A fat guy talking about video games on the internet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop trying to engage my non-existent enthusiasm.

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

But I kind of also want money.

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

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

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

He could become my mascot.

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

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

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

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

I guess I’ll always be somewhere in between.

More after the break.

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On the other hand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s something to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m glad I did this.

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

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

I want more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An apt metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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

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

A Three Elon Musk-eteers bar? Nah.

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

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

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A comity of errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes.

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

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

Hardly any at all, really.

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

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

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

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

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

And part of me prefers that method.

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

After all, everybody else is doing it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I wrote another song.

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

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

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

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

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

It all makes sense to me, anyhow.

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

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

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

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

Like I am really getting away with something outrageous.

I quite like that feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

Not that I’m bitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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The nature of the leak

I think I’m leaking prostate fluid.

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

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

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

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

It definitely should not be leaking out on its own.

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

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

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

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

So I am not feeling well right now.

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

Now I’m not so sure.

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

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

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

God, getting old sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I eventually made a somewhat redundant video.

Well, some of the points are new, anyway.

Let me elaborate on my journey.

I wasted a frankly stupid hour and a half trying to convince AI video generation platforms to output a useful video and failing completely.

Many of them, it turns out, are quite skilled at making it seem like they’re going to do it only to yank the football away at the last second and want money.

I should have given up after maybe 45 minutes but I am a stubborn and persistent cuss and sometimes that takes me to very dumb places.

It’s a pitfall all us Taurus types know all too well. Only once we do whatever it was we were trying to do does the stubbornness fade away and leave us thinking that was a stupid waste of time.

But oh well. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

That’s how I ended up with good ol Steve AI up there. That’s one seriously low effort video I generated, but it was free.

I’m going to play around with different settings to see if I can generate something a bit more presentable. As far as I can tell, good old Steve there is not keeping track of “computing minutes” (LTX) or “transcription minutes” (Descript) or “credits” (nearly everybody else) or whatever.

Whoops, I was wrong. Got one vid for free and that’s it forever. Le sigh.

The thing is. I totally want to pay these amazing websites for access, although at this point it would be hard for me to pick one because I’ve tried so many of them that they have started to blur together.

I rally should have been keeping notes. (Yeah right. )

If I had to choose right now, I guess it would still be Descript. Their suite of features is pretty good and I am dying to see if it can put clips to my voice and make me the happiest lazy documentarian in the world.

Although if I was forced to find the clips manually all by my little old self, it would at least encourage me to keep my videos very short.

That reminds me : I should give making YouTube Shorts a try.

But if I had loads o’ cash I would also throw some LTX’s way because their engine is spectacular. It makes such high quality stuff with just a few words.

I wish I could have platinum plus memberships in them all. I would have so much fun.

Other than pointless stress, I have had a quiet day. Discovered an obscure game called Elex in my Steam library that I didn’t remember and looked pretty decent so I decided to give it a shot.

And I’m enjoying it. It’s a decent attempt at a science fiction/fantasy blend and I find the world surprisingly convincing and engrossing and there is no shortage of quests.

And I finally remember to buy some armor, so the combat should be a little easier. I have gotten savaged to death by monsters a LOT.

But meh. It’s interesting enough to keep playing and it’s less frustrating than the original Pillars of Eternity, which I was playing before now.

I just cannot keep up with real time combat, even with plentiful pausing. I can handle the small normal battles but the big fights are completely beyond my poor brain.

I just can’t handle chaos.

But I am definitely enjoying Monster Hunter 2. The original was great and the sequel is just as much fun.

So there’s that.

More after the break.

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The fading away of a sad child

I think I have written before about this “fading away” feeling I get, like my internal combustion engine is trying to start up but the engine just ain’t turning over.

And the first question is always whether or not it’s an emotional or physical issue.

Probably a little of both, to be honest.

I know that I have lived under the tyranny of mental illness for a very long time. That I have been afraid of life and afraid of leaving my far too tiny comfort zone and afraid of getting truly excited or engaged about anything apart from the very thin gruel I can derive from video games.

And underwriting it all is that irrational feeling that I can’t possibly make it on my own. That if I go out into the “real world”, I will somehow perish.

Which makes no sense. I can do all the components of being a grownup, at least in theory. But when I imagine myself taking it all on, I just shrivel up inside.

I fade away. I surrender. I run away on the inside.

And I can talk about needing to stay and fight and while I would definitely be better off if I could do that but I don’t know that I can do that.

It’s so hard to tell.

There will always be that rough, manly voice in my head telling me that I just need to man up and stop being such a pussy and get in there and get things done.

But the man stands on the shoulders of the child and my inner child is not at all well. He’s been terribly damaged for his whole life and has lived in muted misery inside the seemingly impregnable fortress of my smooth persona for so long that the very thought of leaving its protection and joining that exciting world outside its windows seems both impossibly exciting and just plain impossible.

Maybe it truly is physical. Something wrong with my heart, something the stents didn’t fix, and my body is actually just defending itself by keeping me from doing things which might trigger a heart attack.,

But I somehow doubt it. This is a disease of the spirit and I don’t know what to do about those. All I can do is live my life and try my best to heal that sad little boy inside.

He’s doing better now.

But he is still very sick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. Another dang karaoke vid.

In retrospect, this was inevitable.

Eh. I don’t know why I do these karaoke vids. I am always deeply dissatisfied with the results, to the point where I feel a little ashamed for even doing one, let alone posting it where the whole world will see it.

I have a song cooking in Riffusion but this time I wrote the lyrics then set them aside so that I can look at them again with fresh eyes and tinker with them as needed.

At least I can dodge a little shame that way.

I keep telling myself, “of course it’s not perfect, it’s karaoke!” but it doesn’t help much.

The problem is that I can’t edit audio nearly as well as I edit video, so I don’t know how to take my vocal track and spruce it up with Autotune and taking the best of multiple takes and so forth and so on.

I mean, cutting and pasting is easy but I have no idea how to splice music of all things together so that it doesn’t sound like multiple takes stitched together.

I could try looking it up, I suppose.

Or maybe there’s some kind of magical AI vocal cleanup tool now that does it all for you.

That would be nice. I am very comfortable editing video but I only do pretty basic stuff. Cut, paste, add titles, maybe some music. Easy.

Anything more technical is beyond me.

I almost sort of have technical skills, which is frustrating. I have been saying for decades that I am a nerd in all ways that aren’t job skills.

Nobody is lining up to pay me for my ability to remember obscure songs or my scattered knowledge of science or my socially awkward introversion.

But I somehow missed getting all the technical skills that are supposed to be our compensation. I am not a programmer or a sysadmin or an engineer. I don’t have an intuitive grasp of system design or higher math. I don’t think in code.

I also don’t have Asperger’s, which is something I suppose.

And, of course, I’m incredibly talented, creatively gifted, and sparklingly charismatic.

I just need help turning those into, ya know, money.

I keep coming back to the idea of needing someone to hold my hand through my journey into relevance. My problems are both emotional and practical but the practical ones I could solve myself given time if I only had that strong, sure hand to hold to help me calm down and focus and deal with the chaos in my head.

I’m such a fragile, sensitive thing. A hothouse flower through and through.

Now where’s the hot guy with a house?

What I really need is Robin Williams from The Birdcage. A smart, competent, organized, driven person to manage and handle a super talented bundle of nerves like me.

It would be amazing to be able to just relax and concentrate on being me, instead of having to do everything myself.

Obviously what I need is an agent. And I have a list of 38 Canadian agents open in a tab, just waiting for me to apply for one. ^[1]

But so far I am still too damn timid to try. When I try to imagine myself applying to be a client of one of them, this crippling voice inside me asks, “And just what do you have to offer them to convince them to take you on?”.

Nothing, I meekly reply. I have no publications of note. The fact that I’ve written millions of words on this blog since 2011 is impressive but it doesn’t prove to an agent that someone else thinks my work is worth something.

And that’s what they are looking for. They are far too busy to figure out if you work is any good by themselves so they rely on other gatekeepers to approve you for them.

Which means getting myself published.

Which means writing things worth publishing.

And a whole new set of gatekeepers. Sigh.

I need an agent to get me an agent.

More after the break.

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On managing me

I’m pretty sure being my agent would be a fairly easy gig… at first, at least.

I’m not that complicated. Give me a task and I do it, and odds are, if it’s a writing task, I will do it both faster and better than you thought possible.

That’s the payoff for all these years of building up my writing muscles on this blog.

And I am not fussy. If I can do it and it pays, I will do it. In fact, I can see myself telling a prospective agent, “Give me all the really crappy tasks nobody else will do. I will clear them off your plate lickety split. ”

And I will. I would relish the challenge. I don’t care what it is. As long as it pays, even if it pays way too little, I will do it.

And obviously, that would be my way of tempting the agent into taking me on as a client. Just think of all the stuff you’ll finally get done!

And I know I probably wouldn’t be calling my agent in the middle of the night to talk me through my latest nervous breakdown nor would I throw a hissy fit if my intricate and fussy demands aren’t met.

Well, probably not. There’s only so much of people screwing up simple things when they were told exactly what to do one man can take.

But I can roll with the punches.

Plus writers often work alone, and that reduces the chances of drama.

But I suspect that once I was famous some ugly sides of my personality would come clawing their way to the surface of my mind and I would have to contend with that.

As does anyone who “makes it”, I would imagine.

Society does not prepare us for large differences in status between us and those around us. We grow up roughly equal to others.

Fame and/or money can fuck that up completely. There is a lot of primal primate programming that we have no idea is lying latent in our brains until it rears its ugly head when we get power or status.

Will Smith has been saying that he wishes everyone could get everything they always wanted so they can see how it doesn’t really solve anything.

I’d like the same thing, but as a test to see if someone can be trusted with power.

Real character is what you do when nobody can stop you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Maybe I should have called the video that.

It sounds clickable.

Anyhow, so I bitched about people being stupid about automation.

If your job necessarily involves interacting with physical objects, which is most jobs, trust me, you’re not getting automated any time soon.

In fact the whole idea that automation is coming for all our jobs is deeply bourgeoisie. When people say that, they’re not thinking about jobs like carpenter or nurse or managing a Stuckey’s.

No, they are thinking of nice soft middle class jobs. Info work. Creative work. Middle management “work”. The sort of things real people do, ya know?

Only people in that socioeconomic strata could even begin to imagine that automation is somehow going to take “all the jobs”.

Plus, the fact that business A doesn’t need you in order to generate profits any more doesn’t mean business B can’t exploit you.

So to speak.

Human resources are far too valuable to go to waste. It’s still possible that if you’re a middle class person, your job will go to AI and your highly specialized skillset will become obsolete and, well, you’re not exactly going to be able to switch to waiting tables or flipping burgers.

The social descent alone could kill you. We human beings tend to view loss of status as something only slightly better than death and so some people would rather starve while still technically being a lawyer than live as a fry cook.

Plus those jobs tend to be a lot more physically demanding, which is a problem if you are not used to physical work any more.

If you’re middle aged and fat, is what I am saying.

Anyhow, point is, automation and AI aren’t going to eliminate most jobs.

Just the ones people who went to college tend to want.

Switching subjects, I have been pondering what it means to take this whole YouTube thing more seriously.

It’s not an easy equation to solve. Of course, I could emulate the successful YouTube channels that I am subscribed to, and do things like exhort people to like and subscribe and join my Patreon and all that crap.

Oh gee, is my Gen X disdain for doing things like that shining through?

Another possibility would be merch but I don’t exactly have like a logo and a mascot and a (ick) “brand” yet.

I suppose I could take something I’ve said that I think is particularly pithy and slap it on mugs and T-shirts but that seems a tad premature.

Like I keep saying, I know that the product is essentially me. I am the one constant amidst all the random things I talk about. My personality, my charisma, my POV, my wit, and so on are basically what I have to offer the world.

And they’re pretty amazing.

But it’s pretty hard to imagine building a brand around myself. I don’t even have a catchy name to call myself and I doubt I ever will because I instinctively resist attempts to reduce me down to something easy to understand.

That’s not necessarily permanent though. I might figure myself out enough eventually.

My first thought was to name the channel, “Hey, it’s that guy!”. Then I would become known as That Guy.

I could then get all cute and steal something from Friends and call every episode of my show, “That Guy talks about… ” or “That Guy goes on and on about… ” or the like.

Eh. Maybe. That could work but I’m not in love with the idea.

Then again, that still sounds better than trying to market myself as some radical truth spitting iconoclast who tells it like it is.

I mean, I do, but… I don’t know if I want to make that my identity.

I would hate to get boxed in as some kind of angry firebrand and end up having to make up new things to be mad about all the time.

I dunno. Maybe I am just unable to imagine promoting myself at all.

In fact, it highlights one of the conflicts in my nature, where I know that I am pretty fucking amazing, and yet, I am still kind of meek as well.

Too meek to imagine saying,. “Hey world! I’m amazing! Gimmie money!”

I am cringing internally just thinking about it.

And that’s essentially what telling people to go to your Patreon amounts to.

I got some issues to work out.

More after the break.

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You could be a big star

And I want that. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.

Or maybe not.

I would definitely be the sort of celebrity who would make occasional appearance here and there and be all warm and charismatic and cool with my fans, then disappear into the limo and vanish for a while.

That’s the problem with being where I am on the whole introvert/extrovert thing. I am definitely not a pure introvert – I love attention too much for that. And I definitely have magnetism and appeal beyond the usual bounds of introversion.

But I am still fundamentally an introvert and being “on” like that is very draining for me so I would need to rest before I could shine, shine, shine again.

That’s subject to change, though. Could be that with the right social therapy, I would come out of my shell further and find that I can, in fact, derive energy from social interaction and not have to go back into my shell nearly as often.

But I will always need an avenue of retreat, I think.

Of course, this is all just theory. I will be lucky if I even become known let alone famous. I want to be a YouTube star and make a living doing videos, but like I demonstrated in the first half of this blog entry, that’s going to be hard for me to pull off.

So I will just keep plugging along doing what I do and trying to figure out a way to promote myself that I can live with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s vid is a note to Vladimir Putin asking him to not use nukes.

It’s something I am quite worried about.

I have this horrible vision of the old Vladillac himself, drunk and angry and in defiant denial of his own incompetence. staggering up to the nuclear button determined to give this harsh and unfair world a giant middle finger before the overdose of sleeping pills he just took kicks in.

Yes, I know it’s not that simple to launch nukes.

This is a nightmare, not a frigging simulation.

And to say a Ukraine that glows green at night would be the last thing the world needs right now is an understatement the size of all of time and space.

Although I dunno. Maybe nuclear winter would cancel out global warming.

Not worth it, obviously, but one takes one’s silver linings where one finds them.

Anyhow, I meant it when I said that if Vlad the Bad pushes the button the rest of the world would invade Russian looking for regime change.

He’d be lucky to live long enough to see the Hague.

And I hope he still knows this. But like with his bitch Dumb Donnie, I worry that the corrosive effects of autocracy coupled with advancing senility will create a perfect storm for the doing of truly terrible things.

Things they know they probably won’t live long enough to be punished for anyhow so they might as well do whatever brings them the most pleasure.

Dumb Donnie, at least, can still be stopped. The Supreme Court has said no to him many times now. The lower courts hate his fucking guts. Right now the only thing that is keeping him in power is the gutlessness of the Republicans in Congress.

And their majorities in both the House and the Senate are might slim, so it would not take very many of them to defect to the right side of history for things to change quite radically and maybe even permit impeachment.

But we don’t need impeachment to stop him. If the House and the Senate turn against him, and the courts already hate him, there is nothing to stop Congress from passing laws specifically to cut him off at the knees.

They control the purse strings, after all. They could defund the White House if they felt like it. Or pass laws officially stripping him of his powers as Commander In Chief.

It’s weird that the Americans feel the need to pretend their head of state is also the head of their military anyway.

No other country does that.

But as for the Vladiator, I am pretty sure the only way he’ll leave power is in a body bag. He has so much invested in not ever admitting he did anything wrong in attacking Ukraine that I can’t see any other way this can end.

Although I dunno. Maybe there could be a way to plausibly claim that, say, due to bad health he had to regretfully retire to a dacha on the Black Sea shore.

And he was never seen again except for the occasional “proof of life” video posted of him leading the life of a happy retiree.

Which are fake, obviously.

More seriously, I do not like the way things are headed. What are we in the rest of the world gonna do if he obliterates Ukraine with conventional weapons?

I worry that he’s still smart enough to know that if he is going to do that, he needs to do it all at once so that by the time the world knows about it, it’s over and the “we have to stop this madman now” argument loses its punch.

And if he really doesn’t give a shit any more, God help us all.

More after the break.

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The other side

Had my therapy session with Doc Costin today, Wednesday, for the usual reason : he is traveling someone with his wife.

Probably to Calgary, where a bunch of his kids live.

Ended up tangled up talking about meds at the beginning of the session, which normally wouldn’t have bothered me much but after my frustrations with my phone call with Doc Kwok yesterday, it made me a little tense.

I was tempted to snark, “When do we get to the part where a doctor gets distracted and doesn’t let me get to the point?”

Ha ha ha.

But Doc Costin doesn’t deserve that. He’s a great guy.

So I did, eventually, get to relate my tale of woe about the Doc Kwok situation and he had some suggestions. The main takeaway was that I should talk with my main Wound Care nurse about it next Friday, which can’t hurt.

But he also thinks I should take my leaking love-tap to Urgent Care on the off chances that they will have a better attention span.

If I do it, I won’t be going to the UC on 3 Road. That one still fills up for the whole day by 10 am, apparently, and I doubt I could get their soon enough, and even if I could, I really dislike feeling like I am fighting through a crowd to do something.

So we’d be going to the one on Shellbridge Road. Hopefully the fact that it’s in a weird off the beaten track location means it’s not super slammed all the time.

If it’s slammed too, then clearly we need a third one. Dammit.

My leaky gasket is definitely not worth taking to the ER. So far it’s a pretty minor issue, so unless it gets drastically worse, no ER for me.

And I will dutifully go to the lab to get the bloodwork Doc Kwok wanted so that she will at least have one less excuse to not address my issue.

I am getting to the point where I wonder if I am going to have to go into these appointments already pissed off.

“OK, Doctor Idiot, here’s what we will be talking about. Try not to get distracted by someone jangling keys in the next room. ”

Probably not a good idea to say that.

But it sure would be funny!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a phone appointment with my doctor’s office today.

Here’s how that went down.

But first, I have to get this out of the way.

As patient readers know, this appointment was not with my usual GP, it was with his locum, because he’s apparent too important to see patients any more.

Well it turns out his locum’s name is Doctor Kwok.

And I think I deserve some kind of medal for not making fun of that name. The temptation is so strong. The jokes would be so easy, and plentiful.

But I won’t do it because that would be culturally insensitive of me and I refuse to go there no matter how fun it would be.

Still, a pat on the back for that wouldn’t go to waste.

Alright, now that I have unburdened myself, I can concentrate on the actual subject matter of the vid.

I’m rapidly reaching the stage where I just plain stop giving doctors the benefit of the doubt and start treating them all like dim children who have to be handled firmly in order to keep them from wandering into traffic.

No… no Brandon, put the toy car down, it doesn’t want to go play with the other cars, now pay attention to Mommy.

There has to be some way to keep them on topic. Maybe I need to draw amusing animals on my forehead with Sharpie so I can pretend they’re making eye contact.

OK, OK, I’ll stop.

Wait, no, one more : I know, I’ll show up with the topic and a few main points I want to cover printed out onto poster board so they won’t forget.

No, remember, Mister President, remember what were talking about? Tell me what it says on the big piece of paper. No, I mean under where it says, “Donnie is the best boy in the world”, sir.

OK, now I’m done.

The doctor wants me to go in and get my a1c done. I have a standing order so I don’t have to get a lab req from her or anything.

I will do it after Wound Care on Friday.

But basically I am humoring her. What I really wanted was some sense of her being interested in my beginning to wet myself and maybe even a solution or at least some kind of tests towards that goal.

But no. Exactly like Doctor Chao, she seized upon my less-than-perfect a1c level and used that as an excuse to tell me to fuck off and come back when I’ve done whatever.

Every second she spends talking to me is a moment she COULD be talking to another patient and telling THEM to fuck off,

The important thing is to get the money. After that, you’re a liability.

That’s why they seize upon one obvious thing and focus on that because what they are looking for is not a diagnosis but a reason to make you leave.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

This is the same medical system, after all, that has been perfectly fine with not knowing what went wrong with my legs for coming up on three years.

They tried a few things, it wasn’t those, so they got bored and gave up.

Guess I must have made the whole thing up. Or whatever. They don’t care.

God forbid they should actually diagnose me. Ick, diagnoses are such a commitment, and curing people means they stop generating office visits.

Where’s the fun (money) in that?

I would accept a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness. I have no problem with that. I have a history of psychosomatics and knowing the problem is psychogenic would be a huge step forward towards fixing it.

I don’t consider that probable, but it’s definitely possible.

But no, that would involve telling me something I might not want to hear, and that way too much work for a doctor.

After all, that might make you want to stay longer!

More after the break.

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An important video

This video is too long and too serious for our usual Zoom meetings so I am going to put it here in order to share it.

Pearl here learned something important and is brave enough to share it.

In the comments, I said this :

But women will do things to one another out of jealousy, resentment, and so on that would be absolutely unthinkable to a man. Things like starting rumours, using someone’s deepest insecurities against them, emotionally bullying people, and pretty much any other venomous, toxic, nightmarish thing you can think of in their conflicts with one another.

Me, on youtube, in the comments for this vid

And that’s the lesson poor Pearl learned the hard way. Like I said in the comments, women do not fight fair. Men have an internal set of rules that limits what we will do out of aggression and that is backed by the instinctive knowledge that if we go too far, other men will turn on us and kick our ass.

Women don’t have that. So they act out of pure rage and malice and with a coldhearted ruthlessness that makes guerilla warfare look like a polite game of checkers.

Like I said, I can’t empathize with that. Those male rules are in my brain too. Even fairly awful, violent men will follow them and disapprove of any man who breaks them.

I am probably less scared of women than the average straight dude because the power of the pussy means nothing to me and I have the verbal and emotional skills to defend myself against their dirty tricks.

And that’s one of the reasons I consider it part of my mission on this planet to defend straight dudes from the women who will abuse them, counting on both the rule against violence against women and the man’s inability to articulate what they are doing to hurt him to shield them from consequences.

Well not when I’m around, toots.

Women don’t scare me.

And I will tackle anyone at any time if they are being unjust.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was kind of surprised at how much effort went into this one.

Mmmaybe I should start picking the thumbnails myself.

Then again, if it gets the clicks… clicks for dicks, you might say…

But yeah, I was a little surprised when I finished making the thing and it was past 3:30 pm, meaning that it took me over an hour and a half to make a two minute slideshow.

And I was tired, too.

Wow, imagine if I actually took these things seriously and tried to focus down and make the absolute best videos I can make and really push hard on putting them anywhere they might get noticed and dedicated my life to getting big on YouTube.

Wow, what a great way to become crippled by anxiety and self-doubt.

I mean, I am not saying it’s out of the question. But I have never operated like that before. I have zero experience with buckling down.

I’ve never had to.

I think the only way to get me to work hard like that is if I go in the opposite direction and keep on not taking it seriously at all but treating it all like a big game, including promoting myself et al, and having the most fun I can that way.

That sounds way more sustainable. If I go for the hard driving approach, I know exactly what will happen ; the moment my initial impetus fades, I will crash and lose all motivation, drive, and focus in favor of doing what I always do.

Namely withdrawing into myself and letting the world outside my turtle shell fall apart.

That’s how so many bright and noble ambitions of mine have met their untimely demise. I just can’t sustain the momentum. It’s like I’m a rocket with only one burn.

So if that one burn doesn’t get me into orbit, I crash back down to Earth.

And odds are I won’t try again for a very long time.

I think to keep on pushing like that takes some kind of burning passion driving you to be ambitious and bold, as well as a deep well of personal energy.

I’m not like that. I’m a more relaxed, lackadaisical kind of guy. I need to do things joyfully and freely and with a sense of fun and excitement.

Or at least I think I do. I have yet to test this radical new theory of what works for me. It’s going to require a serious rerouting of most of my personality and the breaking of some very ancient habits of thought, and that’s rather tough.

As usual, I can see my destination – a freer and happier and more engaged me – but I don’t know how to get there.

Just got to keep feeling my way around, I guess. As always, I have to “learn to fly” – take my mind the places it needs to go to get the things it needs in order to thrive without it having to be logical or justified or “make sense”.

That requires a true leap of faith, a leap away from the known into a discontinuous world defined not by “logic” or “sense” but by my own mind and my own needs.

I keep telling myself that I don’t need reality’s permission to feel good. That I can imagine and invent whatever I need via my powerfully creative mind without worrying about connecting it to the real world in any logical sense.

I think that’s what healthy people can do. They don’t realize it, but they can.

Deep in the bowels of their minds (so to speak) they have a program running that deploys when mood dips low in order to keep their mood afloat.

Mine sinks to the bottom because I don’t have that lifeboat.

Or maybe I do, and there’s just too much heavy baggage in mine.

More after the break.

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These old bones

I’ve been feeling rather creaky lately.

You know, rusty. Stiff. It really feels like entropy is working overtime to make sure that if any part of me remains still, it seizes up in that position and when I go to move it again I have resistance to overcome like I’m the Tin Man after a rainstorm.

So where’s my little girl with the oil can? Because I need some serious lubricating.

This is a fairly alarming symptom. Good thing I have a phone appointment with the doctor tomorrow so I can talk about it with them.

It won’t be my usual GP, Doctor Chao. He’s away, apparently. It will be his locum, whose name I was told and then instantly forgot.

Good thing they’re the one calling me.

In fact the whole thing was their idea. They called me to make the appointment, which is normally an uh-oh, but I know why they are calling this time.

When I was with the physiotherapist, I told her that I was starting to leak a little. My urinary sphincter doesn’t quite close all the way, it seems, and so a little tiny bit of pee leaks out when I get up and move and things slosh about.

A distressing sign when you’re a man my age.

The physio wrote that down in her file and I imagine that’s what led to the phone call from my GP’s office.

I hope it’s nothing serious. Something that can be fixed with medication or maybe some minor bit of outpatient surgery.

The nightmare, of course, is ending up needing to be in adult diapers. I honestly do not think I could handle that. I might never leave the apartment again if it means I have to worry about crinkling in public and revealing my shame.

So hopefully it’s just the usual older man enlarged prostate BS, and who knows, maybe they have a shot for that now.

Or, sigh, yet another medication for me to take.

At least we’re catching it early!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A little note from Canada to our good friends in the European Union.

You’ll no doubt notice that the video is rather short today. It is, in face, only two minutes and change long. I somehow managed to be succinct.

And I am not sure how I feel about that.

I mean, I got my point across clearly and amusingly. I can’t think of anything more than needed to be said. It is a thing which is sufficient unto itself.

And yet, the whole thing was too easy. Not only did I get my whole point out in just two minutes, there was even a lot less excision to do than is normal.

In other words, there was not that many ums, ahs, y’knows, and weird pauses while my brain loads the next set of words than usual.

I’ve noticed that my speech is becoming more fluent when I am making these things lately but this was a quantum jump, not an incremental one.

Could I be leveling up as a presenter and commentator?

That would certainly put a new complexion on things. If making these videos becomes a lot less work, then that would leave me a lot more energy in my budget to do more with the videos than I have been doing.

Like increasing production values, though I am quite cautious about that. I don’t want to load my vids down with a lot of cheap looking and pointless adornment, nor do I want to make it look all slick and professional and therefore less sincere.

So it’s kind of hard to imagine where those production values would go. I could add a (very brief) title sequence and outro, I suppose, though I have no frigging clue what I would put in one.

Like, most of my videos are just me talking. A highlight reel of that would be pretty boring with music playing over it.

Maybe I would have to go through my recent videos and find little snippets where I thought I was particularly insightful and/or hilarious and/or charming.

I think my fragile psyche could handle doing that.

As for the outro, just credits, I suppose, though it might be fun to sneak in some of the joke credits I have come up with over the years.

Like “Best Boy : Arfy the Wonder Dog”, that kind of thing.

Or I could go with the other idea I had today while I was feeling guilty for my video being too short (and easy), which was just to come up with more stuff.

If I started doing a desk jokes type show – you know, headline then punchline, like on Colbert or the Daily Show – then obviously I would need a heck of a lot more than just one joke a day for it.

But I’m more about the commentary. I suppose I could have it be that there’s the first segment where I do desk jokes then the second segment where I get more into depth upon an issue of the day in a more editorial way.

And then, a zany undercranked chase sequence while Yakity Sax plays!

This is sounding increasingly like a TV show, and that’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, TV is still a thing. People still watch TV shows, even if it’s via streaming and not via cable so much any more.

TV survived the switch from antenna to cable, it will survive the switch from cable to streaming just as well.

People will always want to watch TV even when it’s being beamed directly into our skulls via remote telepathy.

And I will still want to be the person who makes it.

So this could all work out, actually.

Which would be nice.

More after the break.

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Rough and raw

That’s how I feel lately, on an emotional level. Like the substance of my soul is tender and sensitive from its long, long slumber and so the world feels jagged and spiky to me even though the life force propelling it has never been stronger.

It’s an adjustment.

Right now, I am still learning how to focus these newly awakened vital energies into healthy outlets so that they don’t end up turning into anxiety.

That means I have to be open to being motivated and that, in turn, means I have to try to overcome the negative thought patterns of depression that make me think that I have to minimize effort at all cost.

Because that’s the depression talking, making me protect it at my own expense by making me think it’s a part of me.

But it’s not. It’s just a disease. An accident. It’s only a part of me in the sense that a tumour would be part of me, and like a tumour, it can be excised and absolutely nothing of importance will be lost.

And a great deal will be gained once that fucking thing is gone.

But it’s still hooked up to a lot of important parts of me, so I can’t just hack it out of there with a rusty butter knife. It has to be removed with surgical precision and that takes time and care and patience.

Hence my metaphor of defusing a bomb. That one’s pretty old.

It’s been taking longer than I thought.

But now that my Paxil dose is going down, the process has sped up considerably. I feel like my mind can clean the toxins out of its bloodstream (like dialysis) much more efficiently than before and that lets my mind’s immune system attack that fucking tumour and make it wither away.

But it all rests on my being able to be the more vital and active and engaged person I have wanted to be for so long, and that means unlearning bad habits of the mind.

I’m working on it.

See, this is where the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy types have it wrong. They thing that you can change the thought patterns and everything else will follow.

Which would be laughable if it wasn’t so sickening. And destructive. It’s like thinking you can lose weight by drawing on your scale with a Sharpie.

Thoughts follow emotions. Emotions don’t follow thoughts. No matter what we think and no matter what we do and no matter what elaborate bullshit our rational minds cook up, emotions are always in control and we can only hope to use rational tools in order to pursue our purely emotional aims.

And I say this as someone with a long history of being extremely cerebral.

So take it from one who knows.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.