At this point, it would be more weird if that turned out NOT to be the title of my latest song, wouldn’t it?

Here’s the vid :

I was sorely tempted not to put the lyrics on screen this time because as you can see, that is a LOT of lyrics to give the LOS treatment to.

That’s why there’s more text on screen at one time than usual. That way I had to make half as many text objects in my video editing program.

Technically, I could skip the LOS process entirely and just be all ignorant and say, “Just read the automatic captioning!”.

It gets things right like… 95 percent of the time, overall.

But if I did that, it would be to free up my time and mental resources for something far more ambitious and that would be to make an actual honest to goodness video for my song out of publicly available images and video clips.

Holy crap would that be a lot of work. Kind of makes me want to find the clips and images first and write the song afterwards.

I’m a wizard at Three Card Nancy, I could totally do it.

Today’s song felt good to make. Anything that helps me vent some of the acute and chronic traumas of my broken childhood is good and making a song about it expresses what I’ve repressed better than just writing about it ever could.

I feel like I am really moving some heavy furniture in this head of mine lately. Like I am a recovering hoarder that is finally getting around to getting rid of the big stuff.

Whatever, man. It all can go as far as I am concerned. There is nothing in my head worth holding onto if it’s getting in the way of my mental health.

Fuck it. Burn it all. We can have a nice big bonfire of the inanities and warm ourselves while we watch all my bullshit go up in smoke.

And when we’re done maybe I will finally have enough room in my head to really think.

I’ve been contemplating my observations about having too many background processes running in your brain and slowing down your system like you have a million tabs open.

And how that fucks up your mood. It’s clear to me that maintaining a positive or at least functional state of mind requires a certain amount of free mental resources and if you don’t have enough memory free, the program won’t run, or runs really badly.

This may also point towards a possible link between intelligence and depression, as it takes a fairly high level of mental processing power to overload your brain quite as badly as someone like me can do.

Regular folk presumably do not have the ability to consign something they are thinking about to a background process and therefore cannot clutter their brain with processes they don’t even care about any more.

Once more I long for a cold reboot. And into Safe Mode so that it doesn’t reload the old processes and I can review what it’s been loading and get rid of the dross.

I suppose some people get their reboot from meditation and others get it by getting blackout drunk or otherwise using drugs to break their brains.

Or doing some kind of extreme activity like fasting or running a marathon or jumping out of an airplane.

All way to clear your mind and find some mental peace, some healthier than others.

Personally,I would love to try modern ketamine therapy.

It has a pretty high success rate at making symptoms go away.

And I would love to find out what I am like when I am not depressed.

More after the break.

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A quick link

Normally I would just link to the image itself but this really requires Uncle Duke’s hilarious caption to be complete.

How I wish I was at…

Brought to you by the same people as Rob’s Poutine.

Another segment of time

I have been thinking a lot about time lately, and for me, that’s never a good thing.

And the fact that it’s never a good thing is also not a good thing.

And so forth and so on.

Specifically I have been having that terrifying feeling like all the days are blending together and collapsing into one and tomorrow is always now and yesterday is still here and the whole thing makes me feel like reality is collapsing around me and making me feel incredible nihilistic and freaked out.

I guess it’s been so much worse lately because I have finally allowed myself to consciously think about the sameness of my days after literal decades of scrupulously avoiding looking directly at the subject out of fear of these exact things I just mentioned.

But the only way out is through and so I am going to have to face my issues with time and my one eternal day and find some way to wade through all this fear and chaos and existential claustrophobia so that I can reach some kind of harmonious equilibrium with life and finally fine a way to just relax and live a natural life instead of howling at the moon from a cage of impacted self-awareness and hypervigilance all the damn time.

I have faith that if I just keep fighting my way through the waves of emotion, I will find peace at the other side of all this god damned repression.

For way longer than it takes someone to become a legal adult, I have lived my life in whatever way made doing nothing but my usual bullshit the least painful.

But fuck that. It’s not good enough any more. I don’t want to be a child genius any more. I want to finally grow the hell up and find my place in the world.

Even if I have to carve out that place by myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I yakked about sleep.

As patient readers know, sleep is a sore subject with me. Not only is my sleep apnea completely untreated and presumably slowly killing me every time I take a nap, but my sleep is also disturbed by my depression and by my hyperactive mind.

In fact, shortly after recording the vid, I made a connection that seems obvious in retrospect (as they often do) but which I nevertheless think might be quite fruitful, at least in terms of insight.

And who knows, it might even turn out to be useful.

I have known for a long time that one of the fundamental aspects of my mind is its ability to consign thinking tasks to the background of the mind and continue to process things via my powerful subconscious mind, only coming back into my conscious mind when it outputs the result.

This is the engine which produces my substantial gift for insight.

And it operates so well (?) that I honestly have no idea how many processes are running in the background of my mind right now, or what they are.

Or how much of my mental resources they take up. I get the feeling it’s a lot.

And it makes me wish I had Task Manager for my brain so I could go through the process list and shut down the ones I don’t care about any more, and free up priceless mental bandwidth that way.

It does help when I have to wait for something, though, because I have a solid twenty minutes of backlog to clear up at any given time and I don’t get bored till it’s done.

Then it’s like I wake up and suddenly realize I’m super bored now.

I can only provide my own mental stimulation for so long.

Anyhow, the insight in question was to ask what all this mentation does to my sleep.

I mean, it can’t be good for it. No wonder I have felt like the inside of my skull was a very noisy place for so long. It’s like a very busy open office in there, full of the desks of people all working on different tasks like my mind is the city desk at a major newspaper.

This just in : mental overload impacts sleep. Duh. More news to follow.

The question then becomes what the heck can I do about this issue. Task Manager dreams aside, there are no obvious ways to convince your mind to cancel all its subconscious programs so it can truly shut down and not just go into the ironically named “sleep mode” when what you need is a cold reboot.

Eastern meditation practices spring to mind. I’ve thought for a long time that this is what meditation really does for a person. It allows them to synchronize their scattered modern minds and shut down all those extraneous processes and get back those mental resources so they can be used for important things like mood stabilization.

There are no practical reasons why I couldn’t start meditating. There’s a million apps out there to help with it. I could put one on my phone and use it every day.

Yeah right. That’s not gonna happen. I’d install it, play around with it, maybe do the meditation a couple of times, then lose interest when the thing stopped being a novel toy and started feeling like, ya know, work.

I have a truly tragic lack of self-discipline and I know how I am about these things. If I am to get the fuck over myself and get to have an actual life, I am going to have to remember that once that initial burst of enthusiasm fades, I will lose all interest in whatever it is I “should” be doing and want to move on to the next thing.

There has to be a way around that problem.

Maybe I just need to find the right thing for me. Something I find sufficiently rewarding.

And that is preferably not a video game.

More after the break.

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Money is power

Money is power. And power corrupts. Ergo money corrupts.

And while there is no such thing as absolute money in the mathematical sense, on a spiritual level it is, indeed, possible to have so much of it that it corrupts you absolutely.

Right now, the world is at the mercy of something like a thousand utterly degenerate billionaires so hollowed out by wealth and privilege and greed that they can’t stop themselves from accumulating more and more and more and doing whatever it takes, no matter how short-sighted and despicable, to keep mindlessly acquiring.

I’d love to ask these people to name something they wouldn’t do even if it made them richer. I bet they’d have to think pretty hard to come up with an answer.

Along the way, there have been many failures on the part of those who are supposed to keep these monsters in check. They have managed to bribe, swindle, compromise, and otherwise neutralize all forms of accountability and restraint and they did it precisely because they cannot control their rapacious avarice and so their world has the deadly simplicity of all addicts and hoarders.

All that matters is more. More is good. Less is bad. That is the sum total of their ethic. They have clearly demonstrated that they would set the world on fire to make a buck.

In fact, they’re doing it right now.

And we’re all paying the price. The world is on fire. It gets worse every year. And yet the odds are in our favour by 8 million to 1.

Billions of us. Hundreds of them. If we rise there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop us. We can flex out true power, take the handgun away from the toddler, and set the world back on the right track and it doesn’t even have to be particularly violent.

Look at the millions showing up at marches already. They show the power of the people because nobody did a damn thing to try to stop them.

Even the fascists knew better.

Power corrupts. But we the people are the real power.

It’s time we woke up and embraced it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I sang again.

And I swear I am breathing better now.

This merits further examination.

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

Sorry about no LOS (Lyrics On Screen) this time. I got distracted messing around with some site that said it could clean up vocals and do autotune type pitch correction (it could not, in fact, do those things) and ended up using up too much of my time and energy to have enough left for lyrics.

Doing the LOS thing is a serious pain in the ass.

I keep hoping one of these sites that claims to be able to make a music video for your song will become intelligent and sophisticated enough to be worth using.

Honestly, all I really need is one that can transcribe the lyrics and generate a video that displays them in time with the music in some visually appealing way.

Doesn’t seem that complicated. Other sites have been able to do the transcription.

And AI image generation can almost sort of kinda handle text now!

Here’s an example :

It works best if you stick to short strings of text, so I figured I would keep it simple and express how much of rural America is feeling about him ’bout now.

Note : that is NOT Goofy.

I wanted to keep the image shareable, just in case I wanted to try to make it go viral, otherwise I would have made it way more obscene.

And you people know I could do it.

I mean, this is but a minor flexing of my powers.

The not-Goofy pic was the best of six attempts. Most of them look more like this:

I have been having a LOT of fun making images lately, most of which I dare not share.

Check out this naughty little toy.

I actually have a whole backstory for this character. His name is Rico and he has clawed his way (sometimes literally) to the top of the heap in the Sultan’s harem and become the big man’s absolute favorite toy, and is always available when the Sultan needs someone to talk to, someone who’ll listen, or someone to fuck up the ass with wild abandon in order to let off some steam.

Rico is very proud of the role he’s played in easing tensions between nations.

When the Sultan doesn’t need him, however, Rico keeps himself busy ruling over the rest of the Sultan’s harem, making sure they keep themselves as fuckable (and fuckworthy) as possible for the Sultan and his guests.

The Sultan loves giving his favorite supporters access to his world famous harem.

Rico is a strict but benevolent (ish) ruler. He might crack the whip a bit too hard and be a little too free with the sarcasm at times, but he’s also fiercely loyal to all his girls and boys (and livestock) and looks after them like a mother hen.

And his subjects have come to rely on his swift and final approach to conflict disputes.

“Give him the sword back and NO MORE FUCKING ARGUING!”

It’s not for everybody but it works for him.

Aaaaaanyhow, I mean it when I say I think that singing helps my breathing. It’s like it somehow frees up trapped yawns and afterwards I am breathing more freely because the singing cleared out some bad air and expanded my lungs.

This jibes with what I have heard about singing being good for sleep apnea. So I guess it turns out that the rumours are true.

Shame that I pretty much only have one song a week in me. Doing it more often than that feels like a total drag.

But I think I sound reasonably good. And I get better with each song.

I wonder how hard it is to become a session vocalist.

More after the break

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A bad moment

But possibly an instructive one.

Earlier I had one of my bad moments where it feels like I want to jump out out of my own skin from the tension of it.

But I decided not to just shove it aside like I normally would like I am burying a body or pushing a crazy relative back into the basement.

Instead, I sat with it and tried to think about it. What exactly was going on? Where did this terrible pain come from? Why do I feel so bad?

And I realized that it was like every muscle in my body was contracting at the same time and squeezing my bones and making them grind against each other, and that is what hurt so goddamn bad.

As one might imagine.

It all produces an intensified version of that “rusty” feeling I know all too well. That feeling like I’m the Tin Man in need of oiling.

Luckily, the feeling passed, and now I am left wondering what, as they say, the fuck.

It’s got to be something inflammatory. I really need to find a way to finally get those antihistamines I keep telling myself to get, because I get the feeling that my “allergies” cause way more than just sniffles and sneezes and it would make sense if a histamine response triggered body wide inflammation.

It’s possible I was a little dehydrated too. It can happen so fast.

And I have been struggling with not wanting to get up from the computer to go get more water. My inner child tends to be rather difficult about it.

But I am trying to dislodge myself from that rut. It’s very counterproductive. Hell, getting up to go get water is the best exercise I get most days.

At least it makes me get up and move a little.

And I am trying to tunnel through my own resistance so that the realization that I feel a lot better after my Kinsmen exercises can somehow make it through to the part of me that decides what to do and make what is clearly the logical connection : that it’s a thing I should be doing more so I feel better more often.

But there are miles of numb, dead tissue in between me and that obvious conclusion. Just so much mindless dead weight resistance to all forms of motion or change from the badly broken bulk of my mental illness that sometimes it feels like I have to tunnel through permafrost just to do absolutely anything even slightly new.

Till then, it’s just the same day, over and over, till the day I die.

That seems…. bad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No big plans today. I just picked a topic and started talking.

And I think it turned out pretty good.

Here it is :

My lack of assertiveness really is paradoxical. There are circumstance in which I would have the courage of a lion and the strength of a bear and would fight like hell till I either won or dropped dead.

But that would be me fighting for what I think to be right, like for instance, to protect the innocent from the predatory or to address some injustice or speak for those who do not speak for themselves all that well.

But if it’s just me and my own needs, well…. the lion becomes the lamb.

I guess deep down I just don’t feel like I am worth fighting for. There are circumstances in which I will fight for myself – many of them medical – but those are in reaction to external circumstances and not anything I am doing on my own initiative.

I often feel like I have no initiative at all. Like all I can do is react to things and by no coincidence my life is also arranged so that very few things can happen to me.

And most of the things that might happen are medical too, sadly.

It all traces back to how severely withdrawn I am, and have almost always been. I stay with the walls of this mental fortress of mine nearly all the time and my only contact with the real world out there is through this computer of mine.

And it’s all to sustain me in my isolation pod. I have lived 48 of my 52 years on Earth as an urban hermit walled off from the world I gave up on when I was raped and withdrew even further from when I was bullied.

And I know that any serious life growth is going to require my finally emerging from my pod and entering into the real world more even if it is still mitigated by this screen.

For the most part, I run in incognito mode here. The most human interaction I get is when I am pretending to be a fluffy little fox named Fruvous. Otherwise I leave a lot of comments on YouTube and BlueSky and occasionally TikTok, but the great thing about that is that it requires absolutely no real time communication.

Thus I “deal with” my social anxiety by not doing anything to trigger it, Which means it wins, pretty much.

Enter Xanax. I still haven’t used it to deal with non-Kingsmen related anxiety. I could take one when I want to do something challenging to my social anxiety, like something entirely new to me where I have to assert myself like say maybe getting back on to UpWork so I can job hunt, and it would smooth me out so I can cope.

I don’t think that computes with me emotionally yet. Knowing that you want to want to do something that scares and challenges you is a tricky bit of metacognition, especially when you are, like me, far too used to letting your fears tell you what you want.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Obviously. You’re supposed to just want what you want and go from there.

But that might not be “safe”. What if I end up wanting a lot of things that I can’t ever have? Wouldn’t that hurt? Wouldn’t I be better off not “going there” at all?

Only in the most shallow and unenlightened form of hedonism. In reality, the price of cutting off your desires at the root is far, far too high.

Better to want and lack and suffer than to be dead inside.

Take that, Buddha!

More after the break.

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Not going anywhere

So I have wasted my entire adult life staying distracted and never looking up from my screens and thinking about where I am or where I am going or what I am doing.

What I wanted out of life never stood a chance.

So I have spent 30 years sitting in front of one computer or another and burning through all the most productive years of my life by just keeping my head down.

It’s a positively soul-crushing thought that has burdened me for years now. Turns out that when I finally did stop and look around and think about my life, the realization of all that I had lost was there waiting for me so it could fill me with grief and guilt and shame and an absolutely massive feeling of loneliness and loss.

And I am still struggling to get over that. It’s not quite as stultifying as it used to be but I still struggle under its weight. It’s the thing that holds me down and holds me back the most and there is no easy way to get rid of it.

I just have to keep hacking away at the ties that bind me by expressing whatever emotions come to hand when I am in creative mode and laboring in the dark to forge some form of spirituality I can live with that might actually speed things up a bit.

Maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe what my spirit needs is catharsis on an industrial scale and what I really should be doing is actively searching for things that will stir enormous amounts of emotions in me so I can get my insides flowing again and melt some of this iceberg of emotion that’s been sitting on my heart for so long.

I will admit, I’m scared to do that. Dumb emotionally constipated male that I am, I can’t seem to silence the voice in my head that says “catharsis schmatharsis, deliberately making yourself sad or angry or whatever is just plain dumb!”.

And it’s hard to argue with that in a way that works. It’s an inner child versus outer adult thing, and the thing about that conflict is that the inner child controls your emotions and therefore can take hostages any time it wants.

There has to be a better way of dealing with yourself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That sounds like an interesting topic.

Let’s see if I get back to it.

First, today’s vid, which is very vloggy :

I rather like that vid. It’s far less ambitious than my usual vids and yet I feel there is a warmth and charisma and vulnerable charm to it that I am going to try hard to remember for future vids.

Maybe I have been trying too damned hard and I should just relax and be myself.

Hmm, where have I heard that advice before? Oh, that’s right…. everywhere.

It would save me a lot of stress and toil if I just concentrated on making one little vlog type entry a day, TikTok style.

Oh right, TikTok! That’s the app I need to download and install on my phone. That would make vlog type vids much easier to make.

I might even do more than one a day. Shocking!

Heck, maybe instead of a YouTube star, I could be a TikTok star. Become known on that platform for my charming candor and wit and, presumably, somehow make money.

Okay, just verified that you CAN make money for TikTok views – if you have at least 1K followers. Which seems like a lot.

Then again I already have 535 followers. So maybe it’s not that crazy. Maybe people on TikTok are way freer with who they follow than YouTube folk.

So who knows. If I keep making enjoyable content, I might get there.

And it does seem to be my more personal and revealing work that gets comments. The songs and rants and such are probably a lil too “out there” for people to relate to.

Maybe I should worry less about entertaining and concentrate on connecting instead.

Pretty sure I can handle that.

Anyhow, back to the topic. (I did make it back! I did, I did!)

What exactly is our moral obligation to ourselves? What do we owe the person we see in the mirror? Is it a sin to treat yourself badly?

It’s a hard question to even contemplate because of the sort of mental feedback loop that such a self-referential topic creates.

Plus a lot of us do not wish to think along those lines because we correctly suspect that if we applied ethics to how we treat ourselves, we would not come out looking too good.

I know that in my own situation, I treat myself very poorly. I get almost no exercise, I stay seated in the same position for way too long, my sleep schedule is a total mess, and I can only shower once a week.

Well, actually, I could probably do it more but I lack the motivation.

WHICH PROVES MY POINT.

If I was my own zookeeper, I would have gotten fired for laziness and gross incompetence a long time ago. If I saw someone treat an animal the way I treat myself, I would be outraged.

But is how I treat myself legit morally wrong? I don’t see how it could be anything else. There is no room in ethics for a self-justifying personal exception. If it’s wrong to do it to anyone else, it’s wrong to do it to yourself too.

How to we atone for sins against ourselves? Through the only true cure for guilt out there – right action. Do better. Treat yourself right. Do what you know you should do.

But that sounds hard and like it might be a lot of work. Way easier to just keep abusing ourselves and not deal with any of our problems.

Why cope when you can avoid?

More after the break.

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The Council On High

What if there was some kind of cosmic council that judged your soul after death and all it cared about was how you had treated yourself.

How many people would do well on that exam? We abuse and misuse ourselves in so many ways, it’s hard to imagine scoring well.

Because remember, this is not a test of how well we lived, or how happy we were, or how good a person we were to others – it’s strictly about judging you for how you treated yourself exactly as if you were being judged on how you treated others.

Did you take good care of yourself? Were you a responsible owner of yourself? Did you keep yourself healthy and hearty and robust? Did you feed yourself the healthy, wholesome food you knew would lead to a happier and healthier you? Did you give yourself enough deep, restful sleep? Did you keep yourself well groomed and clean?

Were you kind to yourself? Patient? Forgiving? Did you parent yourself well? Did you give yourself structure and discipline tempered with mercy and compassion? Did you show yourself you cared? Were you gentle and warm towards yourself? Did you allow room for your being human and thus imperfect and flawed?

As you can see, no amount of wealth, status, success, or fame can improve your score on this test. You might be king of the world and still hate yourself, internally verbally abuse yourself all the time, and wreck your body pursuing short term pleasure.

I’m not saying one’s score on this test is particularly important or reflects on your value as a human being. This is just a thought experiment to see where this notion of one’s ethical obligation to oneself leads.

Many uncomfortable places, as it turns out. It’s possible that if, somehow, we were all to embrace this view of ourselves, our behaviour would radically change and we’d end up living much cleaner, happier, and more sensible lives.

Sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it?

And it would involve taking on a lot of adult responsibility. Which is a funny thought – actually taking responsibility for ourselves, in full, is a scary thought.

And yet, we’re the only ones who can do it. So you either live a life where you’re bouncing off the walls blindly and thoughtlessly all the time, or you take control and start steering towards what you want.

Easier to just keep bouncing, right?

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s Tuesday, and that means Wound Care at the CHAC (Community Health Access Center) and then my exercise et al at the KADC (Kinsmen Adult Day Center).

Wound Care was routine. This nurse agreed with the others that the wound on my left foot is shrinking, albeit very slowly.

Must remember to move it around more so the blood circulates better.

Then it was off to Kinsmen. Here’s my notes from there.

A few words before exercises begin.

Would have written more, but this time they had a word search and a crossword for me to do and I got sucked in

Oh well. I had fun and even managed to be a little more social and conversational than last week this time.

______________________

Now I am in the bathroom after exercising. Proud of myself for asserting myself enough to tell the attendant that I needed to use the bathroom instead of just suffering in silence and risking an “accident”.

I suppose that the prospect of soiling myself in front of all these people might just have helped me with the assertiveness.

–‐‐———————————-

Third period, after lunch.

Really opened up socially and very happy about.  I  made a new friend, Judy. We bonded over both being Gen X. 

The music system has been playing a lot of the MOR music I strenuously avoided in the Seventies.  Even better, the lyrics on screen are clearly auto translated because some of them have been hilariously  wrong. 

The winner was  it transcribing “put your head next to mine, dear” as “put your head next to reindeer”

Well if you insist…

————————

Waiting for pickup. I am thinking this must be how kids waiting to be picked up by their parents after school feel.

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I mean, I assume that’s how it must feel. It’s not like I know from experience. I was left to walk to and from school all alone no matter the weather.

Anyhow, I had way more fun this time. The ice has been broken. I feel more comfortable there now. I was able to be more of my true talkative self.

I can actually be quite charming and charismatic when I don’t have anxiety riding me like I’m some kind of uber for neuroses.

Oh right! And when I got home, I did a video!

That essentially my blueprint for political reform. That’s how I would remake the system if I could. Screw this token democracy, I want the real thing!

There would finally no bottleneck of moneyed interests to whom the politicians are far more beholden than to the people because the people can’t hurt them until the next election but their rich donors could hurt them right now.

Nope. No more politicians. No more capital city either. No more legislature, no more lobbying, no more oligarchy.

I prefer to call it “plutocracy” myself. Oligarchy is a less specific term. But the world is going with oligarchy and I don’t care nearly enough about it to object.

And think of all the insanely popular things like universal daycare and universal basic income and comprehensive environmental reform would finally get passed into law because there’s no more politicians and lobbyists thwarting the will of the people.

And yes, the people would probably make some truly horrible mistakes. They would validate terrible but exciting ideas while ignoring boring ideas that would actually work.

But mistakes are how people learn, and it will be how a people learn as well.

Besides, democracy has never been about being the best way to get the “right” answer. The idea is for it to be the will of the people and therefore for it to be a way for the body politic to make itself own choices and learn its own lessons.

Direct democracy would be a way for politics to finally move out of the house and grow up. People would have to face the fact that they are, in fact, in charge, and that we will suffer the consequences (and reap the benefits) of our choices.

No more politicians means no more people to blame or praise for everything. There will only be we the people in charge.

And we’ll have a lot of growing up to do.

Oh right. And we might keep a token legislature around for administrative purposes, like producing a head of state.

But like the British royal family, they would have no power and be purely ceremonial.

More after the break.

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A headless democracy

We might need a head of state and some form of powerless “ruling” class just to make the stupid programming in our lizard brains happy.

It could very well turn out that human beings need to have leaders to focus on or they become restless and chaotic. They need to have people to turn to when they don’t know what to do, even if following their lead is purely optional.

I saw at VFS what happens when there’s no real leadership at the top. People are not happy. They feel lost and unmotivated and hesitant and quite frankly depressed.

So the main job of the token legislature might just be to fill that role on a purely ceremonial level. They could even still generate bills and debate them on the record, with just the actual vote on the bills given over to the people.

There would have to be a way for the people to generate bills and put them to a vote without these bozos too, of course.

This token legislature might be a good middle step between our current phoney baloney democracy and true self-guided government.

Kinda like living in your parents’ basement before moving out on your own.

The transition to not having specific individuals to credit or blame for things would be rough enough. In my system, if you don’t like how a vote went, you have nobody to blame but your fellow citizens.

I won’t lie, that might cause unrest at first.

Ballot secrecy might become more important than ever.

But eventually, the people would understand that they are the ones in power and as tempted as they might be to blame everything on, say, whoever the most vocal and well known proponent of the side they don’t like is, ultimately they, as a population, decide.

And that’s exactly as it should be.

I mean, look at all the social progress that has come out of just bullshit fake democracy.

Now imagine the leaps and bounds we could take with the real thing!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took another crack at riffing on the news but what came out wasn’t funny.

It was strident. Or put more generously, passionate.

See, this is one of the reasons I can’t have a fixed format. Even with the best of intentions, I do not end up with whatever I set out to make.

That’s why the product pretty much has to be me.

I’m the only thing it all has in common!

Anyhow, here it is :

Like I could easily do a whole short video essay on my thoughts about direct democracy (I’m for it) and about the psychology of conservatism (they’re dumb) and share my extraordinary insights with the world at large.

And maybe I will do that. And maybe not.

I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that I am, in fact, a flake. An airhead. Kind of of a space cadet.

While also being a startlingly intelligent and talented dude.

But all my character points are concentrated in just a few stats and that means things like “common sense” and “ability to focus on the here and now” are way below average.

To be honest, any truly decent society would have figured out what a genius I am when I was still a little kid and made sure to nurture and develop my mind and my abilities so that I could grow up and truly contribute to the society that raised me.

But alas, nobody even wanted to deal with me.

I might have been a little hard to handle, admittedly.

I mean, what do you do with a kid who’s way smarter than you? Like I have said before, so much of adult authority rests on their intellectual superiority. As a kid they are supposed to know and understand way more than you about life and the world and so you can go to them when you don’t understand things and they can nurture and guide you with their superior minds.

All that goes out the window when you’re way smarter than your teachers.

Ergo I was impossible to control. I could think rings about them. Luckily for them AND me, I didn’t require a lot of controlling. I was an agreeable and eager to please kid who for the most part followed the rules.

But at any moment I might derail the whole momentum of the lesson by asking the teacher a question they could not answer.

And I would do so from a place of total innocence, with absolutely no malice or mischief intended, and that meant their usual tools for handling unruly kids did not apply.

Teachers do not like kids who make them look or feel stupid.

But I was just being my irrepressibly bright self.

And I get the feeling that I am still kinda dangerous like that. I seem quite harmless and friendly, and I am, but I also might suddenly loom over a person like the intellectual giant that I am and not even know I am doing it.

And I am not sure there’s a lot I can do about that. I lack the fine social skills to know and understand how not to do that.

All I can do is rely on my being generally lovable and friendly and harmless enough to gloss over my well intentioned mental mayhem.

Thank God I’m cute.

It’s saved my ass so many times. It may not help me to be less of a spaz or a flake, but it at least makes my clumsiness endearing more often than not.

The youngest child always develops odd coping mechanisms.

More after the break.

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Oh right, the vid

You know, maybe it’s okay that I can’t stick to a topic and never seem to end up where I was trying to go.

I might not nail every subject but I sure cover a lot of ground.

Anyhow, today’s vid.

I’m not happy with it.

It’s not very funny. I just ended up soapboxing a bunch. Hence my little crack about being a commentator not a comedian.

I was trying to be a comedian…. at first…

I guess I just did not have anything particularly hilarious to say. So I will have to make a mental note to slow down and gather the stories before video making time and gather them based on whether I have anything funny to say about them.

Or at least something interesting and hopefully somewhat related.

I suppose I could think of myself as “a pundit who is sometimes funny” instead of trying to compete with Colbert and the Daily Show in the whole “news with jokes” category.

After all, they have swarms of very well paid talented writers and I am just one admittedly very gifted dude.

But meh. I wanna be funny AND insightful. Or at least to keep the funny and the profound in different videos with different intents.

Or maybe I will just keep making whatever I end up making and trust that one day it could find its audience. I dunno.

Maybe what really matters is putting my insight and wit and personality into whatever it is I end up doing and trust that this will coalesce into a personal brand of sorts where my fans are up for whatever it is I put out next.

Sounds sorta risk, kind of like I think I’m like Neil Young switching genres and style with every album but somehow retaining a certain number of diehard Neil fans.

So what the hell. One day I’m singing, another I’m riffing (or trying to), another I am writing a song, another I am delving deep into the musty caves of my moribund soul in search of priceless personal insights and catharsis, and so forth and so on.

It’s all sort of entertaining, I hope. My idea fan reaction would be, “I have no idea what he’ll do next but I know that I’ll like it, so… start the show!”.

If I could manage that, my very unpredictability would become an asset. What will he come up with next? Tune in and find out.

Can you tell I was raised by television?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The Prince of Lies is sad.

So sad that I wrote a song about it, ha ha.

Here it is :

Maybe I keep writing songs like these because some very deep level of 1970’s singer-songwriter programming emerges when I go to write lyrics.

And I mean, I feel like with every song, I skate a little closer to writing the next, “Puff The Magic Dragon”, or worse, “The Unicorn Song”.

God do I hate that song.

This time, I tried to do what I did with the previous song and kind of force it to be heavy metal, in this case, orchestral metal.

But those versions of the song turned out terrible, so, orchestral FOLK it is.

And I know this bizarre identity crisis where the heavy metal, punk, and industrial music is in conflict with the sad, sweet folks I keep writing, is pretty silly. I should just go with my muse and discover my true voice and all that good stuff.

But I can’t escape the fact that the kind of music I’m writing is not the kind of music I like. Like a lot of Gen X kids, I have a deep down aversion to folk music that kicks in whenever I hear softly strummed acoustic guitar and gentle singing.

Like with poetry, it’s not that none of it is good, it’s that the bad stuff hurts so much.

So if I didn’t know who made it and I heard one of my wimpy folk songs played on the radio, I would roll my eyes and mutter, “Oh, GREAT, this should be good. ” sarcastically.

But the thing is, I’m not in an angry heavy metal mood today, or lately. I am in a contemplative, introspective mood where I feel like I have stripped away some of my false self in favor of the real and much crankier me that lurks underneath.

That’s one of the things I have to grapple with : the real me might be way more of a prick than the person I’m accustomed to being.

So it’s anger yet again. Every time I try to imagine a more “authentic” version of myself, all I can see is an angry, sarcastic, short-tempered dude who goes around like Lou Grant, scowling at the world full of people who are so goddamn stupid.

And who knows. Maybe that version of me would be a temporary thing that exists only until I vent enough of my latent rage to cool back down and be normal.

But maybe not, and that’s a risk I am not prepared to take. It would inevitably lead to me hurting a lot of people very deeply with my acerbic wit and uncanny perceptions, and that’s too high a price to pay for my own personal growth.

I mean, I’m not some Boomer who thinks the most important thing in the world is their precious selves and that anyone, like say a wife and kids, who gets in the way of their own personal journey is just going to have to suck it up.

Which brings me back to my fantasies of just disappearing to somewhere where nobody knows me so I can start over from scratch and build a version of myself that is functional in the real world.

Wouldn’t that be something. Me, in the real world, with a job and a boyfriend.

That’s my big dream : bare functionality. The sort of thing most of the world takes for granted once they have been through their period of fire with their first job ever.

I’m still waiting on that. Working for my uncle Sonny at his shop was great. I think my winning personality made me a good fit for the job of cashier/clerk. I liked the customers and they liked me. It worked out pretty good.

So I know that I can do that kind of work, physical disability aside.

In fact if it weren’t for my bum legs I could do all kinds of jobs. I know damned well that I could be a really good employee somewhere.

It’s the getting of the job that confounds me.

And so I am here.

More after the break.

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Is that really it?

I dunno. Maybe not.

I don’t think I am afraid of actually doing a job, but I might be afraid of having a job.

In that it would mean to committing to eight hours a day of sustained effort with no chance of retreating to my nice soft bed when I start to feel overwhelmed.

At the very least, there would be one hell of a nasty adjustment period as I got used to the idea of being “on” and in public for such extended periods.

And that’s not even counting lunch and commutes.

I definitely would have to change my badger ways. No more crouching immobile in the dark like some kind of cave lizard. I’d have to go into and stay in the light.

So maybe there aren’t as many jobs I could do as I thought. Maybe all these years of hermitage have done a lot of damage to my ability to function at a human level at all.

Luckily, I am a writer, and bar for human functioning for us is quite low. If we manage to deposit some text where it is supposed to go now and then, and if we’re lucky make the occasional public appearance where we’re clothed and manage not to say something that gets us canceled, people are willing to let everything else slide.

Of course, that means I really should be pouring more effort to actually getting paid to do this shit. This is also a job I know I can do – I am a highly prolific writer who can write whatever needs to be written as long as it’s not technical.

And the best part is that I can do it without even putting on pants.

And that leads us back to UpWork and me trying to get past their god damned fussy identification process again.

Wish me luck on that.

I will talk to you nice people agan tomorrow.

I sang again.

I think I’m getting better at it, sorta.

Most importantly, I enjoyed singing.

So here it is :

I still haven’t found something that’s like Riffusion in that it generates the music but instead of generating the vocals it uses mine.

So basically, I sing it, and it provides the music.

This is partly inspired by the fact that every single Riffusion song I have made based upon my lyrics has had at least one line where the “vocalist” gets the phrasing wrong or a lyric wrong or sometimes just sort of breaks down completely for one second.

I do my best to make sure my lyrics have the same rhythm and meter throughout but somehow when Riffusion does its magic something effs up anyhow.

So partly I want to sing my own lyrics so I can get them right god damn it!

Plus there’s the fact that I can sing okay. Presumably if I wrote the song I could make sure there were no notes that I can’t reach very well, so it could even make me sound like a much better singer than I really am.

Or am I? Gordon Lightfoot is a legend and he can only sing three notes.

Of course, I’m a much better songwriter than him, partly because I’m younger and hipper and partly because I’m more versatile but mostly because he’s dead.

Died in 2023 at the age of 82.

Not a lot of people who were famous in the Seventies left, I would imagine, seeing as they would be a minimum of 20 years older than me.

The Boomers are all in God’s waiting room now.

Oh, and I made a joke.

Spur of the moment thing, just decided it was time for me to make my first YouTube short and see what happens.

It was a bit of a hassle to make, so I will have to think about how much I want to do it in the future. I think it turned out pretty good though.

Good thing I’m naturally hilarious.

Come to think of it, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do via TikTok on my phone. It’s designed for the quick making of short form content and so I wouldn’t have to mess with a video editor, I could just think of the joke, deliver it to the camera, and forget about it.

Well, and add the tags. God damn tagging. That’s actually the hardest part for me. My mind does not lend itself well to coming up with a bunch of words to describe the thing I just did. It’s always a strain on my brain.

And not the fun kind like with a crossword puzzle.

And then there’s this, which made me very grateful for Doctor Costin.

Because according to that guy, psychiatrists are just pill dispensers today. Why spend one more second with a patient than is absolutely necessary for billing purposes when you can totally get away with just listening for a keyword that matches a medication on WebMD and make them go away?

Apparently guys like Doctor Costin, a psychiatrist who is also a therapist, are rare.

Certainly what Doctor Josef is talking about in that video matches my experience with most of the doctors around here. They practice turnstile medicine where their sole goal is to make that thing click as fast as possible.

Did they properly diagnose and treat you? Who cares, if they were wrong it will just make you come in for more office visits.

I’d like the option to wait longer for an appointment with a better doctor, please.

More after the break.

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Feeling kinda ragged

But does that mean I’m not OK?

God, I don’t fuckng know.

For one thing, there’s hypochondria. I had it really bad at one point around thirty years ago and part of the process of clawing my way out of that stinking hole of madness and malnutrition was developing a policy of ignoring minor aches and pains and other pseudo-symptoms and instead waiting for something serious and scary distinctly bad to show up before running to my local MD.

And that’s a policy I hold to today because the alternative is to once more enter that realm of whirling insanity in whose shadow I spent three months of Hell when I was in my early 20’s.

I can’t let my mind seize upon minor things and blow them into major traumae by sheer neurosis again. It is the panic and the self-scrutiny which made me so sick and I am not going into that bedlam again, ever.

But I pay a price for that and that price is my possibly not “catching some early” when medical intervention might do me the most good.

And I’m not happy with that but the alternative is far worse than some theoretical and unknowable increase in risk for God knows what.

I feel various forms of cruddy all the time. I’m not a healthy man. I haven’t felt robust and healthy for a very long time. I’m always kinda tired and sore and headache-y and out of sorts. I couldn’t possibly afford to take all that shit seriously.

That way madness lies.

You’d think feeling kinda shitty all the time would give me the incentive I need to get up and move around more and try to live a healthier life, but alas, no.

I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s my normal. Every once in a while the clouds part and the sun shines down from God’s heaven and I actually feel good for a while, but for the most part I live in an eternal fen of meh.

I’m not sick, but I’m not well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Short answer : I dunno.

It started with a YouTube video essay I was listening to and they were talking some boilerplate stuff about giving up on the person you’re pretending to be in order to truly be yourself – typical authenticity jive, very individualist – when the narrator mentioned always pretending to be okay and suddenly it broke through to me that I am always pretending to be okay and that I had no idea if I really was.

In fact, shockingly, I might not be capable of that level of introspection. That might seem strange coming from a guy who has written millions of words in this very space about all his psychological issues, but that’s a product of analysis, not true introspection.

I don’t think I can truly look deeply into myself. And if I try, one thing becomes very clear : my deep inner self does NOT want to be looked at, and resents me for trying.

It feels like I have actually been hiding from myself for a very long time. That cranky inner self of mine is a wizard at spinning complex illusions that seem like the real me, or facets thereof, but the truth is that they are more like fictional expressions of myself.

So they are expressing something real, but they themselves are mere projections.

But that’s the only version of me I know how to be. I don’t have a “real me” that I have been holding back all these years, gritting my teeth at the part I am forced to play while my true inner being yearns to be free.

My inner being just wants me to leave him the fuck alone.

Seriously, he’s like an angry badger in there.

I guess I have been hiding within myself for a very long time. It makes a lot of sense now that I have thought of it. I knew that I had withdrawn into myself in layers and that the real me was inside those layers like a Russian nesting doll.

I never can remember the proper name for those.

But what’s new is the realization that those layers became my layers of illusion. It’s like this entire time, I have been a child in an adult sized mecha suit clumsily trying to pretend to be a real person.

Well I am a real person.

I’m just not an adult.

And the whole damn show is just a way for me to hide from the world while operating (minimally) within it. Being a mecha suit, it’s quite clumsy and not well suited to life in this adult real world, and so I have to remain isolated most of the time so that I can take the mecha suit off and relax.

Here in my room, alone, the child inside the suit can function, more or less. There’s nothing here to challenge my dyspraxia or my social anxiety. I can be basically a brain with a computer and exist in a kind of virtual mode where I don’t have to cope.

But here’s something that’s hard for me to confess – even the version of me I cherish the most, the version I am when I am relaxed with my friends, is not the REAL me.

It’s about as close as I can get at this point in my journey. And I love that version of me, more or less the same version I am when I am being Fruvous online, although of course I have a lot more freedom when I am being a fuzzy lil fox.

But I get the feeling that the “real” me would be a lot less warm and friendly and easy to get along with because the “real” me was raped when he was only four years old and has to live with that reality every single day.

No wonder I prefer to stay distracted and avoid being him as much as possible. He’s a much more cold and bitter and angry version of me that’s more like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting only without the good looks and sunny disposition than he is the warm and fuzzy fox you know and love.

So do I. I’d rather be him than me, every day of the week.

And now I know why.

More after the break.

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Piercing the membrane

I feel like I have entered a new level of painful but fruitful paring away of the dead flesh and impacted scar tissue of my mind to release the dormant life sleeping underneath.

I am excited by how much my mind is resisting the scalpel, so to speak. All of my best psychological insights and progress has come from going exactly where my mind does not want me to go so I look forward to really digging into the bad stuff and bringing it into the sunlight where it can heal.

I’m not sure how much of this leg of my journey I will be able to put into words. As articulate as I am, this may go below and beyond a level where words apply and into the realm of pure inchoate emotion.

We will see.

I know that I am well beyond caring if what I need to do to heal myself hurts. Fuck pain. Pain is temporary and ultimately meaningless, especially when weighed against the permanent gains of deep catharsis and the making of the subconscious conscious.

So bring on the pain and the resistance and the friction and the fear. All they will do is convince me that I am on the right track and make me all the more determined to push down on the handle of the knife all the harder.

Time to use my incisive mind as a healing tool.

Nurse, laser scalpel please.

And I don’t care if I am working where the sun don’t shine. I don’t have to be able to see or understanding what I am doing or where I am going or what it all “means”.

All I need to do is follow my feelings to the dead diseased flesh, and keep digging.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.