When I warn that this might mess with your head, I mean it.

In this talk, I challenge things that are normally so unquestioned as to be part of the cultural background, the water in which we swim.

But fish don’t know they’re wet.

Anyhow, here it is :

More on point, they’re the thoughts that make other people go, “Huh….” as they rub their foreheads because I am making their brains hurt.

At least I know when I am doing it. That’s an improvement over a younger me, who would just trot these things out then wonder why the conversation died.

You killed it, younger Mike. You didn’t mean to do it, but you did it all the same.

It’s things like that which assure me that I have that whole “have your own unique personality and point of view” thing they tell young YouTubers to have and I have it in very large amounts.

I have an incredibly unique point of view and personality. I am confident that some of the thoughts I think and have thought (and will think) have never been thought by another human being in the history of humanity.

And may never be thought again, come to think of it.

Must keep putting them out on the internet so they are available for future generations!

Unfortunately, being a magical visionary thought leader type does not, in and of itself, get one noticed on YouTube.

I am still pondering ways to make my vids more appealing. I keep telling myself that I need to start making my points in a more compact and pithy way so that they can fit within a one minute YouTube short.

And I am pretty sure I can do it if I stop being so lazy.

I could easily take some of my more provocative and stimulating positions and get the essence of them across pretty quickly.

Especially after I have made a longer video about them. My vids where I present my case for something, like today’s vid, would make excellent rough drafts where I figure out what, exactly, I am trying to say and how to say it before I then can condense my verbiage down to a minute.

Who knows, maybe I will use my video making time to make a bunch of those one of these days. I can see it being kinda fun.

I might even take notes. Fancy that.

And it would certainly be something different to do. Something that might even lead to my attracting more viewers.

Which reminds me. It has occurred to me that I have to up my promotional game by including (sigh) links to my Patreon in my descriptions and outros.

That is going to be so hard for me. Every Gen X fibre of my being (and that’s most of them) rails against doing something so obvious and commercial.

So I will have to figure out a sufficiently sarcastic and self-aware way to do it like I did with my little Like and Subscribe outro.

Would you believe that I recorded that thing with zero pre-planning or forethought and I got it in the very first take?

I am just that amazing. Comedy just radiates from me like body heat.

So yeah, I will herd people towards my Patreon and I suppose I should get a Kofi too as those seem popular for, I assume, people who are too cool for Patreon.

Next thing you know, I will have my own Discord server that is only available to members of my channel and things will get all elite n’ shit.

Honestly, like I said once before a long ol’ time ago, I would be happy just to have a small community of interesting people with lively and curious minds that I could draw upon for the thing I love the most in the world, intellectual conversation.

If I had that, I wouldn’t need anything else. And I wouldn’t care if it made me money either, although that would, of course, be nice.

But today I realized that once my new power supply is installed in my computer, the question of “what would you do with the money?” is kinda solved for now.

That was the last thing. Once my computer is fully future proof for a while, I am all out of grand financial ambitions.

My next tier is things like a new (smaller!) bed, and those don’t come cheap.

And there’s always sex workers…. mmmm…

More after the break.

---

24 Karrot Gold?

Downloaded a little app called Karrot, and it really says something about how terrible and stupid app names have gotten that a name like Karrot seems normal to me now.

Downright respectable, even.

Anyhow, Karrot is your typical buy/sell/trade marketplace. I checked it out on a whim because I saw an ad for it that claimed people used it to give away stuff for free, so I figured, what the fuck.

So far, I am not seeing any really wild deals. If people are giving away stuff for free, I ain’t seeing it. Maybe they just don’t do that around here.

One tiny bit of amusement – in order to sign up for Karrot, I had to give them my location so it knew what “neighborhood” I am in, and it gave me a choice between two – am I in City Centre, or Brighouse?

And I’m like….”Both!”

I chose City Centre.

So after failing to find free stuff, I browsed for a bit before suddenly realizing that I had no money to spend so what the heck was the point?

All my spare cash is in this new power supply. And I am quite proud of myself for finally biting the bullet and buying the damn thing.

And this week’s groceries came in below budget, so who knows? Maybe I can even afford to order in tomorrow night.

As long as it’s something cheap, like Subway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Boy, this song really takes me back.

More seriously, here’s my own video for today :

No heavy handed political message today. I’m done with that for now. Now I am back to being easy breezy Fru wondering about the weird shit his health does.

I mean it about the people who leave comments, by the way. Nothing encourages me like engagement. I even appreciate the sad right wingers who tried to refute my analysis of people like them.

Or rather, failed to do so, attacking my implied worldview instead.

I guess they must have thought my analysis of folks like them was correct. I totally nailed their flaws, defects, and general patheticness.

Nice to know I got it right.

Moving on, after I made today’s video, I decided it was, indeed, time to give UpWork another try. But it was the same as before. No matter what I did, it didn’t recognize my ID, leading me to wonder if it just doesn’t recognize IDs from BC at all.

IT’s not like our IDs are weird or anything. They’re perfectly boring standard photo ID type documents. They don’t have holograms on them or anything.

Anyhow, after the damned thing failed to recognize my ID no matter what I did, I gave up and decided to sign up for one of UpWork’s competitors, a site/app with the depressingly low effort name “GoLance”.

Make UpWork seem dignified and respectable by comparison, dunnit?

Oh well, as long as I get work and get paid through them, they could be called DoctorFart.com for all I care.

Superhero or villain? Tune in and find out!

Come to think of it, I think Doctor Strange is the only major superhero with Doctor in his name. All the other Doctors, like Doctor Octopus and Doctor Doom, are villains.

Even superheroes who genuinely have doctorates like Reed Richards and Bruce Banner don’t make it part of their hero identity.

We really don’t trust smart people, do we?

Anyhow, where was I? Freelance job hunting, right.

So far, GoLance hasn’t asked me to scan my ID or anything stupid like that, and the site seems reasonably solid and well organized.

Apparently there’s no bidding on contracts like there is on UpWork. To be honest, I am not sure what people mean when they are talking about bidding. When I was active on UpWork, everything was done via proposal. If I wanted to apply for a contract, I would fill out a form for my proposal for that job, and the body of that proposal would be my pitch for the job.

Yeah, there was a proposed payment involved but I never thought of myself as bidding on anything. It’s not like some sort of horrible reverse auction where the lowest price wins every time. That would be terrible for the freelancers as it would drive the rates down into the gutter.

Anyhow, I am done with those assholes. On to GoLance.

So far, they don’t seem to have much creative work. Which sucks. But I did a lot of other stuff for UpWork clients. Scut work, really, but what the hell, work is work. If I can do it and they’ll pay me for it, bring it on.

Like I said, it would feel good just to have something to do. I am sick and tired of wasting my time playing video games. I want to do something with a purpose.

I’m sick of feeling like a hamster on a wheel.

I want to feel like a real live adult type human being who gets things done instead.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

I pulled the trigger

Oh yeah, I finally ordered that new power supply for this ‘puter of mine.

It’s sitting in its Amazon package on the bed behind me. Joe just brought it in from outside the apartment door for me. Thanks Joe!

I must say, I am somewhat alarmed by how damn heavy the thing is. I hope I ended up with the right thing. I ordered what my friend Windchaser told me to order, so it should be all aces from that angle anyhow.

It’s probably just that this is what power supplies weigh these days. I know that to do their job of converting wall current to something the computer can use, they have to have a fairly large condenser in them in order to store the power while it’s being converted, so it would make sense if that made them heavy.

Same reason the adapters I used to get so I could play my handheld video games without batteries used to weigh so much.

I can still smell that combination of plastic, rubber, and ozone odors they gave off when they heated up.

I spent many a happy hour bathed in that scent.

That probably cost me a minute or two off my life. But it was the 70’s, when people still smoked indoors and nobody gave a shit about seat belts or children and lawn darts were considered totally normal toys.

We clearly had no idea what the fuck we were doing.

Anyhow, power supply. I will check to make sure I got what I ordered but assuming I did, it will have to wait till darling Spuug, my tech support cat, can come over next Wednesday to install it for me.

I don’t do hardware. Hardware scares me. If it involves the inside of the computer I leave it to someone more technical than I.

I know that’s silly. The inside isn’t that much more complicated than the outside. It’s still mostly a matter of plugging things into things, like putting together a component stereo.

Still, I would rather not go there. Plus it gives me an excuse to see Spuug and give him a hug and talk with him about science and other nerdy topics.

He’s going to be in Richmond that day for a Linux User Group (LUG) meeting, and it’s at the Richmond Public Library which is like three blocks from here, so it’s the perfect time for him to drop on by.

And I am not in that much of a hurry to get my computer completed correctly.

I’ve waited this long, after all!

Of course, this means I don’t have any spare cash left this month, but whatever. I knew that if I was to do it, I would just have to grit my teeth, spend the money, and deal with the fallout afterwards.

It cost me $85. It would have cost $115 but I got a “like new” used one.

Amazon themselves guarantees it, so I figure I can trust the self-interest of vast faceless corporate monoliths who don’t want to have to pay to replace it.

That’s how the system is supposed to work!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, my vid of the day.

I’m not that happy with it.

Here it is :

I didn’t totally feel like doing another video in the “Why you…. ” series and it shows. I had some ideas of where I wanted to take it and I thought they were enough, but the previous two vids were way tighter and more focused and I think it’s because I gave myself more time to think over what I wanted to say.

A lot of stuff from the first two vids was stuff I have had lying around in my brain for a long long time, so it comes across better.

Oh well, iterative learning isn’t always pretty. The next one will be better.

Anyhow, I thought I’d talk about my relationship with my brother Dave and how the fact that at points he was scaldingly jealous of me and my genius and how that affected me.

Had I been a different kind of kid, I guess we would have fought a lot. At least, that seems like a more normal reaction to a jealous older brother. And we did argue from time to time, especially when I was in elementary school, but for the most part his jealousy just was not part of my universe on a conscious level.

I was such a sensitive and empathic child that I learned to hide my light under a bushel in order to not upset him. It’s not like I couldn’t tell he was jealous of me, he was not exactly subtle about it, but I didn’t fight him on it, I just… adapted to it.

I don’t like interpersonal conflict. I will always, all things being equal, choose the peaceful option. Me shining bright upset him so I didn’t do it around him.

It really was that simple.

And for the most part it was subconscious. It happened on that deep and mysterious level where we negotiate with one another without even realizing it as our souls act like people sharing a row in coach on an airplane, moving around looking for a way we can occupy the same space comfortably.

I am guessing other people do not perceive said space consciously like I do. But I am a strange and mysterious critter and see much that is unseen.

And fail to see things that are seen, and trip over them, and fall, and say ouch.

Such is life in this material existence.

Anyhow, it’s hard to track how much this not wanting to outshine my brother has affected me. I did it because I didn’t want to upset him, not because I was afraid of hi or anything like that, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get my shyness reinforced that way.

I am only now getting to the point where I am willing to truly let myself shine. And I am really only getting started with that. I can go way, way brighter than I ever have before, what with my megawatt brain and jumbo personality.

In fact, sometimes I think I belong on a stage, where I can shine all I want and people kind of expect it. Maybe as a performer, I could finally truly express myself.

Too bad I’m a gimp. Le sigh.

For the most part, I am just not equipped to handle other people’s jealousy. I had fellow students in my various schools who in retrospect were clearly jealous of me, but at the time it didn’t even really register.

Which must have been infuriating, I suppose. Oh well. I was just being me.

I guess a big part of it was that I was so naturally gifted that I excelled others without even trying and thus I never saw others as rivals myself.

When I told Michael McNally I was happy he had won some dancing competition, I was being absolutely sincere, and in my own clumsy way I was trying to compensate for his jealousy of me by showing him he was good at things I couldn’t do.

That’s not how he took it, though. He gave me such a look of burning hatred that I am surprised he didn’t hiss.

To this day, I dunno what I’d do if I found out someone was seething with jealousy for me. Try not to shine too much when they are around, maybe.

I am just not built for that shit.

More after the break.

---

Now roll 1dbrains

I am feeling rather mind scrambled at the moment, like someone shook my brains in a Yahtzee cup and pitched them against the wall like dice in a back-alley craps game.

I’m sure I had a bunch of ideas as to what to write here earlier today, but of course, I never write that kind of thing down, so they’ll all in the random file now.

Most things end up in the random file, at least for a while.

Tonight’s dinner is another of those President’s Choice dinner. They are, so far, a lot nicer and somewhat larger than the Michelina’s I am used to eating, but they are also over twice the price, so it’s a tradeoff.

I can probably buy one a week without breaking the bank.

This one is General Tao’s Chicken, so I hope he doesn’t know I have it. Ha hah.

I first had this dish as General Tso’s chicken at a Thai place in Portland, Oregon. It was my first time ever eating Thai so big Brian got a big order of this because it was the thing on the menu that would look the most familiar to a rube like me who had only ever had “Chinese” food before then.

He’s a sharp dude. When I knew him he’d survived as a social worker for six years way back in the 90’s. So his people managing skills were on point.

It said it was medium spicy on the package, and I agree. That was like, normal spicy. I probably should not have ordered it, given the occasionally explosive results of my eating spicy food at my age, but so far so good.

And it was quite tasty, too. I won’t get it again, but it was nice.

Now to lay down so I can suddenly remember what I meant to write about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Clearly this is becoming a series.

Mostly because if I do something twice, I feel compelled to do it a third time.

But I already know what I will be talking about in the next one, so there’s that.

Anyhow, you know this isn’t aimed at you, so here goes :

I have finally started tapping into my deep wells of both sarcasm and cutting observation in order to put my work and my words out there in the world and I must say it feels pretty good.

And I have already gotten both praise and backlash and I love both so I am quite happy with how things are progressing.

But my ambition remains to go huuuuuge with my words. I want to be a globally recognized thought leader whom people turn to for my vision, my insight, my unique point of view, and my ability to be more right about a lot of things than everyone else.

I want people to say, “Boy, I can’t wait to hear what HE has to say about this!”, both on the left and on the right, and it would make me so very, very happy to know that I am sparking discussion and debate all over the world with my thought provoking takes on the world we live in.

That would make me one very happy trickster. I would know that I was doing my duty to get people to think and grow and expand their minds, even if initially they are only doing so in order to better disagree with me.

When people think, we win. It’s the sleeping brutes we have to watch out for.

Now what else should I be typing about? Oh yeah, my day.

---

Time for a life update

Did not make it to Kinsmen. Last night and this morning I was having one of my attacks of flu-like symptoms. Raspy throat, scratchy lungs, stiff sore muscles, energy drain, all the old familiar faces.

It’s clear up a little bit since. My lungs and throat are still out of whack but some rest and fluids seem to have cleared up the drained feeling and moving around some today and getting some sunshine and fresh air seems to have helped my poor muscles.

It’s amazing how often that in order to get better, I have to do the exact opposite of what my stupid body wants me to do.

No, don’t pick that itchy as hell scab. Move those sore stiff muscles. Don’t eat the stuff that looks so tasty but it’s fulla sugar so you know it will make you sick.

Anyhow, I did make it to my doctor’s appointment today.

Being too sick to go to the doctor is something I reserve for when I need to be way more irrational for whatever reason.

We talked about my high blood pressure. He tried to measure my BP the old fashioned way, with the pressure cuff and stethoscope, and it didn’t work.

Could have told him it wouldn’t work, but would he have believed me?

Once we moved on to the automatic digital method, he discovered that my blood pressure is, indeed, too high, but that the difference between my sitting and standing BP was so great that upping my BP meds to lower my sitting BP would lead to my BP dipping so low when I stand up that I’d pass out.

But he referred me back to Doctor Shari and I will talk it over with her eventually.

Unfortunately it took a long time to get back home. When I was done with Doctor Chao, I got his receptionist to call Julian.

I had to do that because my dumb self forgot his phone at home. Which meant a lot of being bored while waiting. D’oh.

But Julian did not pick up. So the receptionist left a message. Then we did the same thing half an hour later. Same result.

Another half hour later and it finally occurs to me to get her to call Joe’s cell instead. That works, and gets the ball rolling for my pickup.

Then I have another brainwave and realize that I can wait for pickup outside in the fresh air and sunshine if I just used my walker’s seat.

So I got my fresh air and sunshine despite missing Kinsmen.

Turns out the problem was that Julian’s cell ran out of power.

Oh well, excrement occurs.

More after the break.

---

plussingthetrigger

Another home run from Kee

Wow, does this guy get me.

Yup, this is pretty much it.

Like I have said before, what sanity I retain I think I got from my babysitter Betty.

So things didn’t really go all to hell for me until I got to school and there was nobody looking out for me or who even cared about me any more.

And so I became more and more withdrawn. At first I tried to make friends and get along with others but there’s only so much rejection a sensitive child can take before they conclude that there is nothing out there for them in the world of other people.

Like I have also said before, my shyness is somewhat paradoxical. I can seem outgoing and friendly and even charming but that disappears at the slightest sign of rejection or even just non-inclusion as I am crushed like the hothouse orchid I am.

In a sense it would be less confusing if I was just plain antisocial all the time. Might even be healthier for me, really.

But that’s uh, not how things turned out.

I mean, I need a Xanax to do my stuff at Kinsmen and yet I record a video of just me talking every day and think nothing of putting it on YouTube and TikTok.

I never had any trouble speaking up when I knew the answer in class. Yet I hid from my fellow students during lunch and recess.

I was a complicated child, and now I am an even more complicated man.

I hope that at least makes me interesting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am quite proud of the video I made today.

Don’t take it personally. If you’re reading this, odds are heavily in favour of it not being addressed to you.

See the title if you get a tad confused. If that doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not for you!

Anyhow, here it is :

The choice to address it to the viewer in the second person (“you”) was quite deliberate. This vid is me aiming flaming truth arrows right at the heart of the modern right wing in order to break through their thin patina of justifications and reveal unto them just what worthless fucking cowards they are for being such pathetic stooges.

And all because the alternative is to think for themselves. Unacceptable!

I pondered trying to work that angle of insult into the speech in today’s vid but it already has a small amount of topic drift so I left it out.

But perhaps that will be the angle for my next verbal tactical assault.

I posted that vid to BlueSky, of course. I know it will appeal to my fellow lefties. My hope is that it spreads far and wide enough that some actual right wing fucknut types will see it and feel the sting of my extraordinarily sharp observations that cut them to the quick.

One does what one can.

The dream, of course, would be for this to bring down a torrent of incoherent and badly misspelled abuse from MAGAts on my head. Think of all the fun I would have responding to these pinheads and crushing their tiny minds with my mental might.

Bring it, motherfuckers. I will strike you down with God’s own thunder.

Actually, fuck that. I will strike you down with MINE.

My butt problem continues. The inflatable donut is back – Joe used his magic powers of knowing where he left stuff or saw stuff to retrieve it – and it helps but my weight squooshes the air out of it pretty fast.

Guess I need something with a stronger valve.

Obviously I don’t want to start buying cushions again. I remember how none of them worked for me before, possibly because I am quite fussy when it comes to my comfort, especially the comfort of my big beautiful bum.

So right now I am rather uncomfortable and will be getting off the computer the moment I am done with my words in order to let said profound buttocks rest.

I wonder if there’s butt exercise I could do to build up its core strength.

I wish I knew what the hell I did to make the pain go away last time. Did I just subconsciously learn to sit a different way? A way that did not create pressure points to torture and torment me?

I have no idea. Like I said before, this problem seems to have been coming on slowly over a space of months, so it’s not going to be a simple matter of making an adjustment.

Something changed within the butt itself, and I wanna know what.

My ass wants answers, dammit!

I suppose I could talk about it when I see Doc Chao tomorrow about my high blood pressure. Clearly the hypertension is my top level concern but if he has some suggestions as to what to do with my butt, I’m all ears.

I just like saying butt a lot. Hee hee hee.

I’ve also had a few attacks of very mild shortness of breath lately. Nothing I would call 911 over, just feeling a little out of breath at odd moments, and earlier today I had a dizziness attack when I was getting my clothes for today off the shelves.

Once more, I was saved from a nasty fall by my giant bed.

Without it, I would have to go around wrapped in bubble wrap.

More after the break.

---

Feel so tired

I just came back from getting my supper out of the fridge and I am way more out of breath and tired than usual.

And that’s after a shorter trip than usual because all I had to do was grab my leftover Subway from last Saturday night plus a can of pop and a piece o’ fruit.

No waiting around for the microwave at all.

Maybe that’s the problem though – no pause in the middle. Hmm.

Anyhow, more worrisome than the being out of breath and my heart and head pounding and so forth is this scratchy, sore feeling in my lungs.

Uh oh. That feels distinctly viral. I will do my best to hydrate thoroughly and see if that fixes me up but if not, I might not make it to Kinsmen tomorrow.

Which would kinda suck.

I will still make it to my doctor’s appointment regardless, of course. Apparently I need it more than I even knew when I made it.

Like I said, it could all go away with sufficient fluid intake. We’ve been down this road together before, dear audience, and what seems dire turns out to be nothing or nothing much at any rate.

But I do not like the feel of it at all. This plus that dizzy spell I had earlier point toward there being something draining my system and I do not wish to end up with god damned pneumonia again so I am gonna be real careful about this.

I swear that my body chooses when it knows I will be going to the doctor in order to get ill. LIke on some deep level I have been suppressing my own symptoms and only the prospect of actual care can cause them to surface for real.

That’s a depressing thought.

I will keep you updated, dear readers. And I will be monitoring my own condition very carefully because if this gets worse, it’s off to UC or the ER for me.

Because I am NOT getting pneumonia again dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starting with my own, of course.

Considering the amount of time I spend making outrageously and delightfully filthy AI art, my libido is in working order, more or less.

It’s a fun hobby because it motivates me to learn to make the AI art generators do what I want them to do and that, in turn, encourages me to stretch my visual imagination and try to learn to be as specific as possible.

The AI art generators punish non-specificity by creating Cronenbergian horrors that look like someone crossed this website with the last 20 minute of Akira.

Let’s see if I can find a creation of mine I am willing to share with y’all.

Pretty sure that one won’t get me in trouble. Probably.

Still pretty harmless. OK, one more :

I think that’s probably enough for now. Right? Right.

And then there’s this rockin’ gem :

Holy shit, right? That sounds so good. That channel, Fake Music, has a whole bunch of similarly funkified versions of 80’s and it blows my mind, man.

I am also jealous of the name Fake Music, because that’s what I make and now I can’t call it that and it’s like the perfect name.

I might call mine “synthetic tunes” if I ever organize my stuff into channels. I like the sound of that. It sounds like exactly what you would expect people to be listening to in “the future”, at least if you were around for New Wave the first time.

I’m getting the itch to write another song. Something more personal. So watch this space for my next mopey folk song built around an elaborate metaphor for my inner life.

I’ll call it, “Emo, the Tragic Dragon. ”

I’ve been struggling with my “shoulds” today. As in, my idea of what I “should” be doing but I am not doing because I am just letting my usual routine carry me along instead.

And I know that’s the wrong way to be looking at it, and I am trying to get over it. There is nothing I “should” be doing except staying alive and trying to stay healthy. That is all society asks of a disabled person like myself. I don’t “owe” anyone anything else.

What I continue to desire is to do things I want to do, because I want to do them. Need and “should” don’t come into it. I will be much better off if I learn to simply follow my desires without putting any pressure or stress on myself.

Because it’s the pressure and stress that triggers the avoidance and it’s the avoidance that keeps me from getting anywhere in life.

But so far I still lack the courage to simply step off of my well trod path and go looking for whatever else out there seems fun.

For me that might as well be a spacewalk. That’s how big of a step it feels. Like I would be venturing into the hard vacuum of space.

Which is ridiculous, of course, and obviously a delusion spun by my mental illness in order to “keep me in my place. “

But my place kinda sucks.

Somehow, I am going to find a way to stop withdrawing so hard so I can emerge from my shells and take a look around me at long last.

And that means giving up on giving up on reality.

And that means going back to where it all started.

And that’s not gonna be fun.

More after the break.

---

Your pet Fruvous

As I have mentioned before in this space, as sad as it sounds, it has does me a lot of good to start thinking of myself as a pet rather than a burden.

Not that any of it makes sense at all when it comes down to it. Via the province, I pay my own way in this household, so I’m not a financial burden except in small incidental ways like the gas money to drive me to my medical appointments.

It says something about my mindset that I think about things like that.

And yes, my roomies help me with my walker when I am getting in and out of the car. And that’s very nice of them and I appreciate it a lot, but the still-sick part of my mind insists that this makes me a burden on them even though they are not, in any way, complaining about it.

So the pet thing helps me to recontextualize it all. After all, pets always involve a certain amount of effort to care for and look after. And unless you are very small of soul and puny of heart person, you don’t resent the pet for it, because you know you get a great deal from having your cat or dog or budgie around as a companion and looking after them is, if you are strong enough to see it, actually part of the pleasure of it all.

We humans have instincts to care for beings who are dependent on us, after all.

So imagine myself as serving that function in the lives of my friends, both offline and on, helps me to quell the evil voices in my head telling me that I am nothing but a liability to all who come in contact with me and…. well, everything that can lead to.

I’d still much rather be earning a living as a normal, tax-paying, decent citizen as opposed to being a burden on the British Columbia taxpayer (albeit a microscopic one), but at least thinking of myself as a pleasant pet who provides a companionable presence and amusement and occasional bits of adorkable incompetence (as well as. of course, my top notch analysis) makes me feel like there is, in fact, some point to me being alive and that I do, in fact, contribute to the world in some way.

Digging myself out of the deep hole which swallowed my self-worth for so long is taking a long time, but I am getting there, little by little, every day.

I even like myself some of the time now.

It’s a start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel a great deal of strain right now despite not having done much and I am assuming that means I am once more dehydrated.

But maybe it’s something worse. Who knows.

I do know that I am very much looking forward with talking to my GP, Doctor Chao, on Tuesday^[1] because I am quite worried about what has been going on in my health lately and I am eager to talk about it with him.

Who knows, he might even have something useful to say or even do.

Keep your dreams alive, kids.

The infection on my thumb worried me a great deal because I associate that kind of grotesquery with the bad old days when I didn’t take my diabetes seriously at all and had a1c readings in the 20s (normal is 7) and acted like there was nothing I could do about it, that was just life I guess.

What a fucking idiot I was. And I am paying the price for that idiocy now.

If my a1c has for some reason gone nuts again then I am going to have to go back on insulin and that means solving the whole blood sugar testing question.

Luckily, the province pays for the modern blood-free testing systems now where I just have to put a sensor in my arm once a month and it takes the readings.

I think we’re up to the Freestyle Libre 2 now, maybe 3?

And I am sure Doctor Shari (Caswell) can hook me up with something like that. So that should be less of a hassle.

And the thing is, it’s entirely possible that I could have the high blood sugar again despite there having been no change in my diet because diabetes is a progressive disease and so it could very well have just gotten worse on me.

And that could explain the other thing that has me worried, the sky high blood pressure readings they took when I was at Urgent Care for the thumb.

That’s very very not good. High blood sugar can lead to high blood pressure because high blood sugar makes your blood thicker and it therefore takes more total pressure to move it around your body.

There’s a few bits of naughtiness I could cut out of my diet. The muffins I get with my McD’s twice a week, the vanilla soft serve cones that I get now and then, also from McD’s come to think of it.

That place is no good for me, I tells ya.

And I could cut back some on the carbs, although I am leery of that given how badly I botched that before with my no carb diet.

Turns out that’s a bad idea. Felt ever so much better once I put carbs back into my diet. Then immediately felt stupid for my dip into nutritional extremism.

Because I know better, god damn it. But I guess “carbs bad” was easier to remember than “maybe less carbs?”.

Fucked if I know.

Oh right, and I did make a vid.

Speaking of nudity, I think my body misses me being naked a lot. Now that I have things arranged so that I can change into a clean set of clothes every morning, I spend most of the time clothed, only being naked when I shower and when I sleep at night.

Almost like a normal person.

And I have noticed that when I am getting dressed in the morning it’s like my body is going, “Oh god, no, not this shit again!”, like I was putting on ski clothes in the summer.

Maybe I need to start showering more than once a week in order to clean out my pores so that my skin can breathe and regulate my temperature better.

What I really want is a long hot soak in the bathtub.

But that’s not an option for my gimpy self any more. Le sigh.

More after the break.

---

Another tale of ordering in

And I am writing about it, so you know something went wrong.

Nothing major, thankfully. I just ordered Pepsi Free with my meal and got Brisk Iced Tea instead. Luckily, after finding where they had moved the Help button on DoorDash, I was able to put in my complaint and got an instant refund of the whole cost of my Cold Cut Combo meal, which was $10.30!

Now that’s Brisk, baby!

I also ordered this Bean Fiesta Side Salad for $3.50 which turns out to basically be salsa with beans in it and is quite tasty!

And much healthier than the red velvet cookie I almost bought. Phew. Those are very very delicious but very very bad for me.

I also got Miss Vickie’s Sweet Chili and Sour Cream chips with my order, which I had not had since I was at VFS. They’re still quite good, though not as good as my beloved Miss Vickie Sea Salt and Malt Vinegar chips.

But I wasn’t in the mood for those.

I love them dearly but they do insist upon themselves.

One niggling detail the refund couldn’t cover : my body is essentially pouting at me because it was promised caffeine in cola form and didn’t get it.

Well too bad, body. There’s no way you’re getting it now.

I don’t even like iced tea.

What else. Not a lot going on in my sad little life. I keep talking about doing new things in order to liven up my life and wake me up inside and such, but the easiest thing to do is always nothing and so far I have not been able to make myself actually do it.

I still come up against that feeling like if I do that I will somehow injure myself, like I would have to cut off a finger to do it.

Well, they say that to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself.

But it’s so much easier to just keep running on my cozy little treadmill, and like a hamster in its wheel, feel like I must be getting somewhere when I know I am going absolutely nowhere and that is, in fact, the idea.

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went pretty darn deep on this one, and I am glad I did because I think this little therapeutic exercise did me a heck of a lot of good.

And now I am busy trying to hang on to its lessons so they penetrate my defenses.

Here it is :

It started as thoughts about how I have been doing really well with the catharsis lately. How I have been feeling larger amounts of emotional release when I trigger various feelings through my writing or talking and how great that is and that got me thinking about how to best take advantage of that and that’s where the idea for the little “letter to myself” you see above came from.

I think it makes for a rather intense and dramatic video, but then again, i might be biased, seeing as it’s all about ME ME ME.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I am holding on to the good feelings from making (and watching) the vid because I can already feel the usual chemical holocaust of depression and anxiety that rages in my head trying to put things back to “normal” and I’m not having it.

Fuck my “normal”. It sucks used monkey tampons. I deserve a far superior “normal” and I am going to change my default fucking settings or die trying.

Returning to “normal” is at the heart of so much of our pain and suffering and self-destructive behaviour. Perhaps one of the best things drugs like ketamine can do for us is release us from our “normal”.

Fuck normal. I want awesome!

And that’s a good thing to keep in mind as I fight to keep my mind from going back to its (my) self-loathing toxic swamp monster beliefs about myself.

I am not some kind of horrible nightmare being of maximum repulsiveness whom random people loathe on sight for having the sheer gall to think I deserve to be seen in public when I clearly should be locked away in a dark sepulchre somewhere.

Holy crap, I spelled “sepulchre” right the first time. Score.

I saw a short furry animation about social anxiety recently that really struck a cord with me, though I dunno if people without the disorder will get it :

So I wrote this comment under it : 

Oh, so very THIS. This is exactly the kind of insanity my social anxiety imagines happening to me only without the British thing to hang it all on. Just this pervasive feeling that everybody hates me for having the sheer gall to bring my clearly incredibly repulsive self out in public to nauseate the public and pollute time and space themselves with my toxicity. And that any second now I will do something that pushes then over the tipping point into mob violence and I will be chased out of civilization by a rage fueled torch wielding mob.

That was extremely cathartic to type. Phew!

And it really was. Like I have said before, sometimes I have to vent the negative thoughts and emotions in my mind in order to feel better, and those evil social anxiety delusions had not been taken out and aired in a long time, so it was time to do so.

And just like that, another fat drop of condensation drips off the iceberg on my heart.

I’ve made a ton of progress since the time of those unstable thoughts. I now know (most of the time) that feeling like that was just some biochemical noise in my brain and that none of that deranged bullcrap is true and most of it doesn’t even make sense.

Now I believe in myself and my abilities more often than not, and the more emotional detritus I jettison, the better off I’ll be.

More after the break.

---

Industrial scale catharsis

Like I have said, I am very happy with the acceleration in my rate of emotional release lately. I feel like that lower Paxil dose is really paying off now.

But I am also itching for more. I guess it’s a sort of spiritual ambition. I want to start shipping out those latent emotions like I’m a heavily laden cargo ship being unloaded by stevedores getting paid a flat rate.

Not the most accessible of metaphors, but I yam what I yam.

One of the things I am just starting to wrap my head around about myself is that I think I am a lot less patient than I used to think I was.

In my natural state, I am a lot more dynamic and active. I want to go go go and keep going. And while that comes with a deep reservoir of energy and motivation and inspiration, it also comes with a certain amount of impatience as the energies inside of me clamor to be expressed.

Not an easy thing for a Taurus like me to admit. Patience is supposed to be one of our primary virtues. And I am still more patient than average, I would say.

But as I unpack and activate myself, I am going to have to do what a lot of young people end up doing as well and that is to learn how to harness those wild energies so I can express them in a productive and healthy ways.

I may need to let them run wild for a while first, though, because this wild horses of mine have been cooped up for way too long and they need to run.

Whatever the hell that’s going to mean.

Obviously I’m not going to be limbering up for the triathlon any time soon. That ship sailed many years ago. And I don’t immediately have any conception of how to let those energies out within the framework of my current life.

Maybe I will have to find a whole new mode of existence, and I have no idea where something like that may lead.

But I am learning to trust my instincts and not worry about knowing what is next as long as I am doing what my heart tells me is the right move.

The acorn has no idea it’s going to be an oak tree.

But it becomes one just the same.

I should be so wise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first I will bitch about my therapist.

Today was Therapy Thursday and my last session before my fucking therapist buggers off for a three week vacation with his wife, meaning my next session with him isn’t until September 25, which is almost a month from now.

Because of course he doesn’t arrange a locum (substitute doctor) or anything. After all, only my mental health is on the line. and even professional psychiatrists like him agree that mental health isn’t important, doesn’t matter, and won’t suffer if you just decide not to provide treatment for a month.

This kind of shit is why the other medical specialties look down on psychiatry.

Imagine if an oncologist took that attitude. “Sorry, no chemo for a month, I am taking a vacay with some chick I met at the gym. Try not to metastasize while I’m gone!”.

Not that I’m bitter.

Actually, I have not even started being bitter yet because you will never ever guess where my elderly therapist is going on this vacation.

Go ahead and guess.

Give up? Well here it is :

HE IS GOING TO FUCKING PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.

My home province! Which is where I want to be this time of year!

Oh but wait, there’s more.

HE WILL BE SPENDING THREE DAYS IN SUMMERSIDE.

MotherFUCKER. He is going to be EXACTLY where I want to be so I can see my family and hug my Mom and meet a bunch of Acadian relatives!

And all in the gorgeous summer in my home province, the time year all my happy childhood memories take place.

ARGH. I am unbelievable pissed off and bitter about this. Of all the goddamned places he could go in this great nation of ours, he chooses not just my tiny home province of only 180,000 souls but my exact home town of around 17,000 people.

That son of a bitch. When we were on the phone, I had to strangle the urge to scream “Take me with you, god damn it!”.

The province really is a magnet for old people. They like our slower pace of life and the fact that we’re always behind the times.

The very things that drove me nuts as a kid.

So while my mental health wastes away, my therapist will be having my dream vacation, and there’s not a god damned thing I can do about it.

Old people have too much money.

Anyhow, back to the topic. During today’s therapy call, the subject of my pugilistic side came up because I have been struggling to integrate it into the rest of my psyche lately.

Part of me always wants to fight. Not out of some need to prove I am dominant or some inherent desire to hurt people or express my rough and rugged nature.

I just want to very energetically engage with the world. To be able to exorcise my deep seated latent aggression outside the usual rules of civilized restraint.

But I learned at a (thankfully) young age that my desire for a good scrap does not mean that those around me have volunteered to be my sparring partner.

So I locked that part of me away. It never fit with my mild mannered and pleasant persona anyhow. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to be loved on and adored!

And now, thirty years or so later, I am wondering if I went too far. Surely I could have found some way to use those powerful instincts instead of pulling a Doctor Jekyll and isolating my angry beast and ignoring it and leaving it to wreak havoc in my subconscious mind and make me all kinds of mentally ill as it desperately tries to find some way to express itself.

Well I hereby declare my intention to start listening. I know it may not have a lot of coherent words to say at first, the poor thing, but I will listen nevertheless.

This is now the top priority in my attempts to reclaim my id.

Oh, right, and I did a vid.

More after the break,

---

I feel known

Apparently this Kee fella has pretty much got me and my childhood pegged.

He gets that I was both an ignored child :

But I was also a hated child :

It was a very simple system. When they noticed me, they hated me.

When they didn’t, I was, by default, ignored.

I was very passively punished for being noticed. Like Kee says, it was in the way people looked at me like I was interrupting when I entered a room, or how I got blank looks like I had just beamed in from Mars when I tried to enter conversations.

Because apparently I hadn’t existed until I opened my mouth.

I never really felt like a member of my own family. It was always my parents, my siblings, and me, the odd one out. The one who didn’t belong. The one nobody really wanted around any more.

The one who was just kind of… there.

The one where the costs of raising me were an extra burden on already overburdened parents, as opposed to being the same as the costs for my three older siblings.

The one who was just callously handed his baby bonus money and told to go do his own clothes shopping. When I was barely old enough to cross the street alone.

“Here. This is all you get. We do not think you are worth any of our own time, effort, or money, so you get what the government gives us for you being alive and that’s it. ”

That’s so god damned cold. How could they stand to be so cold to me? What did I ever do to deserve that?

I didn’t decide to be born.

And I was such a sweet, bright kid. All I ever wanted was for people to be happy around me. It didn’t even have to be caused by me.

I just wanted to be loved and valued.

I just wanted to be treated like I was wanted.

I just wanted someone to tell me I was okay. Good enough. Valuable. Not forever locked in being a burden on people who resented my existence.

I just wanted some god damned emotional warmth.

And I still do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because I don’t. And maybe I should. But I can’t. Or can I?

First off, today’s vid :

Now back on topic. Do I believe in magic?

No, and that’s despite of (or because of) all the pro magical thinking propaganda I was bombarded with as a child in the 1970s.

We got so much bullshit about the “power of imagination” and how things can be true “if you just believe in them” back then that it’s no wonder we grew up cynical little Gen X’s.

Yes, Boomers, I am saying you made us this way. You meant well and were trying to give us the sort of support for imagination and creativity and vibrancy that your Greatest Generation parents couldn’t give you, but it was all a load of crap, you stupid hippies!

Anyhow, where was I?

Oh right, my lack of believe in magic. As far as I can remember, I was always a relentlessly logical child and belief in magic never really stood a chance with me.

I mean, I wasn’t even in elementary school when my relentless questioning forced my siblings to admit that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

And when I heard that, I was relieved because now things made sense again.

But the fact that being a rational materialist like I have always been is logical and makes sense does not actually make it a good idea, and that’s the sort of conflict I struggle with as I keep bumping against the limitations of logic and the internally and externally consistent mindset like a bee bumping against a window as it tries to get past a barrier it is simply not equipped to understand.

I can relate.

Because reality isn’t enough, people. That’s the conclusion I have come to. Whether we consciously believe in magic (or God, or ghosts, or whatever) or not, the human mind needs to be able to exceed the limits of the real world in order to generate the emotional inputs needed to keep one’s mood from going below a certain red line.

Essentially, the mind needs the capacity to be self-rewarding when reality is not providing enough reward center stimulation at that moment to keep us feeling like we are good little monkeys and a credit to our family and tribe.

It really does come down to that on an evolutionary psychology level.

That’s why I keep circling back to this subject and my pondering about learning to fly. None of the roads I am on lead to happiness. Happiness is out of the reach of logic and reason and the need for one’s knowledge to be one contiguous picture. At some point I need to leave the road and fly there instead.

And that doesn’t make any sense. Obviously. So the really big step – the leap of (or into) faith – would be to learn to be okay with that.

For the first time in my life, I would have to learn to accept that something can be true even if it does not make sense and is not justified or logical or reasonable.

Like, for instance, believing in angels. Just to pick a random example.

It’s a matter of believing things because you choose to (and need to) believe them instead of believing them because you have figured out that they’re true.

And that’s a pretty heavy concept, man. I don’t know if I can handle it. I have had this relentlessly logical mindset for my entire life and it completely defines my worldview and my mindset and my umwalt and departing from that feels like I would be embracing insanity and the unknown.

But other people manage it and they are much, much stronger and healthier and happiest and more well adjusted than I have ever been.

So no. I don’t believe in magic.

But I am going to get there somehow, by God.

More after the break.

My previous solution

The previous time I tackled this whole “learning to fly” thing, I ended by reminding myself what an awesome rebel who has never felt bound or compelled by other people’s rules I am so why should the rules of logic be any different?

Which felt quite good to type at the time but now seems… insufficient.

The truth is that there’s not going to be a logical solution to the problem of illogicality. The only solution is to step off the edge of my reality and plunge into a world that follows a different set of laws, ones that are primarily emotional as opposed to be rooted in something like an internally consistent model of reality.

My model might be just as full of shit as anyone else’s but it at least makes sense.

So I would have to decide, consciously and deliberately, that the new rule of my world is that I will be happy, period. And absolutely everything within my demenses, including reality itself if necessary, will bend to this new dictum.

I feel like this necessarily involve telling the world where, how, and with what common household objects it can go fuck itself.

And I am not against that. It does seem to suggest that there’s been some sort of anger at the world seething within me that I somehow forestalled via being so logical, as if I locked away a great deal of emotions via facile justifications.

Hmm. This warrants further investigation. I might be onto something there.

Perhap I have done that a fuck of a lot in my life : used my icy precise logic not just as a way to pursue truth but as a way to nullify nearly all of my passionate emotions.

By becoming detached from them. By escaping the emotional mode in which I felt exposed and vulnerable by retreating into finding things “fascinating” and studying them like some kind of ersatz scientist.

Have you noticed that the expensive words come out when I’m uncomfortable?

What would life be outside all this “fascination”? I honestly don’t know. I would have to take off this SCUBA suit and wade into the water with the rest of you, I guess.

I know how bad that makes me sound and you’re not wrong.

I guess I know the nature of this cage I’m in now. It’s made of logic and science and detachment and analysis and “fascination”.

Given that, there is clearly only way for me to get the hell out of here :

I’m going to have to learn to fly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.