the ponies. And when he comes back, he not only pays you your money back, he gives you an extra $500!

Wow, what a great guy! $500 is a lot of money! He must really know horse racing inside and out. You’ll definitely “invest” your money with him again.

But what your “friend” isn’t telling you is that he actually won $10,000 and so giving you $500 left $9500 for him and a ripe sucker (you) ready to be plucked again the next time he needs gambling money.

That’s how it works with these stockbrokers and investment firms. They take your money saying they can make it “grow” or even saying they will “make your money work for you” (what a load of manure) and if they happen to win at the racetrack that is te stock market, they give you a little of that money to make you think you made a smart choice and keep the rest.

Now can you see why all these sociopaths love gambling with other people’s money? They can’t lose! If the stocks go up, they keep most of the profits, and if they go down, you take all of the losses.

And because of the vast asymmetry of (apparent) knowledge, they know that if they blow all your money on a bad bet, they can just feed you some line of bullshit about market volatility or whatever and you’ll have no choice but to believe it.

The whole thing is a Ponzi scheme inside of a scam wrapped up in greed and delusion. Like I said in the vid, I would get rid of all the stock markets in the world if I could.

But I will have to settle for being one of the only people in all of existence who can see that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but he has a tiny dick.

I’ve always felt like my destiny was to be a soothsayer of some sort.

Now if I could only find a way to make it all funny.

More after the break.

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And now the news

I could do a Daily Show style satirical news roundup, I suppose.

Obviously it would be anything but an original idea, but that doesn’t worry me because I know that wouldn’t matter as long as the riffs on the news are funny.

And of course, they would be. This is me we’re talking about here. I would freaking rock a format like that.

I’d have to pick up a few skills, like how to grab the footage I’d be riffing off of from other channels’ video feeds. That shouldn’t be too hard though it could get annoying.

And to be honest, it would be pretty low effort content for me. I generate jokes while I am watching things like the news as just a natural byproduct of being alive.

I joke therefore I am.

But the idea doesn’t really inspire me, at least not yet. It could be that if I think about it for long enough I will find a way to make it into something more.

Until then, I will file it under “good idea strategically” and it will wait until I feel ready to give it a try.

Speaking of the news, I read some good news today. Apparently the tariffs are really pissing people off, including massive MAGA “thought” leader Ben Shapiro, who is now ripping into Trump big time.

And he’s got millions of followers and is, as they say, “about as right wing as it gets”, and is massively influential in right wing circles, so if he has turned against Trump, presumably most of his followers will do so as well.

And that means the palace revolt is officially underway. Trump and Musk’s rampage is going to cost them all their base, especially when the tariffs trigger a recession and the prices for everything goes up right when people are losing their jobs, and then you will see his former supporters really getting pissed off.

And then no force on Earth will save him from the wrath of his people. Congress will turn against him. The Supreme Court will turn against him.

Hell, some of the smarter (?) people in his own executive branch will turn against him. His entire edifice will crumble away beneath him.

At that point, he’d better hope that all that happens to him is that he goes to jail.

Better to go out like a criminal than to go out like Mussolini.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I ended up talking about today.

And the sad truth is that we might be headed for divorce.

And like a lot of people whose relationship is foundering, we are talking about it to our friends and getting their support and luckily, literally everyone is on our side.

I don’t know the details of Trump’s new “liberation day” tariffs yet. I assume they are horrible and are going to spell disaster for all of us, American or no.

But in the long ruin, he will have simply taught the world that they don’t need the USA. We can just trade with one another, and pretty soon, the USA won’t be able to trade with anybody, and they will learn just how interconnected we all are.

Sure, losing a market of 350 million plus consumers will hurt everyone. But despite what they seem to think, most of the world is NOT America and there are 7 and a half billion other consumers we can sell our stuff to.

And Trump won’t last forever. He’s a very old man. He could die at any moment. It’s not like we have any idea what is health is really like.

And of course there’s impeachment. At the rate he’s pissing off (and on) his own supporters and causing them to scream at their senators and congresspeople, that comes closer to being possible every damn minute.

And wouldn’t that be a lovely way for this fiasco to finally end? Trump impeached and arrested along with all his cronies, with even his biggest (former) supporters all cheering like their team just won the Superbowl?

Because that’s the thing. He’s doing evil shit that even his supporters can understand, and they don’t care that he technically told them he was going to do it before they voted for him because these people run on emotional reasoning, not logic, and he made them trust him – that’s his superpower – and then betrayed them and that is all they need to know in order to be out for blood.

All we liberals need to do is to resist the urge to scream, “I TOLD YOU SO” and instead be extremely sensitive and supportive (something we’re good at) and maybe, now and then, say, “Wow, are you gonna take that from him?”

Just a thought.

Had Therapy Thursday today. Talked to Doc Costin about how I have been feeling better lately and how I actually had a moment when I felt emotional healing begin.

He agreed with me that the sunshine is probably helping a lot. The evidence that it’s been SAD^[1] making me sad is piling up.

Which means I should take advantage of my solar powered mood state in order to make sure that I have my light therapy setup ready for when winter rolls around again.

I know I have a solar light setup around here somewhere….

It also helps that I have been doing videos. They are something exciting and new for me to pour my energies into and that helps me perk up and stay alive and away and engaged with reality.

Oh, and I started my Onion headline list today. I already have five of the needed 30. Getting together 30 of them will not be a big deal for me.

Working them until I can’t think of any ways to make them better will be the challenge. I don’t normally operate that way. I create things then shove them out the door to make room to create more things.

As I am sure you all know.

But I am sure I can do it. I just have to recalibrate my brain a bit.

More after the break.

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Foot long nachos

Yup. That’s a thing.

They have them at Subway. I ordered myself some Subway last night and DoorDash hit me with the “if you add X amount to your order you’ll save Y on delivery” thing and for once it was actually profitable.

Usually it’s like, “add $5 to your order to save $2 on your delivery fee!” (um, no), but this time, for once, it was the other way around.

So I looked around the Subway menu on Doordash and that’s when I saw Foot Long Nachos in the Snacks and Sides section.

And I was like, WTF could that possibly be? There was no description, no picture, just those three mysterious words : Foot Long Nachos.

So obviously I had to order it.

Turns out it’s just regular nachos in a foot long dish. Which was not surprising, though still a little disappointing.

I wanted foot long nacho chips dang it!

Unfortunately there was no option to skip them putting jalapenos on there. I don’t eat those. They loudly disagree with me.

I am guessing these nachos probably come pre-assembled and then are cooked from frozen in their sub toasting oven.

I can’t see them catching on. It’s kind of a dumb idea anyhow.

For my sub I decided to go buck wild and not get my usual Cold Cut Combo. Instead I got the Steak and Cheese, with Sweet Onion Teriyaki sauce.

Not as good a combo as I had hoped. Sadly, I once more couldn’t taste the teriyaki at all. It seems like this curse of mine is forever.

Oh well. I was in the mood to try something new, and I did.

At least the steak wasn’t chewy like the first time I had a steak sub from Subway. That experience put me off those for twenty years.

Seriously. It was like beef flavoured bubble gum.

Otherwise, I am feeling a little down compared to earlier. Fair enough. That’s part of life that I am just going to have to get used to.

I think I am just getting sleepy because the sun has gone down. I will take a wee little nap between now and midnight.

And that’s another day in my two-fisted smash’em up of a life over.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I had just played way too much Tyranny and my brain calories were all used up. But I knew I would have to record a video soon.

So I decided to lay down for 45 minutes then make the vid when I woke up. That would have taken me to 2:30 pm, with blogging at 4 pm.

Kind of tight, but my brain was fatigued.

And as I lay down, I tiredly thought, “Who knows? maybe while I’m laying down I will get a great idea for today’s vid.

The moment I laid down, I had the entire idea for this :

It just sprang full formed into my mind. I’d start a series of one minute thought provoking videos called A Minute To Think. Tight, dense, and full of food for, well, thought. And I would make them into YouTube shorts.

I didn’t quite make it with that one but what the hell, it’s a prototype.

Turns out that in order for your video to be a YouTube Short, it has to be a) one minute or less long and b) “vertical”, which I think means in a 9:16 aspect ratio.

So basically, it has to look like it was shot on a phone. That will take a bit of doing on a PC, but I am sure I can pull it off.

It might even be possible to record in that format and simplify the whole process. I hope so. Converting video formats can be a huge pain in the ass.

Though I dunno. Maybe AI can make that miraculously easy too. It already can separate out all the tracks in a piece of recorded music, which blows my mind.

At some point today, possibly the moment I finish blogging, I am going to start that list of Onion headlines, even if all I can put there is my dumb joke, “Area Man joins with Depth Girl to create Volume Child”.

Ha ha ha.

To come up with these headlines (and the Minute to Thinks) I am going to have to learn to process things a different way and I am looking forward to the challenge.

For the Thinks, I am going to have to learn to be succinct.

I don’t think I normally waste a lot of words but I am definitely not succinct, and so learning to get my thoughts out in under a minute will be tough.

I only got it down to 1 minute 7 seconds today, damn it. There was more I might have been able to trim but by then I was TRULY brain fried so I had to stop.

Oh well, like I just said, it’s a prototype. I will refine the process as I go. Including, and I am gritting my teeth as I type this, being willing to do the whole thing over with tighter phrasing if that’s what it takes.

I hate doing things over. Especially things like my videos. Part of my “brand” is total sincerity and you can’t be completely sincere twice.

But art requires compromises.

For the Onion headlines it’s going to be a matter of learning to process the news in a sharp and satirical way.

Big deal. I already do. Admittedly, I haven’t turned those into Onion style headlines much, but I am a completely natural satirist.

That’s just how I process the world. With irony.

It’s a defense mechanism against hypocrisy.

So I am not worried about coming up with the headlines. I can do the bitingly satirical ones and the quotidian observation ones too.

Area Man Suddenly Worried Taco Bell Not “Authentic”.

He was quoted as saying, “I’m starting to think this might not be what they eat in Mexico at all. I bet they look at this kind of thing and laugh!”.

Excerpt from the potato

And that was just off the top of my head.

Yeah… I could totally write for the Onion.

They just have to be smart enough to hire me.

More after the break.

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What is masculinity?

That’s a darn good question, Patrick.

To expand on what I said in the comments : you’ll notice that women don’t sit around debating what it takes to be a woman.

A woman is a woman is a woman. The only qualification is menstruation. I don’t think one woman would ever say to another, “stop being such a little boy!”.

Or accuse another (or themselves) of “not being a real woman”.

The closest they get, I figure, is, like men, wondering if they are a legit grownup.

I know I sure as hell ain’t.

Or they might wonder if they are a good woman, like a good feminist or housekeeper or office worker or whatnot.

But there is no sense that they can just plain not qualify for womanhood.

But like I said in my YouTube comment, I think we men need something like that. The standards of manhood might change over time but the need for them does not.

Of course, things are even more complicated for us gay men. For many decades, gay was synonymous with unmanliness. To be gay was the worst possible crime against masculinity and therefore literally any heterosexual man outranked you.

We’re getting over that now. Slowly and painfully, but we are. Gen X types like myself are still carrying a lot of that negative programming around, asleep but not gone.

In a way it’s easier for us gay nerds because nerds don’t exactly invest much in manliness for a whole number of reasons.

As such, I have always viewed the “manly” world as something interesting and certainly not without its merits but almost completely alien to me.

My Dad did try to instill some in me and my brother Dave. It worked a lot better with Dave. Of the two of us, he’s always been way, way, WAY better at being normal.

Of course, my dyspraxia kind of put manliness out of reach too.

It’s like I am the exact opposite of Nick Offerman.

That’s part of how I know I would be the “woman” in any marriage.

I’m warm, I’m nurturing, I’m a homebody, I’m rather emotional.

Now I just need someone to be my “man”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, this :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assuming I can pull myself together enough to start.

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

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

You know. Like a news organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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About not failing myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well fuck control. Control don’t work.

Time to try a little chaos.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

And I lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, did we really deserve that orgasm?

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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Past the decadent

There is a reason why decadence leads directly to temperance.

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

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

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

Certainly everybody with depression. We all self-medicate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

So it’s like… creative constipation.

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

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

I mean, I post stuff like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voila, the road to effortless excellence.

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

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

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

That seems like the right attitude to me.

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

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

It’s like being manic-depressive.

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

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

I could invent a whole new genre. Comedy noire.

I will think about it.

More after the break.

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Why you can’t go home again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what I decided to talk about today :

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

How’s that feel?

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

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

It uh, doesn’t work like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, see, you’re a HOUSE slave.

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

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

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

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

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

How does that sound to you?

More after the break.

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Karma from shawarma

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

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

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

Repeat until believed. Then do it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve certainly done that plenty of times before.

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

I should probably do something about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole thing left me a tad miffed.

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

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

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

More after the break.

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So now what?

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

Reportage is so much easier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s well within my skillset.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.