I did another slideshow.

This one is almost shockingly wholesome!

Originally, I was going to do something more autobiographical. But then I realized I had absolutely no idea where I put those images and I did not feel like going through the Google Streetview of my home town again to regain them.

Plus the siding on my childhood home is this ugly green now.

Still, the concrete front step is a good idea.

Anyhow. Been doomscrolling Blue Sky a fair bit. Trying to keep up with what is going on in Los Angeles. Balancing terror and hope. Fretting.

I do think the good guys will win in the end. Dumb Donnie and his coterie of fucktards are way too stupid and incompetent to pull off a fascist coup.

I mean, he sent the Nation Guard in without food or water or equipment and refused to even pay for lodgings for them, so they all just slept on a floor somewhere.

A Machiavellian mastermind he ain’t.

In fact, it reminds me of Dubya, though of course, much much worse. The Dubya years taught us that incompetent evil can still do a lot of damage.

But as far as I know, while the National Guard and the Marines are in Los Angeles, most of them are not even doing anything yet.

It remains to be seen whether they will truly see action. Right now, I imagine their commanders are doing everything they can not to violate Posse Comatatus while technically following orders.

For the Guard, just being there is already illegal. They’re not invited. But I suppose nothing is illegal if there are no consequences.

As long as people continue to inexplicably follow Dumb Donnie’s orders, that tangerine Caligula is effectively the idiot-king of America.

They could flat out refuse his orders. Ignore him completely. What’s he gonna do? I bet there’s already been a spate of voluntary discharges and desertions. Acting against American citizens doesn’t just violate the law, it fundamentally goes against the grain of the entire ethos of the American armed forces.

They fight foreign threats in order to protect their fellow Americans. That is what it’s all about. If they act against Americans they become the enemy.

And that would be the ultimate betrayal.

So they could just refuse the orders. I realize that would also be a betrayal of their beliefs. I’m not going to pretend this is something they could do easily.

But these are desperate times.

And what’s Dumb Donnie going to do? Court-martial the entire U.S. fighting force? And they have numerous legal avenues for refusing illegal orders.

And of course, Congress could stop all of this. Every Republican in the House and Senate is radically and treasonously failing the American people by not having the guts to stand up to Dumb Donnie and put an end to all of this mishigas.

And it goes well beyond fear of consequences now. They fear him not because he can hurt them but because he is their God now and to challenge him would be to go against the fundamental nature of reality.

They are now the “good” children of the abusive parents, the ones who still obey despite the abuse because they are so heavily indoctrinated into the abuser’s version of reality that to do anything else is simply beyond imagination and thus terrifying.

Some of them are starting to wake up and listen to their constituents but so far no leader has emerged to lead the charge to save America.

And it would only take a small number of defectors for impeachment to go through.

I’m just sayin’.

More after the break.

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I thought this was beyond brilliant.

Between ambition and inaction

It’s not like I am happy doing nothing with my life.

I have a fiery fountain of a roaring, soaring firebird screaming for release inside me.

But I also have an unyielding wall of cold, dead depression standing in its way.

This conflict leaves me feeling like a million pounds of rocks is crushing me against a cold, flat cement floor.

Historically, I have “dealt” with this by not thinking about it. By keeping myself too distracted to feel the pressure and the pain and the frustration caused by such a strangulated state of affairs.

And I suppose compulsively playing video games is my way of allowing just enough of that pressure to escape for me to be able to breathe.

But breathing is not enough. Survival is not enough. Making it through the day is not enough, not any more.

I want to be truly alive.

And that’s going to mean pain.

Pain because the old dead parts of me that are holding me back will have to be cut away and there’s bound to be a little feeling left in them.

Or whatever they’re currently attached to.

Pain because I have a hell of a lot of latent growth stored up inside me and a hell of a lot of catching up to do and growing that fast is never gentle.

Pain because it will mean pushing through the tough, fibrous membrane of fear that has been a fake and worthless part of the tissues of my mind for far too long and when that thing tears it’s going to fucking hurt.

At least for a second or two. Like ripping off a bandage.

But fuck pain and fuck fear. I will summon the courage to leave this cozy but fetid grotto of mine and walk out into the real world and find my destiny.

Or at least something more interesting to do than play fucking video games all day.

Hopefully but not necessarily something that makes me some money. Maybe figure out which AI video gen site is worth investing in so I have a new toy to play with.

Or, ya know, find some other app that’s fun to make stuff with.

I don’t have to suddenly become this dynamo of productivity.

I just need to expand my definition of fun.

I could enjoy that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry about the rather underwhelming video.

At that time, it made sense to keep it simple and talk about feeling sick. I really was not feeling too good. So I cut myself some slack.

But now I wish I had just done one of my usual kinds of video because doing that one left me very creatively unfulfilled and in a way that felt just as bad as being sick.

So, lesson learned. Do the thing anyway. Sure, it will kind of suck to do it while feeling ill but at least I will avoid a serious case of creative blue balls.

I’m kind of itching to write a song. Mental note.

And like I said in the caption for the video, I do feel better now. It’s amazing what getting enough water on a hot summer day can do for a fella.

The thing is, I almost got it right. I clearly knew dehydration was the most likely scenario, but I played it “safe” by not straining myself much in case it was something more serious than that, and cut the video (quite) short.

Made sense at the time, but in my defense, I had only been awake for about ten minutes and I was quite dehydrated so my judgment was not great.

Oh well. Mistakes are how we learn. Take the lesson then just keep movin’ on.

I keep returning to the idea of life momentum. How important it is in life to stay in motion and not let yourself fall into the doldrums like I have.

But the thing about a “stuck” life like mine is that it’s super predictable. A life in motion is not. Without knowing it, I have been hyper-controlling my life to the point of paralysis out of a very morbid fear of being “out of control” and not knowing what will happen.

The only thing “out of control” was my urge to be “in control”.

And it all traces back to that deep and terrible mistrust of the universe in general and people in particular.

It’s the trust/control complex. The feeling like the world is not to be trusted because it is, on some level, inherently hostile to me and “out to get me” leads directly to the belief, unstated but powerful, that only that which I control and can verify every bit of can be considered safe, and that leaves precious little room for actually living.

Off the top of my head, I have no idea how to convince myself to trust the world. I can tell myself I am safe and that nothing is waiting for me to drop my guard so it can GET me, and that does help some, but it’s more like treating the symptom and the root cause remains in place.

After all, my life was shattered when I was raped at the age of 4. That left one hell of a psychological wound that went untreated for decades and that still has not really been addressed because I don’t know how to address that.

Not via logic and reason, that’s for sure. Maybe by learning to love myself, but I don’t “know” how to do that either.

By faith, or something like it, I guess. By deciding to believe in myself a priori, without needing any evidence, no logical connection, a pure act of will, a true choice.

Sounds good. But so what? So do a lot of things. And none of them matter unless I have the courage to stop thinking about them and actually do them.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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Giving myself permission

And just like that, we’re back at another familiar offramp : one labeled, “Flight Lessons This Way”, with an arrow.

Oh, if only it was that easy.

In other words, I need to learn to fly. To leave the structure of contiguous logic and knowledge where everything fits together and makes sense and can be justified in order to simply give myself the emotional inputs I so desperately need without worrying about what the “rules” say.

Sounds simple enough.

But I’m so scared.

What else is new? My life is ruled by my fears. On some level, I’ve been appeasing them, as if giving them everything they want will somehow convince them to let up long enough to let me be at least a little happy.

But of course that doesn’t work. Appeasing them just makes them bigger. And the bigger they get, the harder it gets to say no to them.

So the next thing you know they are running your life entirely for their own benefit. Sigh.

It always circles back to the same old thing : be scared and do it anyway. Have the courage to push my way through the curtain of fire and get to the healthier world on the other side, and show my fears who is boss.

Who are they to think they can trap me? Hold me prisoner? Contain me?

Fuck THEM. I’m the unresolvable variable. I’m the unbound function. I’m the seething madness that is strong than sanity when wielded by the strong and certain hand of my mighty mountain of a mind, and absolutely nobody is going to hold me back, hold me down, hold me up, and lock me in a cage.

How DARE my fears and my issues think they can do that to me. When I die they might as well dump me straight into the ground because no god damned box will hold me.

I cannot be tamed.

And I am building myself up to be able to face that screaming existential void of having to figure out what to do with myself.

Or rather, what I want to do.

It doesn’t have to be video games all the fucking time, There’s all kinds of fun things I might be doing at any given time.

Some of them could even lead to more fun via jobs and money.

What a wild idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because seriously, what the fuck else would I be talking about?

I feel like I had more to say but I don’t know what,

And that’s happening a lot lately. I must be at the dawn of one of my artistic growth phases where I become discontent with what I am making and it’s that discontent that burrows deep into my psyche to find a solution.

Solution : get better at it!

But it’s a tad more complicated than that.

On one of its extremely deep layers, this almighty mind of mine will rearrange its contents into a more efficient form, eliminating redundancies and clearing up conflicts and when the process is complete, I will have leveled up.

That’s seriously how it works for me. Go fig.

Meanwhile I’m going to sit here and fret about what’s going on in L.A. and New York.

Hopefully, at some point, the mighty moron army of the Dumb Donnie administration will realize that despite all their fascist power fantasies, it is literally impossible to fight absolutely everybody and they are actually going to have to learn to use their higher brain functions for once instead of trying to punish their way out of this mess.

But that doesn’t sound very likely, does it? Which means this may go to the bitter end that all fascist regimes face when they reach this point in their degradation.

Namely, the point where they really do keep trying to “solve” the problem with greater and more brutal applications of force, unable with their tiny minds to grasp that for every person they strike down, they inspire ten to rise up, and that every atrocity convinced more everyday people that if they and their family are to be safe, you have got to die.

I will note, at this point, that there’s currently protestors in front of the White House. And there’s already a massive protest set for next Saturday.

Did you see how few rioters it took to storm the Capital?

Now imagine millions.

Sadly, the Secret Service are extremely good at their job so they would undoubtedly get Dumb Donnie out of the White House and to an Undisclosed Location (idea : open a bar in DC called An Undisclosed Location) before the angry mobs could get to him.

Unless Dumb Donnie threw a tantrum and refused to leave. “No! This is MY HOUSE! They should be the ones to leave!”.

I truly wonder what they would do then. I picture an ultra serious Tommy Lee Jones type doing that thing people can do in movies and TV where they punch someone in the midsection in such a way that said person ends up over their shoulder and then the Secret Service person just carries them away.

Anyhow, back to New York and L.A. I really question the sanity of trying to fuck with New Yorkers. These are not mellow SoCal hippie surfer types. They are hardboiled survivors who take great pride in being tough and willing to scrap with anyone if they feel like they’re getting stepped on.

And they have shown how readily they band together when there’s a threat.

L.A. is the bigger story right now, but it’s in good ol New York where you’re going to see the most implacably ferocious resistance.

And of course, young people will be flooding into those areas from all over the country looking to join in the good fight. Especially Gen Z!

These monstrous morons have bitten off far, far more than they can chew.

And I hope they fucking choke on it.

More after the break.

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Precious seconds of humanity

Alright, time to take another swing at this piñata.

If really sad or upsetting things like this music video…

…can unleash a big enough emotional response in me that I actually feel human and maybe even have some idea of what it’s like to be a normal person, what in the name of little green garden snakes am I the rest of the time?

A lot of things, as it turns out, but let’s concentrate on whatever mental state these sad and/or upsetting things temporarily save me from.

At some point – maybe when I was raped, maybe some point after – I retreated into the ice cold world of detachment as a way to escape my negative emotions.

And this made me inhuman. I can see that so clearly now. It made me eerily removed and detached from the rest of the world in a way that I was more than capable of somewhat superciliously defending as just “me being me” and very disingenuously claiming to have no idea what people were talking about when challenged on it.

I could do this because deep down I knew nobody would be articulate enough to actually nail down what it was that was “off” about me.

God, that’s creepy.

And I suppose this involved me hiding my “true” nature from myself as well. When you are as multifaceted as I am, it’s very easy to change which facet is the “real” you based on whatever best suits your self-image at the moment.

So I think of myself, most of the time, as a sweet, fluffy, cute, compassionate, sensitive critter who is lovable and expansive and easy to get along with.

And that’s all true… for one of my facets. The one that I, arguably, like the best.

But I know there’s more to me than that. On another facet, I am that cold and calculating and ruthlessly pragmatic snake. On another, I am a fire breathing rabble rouser fit to lead people into bloody revolution. On still another, I am a junior Messiah full of love and compassion and understanding for all and who just wants people to see the humanity in one another so we can all come together in harmony.

And so forth and so on.

And asking me which of these is the “real” me is as meaningless as asking which side of a d20 is the “real” d20.

They all are. I am none of my facets, and all of them. The question makes no sense.

I must have a sort of meta-facet that decides which facet best suits a situation and, if absolutely necessary, carves a new one if none of them fit.

It feels automatic. Like it’s the world that makes the selection, not me. Situation A stimulates response X, and so on.

And truth me told, I am not sure if I could control the process even if I wanted to.

And I do not.

So what am I when I am not having my seconds of humanity?

Something entirely different and not entirely sane, I would have to day.

But now that I have a conscious of idea of how much good those moments can do me, maybe I can find the courage to seek them out deliberately instead of leaving it up to the whims of fate.

Sometimes it does good to feel bad for a while.

I’ll try to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did a sort of vid.

It’s technically better than me just sitting there talking, but… ehh.

It’s still not making me happy. I get the feeling that if I want to make the best videos I can make (and I am pretty sure I do), I am going to have to put far more time and energy than I am right now.

At least at first, when I am developing the format.

Once the pieces are in place and I know what I am doing (it could happen), it will presumably become more routine.

I know what elements need to be there to make my little vids the slick satirical commentary news-style program I want it to be, so it’s just a matter of pulling enough of myself together to get all those things into one project.

But I know how I operate. Incrementally. I build things up layer by layer. I add a thing, test it, see if it’s working and if so if it could work better, and the next day I do it again.

That’s just how I work. I tinker. I test. I analyze the result. I think about it. That thinking goes into the next model, and the next, and the next, and so on.

I can’t imagine going on to step B before verifying that step A is solid and trustworthy, or at least is as solid and trustworthy as I can make it.

I guess it’s sort of an application of my fundamentally cautious nature. Deep down I don’t trust things to go well unless I make them go well and that naturally leads to a certain slow but sure approach to things.

Today, I gave looking to my BlueSky for inspiration a try. When it was vid-making time, I had no particular inspiration for a vid and my mind seemed reluctant to come up with one (stupid summer brain) so I figured it was time to look to the news.

Clearly, static images while I talk is not much of an improvement at all. Technically, there’s more to see when I am talking on the screen.

So obviously my technique needs to be refined a tad.

What I really should do is stop being so damned lazy and put in the hard work to come up with enough images and clips to accompany what I am saying.

It doesn’t have to be a non-stop slideshow. After all, that’s not how Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Seth Myers do it.

But it has to be enough to keep the visual presentation going and make things look slick and cool and like I might even know what I’m doing.

I don’t, really. But it feels nice to pretend.

I provide the genius. The competence tends to come from others. Or at least I wish it would. I would be so much more relaxed if I had a trustworthy crew.

There’s that word again. Trust. I don’t have it. I only trust what I can know and verify and that leads to a very limited life.

At some point – a point I can only call “faith” – you have to trust that the universe is not out to get you and that disaster does not constantly lurk waiting for you to foolishly trust that things will be okay and then POUNCE and that the world is, in fact, pretty okay.

And on the surface of my mind, I know all these things. Logically speaking, my level of suspicion and paranoia is insane. None of it is remotely justified.

But deep down I have a lot of unhealed wounds and infected scars and those refuse to let me ever truly relax and trust that everything will be okay.

Because by default, everything sucks and everything that can go wrong will and the only hope of any kind of safety is to watch in all directions at once.

And that’s impossible.

More after the break.

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The dire deep

It started with this :

(warning, video is somewhat emotionally disturbing for non-scary reasons)

I needed to see that video because it pushed a lot of emotional buttons for me that I really benefitted from having pushed.

Her descent into and out of madness helped me process some stuff.

But it also left me in a temporarily perilous state. When the video finished I felt my frustration with my life very keenly, like the video had honed it to a point, and I felt dizzy and confused and a little crazy.

More than a little, really.

But there was no need to panic. I knew it would be temporary. In fact, I wish I had thought to grab that feeling and hang on to it because it had managed to penetrate my usual cloak of numbness and made me feel emotionally real and present and alive for a while and I wish I had made that last as long as possible.

Those rare precious moments are when I truly get some emotions processed, and it’s almost always because something made me really really sad and/or upset.

Not the most comfortable way to piece one’s insanity but not the least either.

When I have these moments, it’s like for a little while I know how normal people experience life. How they just go forward feeling what they feel and making the best decisions they can based on an emotional logic that eludes me.

It’s like a calculus that takes their emotional needs as a foundational variable and therefore produces well rounded and psychologically healthy solutions.

That seems achingly beautiful to me. Sure, they may not be as “smart” as me, but those people are a hell of a lot more functional and wholesome and complete than I and so my hot n’ greedy little heart wants to reach out and take what they have for myself.

I’m no angel. Or rather, I am an angel, but I’m a hell of a lot of others things too.

I know that the cold, broken world inside me is wrong on so many levels. It came from a small boy withdrawing into the world of the mind to escape the unthinkable happening to him and it alienated me from my own emotional core in order to create this eerily calm and secretly coldblooded ice cold snake inside me that intellectualizes everything as a way to make it digestible.

And I am still hiding inside myself from myself and from the big bad world out there.

And I wish I could just make myself be real and normal for a while. For long enough to worth through some very strong and deeply buried emotions.

But I can’t.

Not yet, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First we have today’s vid :

I realize I didn’t say anything particularly novel or unique about the situation, but what the hell. For once in my life, I was just like everyone else.

Feels weird, to be honest.

I’ve been trying to compute what the actual likely outcome of this big sissy slapfight is. It’s really hard to say. Both men are theoretically quite powerful and therefore they could, in fact, act directly against one another.

But they’re also both billionaires, which means it’s highly unlikely either of them is going to be picked up by the authorities and thrown in the slammer any time soon.

More’s the pity.

Trump could listen to that bargain basement gargoyle Steve Bannon and have Elon deported. But as satisfying as that might be for Dumb Donnie, in the end it’s pretty weak sauce. It would, at most, mildly inconvenience Elon the Alien.

I mean, he’s the richest man in the world. Like he cares whether he lives in the USA any more. He can be wherever he wants to be whenever he likes. I am sure he has houses all over the planet and access to the very best communications tech so he can Zoom (or whatever) with whoever he likes at any time.

And of course, it’s also possible that Elon the Elongated truly does have the dirt on Dumb Donnie and can do him way, way more harm than he can inflict on the Elonien.

The Elon From Outer Space is already threatening Donald the Dunce by saying that the reason the infamous Epstein File, with all the names of prominent pedophiles occupying the very highest levels of power, hasn’t been released is that DD is in it.

Which is like, duh. We all know he’s in there. There’s tons of photos of him at Epstein’s pedo parties for fuck’s sake.

But unless you actually have said file and can release it, that doesn’t mean jack shit.

Still, Muskie does potentially know where a lot of bodies are buried, including ones which do not lead to crimes for which Trump is currently immune from prosecution.

But unless someone has the guts to send U. S. Marshalls into the White House to arrest Trump and his confederacy of the dunces (and dunces of the Confederacy), that’s not going to mean much either.

Or hell, grab him when he’s on one of his golf trips. It’s not like he stays in the White House all the time. Bust his lumpy ass mid-stroke if you can.

He probably cheats at golf anyway.

Anyhow, what I am trying to say is it’s not clear how much actual harm these two can do to one another.

It’s clear that Dumb Donnie’s One Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill is going to have a very rough time of it in the Senate.

The knives are out for it and many Republican Senators have done the unthinkable and actually read the damned thing and found their own reasons to vote against the thing besides the fact that if the thing passed their constituents would string them up by their gonads then set them on fire.

But I guess they can’t admit that, so they need to find things to object to other than, ya know, the thousands of people it will kill, the millions of families it will shatter, the freedom and democracy it will destroy, and the human rights it will shit on.

It can’t be wrong for any of those reasons because those are liberal reasons and everyone knows that voting for wimpy girly liberal reasons makes you gay.

I swear to God that’s what is behind a lot of conservatism.

More after the break.

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Not quite done

I got a lot of my usual negatives out in last night blog entry, but after I was done I realized that there was more dreck to be expressed, and this time it was something deeper than the usual litany of frustration and self-loathing.

So I am going to take a stab at reaching it by talking about the life I never got to live.

I was well on the way to a double major in Psychology and Philosophy when my parents yanked me out of UPEI and made me come home to my childhood bedroom just as I was starting to bloom as a person and as an adult.

I then proceeded to have a total mental breakdown that left me unable to eat or drink or do much more than lay on the couch with the TV on and suffer.

I couldn’t eat or drink so I became malnourished and dehydrated and lost my marbles pretty much completely.

Clawed my way back to who I am now from there, and that’s who I’ve been since.

But it could have been so much better. I could have gone on to get my double major then from there get a Master’s in psych before becoming a psychotherapist.

And seeing as I’m an academic super-genius, I am pretty sure I would have aced the academics and shown to all concerned how amazing I am.

They might have tried to get me to go into research. But I would not really be interested. I love science and would love to be a scientist but being a therapist is my calling.

Or at least it was supposed to be.

If my life had gone that way, I might even be on the road to an early retirement by now. I certainly wouldn’t be a pathetic never-been with a crippled soul clinging to the bottom rung of the social ladder and too frozen by fear to make any real progress in life.

I could have spent the last 25 years helping people. Holding their hand and guiding them out of the darkness that grips them and leading them to a happier, saner, safer, stronger, healthier frame of mind from which they can thrive.

And who knows. Maybe I even could have done that for myself.

Hard to know how the mental injuries I had when I went to UPEI would have influenced my state of mental health in this alternate realm.

Maybe not at all.

I was pretty sane before my parents yanked the rug out from beneath me.

I guess I’ll never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t give too much thought to that title, because I sure didn’t.

Anyhow, I did a song.

Because seriously, doing all those individual text objects is SUCH a pain.

Admittedly, part of that comes from how incredibly fussy about timing I am.

I could just plop the whole lyric sheet into a single scrolling text object and be done with it. But no, then the words wouldn’t line up with the singing properly, so I gotta do all these individual text objects and oy.

Offhand, I can’t think of what else I would put on screen while the song plays. I suppose I could be like my guy John Michael Godier and use the same much of stock footage clips for most of my videos.

But that would be lame. No offense, JMG.

I could also, of course, hunt down a whole whack of images and clips that go with the lyrics and do a montage of those.

That would also be a whole lot of work.

And I have the terrible feeling that I would still feel the need to put my beautiful lyrics on the screen anyway because watching stock footage can be boring.

So I dunno. I think I might have reached the limit of what I can do by myself. Anything more elaborate and/or higher production value will take a team.

That’s definitely part of my YouTube dreams : to be one of these YouTubers that makes so much money off YouTube that they can pay entire squads of people to work on their videos for them.

Like, there are YouTubers who employ an animation studio with like 30 employees just to make their animations. All they have to do is write them and record the voiceover.

That seems like Heaven to me. And the VIP part of Heaven. Heaven Plus, if you will.

The premium service is worth the price for the concierge alone.

It would be so nice not to have to do everything myself. Of course, money is only one part of why I work alone.

Another big part is being a big under-socialized weirdo who doesn’t play well with others. I honestly do not want others involved if they are going to slow me down. I would hate it if I couldn’t move forward on something because I am waiting for somebody else to do their part of it.

Fuck that. I will do it myself. Badly.

So if I did have a studio, I would have to develop a relationship with them where I can just give them my part and then trust them to do the rest.

And I do not trust easily. Especially when it comes to other people’s competence.

Which is odd, because thanks to dyspraxia et al, I am not competent in most physical ways myself. Which is sad.

But the sort of competence I don’t trust in others is things like being able to stay focused on a goal, solve problems with common sense and creativity, being able to keep the big picture in mind, and other such busybody things.

Which means I would make a pretty good manager. I’d take all that on mysef and then my workers could concentrate on just doing their job well.

Maybe I should run my own studio. Hmmm. 🙂

Went to physio today, which I was dreading because I had to admit I had not been doing the exercises my physio Ekta had assigned me last time.

Forgot all about them. D’oh.

This time, I am going to try to make them part of breakfast. I will stand a better chance of remembering them if I attach them to something I already do.

And I don’t currently have anything I do during breakfast. So what the heck.

It was a bit depressing how much doing the very simple exercises she was teaching me took out of me.

Not a surprise, but still sad.

More after the break.

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I hate my stupid fucking life

Yeah, we’re back here again.

I tried to scratch this particular itch with that song above but I guess that was too indirect to get the job done so, fuck everything everywhere eternally.

I feel cranky and unstable. This straitjacket of a life is so fundamentally pathetic and radically unfulfilling and filthy and stupid and humiliating and disabled and lame.

I want – I need – so very much more than this. Nobody should have to lead a stunted half-life like mine. I have so much human potential locked up inside me itching to get out that it’s a wonder that I haven’t gone completely berserk yet.

I’m not meant to be so limited. I’m a genius, I should be flying high above the crowds and creating spectacles and wonders and showing the world what an incandescent wonder I am, not rotting away in this shithole of a bedroom as death looms ever closer and every day makes my inability to get anywhere even more humiliating.

I am so ashamed of how my life has turned out. I’m such a loser. Even other losers look down at me because they have at least had jobs, or work some McJob, or have some other way of being some use to society.

But no, I am a rare breed of total fuckup that hasn’t even really tried to make it. I’ve made some ill fated attempts at securing employment more than 20 years ago and since then I have been a burden and a drag to the rest of the world.

And I struggle, but I don’t get anywhere. All I ever really do is dick around pretending like I am making progress without ever really doing anything of substance.

And all because I am so damned scared of everything, especially that big bad world out there, that I am compelled to hide in video games all my free waking hours rather than spend one precious second having to figure out what I want to do.

I’m sick of it all and I’m sick of this life and I wish I could just slip my skin and run away and become a completely new person, with no baggage, a suitably non-pathetic synthetic backstory, and no way for the unspeakably awful demon that is the truth of who I really am to ever catch up with me.

I just want to be normal.

I just want to have self-respect.

I just want to be a grownup.

But I can’t even manage that.

A generational intellect and talent and no way to do anything with it.

Man, I really am a loser.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

There. Hopefully that’s enough of a discharging of negatives for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

How so? Watch, and find out.

It’s kind of my way. I stumble through life doing everything wrong, as the song says, and yet somehow it kind of works for me.

Emphasis on kind of. I mean, it’s not like I’m awash in accolades and success or anything. But inasmuch as I have been educated and so far as I have made my silly little creative projects, I have been improvising my way through life without the slightest clue as to what I am doing and yet somehow coming out of it unharmed.

None of what I talk about in the vid should be possible.

So I guess I’m just impossible.

Or at least highly unlikely.

Well, I did defy my mother’s tubal ligation to be conceived. She was under the impression that her getting pregnant was impossible.

Not so, said I.

The must be a way to harness my improbability to get myself out of this rut. Maybe I should just hitch it to my strange boldness and just email famous and/or powerful people out of the blue looking for help getting my career started.

That sounds like the sort of thing that a sweet summer child like me would do.

There is a certain advantage to doing what others would never dream of doing, provided you do it in a polite, respectful, charming way.

I can do that.

Perhaps that should be my entire approach to looking for a job. Just ask for what I want. Or better yet, ask for advice.

Most people love having their knowledge and expertise called upon. It must be part of our instinct to share information with the rest of the tribe.

Perhaps the right people would find my combination of sweetness and perspicacity oddly appealing and I could get somewhere that way.

The other thing on my mind today is how I’ve always been..

An island unto myself

A solitary fortress in a large and lonely sea.

It never seemed like I was choosing to be that way. I grew up terribly lonely, so lonely sometimes that it physically hurt. I wanted friends, I wanted closeness, I wanted people in my life who saw me and took care of me instead of throwing me to the wolves.

But I don’t think I knew how to let people in. I still don’t. Perhaps I missed some vital developmental window in which one is supposed to learn human connection and because I was neglected and ignored (and resented) at that time, I didn’t get my proper dose of it.

I’d hate to think that’s permanent. But it might be.

On the whole, I think I’d rather be alive.

That would make a great line to start a short story with. I’ll have to remember it.

Now I come back to the idea that it would take something really big to overwhelm my fractured mind’s stupid defenses and actually set me free from this prison fortress that has grown up around me over all these years.

But I know the truth. Door’s wide open. I can leave whenever I want to.

This is not a secure ward.

What keeps me locked into this sad little insufficient life of mine is fear. Simple fear, as in anxiety, and a much deeper and more telling fear that flows from that broken boy of long ago who was shattered by a rapist and then filed it away in his mind as something too big for him to deal with and there it has stayed.

The person I became is made of whatever was left behind.

I could be so very much more.

But not without help.

More after the break,

---

Ordering in again

Crunched the numbers and saw that I was around $40 ahead, ergo I am eating me some Chipotle right now.

And it only cost me $20, so I am still $20 up. Awesome. I like having a buffer.

Still three weeks to go on this festering sore that is 5 week month : the Revenge. I will be so glad when this bullshit is over.

I just checked and the following month is definitely a normal four week month. Phew.

I’m not taking anything for granted any more. If there could be two in a row, there could be three just as easily.

Son of a bitch.

I’ve been doing okay other than financial stress. Life keeps clicking along and dragging us into the future and every day my lack of life progress gets a little more sad.

Not the healthy way to look at it, I know. Hopefully putting it that way here will help me exorcize a bit of that energy.

Sometimes I have to let the bad thoughts out in order to feel better. So what might seem like I am getting worse because I am expressing such dark thoughts (and in my own particularly evocative way) but it’s actually the opposite.

I’m getting better by venting my toxins.

It’s conceivable that some distant, future version of myself would be able to deal with his emotions in realtime in such an effective and healthy way that I don’t build up the negative feelings in the first place.

Until then, I gotta purge now and then.

Not right now though, so you can relax. Some time when the darkness is a lot closer to the surface. Right now I feel somewhat summer-mellow and okay and I am not about to ruin that by sticking a metaphorical finger down my throat.

I suppose there’s a little melancholy in my soul right now. Maybe I could use a good cry.

Maybe I will even be able to have one once I lay down again.

Maybe I still have too much invested in predictability and not nearly enough in being able to handle whatever, whenever.

And I still compulsively take shelter in video games most of the time. I feel like I am slowly prising myself away from that habit but I haven’t truly challenged the addiction yet and when I do, it’s going to be rough.

Just keep thinking of job hunting as a game.

That should help.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A fat guy talking about video games on the internet!

Arguably the subject that would most “make sense” in a simplistic sense for me to blog and vlog about would be video games.

And I am positive I could create decent video game related content. The usual stuff, reviews, news, stuff you can use. My theories about what makes a game good.

But I don’t really want to. My vlogs and blogs are how I get away from my video game addiction and have some time when I am not involved with them at all.

I’m trying to wean myself off gaming, so far with little success. It’s still how I spend most of the time I don’t spend making and editing videos and writing on this blog o’ mine.

That’s why the videos are a good innovation. They are one more non video game related thing for me to do with my day. Something even vaguely productive.

I mean, people DO see my videos, both on YouTube and on TikTok. And I am pondering posting them to Instagram as well.

What the hell, it’s not like it’s a lot of work.

And the fact that there are people who see my vids who don’t even know me personally expands my “reach” compared to this blog, where I can greet my readers by name.

Hi Julian! Hi Felicity! Hi spuug! Love you all! *enormous hugs!* Thank you so much for reading my “not written with entertainment in mind” blog.

The youths call that “shitposting” but I’m far too refined and sophisticated motherfucker to call it that.

This very circuitously rings me back to the subject of taking my videos more seriously by trying to make them seem professional and even telling people to like n’ subscribe.

I’m still divided on that. I kinda like that my videos don’t pester people like that. Being so needy and pushy with promoting yourself is very anti-Gen X. We’re the generation that hated being advertised to or at.

Like, fuck off. Seriously. I don’t give a shit about your stupid craptacular product.

Stop trying to engage my non-existent enthusiasm.

So it feels really wrong to become a carnival barker for my own “brand”. I would much rather just do what I do and say what I say and if the power of my self-expression and my ideas and my vision attracts followers, great.

But I kind of also want money.

The usual Gen X dilemma, just reached far too late in life : money versus integrity.

I could make merch. Step right up and get your very own “I’m a fat guy on the internet” T-shirt. Hot off the Cafepresses!

Actually, that might catch on. Hmm. Add some cute (and non-hateful) aimage of a fat dude bathing in the glow from their monitor and typing.

He could become my mascot.

But it’s so hard for me to imagine picking one aspect of myself and going with it as who I “really” am. No matter what I chose, it would feel like I was killing a big part of myself.

And I don’t think I can do it. No matter how I try to frame it in my mind, it still feels like I would be choosing one version of me to survive while jettisoning the rest into space.

Hence my never ending quest to come up with a single identity for myself. It seems hopeless sometimes. How could one unify so many aspects of myself?

Just the contrast between my warmly loving side and my coldly calculating side seems to make unity impossible.

I guess I’ll always be somewhere in between.

More after the break.

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On the other hand

Maybe it’s okay to have no idea who you are.

It certainly leaves your options open. Which might be the point. Maybe my lack of ability to decide who I “really” am really comes down to not wanting to be “trapped” in one identity and therefore not be able to shapeshift into what I need to be in the moment.

That kind of makes sense. In my own warped way.

And very patient readers know I have trod this road before. Talking about being “goo” and not wanting to be stuck in one particular form, but also knowing that my lack of internal structure comes at a very high cost in terms of stability and security and having a freaking skeleton to my embodied soul.

And yet I can’t imagine having that structure or that skeleton any more than I can imagine choosing one of my many sides to be “the one”.

I think I have always assumed, way WAY in the back of my mind, that life would somehow choose for me. That I would putter around doing this and that and eventually one thing or another would catch on with people and that’s what I would become.

I’ve read celebrity bios that went something like that.

But of course, that kind of assumes that you’re putting your work somewhere where it might be found. And until recently I have not been doing that.

The videos, though, are at least discoverable. When I have the wherewithal saved up, I will try to make them at least a little more than that.

Somehow. In some way that I can live with. Le sigh.

It’s hard being Gen X if you have literally any ambition. We’re the Slacker generation, ambition was for idiots and corporate drones and lick-spittle keeners and preppies and type-A yuppies and other kinds of undesirables.

In that sense it’s kind of a wonder that any of us got famous.

And yet, we did. Presumably without ever looking like we really cared.

In fact, I was always a tiny bit of an outlier in that I did show open enthusiasm for some things. Maybe us Gen X nerds were the exception, I don’t know.

But no generation can resist getting married and having kids and thus having to get your shit together and get a real job so you can raise them right.

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing how nobody is forcing us to get married and reproduce and yet we do it anyway, almost universally, all of us making the exact same decisions for our own individual reasons.

Some things no amount of individualism can erase and our need to pair-bond and have kids seems to be one of them.

We think we’re so autonomous and individual yet we all end up doing the same things.

It’s something to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m glad I did this.

Because it felt really good to get some stuff off my chest. I felt distinctly unburdened when I posted that video to YouTube. I feel better now.

So expect more things like that down the line. It did me a lot of good to make myself vulnerable and be real with people today.

I want more.

I think part of why it did me good was that I confronted the long freeze that my emotions have suffered over these years.

I’m finally ready to admit it : my Midnight Tundra has been Paxil all along.

And I have come up with the opposite of Midnight Tundra : Twilight Summer. It’s that wonderful time of a summer day where the sun has started to go down so you don’t have the burning heat of direct sunlight beating down on you, but there’s still plenty of heat coming up off the pavement, so things are still toasty warm.

I love that time of day. It’s the best.

So that’s my opposite of all that Midnight Tundra inside of me.

I’m on my last week of my current month of meds and next month my Paxil will go down another level. Six days a week on 30 mg instead of five

And I am a little worried about that. My emotions are already pretty rough and raw and a lot of bad stuff is coming out of hibernation as things warm up inside me.

But mostly, today, I am excited about the prospect because talking about my Paxil freeze for the video has made me keenly aware of the glacier that still resides within me and how it’s been holding me back and I want the fucking thing gone yesterday.

Obviously I am not dumb enough to just quit Paxil cold turkey. Part of me wants to do that, but I know that is, shall we say, inadvisable.

Don’t want to end up falling all the way down to the “institutionalized for my own safety” level of crazy, though part of me feels like nobody would know or care.

I try to keep those feelings safely contained. I can’t erase my feelings that nobody loves me and nobody gives a god damn about me, at least not yet, but I know them to be demonstrably insane and completely false so I can safely ignore them.

Aside from needing to let them out now and then like they’re animals that have been cooped up too long in the winter.

An apt metaphor.

It’s weird to know you have feelings that are crazy and yet knowing they are crazy does not get rid of them.

They must stem from some kind of deeper pain that has yet to be addressed. Some level of emotional damage that merely expresses itself that way and therefore trying to completely suppress them will only make the same emotions pop up elsewhere.

No point in playing whack-a-mole with your feelings.

I know I am very deeply damaged and have been since I was raped when I was 4. None of that primary trauma has ever been treated and I have no idea how one would go about it after all this time.

It would probably take a much deeper and more intensive level of therapy than I could get from Doc Costin over the phone.

And the province doesn’t spend that kinda money on mere depressives.

So like I said in the video, I will just have to keep plodding along.

But who knows what self-therapy via YouTube might bring?

More after the break.

---

Here’s some awesome stuff I found on BlueSky today :

Eat the rich : A highly appetizing idea for a game show. Unless we’re eating Elon Musk, because that just sounds gross and I can’t think of a cannibalistic pun for him.

A Three Elon Musk-eteers bar? Nah.

Bowser is bi : Bowser from the Mario games makes a big announcement that surprises absolutely nobody. Least of all me. Even if he didn’t start off bisexual, the sheer heat of a million pieces of gay Bowser fanart would have turned him that way.

How to catch a mouse : This person has truly built a better mousetrap!

---

A comity of errors

So I forgot to order a snackable to mix in with my microwave popcorn last week.

No big deal, I have a jumbo size box of Cheez-Its and know from experience they actually do the job quite well.

Turns out I also forgot to order 2L bottles of my favorite sodas.

That’s harder to replace. Normally I have half of one of those (so, 1L) when my have my snack and oops, nope, not this week.

Well I guess now I know where my last three precious cans of soda will go.

I didn’t forget to order those. I skipped it on purpose, to save money. Like I said before, I was going to see if the cans were something I could do without for now.

I have yet to actually run out, so technically, the experiment continues.

Now they will be the soda portion of my midnight snacks.

And so it goes.

You know, I don’t know why I fear change. I’m a fairly adaptable guy.

Took a look over that list of agents. Realized that they are, indeed, literary agents and that I don’t write much fiction any more.

Hardly any at all, really.

Which begs the question of what exactly I would be handing to an agent for them to represent. It’s not like I need an agent to be a YouTuber.

Maybe pay for an afternoon of a marketing expert’s time to get the thing off the ground.

And do them with a touch more professionalism. Like asking viewers to like and subscribe, and even directing them to my Patreon.

All three of those things go against the grain of my nature, but one can only assume people do them because they work, so I really should swallow my pride and my Canadian aversion to tooting one’s own horn and do it too.

I mean, I could just keep making my content and hoping that I will be noticed some day and my channel will take off like a rocket carrying me to fame, fortune, and loads of sex.

And part of me prefers that method.

But the more sensible part of me knows that there’s nothing wrong with giving my odds a bit of a boost with self-promotion.

After all, everybody else is doing it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I wrote another song.

It’s soft and sweet and a little weird, just like me.

I don’t think I can explain or justify the lyrics except that I was going for a kind of Leonard Cohen in a gentle mood kind of feel.

To me, it’s a song about two lovers playing around with one another being goofy and talking about this and that and just enjoying one another’s company.

In a broader sense, it’s about the deep, quiet pleasure of being with the one you love.

In my case, that means someone you can be weird and wacky and warm with.

It all makes sense to me, anyhow.

It occurred to me earlier today that I could use Riffusion to make a children’s song. So now the back of my brain is working on what sort of song I would write.

Something gentle and warm and maybe slightly naughty, just to give the kids a little giggle. Something to maybe help lonely kids feel less alone.

Originally that was my vision for a children’s book but a song sounds way easier to put together thanks to Riffusion.

I wonder if this is how famous lyricists like Tim Rice feel, because to get away with only having to write the words feels downright scandalous to me.

Like I am really getting away with something outrageous.

I quite like that feeling.

Of course, if I was to try my hand at a children’s song, I would put it in its own channel far away from my usual YouTube output.

Not that I talk about anything smutty on my main channel or anything, but I would absolutely insist anything I do for children be in its own little walled off world so both the kiddies and their caretakers feel safe there.

I don’t want some kid going from one of my nice safe kiddie songs to one of my foul mouthed rants against Vladimir Putin, or whatever.

Hmm. Maybe I could write something about an adorable magical pet. Kind of like Puff the Magic Dragon, but without the bummer ending.

Because my song would be an actual children’s song, not something written by spoiled boomers who miss their childhood.

Not that I’m bitter.

Hell, while I’m at it, maybe I could reform that god damned unicorn song.

It’s a sweet, charming song for the wee ones about how there’s no unicorns any more because they were too stupid to go on the Ark so all drowned.

Yes, children, they swam and swam until they were too tired to swim any more and then their proud and noble heads slipped beneath the waves and they DIED.

As did every single other living thing on Earth! All the kittycats and puppy dogs and big strong horses and giraffes and lions and of course, also all the mommies and daddies and children and babies and literally everything else that lived.

But that part is the Bible’s fault, not the Irish Rovers.

And I think the worst part of being bombarded by that song everywhere when I was a child was that I seemed to be the only one who noticed how horrifying a tale it told.

To this day, I don’t get how people can miss that. I mean, sure, the whole thing sounds all sweet and folksy and child friendly but the implications are brutal.

And the fact that I was the only child who understood that feels emblematic of some fundamental disconnect between me and any chance of being a normal child.

Without the rape I might have been a far healthier child, but normal was never in the cards for lil ol me.

More after the break.

---

The nature of the leak

I think I’m leaking prostate fluid.

That’s my conclusion after realizing that the inside of my foreskin is constantly wet and what I thought was a small amount of urine dripping from me like a very slow faucet leak was in fact something that was clear, oily, and a little sticky.

And when I try to masturbate, a great deal more of this fluid comes out.

And I have pondered what it might be and I came (snrk) to the conclusion that it must be the fluid secreted by my prostate gland.

In a normal ejaculation, this fluid is combined with sperm from the testicles in order to form semen as we all know and love it.

It definitely should not be leaking out on its own.

I wish I had realized this before I had my talk with Doctor Kwok. This seems like ther exact kind of thing my GP (or his locum) should know about.

Also, I just came home from our usual Denny’s night out, and while there I found that I had started to shiver.

And it did not feel like a healthy kind of shivering. It felt more like the “I’ve caught the chills” kind of shiver. The kind you feel all the way into your very soul.

Then I noticed I felt weirdly hot and cold all over. Too warm in some places and too cold in others. And overall I have that feeling of malaise I’ve talk about before.

So I am not feeling well right now.

I will see how I feel after a nap. Earlier today, I was quite sleepy, but I had no other symptoms so I assumed it was just me needing to catch up on sleep.

Now I’m not so sure.

I still feel hot and cold all over. I’m not shivering but I feel like I could start at any moment. I feel vulnerable and cranky and a little paranoid.

I know I need to figure out what to do about the prostate thing.

At the very least, I know this is one thing I can’t blame on dehydration, though I suppose it might contribute to it.

God, getting old sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.