Don’t worry, it’s actually from me.

I am starting to think that my best stuff comes after completely blanking on what the hell I am going to talk about and therefore being forced to really rummage around in my data banks and pull out something that’s in there good and deep.

It is, of course, incomplete. There’s other stuff I could have put in there. In my world, nothing is ever truly complete or entire.

It’s all just whatever comes to me when it comes time to create. More things always pop into my head afterwards. I am getting quite used to that.

I wish I had the technical muscle to make my vid seem more like it comes from Fox News. It would be so much more powerful and impactful that way. It might even fool some people for a minute.

But alas, I do not have that kind of skill. Yes, I edit my own videos, but that is 99 percent just cut and paste work with the occasion adding of on screen titles, and the sort of graphics and audio work it would take to sell the Fox News thing are well beyond me.

This is why I need a team. A small, focused, dedicated group of subversive weirdos like myself who want to make outrageously amazing content that goes viral because of its hilarious comedy and politically provocative content.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Problem is that I lack the social skills to even know where I could find such people, let alone having the chutzpah to recruit them.

Still, with the help of Xanax, maybe I could pull it off. I know that I can be a charismatic leader if I can just get the fuck out of my own way and stop the shrieking banshees of anxiety from screaming in my ears and making it hard to get anything done.

That sounds like a job for Xanax to me.

I must keep reminding myself that any time I feel like anxiety is getting in the way of doing what I want to do, I have the magic pill to make it go away.

I guess I have lived under anxiety’s reign of terror for so long that it’s hard to remember that it is possible to exit it. Taking one before my Tuesdays at the Kinsmen Center is easy because I know I am about to enter a very anxiety provoking situation.

But doing it purely for something I am going to do here, at home, where I feel the most safe, is another thing entirely.

But I can’t deny that, home or not, I am still hemmed in by anxiety. I don’t actively feel it most of the time because I don’t actually fight it most of the time, so for me, it’s kind of like an electric fence is to cows.

They don’t have to get zapped all the time to know they shouldn’t go there. The painful association with the fence is more than enough.

And my fence is made of anxiety. And there are times when I feel like just leaning into that fucking fence and ignoring all the stupid alarms going off in my head in order to find out if I can break through to the other side.

So far I haven’t been either strong enough or nihilistically numb enough to do it.

But one of these days, who knows. Might be worth it just to feel something.

Sometimes feeling pain is better than feeling nothing at all. That’s why cutting is a thing.

I am glad I never heard of that when I was a very depressed teen. I would have started cutting myself, or doing something equally painful, for sure.

Come to think of it, I used to stick my bare hand into a snowbank to see how long I could go before the pain from the cold made me take it out.

But I gave up on that when I realized there was no limit. I could keep my hand in there for as long as I liked.

Because I was so damned numb.

More after the break.

---

Not thinking of that

I have a long, long history of not thinking things through.

For example, as a child, I was super excited to get my very first Walkman… until I realized I had no tapes for it.

This did not occur to me until it was Xmas morning and I had my brand new Walkman in my hand. It had a radio, so I would not have been completely screwed, but luckily my siblings had anticipated my cluelessness and had made a mixed tape for me.

The subject is on my mind because I ordered some KFC tonight without stopping to think about whether Julian would be home to get it from the door for me.

Not a big deal in and of itself because I can get my stuff from the door when necessary. For me, the trip to the apartment door and back is a bit of a hike but I can do it.

But at the same time, my land line phone went on the fritz. So when the Door Dash dude arrived, he couldn’t get through to me via the buzzer, so he had no choice but to leave my stuff outside.

This is typical of how life conspires to fuck me over. It’s always via something random that I never could have anticipated even at my most paranoid.

How was I to know the phone wasn’t working?

Oh well, Julian came home and brought me my food. I had to eat it cold, which is suboptimal but not the end of the world. So no big time harm done.

And by itself, my mistake in not checking to see if Julian was around was not that big an error. If the phone hadn’t stopped working everything would have been fine.

Still, it’s a bitch and rather stressful to have to go through this bullshit.

Oh, and they gave me the wrong drink. I got 7 up instead of the Diet Pepsi I ordered, an obviously I can’t drink that.

Which is too bad, because the sip I took was mighty tasty.

I’ve put my complaint in to DoorDash. I will probably get a refund.

I’d rather have had my proper drink, but a refund will have to do.

Such is life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, so, today has kinda sucked.

Learn all about it here :

Funny how I started off thinking I had nothing to say but ended up rambling on for almost ten minutes anyway.

When in doubt, start complaining, I guess.

That subject has been on my mind : complaining, and being crabby in general. It’s a somewhat acceptable way to vent one’s spleen, as long as you’re not attacking your friends and other loved ones or punching down, and so I have been examining the idea that I am just a crabby person and seeing if it feels like that suits me.

It’s a complicated thing to examine. It would certainly require reducing my compulsive need to be as lovable and pleasant and funny and fun to be around all the time.

A very deep and desperate part of me thinks that I have to use all my charm and appeal and so on to make people like me at all times or they will suddenly realize what a horrific nightmare of a person I really am and run away screaming.

Which is brutally sad.

Seriously. My god. I meant to just look up the song for the reference but found myself mesmerized by the recording quality.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, being crabby.

I keep thinking of Andy Rooney. He made quite a good living being crabby in a funny way^[1] and I am both crabby and funny and so it makes me go hmmm.

Perhaps one can complain about stuff a lot and still be liked. Fascinating.

I keep feeling like I need to do more with my videos, though I am not exactly sure what that would entail yet.

I just know that I am capable of so much more. I look at some of the more ambitious videos I made way, way back in the 2000s when we lived at One Road and Francis Road (aka Nerdvana) and I see how much more alive and vital and (in my halfassed way) enthusiastic and ambitious I was, and I can’t help but sigh.

I sigh a lot. Must be a sign of aging thing.

I mean, look at this strapped young lad :

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to watch all 15 minutes, it’s just a sampler.

At least this time around, I know I need to put on a frigging shirt.

I keep pondering things like one person skits, fake newscasts a la Daily Show et al, maybe even (in a very separate space) some stories of kids, and I guess you could say brooding over the idea.

And who knows, maybe one fine morning I will wake up and launch into a whole new era of video making (videography?) and make really top quality stuff instead of mostly just me talking to the camera and maybe even make something of the whole thing.

It’s like that with me. Like my idea are eggs and I never know when one will decide to hatch and make itself known in the world so all I can do is keep it warm and safe in my big ol head and wait.

So maybe one of these days the energy will be right and I will say “Today’s the day!” and make something truly amazing.

Or maybe one day I will die living exactly the same way I do now, if not worse.

It’s really up to me.

So um…. don’t hold your breath.

More after the break.

---

Every JRPG ever

I thought this was quite good :

Not sure if you have to be a veteran gamer to get the jokes. If so, sorry. I am hoping that the general idea comes across regardless.

For some strange reason, the gag I love the most is the Secret Princess being interrupted by the XP/GP screen.

Maybe I just love the way she just says, “Oh, OK. ”

Anyhow, on with the show.

---

Nothing to update

Because I feel more or less exactly like I felt when I wrote Part 1 up there.

The only thing that has changed is that I feel slightly less tired and dragged out. Other than that, the person standing on my chest hasn’t gotten any lightly nor has the sandpaper in my throat switched to a finer grit.

And that kinda sucks. Standard disclaimer, if things go on like that, I will have to consider taking the ER/UC route.

As far as I can tell, nothing else is going wrong. My usual muscle aches and “rusty” feeling in my joints from the inflammation haven’t shown up yet. My nose had been running but that’s almost certainly from seasonal allergies, not a virus.

Maybe the difference is that this time, I have been doing a much better job of staying hydrated than usual and that’s helping my body fight the bug, or at least keeping my muscles and joints lubricated.

Oh well. Maybe I should try to develop that “attitude of gratitude” that so many mental health people push these days. Be grateful for every day in which I am less sick and miserable than I could be.

Yeah right. Sorry, still way too bitter and cynical for that heinous bullcrap. The very idea of it fills me with nausea. What a pathetic, groveling, lowly way to live.

I dunno who that shit is working for but I bet they’re not Gen X.

My friend Lou was telling me that nobody born after 1998 – in other words, Gen Z – believes that things will get better or can ever be good again.

And I thought, wow, maybe they’re more like Gen X than I thought. The difference is, I suppose, that we developed nihilistic cynicism to hope with a world without hope, and the Gen Z youngsters don’t seem to have nihilism as a weapon.

Maybe I can teach it to them.

Homework assignment : watch the video for Black Hole Sun ten times in a row.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the vid of the day.

Brace yourself, because it’s pretty exciting.

So yeah, my tootsies are burning. I’ve taken some Tylenol and that definitely helped some but they still feel like I tried the whole “walking on fire” thing and failed.

Ow ow ow, etc.

Dunno WTF is up with that and I suppose if it persists, I am going to have to take it to god damned Urgent Care.

Luckily, walking doesn’t make much difference to the pain, so I can do my event at the Kinsmen Adult Center tomorrow, all things being equal.

But I sure am tired of random shit going wrong with my health.

I also have Wound Care tomorrow, so I can ask my nurse about it. Like I say in the vid, I don’t see any obvious signs of the source of the pain, but the nurse might see something I do not.

Lord know I’m not exactly observant.

I missed the gang at Kinsmen last week. There was no get-together last Tuesday because it was a stat holiday. I missed my one day of being vaguely normal.

With the help of the almighty Xanax, hallowed be its name, of course.

Anxiety is such a bitch. My own nervous and endocrine systems are against me. That’s where my extremely overactive alarm system resides and I wish I could just short circuit that shit forever because it’s doing way more harm than good.

Still, it’s good to be able to perceive it as a meaningless malfunction I am temporarily stuck with as opposed to thinking it represents any kind of truth.

It’s just neurochemical bullshit my body does because it got into a self-reinforcing cycle of hypervigilance as as result of my depression and isolation, and now I have to live with the absurd result.

When I am strong enough, I am going to just muscle the fucking anxiety out of my way so I can finally get on with life.

Or not. Maybe I will be exactly how I am right now until the day I die. If not worse.

There’s a cheerful thought.

Admittedly, I’m not feeling very good today. In addition to the foot thing, I feel worn out and tired and physically depressed.

God, I hope I am not coming down with something. That would fucking figure. It would be like the universe is conspiring to keep me away from Kinsmen.

I definitely don’t feel well. Hopefully this is just another of my mysterious transient health issues and will go away when I have had enough rest and/or hydration.

God, I can feel my hypochondria trying to creep in. Maybe I should take a Xanax. That would head it off at the pass real quick.

I suppose it could be seasonal allergy related. Maybe I have some kind of histamine activated system wide inflammatory response shit going on, I dunno. I have been sneezing now and then, and inflammation would account for the burning foot thing.

Once more I tell myself I have to buy some damn antihistamines already so I can get this shit under control, but I know I will probably forget or be too lazy or indecisive.

I did manage to make a decision today. I bought a game called Marvel Midnight Suns, which has excellent reviews and promises to be a Marvel based deck building game.

But not just deck building. You can also build patios, porches, and verandas!

Ha ha ha. It’s $12 and if I don’t like it, I can return it, so it’s not THAT big of a decision, but at least I acted on the Steam Fall Sale before all those bargains disappeared.

And I am proud of myself for that.

After all, I missed the Summer Sale entirely!

More after the break.

---

Still not good

I feel somewhat better than I did earlier today but I still don’t exactly feel great

So the question of my participation in the Kinsmen activities tomorrow remains open. Maybe I will be over all of this mishigas by then, who knows.

Another attack of my flu like symptoms. Must be that time of the month.

Tried out Midnight Suns. So far so good. There’s been a lot of cutscenes, which can get annoying, but amazingly enough, the writing is actually quite funny in places, so I will allow it for now.

And there’s lots of people like the short haired military version of Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, Iron Man of course, Blade, Doctor Strange, the Scarlet Witch, a character from the MCU called The Caretaker (sadly, not played by Kris Kristofferson this time) and various other Marvel heavy hitters.

Quite literally, for at least some of them.

System seems pretty simple so far. You get five cards a turn and you can play three of them, so a certain amount of prioritization will be needed. There is technically a spatial aspect, and you can use stuff in the environment for attacks (like, say, throwing a boulder at a bad guy’s head), which spices things up a tad.

Ergo so far it’s a keeper. I am making a very deliberate concentrated effort to not let my high strung anxious nature make me flip out and return the damn thing out of sheer nerves. I am going to give it a solid chance.

I have got to tame my rogue energies and get them all moving in the same direction instead of my mind going madly off in all directions all the damn time.

And that means continuing my efforts to integrate my long neglected id into my consciousness. I have lived in the numbing grip of intellectualism for far too long and I am long overdue for a spiritual tune-up to bring things into balance.

Hopefully without me having to go completely insane and/or become a raging impacted arsehole in the process.

But if I gotta, well….. I hope the world can forgive me in the long run.

I don’t wanna go there, but that might be my only way out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out, I had a lot to say today.

A classic case of the very “me” phenomenon where I start off talking about one subjects but that branches off into another and then another and before you know it I have talked for almost ten minutes about an only tangentially subject.

But it’s all worth saying, so whatever.

After all, whether it’s video or text, the idea is primarily to get things out of my head and into the world so that I can reduce the pressure of words in my head and maybe make some room for calmer thoughts in there.

My brain produces things to say at a ferocious pace. I can’t imagine actually being able to keep up. It’s all I can do to slow down the backlog a bit.

But as I develop as a writer, I learn to put more and more of myself and my overwhelming creative energies into every word, and so I might actually achieve some kind of equilibrium that way some day.

Either way, it’s cool. I have enormous creative energies I can tap into at will. It’s one of my many powers. I really am quite amazing when you think about it.

Insert obvious “and so humble!” joke here.

Building up my self-esteem (or “ego” as we used to call it) is a difficult long term project. It would be different if I was not so cautious by nature and worried about losing my mind to delusions of grandeur type things.

Because that’s the problem when you realize that you tower over others intellectually. The human mind is a status seeking machine and so my primitive mind immediately wants to skyrocket into a quite frankly pathological level of self-regard.

I don’t think I could become a full fledged narcissist. I am too ironic and self-aware for that. But I could see feeling like some sort of god amongst the human herd.

And that thought repulses me. I hate elitism, especially my own. But sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t be healthier in the long run if I just let my ego jetpack me up into the stratosphere and let myself float back down to Earth naturally.

But I am so scared that I would just get lost up there. I have this vision of myself as some kind of cackling loony in a cell somewhere constantly muttering to himself about how some day they will all pay and deluding myself into thinking I am doing some kind of incredibly esoteric science when all I am doing is writing nonsense on the walls with my own poop.

Sorry about that image. Did not know I was going to go there.

Or even worse, I would, like Ziggy Stardust, get sucked up into my mind and making love to my ego and be, in the real world, completely catatonic.

It would be the logical final act to my withdrawing into my mind to protect myself from the world, and I fear it more than I fear death.

The sane part of me is still desperately clinging to the edges of my reality in order to keep from being completely consumed by the hungry void that always threatens to drag me to my doom like a whirlpool.

I should probably see someone about filling that thing in. Or maybe just putting up really good guardrails so that I can relax for a minute or two.

Or, radical thought, just not be fucking crazy for a while.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

Crisis? What crisis?

Well, i guess it’s time to gnaw on this old bone some more.

Am I in a crisis? Yes and no.

The yes comes from my frustration and anger at my clogged up life and my broken motivational engine which keeps my considerable passionate energies all stopped up inside me where they can cause all kinds of mental mayhem and it is the nature of said energies to strain against their constraints and when they can’t get out that emotion has to go somewhere and in my case it devolves into panic.

I hope that all made sense.

So the sense of crisis in my life comes from all that frustrated emotion and the pain it causes me as it strains against the plug of mental illness holding it back and the energies end up backing up and venting internally in a very unhealthy way.

So in that sense, damn right it’s a crisis. One that makes me feel like I am going crazy sometimes. But it keeps me trying to shift that damned plug and each day it loosens a little more and hopefully one day it will finally POP out of there.

But in another sense, I’m fine.

I’m in no danger. I have a highly equitable lifestyle. As far as I know, there’s no health problem looming that’s going to fuck me up forever. I have wonderful friends who take care of me. I have food and shelter and clean water to drink.

I could go on like this for years. I know this because I already have. I could go on like this till the day I die, and the way it looks now, I will.

And maybe that means that I should learn to relax and just accept that. Accept that this is it and try to make the best of it so I can exit crisis mode and let my background adrenaline levels drop to a more healthy baseline and maybe make some kind of acceptable life for myself out of the ingredients I know I have.

That sounds like giving up, says a possibly unhealthy part of my mind.

And yeah. That would be giving up. But giving up on what? Maybe I would actually make much better progress against my problems if my entire nervous and endocrine systems could just settled the fuck down and let me be mellow and copacetic and healthy instead of constantly imperiled.

That does sound a whole lot better than wasting my life while background stressing constantly about wasting my life.

But I don’t know if I can switch gears like that. I think some part of me needs to strain and stretch and strive and at the very least I will need to find a healthier way to make that part of me happy if I am to succeed in mellowing out.

I know I need more in my life. I can’t just mentally masturbate all the god damned time any more. I’m awake and alive now and I know what I’m missing.

But it might just be that my best bet is the Zen solution of striving without trying. Of forgetting extrinsic goals entirely in order to focus on being myself to the fullest possible degree and to hell with logic and reason and anything else – ANYTHING else – that stands in the way of that goal.

Because this is my life and my mind and my world and they are there to benefit ME.

And nothing else matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got political again today. Eventually.

It went exactly like this :

I started out with just the stuff about the webcam working, but initially I then blathered on about the games I am currently playing till I hit the point where I realized I was boring myself and threw all that bullshit away.

And I like that I did that. I feel like I am maturing as a video maker and part of that is developing the backbone to say, “This is crap, fuck it, I’m starting over. ”

What followed was ten uncomfortable minutes of me desperately trying to think of something to talk about and drawing a total blank.

Always painful, those sorts of moments. One of the hardest parts of being a creator, at least to me, is making it through times like that.

Eventually I remembers the stuff about the outrage machine that has been waiting for me to write about it for months now and kept getting “bumped” by other topics.

Well today was the day that topic finally made it to the stage.

And it’s important stuff, I think. The internet is great at giving you more of what you like, and it judges what you like by what you engage with, and it neither knows nor cares whether you’re engaging with it because you’re happy or because you’re angry.

So if your feed is full of modern misery, it’s because according to the internet, that is what you “like” to see.

And outrage is addictive. It’s just like any other rage disorder. The “high” comes from the adrenaline rush and the way said rush makes you feel righteous and motivated and pure and makes it seem like things are much simpler than they are.

Hence why old people eagerly consume media where people like Fox News deliberately stoke their anger because being outraged makes them feel stronger and more alive.

And that goes for the left, too. There is a reason my Bluesky feed is full of hysterical hand-wringing about how awful Trump is and how the latest atrocity is a sure sign that America is sliding into fascism and any minute now there’ll be a gas chamber on every street corner and concentration camps as common as 7-11’s.

And they’re not wrong except possible in degree. But at some point you have to stop caterwauling about how awful it all is and start doing something about it.

And that means giving up on the outrage. Feel free to ignore the news for a while. Completely skip over an entire brace of outrages and blatant affronts.

These things do not require your outrage. You not being around to be frothing with rage about them will make no difference whatsoever to the big picture. You can take a pass on all his latest horribleness and nothing of value will be lost.

And something of value will be gained if it lets you concentrate more fully on driving that spear right into the conspicuously corpulent heart of Trump’s regime.

At some point you have to turn the damn alarm off and fight the fucking fire.

But of course, that’s not fun. That sounds like it might involve work and effort and risk and the horror of spending a few minutes less than optimally entertained.

Well fuck that, better the world should burn (and it is) than us having to give up even a single precious nanosecond of our “me” time.

And I am no better. Somehow we have grown incredibly dependent on these security blankets of entertainment and distraction and the very idea of leaving the comfort of them voluntarily feels like we’re being asked to do a spacewalk without a suit.

And I don’t know what to do about that.

More after the break.

---

What to do about that

Oh, I dunno.

I know that stirring calls to virtuous action are meaningless. Sure, doing all you can do to bring down Trump is the “right” thing to do from the point of view of the future, but we don’t live entirely for the benefit of the generations to come, we live here now, in the present, and in the present we have to cope.

Maybe that’s the problem : that our lives are something we have to cope with rather than just relax and enjoy. I’ve written before about this modern treadmill of spending half your waking hours at work and half recovering from work is insane.

And of course it’s school that sets us up for this. The transition from hating school to hating your job is almost seamless.

That’s why homework is such an affront to a child’s sensibilities. It’s like school is invading your precious not-school time. No fair!

And of course, once people have kids and spouses and households and extended friend groups and so forth, that “me” time becomes even more precious and the idea of sacrificing any of it for abstract goals outside of your life, no matter how important, seems even more unthinkable.

And I mean, surely somebody else will take care of it, right? Because clearly somebody needs to do something about Trump. We’re quite firm on how other people should definitely be doing something about it, those lazy bums.

Just not us, because we have lives and kids and so much stuff to do.

I guess that’s why it has to have a personal impact before it stirs people to action. That takes it from the realm of the news and doomscrolling into actual, y’know, reality, and makes people see it as a threat to their families, and that can inspire action.

Then again, so does the prospect of maybe getting laid at the rally.

It takes all kinds of motives.

The next big rally is on October 13. I feel like the clock is ticking in a sense because these rallies are going to become rather sparsely attended once winter kicks in.

Maybe make the one after this one Christmas themed?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So another part of my life has gone FUBAR :

It’s been a looming disaster for a while, in retrospect. I had trouble in the past with the thing spontaneously connecting and disconnected from the smallest of fly farts in its general direction. So I saw this coming.

But what was I going to do about it? All I could do was soldier on.

That’s all I can ever do, just about. It’s my one great skill : keeping going.

Because God forbid something should actually force me off track (what track?) and make me sit still and deal with my problems and maybe even fix something.

No, I simply must keep going in my slow inexorable way, like a steamroller, mindlessly crushing everything in its path as it keeps going in the same direction forever.

I’ve had better metaphors.

Been trying to think, or feel, or hell sabotage my way through this barrier inside me that keeps me nailed to the floor and fixed in place and chained to this fucking treadmill so I can relive the same day over and over again.

New day, new creative outputs, same old habits and the same old bullshit.

I hope that some day, if I keep feeding energy to the deepest parts of myself in an attempt to jump start my life force like I am hotwiring a car, I will one day activate and wake up and be truly alive instead of living this half-dead existence all the time.

I seem like I’m here but I’m not really here. I am crouching in a bunker way down deep inside myself and piloting this clunky automata of a body of mine as I project a whole and healthy image of myself into the world that I only wish was the real me.

I would become Fruvous in a heartbeat, even if it meant being a four foot tall anthro fox in a world with no other “real” furries in it.

But then again, I am already Fruvous. Sorta kinda. He’s within me and it’s tempting to think that “becoming” him is just a matter of letting that part of me take over.

And maybe someday that will be possible. Or maybe it’s possible right now, in this very minute, and I am just too chickenshit to pull the trigger on it.

Sometimes I get the very strong urge to just throw myself off the metaphorical deep end somehow and force myself to adapt (in a healthy way) to the god damned real world for once in my god damned life.

I guess that’s my inner competent father figure longing to give me the short sharp shock that will make me snap out of this decades long daze and actually be alive for a change.

I am not against the idea. I know that sometimes that’s what will do you the most good : a shock to the system that wakes you up inside and makes you aware of yourself and your being a part of the world, even if it’s only to say, “Ow, that hurt!”.

I know that the words that have done me the most good in my life have made me really, really angry first.

Unfortunately, I am too old and infirm and impecunious to do something young and crazy like just move to a different city with no plan and no job so that I am forced to land on my feet and learn to cope.

I guess I could do something slightly similar on a subReddit. Go marching all in to some politics forum determined to seize territory and make myself known.

Put my thang down, nomsain?

More after the break.

---

We can’t say that word here

This is brilliant stuff.

Personally, I am sympathetic to the concerns and goals of Happyworkerism but I don’t think it has an actual plan for the economy that would work.

The one big advantage of capitalism is that it runs itself, mostly. The government provides the infrastructure and other support (like a stable currency) but the rest of it operates more or less on its own. No central plan needed.

It’s beautiful in that regard.

Too bad a lack of policing has let it get all fucked up.

---

One notch closer

I feel like I somehow got one degree closer to being a real live human being and not just a lifelike simulation of one today.

As often happens, it started off with me feeling awful. I felt terrible when I got out of bed to go to Wound Care this morning at 10:30 am. The slightest effort made me feel sweaty and sick, I felt like I weight a million pounds, and I had that ineffable feeling like somehow my soul was in a total eclipse leaving me bewildered in the dark.

But at some point today, I got better, and when that happened I realized that I now felt a bit more alive and robust and embodied and good.

So I guess my soul just had some shit it had to go through. I had reached the critical point at the bottom of my mood cycle where I shed the toxins and garbage I have filtered out of my soul’s waters and whilst the shedding is unpleasant, once that stuff is gone, my soul can bob back up higher than before without all that emotional detritus weighing it down.

And thus I make progress one dump truck load at a time.

And this time I didn’t even have to write a super depressing negative blog post or make a really dark video in order to get the bad stuff out.

Although I suppose bitching about the webcam served that function.

Oh, and the webcam suddenly started working again during Zoom. I will have to see if it will work with my video editing program tomorrow.

Because what the fuck ever, am I right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, today, when I rolled the dice in my head for what to talk about today, it came up “deep dive into my depression”, so here we are.

I get the feeling that when I was raped as a child, it caused me to bypass a very important developmental stage where you just do whatever pops into your head and organically suffer the consequences and you learn about the world that way.

I mean, I must have done some of that at one point. I wasn’t always as depressed as I would become. I remember being a kid on summer vacation and being able to decide what I wanted to do with my ample free time.

Besides watch television, of course.

But for a time I was at least somewhat happy during summer vacation at least because I had no bullies then, just myself.

And my friend from across the street Bobby for a few of those summers. Dunno why he’d be at the Votour’s house in the summer and not with his own parents, wherever the heck they were, but he and I were friends then.

And I have got to remember that. My childhood was not as lonely and friendless and isolated as my polluted inner narrative would have me believe.

I honestly wonder of my inaccurately negative inner narrative exists, at least in part, because that story of unbroken loneliness is just more narratively satisfying than the complex and layered truth.

If so, I really need to work on that. Real life is never that simple. The real world can rarely be summed up in a neat little story like “lonely boy with no friends forever”.

There were people I was friends with now and then, again, during the summer at least. There were long cold friendless stretches too, that’s not a lie or a delusion.

That became especially true in high school. Me and Heisler split up in Grade 10 and so I was all alone after that.

Well, there was Tim. He and I were friends because Mister Newcome the science teacher put us together to compete in a science competition.

We saw each other a couple times a week at his place. The thing we made for the science competition was a total joke because Mister Newcome, being the impulsive spaz that he was, put us in there before he taught us the physics we needed.

But oh well. We got to hang out and be geeky together for a while.

So yeah. Even those lonely years of grades 11 and 12 were not a total winterscape of isolation and turning inwards.

But high school is also when I become seriously depressed for the first time. The first time I felt suicidal, the first time I felt like my life was draining out of me as from an unbandaged wound, the first time I felt crazy.

Not coincidentally, that’s when I started skipping school a lot too. Some mornings the walk to school seemed impossible so I stayed home and popped popcorn for myself and watched daytime TV.

And my parents didn’t have a clue because they both left for work before I even got out of bed. And I got home before they did. So they had no way of knowing.

Well, other than to actually be around, of course.

And I certainly didn’t give a shit about school. I knew that I could get away with it on that front too. I would only show up for like half of the classes and still ace the course.

What can I say? I’m gifted.

And a lot of the teachers just read from the fuckin’ textbook anyway. Thanks, teach, I look forward to you being replaced by a text to speech AI in the future.

Needless to say, I was a very 80’s nihilistic teen. And I still feel that way sometimes.

Sometimes nihilism is the only positive response to the anxiety threatening to choke the life out of you or make your heart explode.

Nihilism is the exact opposite of anxiety.

And sometimes that’s what you need the most.

More after the break.

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Update from the other world

I’ve acquired a few video games lately while the Steam Fall Sale is on.

One is a pretty decent game with a very stupid name, Villages and Dungeons. It’s yet another deck building game – there are a LOT of them now, which is great, because I love them but for ages they were a weird obscure genre.

It’s pretty barebones as of yet but it’s in active development so I am sure more stuff will be added fairly soon, and it’s entirely playworthy, just a little lacking in depth.

I am sure it will get fleshed out over time.

I also, somewhat surprisingly, got a furry visual novel called Winds of Change.

I don’t normally do visual novels,or VNs, because they are basically books with illustrations in a vaguely video game ish form and while I love to read and I love video games, I don’t play video games to read.

But the trailer for this one intrigued me with the nice British lady telling me about all the different forms of complex storytelling involved, and so far it’s been mostly linear but with a plot that is unique and exciting enough to have me hooked.

And lastly there’s big granddaddy, Red Dead Redemption 2.

A Wild West game made by the same people who made Grand Theft Auto (hence the nickname “Grand Theft Horse”), it’s a real long shot for me because it’s a heavily 3D game and therefore is very likely to crash my computer, hard.

But I will ruefully put it on low settings and hope for the best, because if I can get it to run without crashing, it’s an absolutely legendary game that won a million awards and I am eager to give it a try.

So wish me luck on that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got pretty deep into this subject, and I am proud of that.

I think it’s an important one for those of us who are always struggling to figure out what is really going on, as Robert Anton Wilson put it.

And yes, I picked two left wing examples. That’s because the right wing examples are obvious and pervasive.

Anyhow, here it is :

But you can see how this sort of thing can happen to anyone. As far as I can tell, the zeitgeist is riddled with this kind of bullshit and I think we’re just going to have to live with that because of the imperfect nature of our minds and our consciousness.

Which is frustrating to a part time truth warrior like me, but I am above all else a pragmatist and there is little point in railing against something I can’t change.

And as a humanist, I love us naked beach apes for all our fragility and absurdity and imperfections and pretense, so there’s that too.

Plus I question the universal utility of the truth as well. In a lot of situations it really doesn’t matter whether what someone believes matches objective reality or not.

I mean, if someone genuinely believes the moon is made of green cheese, odds are that’s not going to hurt anybody, least of all them, even if they spend their free time trying to build an extremely large fondue pot.

The problem is that us human beings have a strong instinct to merge our views of reality as a way of creating a pool of shared knowledge greater than what any single one of us could know.

Like I have said before, if Conk the Caveman sees a bear in the valley with the red berries and then tells his tribe about it, now the whole tribe knows to avoid Red Berry Valley unless they plan to hunt the bear.

But this instinct was not evolved with the complexity of life in a much bigger tribe in mind. When two people’s worldviews conflict (Brank was just in Red Berry Valley and he didn’t see a bear there) this information sharing instinct experiences a conflict and that can only mean one thing : arguing.

Both Conk and Brank think they are right, and odds are, neither one is going to convince the other the truth of their opinions. So the argument is pointless, right?

Well no. Welcome to the world of discourse. Because the other members of the tribe might not have made up their minds about Red Berry Valley yet and they are waiting to see how the argument goes before they decide who is right.

See how it all works?

Fast forward to today and people arguing on the internet. Our world is incredibly complicated, far moreso than our monkey brains can handle, and so we have complex discourse and seemingly endless and pointless arguments and all of us contributing to the massive shared knowledge base of humanity in some way.

Anyhow, back to the knowledge sharing instinct. That instinct is why it bothers us so much when someone says something we disagree with. Our initial instinct is to merge realities with people and when a conflict makes that impossible, we argue.

And while it’s very rare for anyone to be convinced via argument to change their views, in the aggregate, all these little spats are how a society thinks something over, and eventually the side of right (hopefully) develops strong arguments that the side of the devils can’t counter, becomes dominant, and then that world view becomes the one we all accept and share in the future.

That’s why the arc of history bends towards justice. That’s how social progress happens. That’s how we evolve our consciousness as a species.

That’s how we make our world a better place for all.

Kind of inspiring, isn’t it?

More after the break.

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After the talk

Had therapy today at noon.

Don’t worry, it will go back to the usual Thursdays starting next week. My therapist has just been recovering from his luxury vacation to my fucking home town.

Okay, so I am still a little angry and bitter about that. I mean, what are the fucking odds. The whole world for him and his wife to vacation in, and they ended up going to the one place on Earth that would piss me off the most.

Oh well. Some day I will go back and hug my Mom, probably for the last time.

I’ve pondered whether or not I’d move back. I mean, it’s not like it really matters where the bedroom with my computer in it resides.

I could have the exact same lifestyle in Timbuktu, language barrier aside.

Of course, this location has one unbeatable advantage : my friends. So moving back home would mean swapping my friends, who have looked after me for over a decade and who love me a lot, for the family I barely even know any more.

Put that way, no, I don’t think I would move back. I could see myself going home for a summer, maybe, but I have roots here in BC now.

Dunno what my brother Dave will do once my mother’s gone, though.

Damn I hate thinking about stuff like this.

But some day she won’t be there and my bro will be all alone in a house that is way too big for one person and everything there will remind him of her and he might just need to have his little brother around.

Lord knows it’s not like my two sisters will move back home.

We Gen X have reached prime “losing your parents” age and as a generation we’re going to have to deal with that. Despite all our bitching about Boomers, it’s going to be a much colder world when they are gone.

And then we’ll be the ones expected to be the wise and responsible ones.

And we’re not cut out for that, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now you’re thinking, Trump? I hate that guy! And I certainly don’t respect him!

But remember, you don’t have to like someone to respect them, nor do you have to think they are a good person or are right about things.

In the case of someone like Trump, even treating him like you would another adult is too much respect shown to him.

I go into further detail here :

Don’t lecture Trump and his cronies. Scold them. Tell them they are being very bad and that they need to stop it this second or there will be trouble.

What we need is an older woman of absolutely towering resolve, respectability, and scariness to make videos where she calls these people out exactly like the misbehaving children they are and tells them to clean up their mess and put things back exactly how they found them and then go to their rooms without supper.

I even have a name for her. We can call her Nanny State.

And I bet it would work on them. Their childlike fascist mindsets would not be able to resist the power of female authority. Sure, some of them would raise a fist in protest and swear they don’t care what she says, but even they would be feeling the power of it and before long they would be looking for excuses to comply.

And respectability is key. It has to be someone their primitive minds can’t find a way to just dismiss via some inane categorical.

It has to be someone who is powerfully dominant on all levels.

Basically, we need Margaret Thatcher, but not evil.

Heck, it could be Thatcher full stop. If she were still around she would be absolutely livid at the pathetic state of British conservative politics right now.

But I digress.

I bet it would even work on Trump. We know he fancies himself (quite tragically) to be some kind of prime male authority figure, and his fanbase is so pathetic that they actually accept such a cowardly, weak, dishonorable, dishonest, and disgusting man as one, but I bet if a woman with real power behind her personality told him what to do, he would very strongly want to comply.

But regardless of the form it takes, I am serious about not treating him with any respect any more. No more frothing at the mouth about what a bad president he is, no more railing against his fascist government, no shaking your fist at the sky.

Because when we do that, all he hears is, “I am very power and important! Look how my enemies fear and hate me!”.

No, we have to start talking about him like he’s making an embarrassing spectacle of himself all the time, how people are looking down on him as a result, and how all the sorts of people even a moron like him respects are laughing at him behind his back and have about as much respect for him as they do the town drunk.

Right now, he thinks he’s pulling it off. He thinks all the world leaders like and respect him. He thinks his billionaire buddies think he’s the greatest. And he feeds on this idea of being important and respected constantly.

We need to take it away from him. Force him to recognize that he’s nothing but an embarrassment and a laughing stock and a loser, so big of a loser in fact that even becoming the most powerful man on Earth couldn’t cure it.

Destroy his sense of social dominance. Let him know that he’s nothing but a toddler with a handgun and he should slink away and hide forever because there is no cure for the amount of shame and embarrassment he should be feeling.

It would be a psychological assassination and nobody deserves it more.

More after the break.

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😎 Tell me if this showed up as a happy face in sunglasses for you.

If it did, then hey, I can use emojis in this thing!

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Yet another incident

Warning, the following involves not making it to the bathroom in time.

Well, as I often say (to myself) the first thing disability takes from you is your dignity.

Then again, I suppose this could have happened to anyone, more or less, so perhaps I just prefer to blame it on being disabled.

I was watching things on Zoom with Le Gang when I realized I needed to poop. But it was 9 PM and Felicity was leaving at 9:30 PM so I thought, “Why disrupt our viewing when I can just go after she leaves?”.

It was a stupid thought, and social anxiety was definitely a factor. I didn’t want to interrupt everything and make things awkward by telling people I had to “go”.

So I waited and I waited and watched stuff with my friends and added the occasional comment and meanwhile the pressure in me was getting pretty bad.

Thus, the stage was set for disaster.

The final video ended and I got up to make my all important trip, trip, trip to the loo (my darling) but something had gone wrong in my skeletomuscular system because I went up but then I toppled over onto my front.

Needless to say, containment was breached. Ain’t nobody gonna be able to hold it in when gravity conspires to squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste.

So I had to make it into the bathroom with a pantload and then I had a small brief blissful window where I could forget what I had clearly felt happen in my pants as I finished what the fall had started and then I had to delicately take off the pants so I could rinse them out in the sink.

Like I said, it could happen to anyone who waits too long to go poop, but the fall was quite possibly the fault of my disability.

There was definitely dizziness involved. So maybe it was a blood pressure thing.

All I know is that I went up and fell down in the space of a second. And that, of course, when I felt it happen.

That is a very terrible feeling. Anything involving errant defecation taps into a very ancient bit of programming in our brains that was instilled before we could even talk and stuff that old always has a powerful impact.

Oh well. It’s over. I handled it. I rinsed out the pants so that they who do my laundry are not overtaxed by my needs.

What can I say? Shit happens.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God damn it.

My fucking internet died for the second time today. I don’t know WTF is happening but it need to stop. It happened just as I was sitting down to blog, you know, for extra pain and suffering, and so now I am stuck typing into an Office Libra (or whatever) file and cursing fate.

Now I am too angry to post a link to my video about irritability!

Seriously, that’s what today’s vid is about. Done on the webcam attached to my PC this time, as I intimated yesterday, and this very slightly edited.

Hmmm. Forgot to put the “like and subscribe” bit on the end. Oh well, whatever.

What really sucks is that normally I am hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries when I do my blogging and with no internet I can’t do that and I miss them.

It’s not an accident that I ended up talking about irritability today. Not only is it a subject close to my personal history but I have been feeling aglow with sheer crankiness today, largely because my right foot has gone from hurting on the sole from the damage I did with my zeal to peel the un-shed skin off to now hurting in the bones and muscles of the foot as there seems to be something very “off” about the way the pain of the injuries to the sole has been making me walk and now I am walking around feeling like my ankle is half sprained already and feeling the muscles and bones shift around in gruesome and unnatural ways as I walk.

I need one of those floating wheelchairs Baron Harkonnen has in Dune.

Or a splint or the like. Something to hold the ankle in place while the foot heals so that my foot doesn’t twist out from under me when I walk, so that I end up walking on the side of the foot.

That’s not right.

So that pain had me feeling snappish and irritable before the internet died and so that is how I ended up delving into that subject in the vid.

Because as us chronic illness sufferers know, there’s the physical pain, which is bad, but then there’s the effect it has on your mood and your outlook, which is worse.

Not only can I clearly feel the walk-sprained condition of my ankle even when I am not putting any weight on the foot in question, but the prospect of being even more crippled than usual as well as the certainty of more pain in my near future as I navigate my day (meals, bathroom breaks, water refills, bookcase trips, and so on) does not exactly put me in a bright, sunshiny mood.

I have Tylenol now. Ordered it off of Amazon. Yes, I know I am a bad boy for putting more moneyin Jeff Bezos’ pocket and I don’t care.

Point is, I can treat the pain somewhat. Well, I can turn down the volume on it anyhow. Yay analgesics.

But I am really, really worried about what is happening with my right foot. I can’t quite put into words how “wrong” it feels when I walk on it. And the way my ankle is just not doing its job and that leaves the whole foot to twist in a very bad way.

I am worried that I will end up seriously hurting that foot or even that leg.

Well, I have Wound Care tomorrow so I will see if the nurse can rig me up something to make walking less of a body trauma.

I don’t even care about the cuts on the sole any more. They’ll be fine.

More after the break.

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The return of the King

Got my internet back, so hooray for that.

In desperation I was futzing with my wifi antennae, just kinda wiggling it in its weird socket ^[1], when Windows made its “a device has connected” sound and I said, “That sounds good!” and rebooted, and here we are.

I will try to make sure nothing so much as breathes in that thing’s direction again.

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Always wandering lost

But I no longer thing I am looking for a way out. A way out of what? There’s nothing really here in my mindscape except for the kind of fog that you can’t see when it’s right in front of you but can see when you look further away.

Not that I know what THAT means.

But I am not looking for a door out of this “maze” any more. I know that all this hazy bullshit will burn away like a morning fog when I am finally truly ready to go out there and face that big old world.

I know this because I know that the fog’s real purpose has always been to hide reality from me so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I have been fighting reality since I was raped when I was four, and this fog – or maze, or castle, or infinite corridor, or whatever – is my way to shrink the aperture through which reality enters my mind to a manageable size.

And by “manageable” I mean “really very small and narrow and mostly virtual”.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing how much I perceive through that little hole. Thanks to the internet and mass media in general, I can not only learn about the world, I can deduce its deeper patterns and meanings with my supercomputer brain.

But who cares? I’m still locked away in here, scared of the world and convinced, despite all evidence, that the “real world” will eat me alive because it’s out to GET me.

That’s all bullshit and lies, of course, but that’s what makes this mental illness – knowing something is not true and being unable to stop believing it anyway.

The belief expresses something in me that desperately needs it and until I find that something and give it a better way out, the belief will return like plants coming back after a forest fire.

And I am still figuring out how to deal with shit like that.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.