That’s what I feel like right now. Like I am carrying an armload of rolled up blehs like an architect carrying blueprints and I’d like to be able to put them down, but I can’t.

As to why, I dunno.

Today I had therapy and today I did a vid about it :

I am trying to imagine behaving differently during therapy and my mind really does not want to go there.

I can’t imagine sobbing into the phone, or ranting and raving like a loon, or otherwise letting my guard down and just letting it all out.

I’d feel vulnerable and I’d be embarrassed. Yes, even though it would be my therapist witnessing it and if anything he would be very pleased that my emotions were coming out and want me to do it more.

But I guess my social persona is not that flexible. I learned at an early age to keep it all to myself and not let anyone see how sad and depressed and anxious I was, because like I say in the vid, I could imagine no good outcomes for that.

Hell, even if the person was 100 percent sympathetic and supportive and offered me a great big hug, I would still feel awkward and ashamed and I am not sure I would be able to accept further love and warmth from this person.

I might just need to run away and avoid that person for a while, even though they did the ideal thing in that situation.

Or at least the best that I can think of.

So I am not sure what would help me. I’m not sure I can even be helped.

I suppose a job would help a whole heck of a lot. It would lend structure to my life and give me an income, which would be nice, but mostly because it would let me finally pay my own way and not be a lumpen drain on society any more.

Like I told Doctor Costin, I still carry around an enormous amount of grief and guilt and shame about how my life turned out.

And it doesn’t matter how much others might tell me that I shouldn’t feel that way, that I should just accept that I have been sick for a long time and not able to earn my way.

And I will not dispute the truth of that statement and yet this heavy blanket of shame is not affected by it. I guess I just can’t forgive myself for this whole debacle yet.

Which means that on some level I must believe that I could have done better and that therefore I should have done better.

But that does not necessarily follow.

I made a lot of “mistakes” to get here. But were they truly mistakes? Maybe I have done remarkably well given my circumstances.

After all, I do a vid and a blog every day, and that’s technically productive. A little more productive each day given how fast I am accumulating TikTok followers.

Who knows, maybe my fame will snowball and I’ll reach the magical island of having a thousand followers and being able to make money offa TikTok.

I know that, ironically, making a video where I bare myself emotionally to the degree that I did today (not a lot) did me a lot of good.

I feel emotionally lighter now.

I dunno if I will ever be able to truly let down my guard and let loose. Maybe. I would like to think that it’s at least possible.

The fact that I can’t imagine it happening does not mean that it can’t. My imagination, as broad as it is, does not limit reality.

Sure would be nice to get this glacier off my chest.

More after the break.

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Again with the brooding

Or maybe that should have a question mark. Again with the brooding? Oy.

I’ve been in a restless, pissed off, fitful mood today. The kind of mood where I am just glad I spend most of my time alone so I don’t end up snapping at anybody.

Maybe today would have been a great day to record a political rant. Oh well.

A day kinda like this one :

The usual bitter nihilistic thoughts have been circulating in my head.

All the greatest hits, like :

“I hate my life. ”

“Everything is stupid and nothing matters.”

“Why do I even bother doing things?”

“I want to scream and jump out a window. ”

“(to the entire world) Stop it! Just… stop it! Lay off me! Leave me the fuck alone! FUCK YOU!”

now available on album, tape, CD, or my brain

And of course, as patient readers know, I know that this is part of my mood cycle and hopefully I will be able to harness some of this excess aggression into making some real progress on my mental health.

I was telling Doc Costin today that lately I have felt like I am on a speeding train heading nowhere in particular (except the grave) and the train keeps going faster and faster and there’s no way to slow down.

And it might seem like I could get off whenever I wanted to do so but in practice it feels like if I jump off at this speed I will die.

And that’s why this life of mine keeps going in a direction I don’t actually want to go and I am stuck here in this freight car trying to work up the nerve to jump off it.

But it’s always so much easier to just stay on the train. Just for a little while longer. After all, it’s warm and safe (and dank and smelly and gross) here and so we might as well just wait until jumping off isn’t scary or painful any more.

Aaaaaany minute now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. Today’s episode was brought you by italics.

Got some of my feelings about tax whiners and their ilk out today.

And even stretched my abilities a tad, in a couple of ways.

Here’s the scoop :

For one thing, this video required remarkably little editing overall. I think I really am getting better at speaking without a lot of ums or ahs or y’knows, and that pleases me.

And not just because it saves me a lot of work in the editing booth, so to speak.

But because it also means I am growing more confident in what I say. As I said recently, I’ve never lacked the courage to state and defend my opinions (just try and stop me) but my ability to put myself forward in the first place could use some work.

Speaking of editing, I was also able to do something I’d not done before, which was to record more video and edit it in when I had already finished the initial edit.

Very often when I have made these vids of mine a whole bunch more stuff I wanna say on the subject will occur to me while I’m editing and before now I have been too… I guess timid? to do so.

And too eager to get it done so I could go back to wasting my life, presumably.

Well it’s what I’m good at.

That, and not being bitter.

So the fact that I did it today is kind of a big deal for me on the personal front. It should improve the quality of my videos and help me to better express all I have to say on a given subject which will definitely help me emotionally.

And it means I have overcome a personal barrier, and that’s all for the good. Not a huge one in the grand scheme of things, but it’s very good to remind myself that these walls inside me CAN be overcome and need not dictate the terms of my life any more.

It was a good time to push myself to add more stuff because the fact that my initial speech on the subject of tax whiners took so little editing meant that I had the time and energy left over to add stuff.

I was aided by the fact that all the things I said about people bitching about their taxes is stuff I have had lying around in my head for forever. So it was already well articulated in my head before I even said a word about it.

I should rummage through my skull for more things like that. On a deep subconscious background level, I tend to feel like if it’s been in my head a while, it’s something obvious that everyone knows by now and thus not worth saying.

Makes no sense on a conscious level, of course. I have all kinds of extremely original thoughts that the world needs to hear. The fact that I have thought them for forever has no impact on that.

I have a whole lot of insights into a whole lot of things that as far as I know are fairly unique to me and should be shared with the global community.

Of course, getting anyone to pay attention to them is another question.

At this exact point in my life, all I can do is keep doing what I do and hoping to be noticed. And I do seem to be gaining attention on TikTok, picking up around 20 new followers a day.

Still a long long way from the 1000 I need to start making money, but still.

I hope to look up how to promote your YouTube/TikTok at some point. I’ve not had a lot of luck with that kind of thing in the past – it always seems so cheesy and tedious.

But this time I will go in knowing I’m not going to like it and I am going to want to just throw my hands up and stomp off, and try to hang in there long enough to find some things I could stand to do that might help.

And not turn me into a pest.

More after the break.

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Under the whatever

Today was another one of my flu-ish days when I did not make it to Wound Care or my exercising at the Kinsmen.

Which was disappointing. But I woke up with mind fog, a sore dry scratchy throat, aching muscles, and a headache, so I called it all off for the week.

Can’t risk spreading the potential germs et al.

But I dunno. I am beginning to suspect myself of psychosomaticism. I don’t seem to wake up with these symptoms when I am not facing a busy, stressful day.

Or maybe I do, and I just don’t notice it because I always feel like crap in one way or another and so it doesn’t stand out unless I have plans.

I dunno. I am a very complicated guy. The inside of my skull can be like an echo chamber inside a mirror maze with a smoke machine. Everything can be so hazy and blurry and reflected and distorted.

I wonder if that’s part of why I developed such a highly disciplined, logical, analytical, powerfully focused laser sharp conscious mind.

Like an existential hero from 60’s science fiction, I use my logical mind to conquer the turbulence and insanity of my inner world and force clarity to emerge from chaos.

Too bad it can’t do the same for happiness.

Would you rather be smart, or happy? Or can you even separate the two?

Regardless of my preference I have ended up smart. Very, very smart. Painfully so. And that razor sharp mind of mine cuts me to ribbons every chance it gets because it’s a tool of my corrupt and malevolent superego and it fucking hates me.

Ever so slowly I am learning to turn that shit outward so that I can actually heal.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I should get in a lot of trouble for this one, which means I won’t.

Like I say in the vid, I am sure I had a bunch more (tongue in cheek (so to speak)) advantages of men over women in mind at one point but when the camera was rolling I could only think of three.

And the third one’s kind of weak.

Now I didn’t truly mean this as a “recruitment” attempt. For me, it was more about poking fun at cultural assumptions by getting people to question their life patterns a teeny tiny bit.

I am sure a lesbian could make a similar “sales pitch” and I bet it would be hilarious.

I would be highly surprised if my words “converted” anyone. Sexual imprinting is nearly impossible to change and so you’re either into dudes or you aren’t.

After all, you don’t become straight, gay, bi, or whatever, you just find out. Nobody recruits you into it. You can’t be talked into wanting something so fundamental to our identity as our preferred gender any more than someone can talk you in liking a food you think is gross.

In fact, the whole notion that young men can be “recruited” into homosexuality strikes me as quaint and adorable.

“So you’re saying that you think one night of gay sex with me is so damn good it can make your previously completely heterosexual son into a cock loving flaming homo with no interest in women just like that? Well I am flattered, honey, but I’m not that good. Or is it gay sex itself that you think has this magic power? Say, just how amazing do you think gay sex is, anyway?”

I mean, just follow the reasoning. It’s clearly implied.

Today’s been another standard day for me. Video games and video making and blogging and hanging out on BlueSky and so forth and so on ad nauseum ad infinitum.

That’s Latin for “keeps going until you get sick of it”.

My digestive system has been making some ominously loud and moist noises and that has me a little freaked out.

Stuff like that can herald very troubled seas to come for me. But I have no other symptoms. My stomach feels fine, as does my low GI tract.

My appetite is a little lower than usual but it’s well within normal fluctuations. No ominous ceasing of bowel needs either.

That can REALLY herald bad times ahead and yet it’s so easy to miss because it’s something that doesn’t happen.

Then I start feeling ill and suddenly I’m all, “Wait…. when was the last time I pooped?”.

If it was more than 24 hours ago, yellow alert. Be cautious. Don’t eat anything that might stir things up.

If it was more than 36 hours, uh oh. Red alert. Time to take active measures to get things moving again, like aggressive hydration, eating a banana, jostling my torso about some, or maybe even, God forbid, “pushing”.

As an IBS sufferer, I am never ever supposed to try to “push” things along, If it’s not moving, trying to force it will only introduce chaos and tension into the system and quite possibly set of a chain of events that will echo within me for ours making me miserable.

But, ya know, desperate times.

Otherwise life is normal, which means it’s been another cookie cutter day of ding the same old things as always.

I might not be ready to jump off this stupid train just yet, but I am definitely eyeing the bushes beside the tracks and waiting for the train to slow down for a curve.

More after the break.

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No such thing as a good alarm clock

There’s never going to be an alarm clock that isn’t obnoxious and irritating because its very function is to force you to wake up and that’s inherently a very rude task.

Maybe these “dawn’s early light” type smart alarms that raise the illumination level in your room slowly and in accordance with your body’s metrics might be able to do the trick. They, at least, don’t jar you awake with a loud and/or irritating noise.

But I can’t guarantee you won’t still resent being woken up even if it’s by the gentlest of sunbeams. That’s just the nature of the beast.

For as any sleep medicine specialist will tell you, if you need to be woken up by an alarm, you’re not getting enough sleep. Clearly your body and brain need more than you are getting. If left to regulate themselves, you would naturally wake up whenever you were actually done sleeping according to your body and your brain.

But to be a modern human is to live by the clock, and not your circadian one. And the thing is, even billionaires have to live this way to some extent. Whether it’s your tee time or teatime or when the markets open and close, some aspects of your life are going to run on a timetable of their own and I am fairly certain that if you are a product of modern time-bound society you would find it quite hard to regulate your life any other way.

I know I would. For someone unemployable and pathologically idle like myself, I live by the clock to a degree some would find quite surprising.

The thing is, I’ve tried the alternative. Eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, drink when I’m thirsty, and so on.

In other words I tried “listening to my body”, as the 70’s health gurus said.

Turns out my body, like the rest of me, has no idea what’s good for it.

It felt like it was “working” at first as my life did start feeling more relaxed, but soon what I ended up with was a thick mental haze that made concentration nearly impossible and a feeling of being entirely lost in time.

What time is it? Is it day or night? AM or PM? I had no idea.

That’s why I live by the clock now.

Turns out I need it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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.