I feel like I didn’t say everything I meant to say in this video.

But that’s normal for us neurotic writer types.

We always have far more to say than we can say, and in a way, that is what keeps us communicating in the first place.

It may not ever get everything out at once, but it still helps a lot.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

Just tryin’ to work through my emotions and maybe even feel a little bit clearer and cleaner and lighter as a result.

I keep feeling a larger former of catharsis looming in the gloomy depths of my turbulent soul. It lurks there, like a shark seen only as a shadow beneath the waves, and I keep trying to turn to get a good look at it but it darts away.

Perhaps I need to clear out more of the smaller emotions first.

Or maybe deep down I am still too scared to “go there”. I’ve been doing what I can to lean in to my pain and stay with unpleasant emotions long enough to hear what they are trying to tell me and so forth and so on, but it’s all so slow.

I still long for some kind of massive transformational force that could shove my shallow reason and perverted superego aside in order to change me in all the ways I need to change in order to heal and make me into a brand new version of myself, without all that bullshit baggage from all these years of being inert.

Unfortunately, the thing most likely to do that for me would be some kind of massively horrible medical condition. The kind that drags me into a world of pain and horror and humiliation and disgusting bodily realities that makes my life as I am living it now seem like a golden paradise by comparison.

I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. But it might.

I can’t imagine what other sort of force could enter my life like that. Religion isn’t really an option and it’s not like I play the lottery or have any other way for good fortune to hand me an opportunity.

I am going to make another attempt at connecting with UpWork. Clearly my incredibly frustrating first attempt was unsuccessful so I am going to contact them to see if there is some more reliable way to clear the identity hurdle.

Because I still don’t know what “reduce angle” means.

I want to make UpWork work (up) because, like I said, I know and trust them. And the alternative would be to enter the absurd world of “work from home” scams and swindles where I have to figure out which might legit result in real actual spendable money and which are just human garbage victimizing the most vulnerable.

Because it’s not like the well to do of the upper middle class are falling for these scams. It’s disposable losers like me (but dumber) getting conned.

Number one rule : if they ask YOU for money, run. Close that tab and never look back. Because ask yourself, if they can get schmucks like you to give them money up front, what is their incentive to do anything to make YOU a success?

So clearly I am not exactly their ideal mark. I am cynical, suspicious, perceptive, and most importantly just really god damned smart.

I see through these people.

But I still don’t want to deal with all that bullshit.

But I need something meaningful and productive to do with my time and I can’t seem to provide that for myself so I need a job.

The money is not the most important thing. It’s having something worth something to do. My creative output is a great outlet but it doesn’t have enough of an audience for me to feel like doing it counts as productive.

I cherish every follower on BlueSky and subscriber on YouTube, but until I manage to gain a bit more traction, it can’t really scratch that productivity itch.

Surely someone out there needs my outrageous talents.

More after the break.

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The usual kind of job

I don’t really stand a chance in traditional employment, even the online kind.

Because my resume is pathetic and I have no qualifications for anything. All I have is a random smattering of university courses and my… let’s call it “certificate” from VFS.

So the traditional route to employment is absolutely not my friend. Who wants to hire some 52 year old loser with no employment history in this millennium and absolutely no job skills outside a fairly narrow field.

And even my VFS “certificate” is getting old and moldy and worthless. It’s from six years ago, and any sane employer would be thinking, “And nothing since then?”

That’s why a place like UpWork means so much to folks like me. I can write up a proposal where I really sell my abilities and submit that and things like resumes and certifications need never enter into it.

I know that there’s all kinds of things I can do. It’s convincing someone to take a chance on hiring me to do it that is the tricky bit.

I should also hook back up with the March of Dimes people through whom I was taking that network administrator course.

I crashed out on that. But whatever. That doesn’t mean I failed forever. Sure, mental illness ate my progress – typical – but they have other courses and plenty of different ways for people like me to enter the magical realm of actual employment.

Like a lot of things, it merely waits for the next time the breezes inside me are blowing in the right direction to fill my sails and propel me forward.

I wish that wasn’t such a dicey proposition. I wish that I could regularly be a go getter full of enthusiasm and ambition who takes on that big ol world every single day.

But instead, all I can do is pray for blue skies in winter.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was trying to think of something funny to do today as I am an incredibly talented comedy writer and yet absolutely none of that goes into my creative output these days.

Which is weird.

I guess it stems from the unformatted nature of my output. The only intent attached to this blog or my videos is to express my creative energies and I suppose it could be said that attempting comedy in that way would be too restrictive for me.

Which is sad.

But I am getting ready to reform my wastrel ways and learn to focus and commit and make stuff I actually expect people to like.

After all, I really do want to become a YouTube star. And that’s not likely to happen my accident. I know that I have the ingredients to make top notch content – wit, unique POV, unique personality, charisma, basic video editing skills, and so on – but whether I can pull that all together into something watchable depends on me and my ability to get my collective shit together.

And I am going to try, gol’dang it. I can’t recite a spell and have all my multitudinous facets suddenly fold into one solid focused reality, but I can keep nudging my self in that direction until my talents are actually noticed by people I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about my creative capacities lately and how casually I handle big creative ideas and create stuff that is quite original and high in content without even really thinking about.

That’s just what I do.

But none of that really matters if I am still working all by myself and doing things in my usual sloppy halfassed unfocused way.

So I suppose I am at a crossroads where I have to choose to either sacrifice my current state of insipid placidity for a life with a lot more striving in it or sink bank into fruitless oblivion and go back to just marking time till I die.

I’ve been building myself up slowly. But that might not be enough. At some point, some kind of quantum leap of faith may well be needed where I have to jump into something with both feet and no guarantee of success and just wing it.

Give becoming the baby bird that DOES fly when kicked out of the nest a try.

It’s never too late to launch, or so I keep telling myself.

I guess one of the biggest problems is that you can always just… not. Not strive, not stress, not overcome yourself, not try to do things you find hard, not step onto that path into the unknown, just plain not do anything and let routine carry me forward in time.

After all, I’ve done that for thirty fucking years. What’s another day or two?

Repeat until I finally fucking die.

It’s ultimately a lack of self-discipline. I have very little experience with voluntarily making life scarier and more difficult for myself in order to pursue a goal.

I’ve never been asked to do anything like that for school. School’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. Even in college, it was work I could do without raising a sweat.

So I never had to buckle down and focus in order to succeed at school. And having had only passing involvement with the world of employment, I have never had to learn any self-discipline for that either.

So I am brilliant AF but I am as weak and flabby on the inside as I am on the outside.

I can’t do this all alone. But I can’t do it with others either.

Somehow, I will succeed.

More after the break.

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My right foot

I keep forgetting to mention this – the wound on my right foot is officially gone.

Well, it closed, anyhow, and therefore does not require regular bandage changes any more. That leaves just the issue with my left foot left…. er, remaining… for the nurses at the Richmond CHAC to deal with.

And it appears to be getting smaller.

Woohoo, normal human healing!

That raises the prospect of one day not needing to go to the CHAC twice a week at all, and I have mixed feelings about that.

Right now, my Wound Care missions twice a week are the only thing that gets me out of the apartment on a regular basis except Denny’s.

So if that left foot wound healed up, I would only be leaving the house for Denny’s once a week, and that can’t be good for me.

I’d need to find something else to do outside the apartment besides my occasional non-CHAC related medical appointments because I already feel like I don’t get nearly enough fresh air and sunshine with how much I go out now.

I suppose I would still have the sweating with the oldies at the Kinsmen, come to think of it. So I would be going out twice a week.

Relatedly, I suppose since August is barreling towards us like a garrulous drunk I should do my traditional “talking about how I should get Julian to drop me off at the beach at Garry Point Park for a couple hours” bullshit.

And it’s true. I should. I totally should. It would do me a world and a half of good, both physically and mentally as well as spiritually. Everything points to GO on this plan.

But it’s never going to happen. It’s just another casualty on the long long list of my dead intentions, killed by my inability to act on my own to leave my tiny comfort zone.

So there it is, dead on the outside of the walls of this crummy old castle of mine. with me looking down on it with faint pity but mostly detached disinterest.

As if it’s a tragedy but not something that has anything to do with me.

All that matters to my ancient internal operating system is that the Citadel has remained secure, with no chance that any of those evil and insane impulses, emotions, and instincts that make me want to leave the castle can get through and make me act in a way it deems “irrational”.

After all, if you can’t leave, then all those impulses can do is make you suffer, right?

But if you CAN leave…. well…

…then you’d kind of have to, wouldn’t you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Amongst the day’s weirdnesses will be the fact that my vid of the day will be appearing in part two of today’s blogging because I haven’t made it yet.

I was out of the house at the time. I could theoretically have made a video via my cell but I am still too shy and self-conscious to do that in public.

And speaking of my cell, here’s the stuff I wrote on the road :

Today’s exercises were way more ambitious than the previous time I was here. They were done with us standing and holding the back of our chairs. And that was fine. But then the exercises  required letting go of the chairs and that’s where I met my doom because I cannot stand for very long. I held out for as long as I could but had no choice but to sit down before I fell down.  Then I  did the rest of the exercises sitting down while the  old people stood.

That was humbling. 

Oh well.  It was still exercise outside on a gorgeous sunny summer day, so it’s all good. 

And who knows, if I get enough exercise here , maybe I will be able to stand for longer.

Next up is  physio, and I am dreading that because once more, I didn’t do the exercises and I am very embarrassed about that.

So I might just do something extremely uncharacteristic  and just plain lie.

I dunno. My essentially honest nature might keep me from doing that. We’ll see.

After this then physio, wound care is going to seem like a spa vacation.

They need to invent a Xanax for crankiness.

Done at Physio.  I have done a lot of exercise today and I still have wound care to do.

But I feel fine. My muscles are all warmed up and the weather is gorgeous and I feel good. 

This fresh air and sunshine and exercise stuff really does work. Go figure.

Bit early for wound care so I type to you lovely people on my cell.

I installed Google Keep on my phone earlier so I can just one finger type away and when I get back home it will sync via our WiFi and then I will cut and paste all this text into my blog and voila, I am already somewhat done with blogging for thevday when I get home.

Now if only wasn’t so sleepy! I am clearly behind on my ZZZ and I could use a Diet Coke with full caffeine right about now.

My computer crashed while I was out so now I have to sit here while it reboots.

Oh well, at least I can still write.

Predictive text has come a long way since I had my tablet working. It is way more likely to suggest the word I want now. I think it must be taking in more of what I have written already.

It makes me wish I had it on my PC  to be honest. I would blog SO FAST!

me while not at home

Holy crap, I wrote almost 500 words out on the road. Yay for me. That means part 1 of today’s writing is almost done already.

For the record, I did totally lie to my physio. Told her I had been doing the exercises three times a weak.

Like hell I have.

 It’s so hard for me to modify my routine. Adding making a video a day to it was a major operation. And that’s something I more or less enjoy doing.

Adding exercise would be huge. Comparatively, going right back to doing my default thing of not doing that is way, way easier.

The easiest thing to do is always nothing. Therefore the path of least resistance is also to do nothing. And why it’s fatal to get addicted to doing whatever is easiest.

Anyway, odds are I will go right back to life as usual after today.

I am a terrible patient.

More after the break.

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OK, before I post this, know that it turns out things are not as bad as I thought.

Big surprise, I overreacted.

I am still very glad I got these emotions out.

OK, let the games begin.

I crunched the numbers and my life should be largely unchanged except that I will never order in again except maybe once a month.

So that’s a bummer.

But other than that, I will be fine. I’ve just gone from $50/week over expenses to $20/week, and that does suck, but I will be OK.

If I want that damn power supply, I’m gonna have to find work.

And I shudder to think of what the next five week month will be like.

But I am about to find out because the next month IS a five week month. I just checked. Doesn’t that just fucking figure?

The moment the idea of a five week month entered my head, I knew I had to go check to see if life was, indeed, that cruel.

And of course it was.

So for the next 5 weeks I will be getting by on $135 per week, which is doable but my budget will have zero wiggle room.

In fact, I will have to find $5/week in savings.

Maybe I will skip one McD’s a week. I will hate not having the fun everyone else is having – I hate feeling left out.

But desperate times etc.

So yeah, got to find me some kind of online work. I will contact UpWork and see if I can get their arcane identification process done that way.

I’d prefer to use them because I know them and trust them. I am positive I can get work through them with my surprisingly robust ability to believe in my talents when there’s money on the line.

Guess I just need the right inspiration.

And the real deep down gut level inspiration of just being REALLY FUCKING BORED.

I need something meaningful to do, not just spinning my wheels like usual.

I want to DO STUFF GOD DAMN IT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided to vent on something that has been bugging me for a while now.

I explain what I am talking about here :

Like I said in the vid, I don’t think the term is doing a great deal of harm. And I am sure there are millions of people in the world right now who have taken some comfort in the much more serious and attention demanding diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder rather than boring, vague terms like depression.

I mean, everyone gets depressed. But PTSD, only soldiers and massacre survivors and people like that have that!

Which is, in fact, my point. They have it. You don’t.

In other words, I am being my usual tightass self about language and logic. I know intellectually that these things don’t actually matter much, but they bug me.

We all have our little peeves, I suppose.

Today’s been decent. No fresh health complaints, which is nice. Had a good wholesome turkey dinner at Denny’s last night, which was nice.

Wednesday is Deposit Day, so I am at the end of my money. But it’s no big deal. I still have $36 left on my card and 8 bucks in cash. I’ll be fine.

There will be a petty awkwardness tomorrow night when I would usually be giving Julian $20 to cover the McD’s meal he will be fetch for me, to be eaten while he and I and Felicity and hopefully Joe will be hanging out on Zoom.

Call it a Covid Dine-In Experience.

Well I don’t have the cash this time. I guess I paid cash when I should have used the card for Denny’s last Sunday night. So I will have to get creative.

Luckily I have a plan B prepared for just such a contingency. What I will do is order something online from somewhere in the neighborhood (probably Pizza Hut) and get Julian to pick it up for me.

I say probably Pizza Hut because unlike nearly everywhere else besides Superstore that I order from, I actually know where it is.

It’s like two blocks away.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, my Big Day. Wound Care then exercise at the Kinsmen center.

So, also Xanax of course.

Though I wonder if there will come a point in the future where the place and the people and the activities will become so familiar to me that I don’t need the Xanax.

I mean, it’s not like I need a Xanax to go to Wound Care at the CHAC. Heck, I am so casual about that place now that sometimes I don’t even slow down to check in.

I just say, “Hey Megan!” as I rollate past her and she says “Hello!” and then marks me as present on the computer.

It’s a system that works.

In fact the original point of Doc Costin giving me the Xanax prescription was to allow me to get out there in the world and have some positive social interactions without my crippling social anxiety screaming like an enraged banshee in my ear.

So much of my life has been spent desperately trying to stay focused on the here and now despite the massive panic attack I was having without even knowing it.

As far as I knew, that’s just what life was like. You went around in a constant state of low level panic, occasionally spiking up to full on freaking out, until you finally get home and away from everyone else and can finally relax.

No wonder I have isolated myself so much and been so withdrawn. With a setup like that, it’s not a matter of choosing to be alone, it’s being driven to the solitary life by the baying hounds of mental illness.

In my heart of hearts, I’d rather be with people I love having a good time. I am happier when I am being social. When happy social times end, part of me is always sad to have to go back into my sorry assed coffin of a fucking life.

I need to hang on to that truth and let it change me.

Maybe it can set me free.

More after the break

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Curry at last

Well that’s my last ever order from Tandoori Oven.

Because the curry I ordered last Saturday night has bones in it. Big chunks of bone. Just like the previous time I ordered from them.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this could happen twice, but I am starting to think for them, bones in the lamb curry aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

Maybe there’s a culture out there where if their lamb curry doesn’t have bones in it, they assume it can’t be fresh.

Or maybe there’s people out there with the excellent dental hygiene to crunch the chunks of bone like they’re popcorn and these people would be telling me, “But the chunks of bone are the best part!”.

I tried to put in a complaint and get a refund but they don’t offer refunds more than 24 hours after the purchase.

Oh well. At least I got to vent about it.

But I am sure as fuck never ordering from Tandoori Oven again. Fuck those people. They are clearly operating on a set of rules with which I violently disagree.

At this point, I am mostly angry because those huge chunks of bone took up space where more lamb curry should have gone.

Here’s the evidence :

So in general. my entire experience with ordering in last Saturday night has been unpleasant, although only this extra calcium business is Tandoori Oven’s fault.

Oh well. Sometimes life just decides it wants to fuck with you and all you can do is do your best to roll with the punches and land on your feet with some dignity intact.

At least the bone free parts of my curry were pretty good.

I mean, it’s lamb curry. It’s hard to screw that up.

But somehow, they managed it. TWICE.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This vid is weird even for me, and I am very proud of that.

I decided that today I would try to write open ended “mystic” poetry where I tried to express something inside of me without worrying about whether it was easy for anybody to understand or not.

And just for fun, I would then slap than into Riffusion and see what came out.

And as poetry, I think it came out okay for a first try. I will no doubt try again in the future. Maintaining the proper frame of mind was difficult but rewarding.

It was actually kinda fun.

Anyhow, here’s what ultimate resulting from all this mishigas :

I’m proud of myself for being able to at least partially give up worrying about whether I would be understood in order to draw directly from that deep mysterious part of me which I have always feared before because of the powerful emotions it stirred in me that I did not understand and that did not make sense.

So my overly rational self feared it but also, in a sense, obeyed it simply because the emotions involved were so strong.

Luckily, the emotions only ever made me want to go look at the moon or put me in a weird spooky mood, as opposed to telling me to kill.

But I am a lot less scared of that part of me than I used to be. I still wonder, in passing, if I would have been better off with some kind of religious indoctrination so I would at least have some sort of framework for understanding things like that, but eh, that probably would have come with more baggage than it was worth.

And it’s good to know, at this stage of my auto-resurrection, that there truly is a realm beyond my ego and superego that operates without any need for logical contiguity or linear narrative at all and that if I learn to use it properly, it might just become a source for the counterbalancing force for all that “reason” that has been inanely dominating my mind all by itself for far too long.

That was one hell of a sentence.

I certainly need some way of reminding myself, as often as is feasible, that there is this whole world of emotion and connection and intuition and understanding outside of the bright cold light of my powers of reason and that this other realm is not only real but vitally necessary for my mental health.

It is, in a very deep spiritual sense, the realm of the unknown. Not only in the usual vernacular sense but in the sense of being beyond knowledge and understanding. It is a realm where things fit together emotionally, not logically, and that can be very scary for a brainiac like me but like I keep saying, not everybody has an intellect but everyone has emotions and all those people out there who do not have my sort of logical faculties must be getting through life somehow and this realm must be it.

As impossible as it seems to one such as me, their intuition and “gut feelings”, with only weak input from their reasoning faculties, must be enough for survival.

They muddle through life, from my point of view, and it works out fine for them. They grow up, gets jobs, have families, become known in their community, and in all senses function as a normal healthy human being for their whole lives.

All based on educated intuition.

Boggles the mind.

But I am desperate to learn more about it.

More after the break.

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The rest of the story

First, a coda to last night’s tale of woe :

So as patient readers know, last night I ordered in and that was dumb because I had forgotten that the buzzer I use to let people into the building was broken.

So last night, when my phone rang, I told the driver I was letting him in, and I press six, and he immediately messaged me (through DoorDash) that it hadn’t worked, so I told him to try again but if it still didn’t work to just leave the food outside the building.

Phone rang again, I pressed the button again, then hung up, depressed.

Well either it worked the second time or someone let him into the building as they came in or out (naughty, not supposed to do that) because when Joe and Julian came home, my food was NOT outside the building but outside our apartment door.

So I could have had my delicious Indian meal last night, exactly as planned, if I had only known the damned food was right where I could get at it.

Admittedly the hike to and from the apartment door is a bit of a strain for me but I have done it plenty of times without a problem.

So that was the perfect capper to this comedy of dumbassery. The food was there but this fact had not been conveyed to be so I didn’t know.

True, when I didn’t get a message from my driver the second time, I could have deduced that this time he had gotten in, but hindsight etc.

Oh well. No big deal. No harm done to anything but my poor nerves, and they will recover with time.

Some day we’ll look back on this and laugh.

And laugh and laugh and laugh in increasingly high a pitch until the nice young men in the clean white coats come to cart us away.

More importantly, I think I am increasingly making peace with the fact that I am high strung, emotional, reactive kind of dude who does things like get all bent out of shape because of a food delivery mishap and that it’s totally fine to be that way.

It’s certainly a hell of a lot better than creating a state of eerie inner calm by brutally quashing all strong emotions in order to make living a worthless life more comfortable.

Yeah fuck that. I will pay for the highs with the lows if that is what it takes to get myself out of these fucking flatlands so I can go somewhere where the wind doesn’t blow through me all the time and there is a reason way this day is not like every other.

I want my life to have real content to it.

I want to feel things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was a day for gloating like a well fed demon over the burning husk of Dumb Donnie’s stupid White House.

Seriously, I imagine myself rubbing my hands together and capering with glee like some kind of overweight crippled Rumpelstiltskin.

Let the games begin!

It’s odd that at times I am downright saintly in my desire for everyone to get along and understand one another’s humanity and all that good stuff. and yet at the same time I have never had any problem with openly enjoying the misfortunes of evil people.

What can I say. I’m complicated.

And a lot of the facets of my personality don’t really fit together or at least not easily. Hence my difficulty in creating a unified sense of self.

I suppose that most people create said sense of self by unconsciously eliminating sides of themselves that don’t fit whatever narrative emerges during their tumultuous teen years and all that trying on of various identities.

I never went through that because emotionally speaking I was never a teenager. On an emotional level, I am in Grade 7 at best.

Like I have said so many times before, I missed out on a simply ridiculous number of developmental stages, from not having an imaginary friend to not having friends for the first five years of school to never dating in high school or developing an extended group of friends or going to parties to anything else a normal teen (or child) did.

I mean, I didn’t even play with toys. Not stimulating enough.

And the reason I keep coming back to the sheer weirdness of my childhood is that I am trying to wrap my head around how despite all that I did not, in fact, become a serial killer, or the like.

Apparently a lot of the developmental stages we think are vitally necessary to a child’s development are actually kind of optional.

Not that I would recommend skipping any of them to anybody ever. I have no idea how the fuck I got away with it so don’t go thinking you can, too.

I suppose one could see it as a testament to my mental strength and integrity. They kept me nailed together enough to get through 12 years of school and some college despite my bizarre suspended life.

I certainly have no illusions about “catching up”. That’s not how things work. I might be able to cover some of that ground later in my life but that’s not going to erase 30 years of wasted adult life or retroactively give me a better childhood.

I can’t ever get any of that back. There is a bright, happy, well adjusted, and very successful version of me that never got to be, and it is fitting that I mourn that poor fellow so I can let him go and move on.

He’s gone and nothing can ever change that.

Maybe I should hold a funeral or something like that.

I’m never going to “catch up”, but maybe I can make my own unique bespoke version of a happy, well-adjusted future for myself where I work for a living and have nice stuff.

Because sometimes it just feels like…

But more than the money I want the dignity of work. I want the self-esteem that comes from knowing you are a contributing member of society and not just a drain on it. I want to have enough money to not feel like a burden on others because instead of them having to look after me, I can pay people to do it instead.

Not that I think my roomies hate looking after me or anything.

It’s a “me” thing.

I want to have basic dignity and self-respect and no amount of telling me that I should already have them because I’m perfectly fine as I am is going to change that.

I have to become a grownup somehow.

Or I will never be able to forgive myself for living.

More after the break.

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I am a dumbass

Tonight, I was delighted to realize, after crunching the numbers, that I did, in fact, have enough money to order in tonight.

Yay for that.

I was so delighted, in fact, that I completely forgot that our buzzer isn’t working, ergo when the food arrived, I would not be able to let it in.

Which means it is currently sitting outside our building, presumably quite cold by now.

Because I am a dumbass.

Joe and Julian will pick it up for me when they come home. Then directly into the fridge it will go to probably sit there until Monday night because it’s too big a meal to have on a Sunday when I will be going to Denny’s for dinner.

Luckily, it’s just plain lamb curry plus an order of rice so there’s nothing in it that I have to worry about going bad before J&J get home.

Meanwhile, I am eating a PB&J instead of delicious curry because I was too bummed out to make anything else for myself.

Oh well. Whatever. It will all work out fine eventually and it was not all that dumb for me to forget that the god damned buzzer wasn’t working.

Man, I do not update my brain with new information all that easily, do I?

I was excited to be ordering in and my brain just reset to the default (buzzer works) and I did not realize my error until it was too late to cancel my order.

Ah well. I’m good at a lot of things but reality ain’t one of them.

No wonder I prefer to live online and in video games.

Of course, if I didn’t live my life that way and instead had a normal life, I would probably have had to get a lot better at dealing with the real world.

Instead, I am this strange half-formed otherworldly creature who exists primarily in the world of his computer and who can’t really handle the real world at all.

Oh well. At least I’m making progress getting back on to UpWork.

Freelance dollars ho!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, of course, my vid.

I did the lyrics on screen thing this time, and it was an annoying amount of work just to add some fairly meh visual interest to the video.

I think next time I do either a song I wrote or one I sang, I will take the plunge and try to make or find images to go with the lyrics instead.

I mean, yeah, that’s going to be a lot of work too, but at least it will give people interesting things to look at.

And using my AI image generation skills for something a tad more presentable than deviant smut would be quite interesting, though I would have to be sure I didn’t get too sucked in to the process.

It can be quite engrossing.

The real issue is my current inability to work on long term projects. This daily routine of mine certainly keeps me going and makes me at least marginally productive, but it severely limits the scope of what I can achieve and that is starting to bug me.

The REALLY real issue is carving out time to work on stuff outside my usual “working hours” and thus sacrificing more of my precious, precious “gaming time” to do so.

Big frigging deal. Being creative is more fun anyway.

Repeat until believed.

I mean, I know it to be true, but knowing and believing are two very different things.

Knowledge is data. Belief is an emotion. You can know a hell of a lot of things without feeling them at all.

Take it from one who knows.

For example, I have known for my entire life that I am extraordinary. Learned to read at the age of three, never had to study, etc.

But I never felt extraordinary. I just felt weird. Alienated from others.

Not really human, really.

I can very easily understand why some people embrace outlier ideas about them “really” being their fursonas or werewolves or angels or aliens or elves from Avatar or whatever else in the world of media resonates with them in a way that normal mainstream culture never did.

Because alienation hurts, folks. It hurts like hell. And these “other” identities provide a much more satisfying and supportive answer to the question of why you can’t connect with your fellow human beings than the real answer.

Which is that you’re just kinda… broken.

For some reason, society and you did not connect on a very important level and you found yourself feeling like an alien in your own culture and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that makes it so that what works for others doesn’t work for you.

I can point to reasons why I’m broken from my past. Raped as a toddler, no kindergarten, so far ahead of my peers I couldn’t relate to them, and so on.

But regardless of the reason, there was not a place in society for me that I could see and without a place in society you cannot connect with the rest of humanity and thus the humanity inside yourself.

So much of what and who we are is defined and developed by interacting with others that a socially isolated childhood does enormous harm to a developing child.

And the cold cruel truth is that developmental windows do not come back. The harm from my socially isolated childhood will be with me till the day I die.

Like a disability, I can learn to live with it and to a certain extent compensate for it, but it’s still not the same as being normal.

And so I grew up in a very cold and isolated world of my own and could only look in at the warm and vital world the rest of humanity seemed to live in without having any idea of how lucky they were to feel alive like that.

I worry that my current isolation can never truly be breached. I mean, here I am with perfectly lovely friends who love and care about me and yet I feel alone a lot of the time.

Even as I sit here, I feel like I am a million miles away from everybody else and I am so very dead and cold and numb inside that it’s like I am not even part of the human race.

I don’t feel human.

Even though I know I am.

More after the break.

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The sunrise of the soul

That’s what I am trying to pull off as I strain against the ice that holds me down and keeps me from becoming who I am truly meant to be.

And it ain’t this sad little form of mine, I can tell ya that.

I will be so much more.

But right now, I’m still in the egg, waiting to be born. I need to come out of my shell and that means finally facing the world instead of living my entire life with my back turned to reality as I stubbornly remain fixated on my screens.

Screens are not and can never be enough.

But they can feel like enough. Sitting here with all this information and entertainment and interaction at my fingertips did a very good impression of non-isolation in my life for way too long a time.

Thinking about my future, where my life was going, what I wanted to be doing with myself, and so forth and so on was depressing and scary so I didn’t do it.

It is, rather pathetically, that simple. A very easy formula for wasting your entire adult life being buried in video games and the internet so that you never have to face the depressing and terrible reality of your life.

Which is only so depressing and terrible because of your lack of dealing with it, of course. Funny how it works like that.

Obviously the only solution is to wade into the much and deal with things.

But I don’t feel like I can do that alone and I don’t have anyone to do it with.

I’m coming to realize that a lot of my problems in life stem from the limitations of always doing everything alone.

But I don’t know how to work with others. The ship may have sailed on that for me. I might be stuck doing everything myself because my social abortion of a childhood made me too impatient and hostile and suspicious of others to work any other way.

There are worse fates. At least I can do fairly amazing things by myself. That helps.

But I worry that it’s impossible for anyone to truly get close to me.

Because nobody ever has. That’s both my doing and theirs.

A deep animal part of me can only see other people as a threat.

And I hate that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, today’s vid, which is just me yakking about stuff.

Yes, I finally have a smartphone. Huzzah. I will share the number with trusted folk upon request so that you may text me.

I mean what the hell. Text is a large part of what I do all day anyhow.

But like I said before, there will be absolutely no games installed on it, EVER. I don’t want to get drawn back into gaming in bed and absolutely wrecking my sleep.

I will use the thing to listen to podcasts or YouTube vids or whatever and of course I will use it to communicate but that’s it.

My video game free time in bed is precious to me now.

Besides, if I start adding games to it, I will end up doing crosswords all day.

Secondly, holy crap, I just made this :

Turns out the magical folk at Perchance have bestowed another miraculous tool upon the creative landscape, and this one makes COMIC STRIP PANELS. Holy CRAP!

This could be huge, folks. The imgen engine still doesn’t quite handle text right, but it’s pretty damn close, and that means it might be close enough for me to work with.

Hank Watches Television could actually come back! Although this time, I think the farm animals would be terminally online instead.

And because this is Perchance and they are magical. it’s all totally free. That is especially welcome after going through three “free to try” sites that do the same thing but want my money.

Well fuck you. I’m a Perchance fox.

I am going to master this comic making tool and then I will start putting out some sort of webcomic, possibly on a daily basis.

Having to make it a panel at a time is a bitch, so expect me to be exploring the world of single panel comics for a while.

But holy batshit, Fatman. COMICS.

Next up we have the most wholesome, heart-melting, life-affirming video ever.

Damn I wish I could embed Bluesky videos!

Anyhow, here it is.

Is that not the greatest dog ever? They’re helping the baby walk! Nobody taught them to do that. They figured it out on their own and all because all mammals instinctively are gentle with children and do what they can to help them.

And it doesn’t matter that we’re different species. Clearly all mammals are programmed to recognize children of all species, and instinctively care for them.

And if that doesn’t warm your heart, you are god damned dead.

What else, Oh right, the thing I set out to talk about.

When doing Therapy Thursday today, the issue of my need for a very particular kind of control came up and something crystallized for me.

I love it when things do that.

I realized that it’s as though at some point, my overweaning intellect took total control of my psyche and my soul and declared that from that point on, all my impulses, instincts, motivations, drives, and other motive factors has to go through it for approval.

And it doesn’t approve much.

What’s worse is that this created a system where all those motive factors were treated like alien impulses trying to take me “out of control”.

And that’s just so damned wrong.

These are the mechanics of why I find it so hard to get motivated to do things. On some primal level, my stupid brain attacks and destroys urges to do things because it’s stuck in “freeze and hide” mode and thinks that impulses will get me “caught”.

The only safety is in stasis!

What a terrible way to live.

More after the break.

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Permanent flight or freeze

Otherwise known as “getting stuck in run and hide mode”.

Somehow, I need to deep down into the deepest levels of my psyche and convinced that scared little animal of mine that everything is safe now.

That’s nothing you patient readers haven’t heard before, of course.

But I feel like I have a better understanding of exactly what the stakes are and what the problem is now. Like it’s the same problem but now I see it more clearly than before.

And I know I will be able to bring more mental weight to bear on the problem now. I was talking with Doc Costin today about feeling like I am straining against my confinement and how my growing discontent and restlessness, while unpleasant, will be key in marshalling enough spiritual force to finally break these chains.

They’ll break when I don’t need them any more, I know, annoying jedi master.

Still, I feel like I am straining against myself now. Like my project to push energy deep down into the core of my mind is really picking up steam and I am melting all that frozen feeling inside me at an unprecedented rate.

And occasionally, little shoots of hope and motivation push up through the ice. They don’t last very long but they are there. The future in which I do the things I feel like doing because I feel like doing them seems closer than ever.

It’s just a matter of dismantling this cruel and irrational empire of ice I have been living in so that I can let my feelings flow and change in a natural way instead of keeping everything bound in ice like a stranded freighter deep inside me.

Those times when I manage to let out some tears or some anger have shown me that it is that emotional ebb and flow that brings mental health for me. My feelings have to flow like blood through veins in order for my mind to balance itself and stay “clean”, and if that means that on some obscure level I am “out of control”, so be it.

Better anarchic happiness than inanely ordered misery every single god damn day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I’d really wanted to, I probably could have come up with another rant.

And don’t get me wrong. I’m very glad that some people found my ranting amusing and/or informative and/or illuminating.

But I don’t want to be “that angry guy” who builds his persona around ranting. That’s way too restrictive. And proscriptive – what if I’m just not angry that day?

Nah, I will continue to have the one unifying thing about my content be me. You either like my stuff and my style and my wit and my personality and so on or you don’t.

I do this to express myself. That is the primary mission of both the blog and the videos. I am a high strung creative type who needs to express his inner energies in order to be anywhere in the same neighborhood as sanity.

Who knows, maybe one day I will discover the perfect way to express all of my copious creative juices in one glorious endeavor and actually be able to have some time of actual lucid mental health at the end of the day,

Oh right, the video. Here it is.

I kinda had that back when I was doing my Million Word Challenge and was writing around 1,667 words a day,

There were days in there where I would go do stuff with Le Gang after a day of writing and be a way more relaxed and groovy version of myself.

More or less the version of me I have always wanted to be. Relaxed, confident, positive, expansive, witty, all very very Sagittarius.

But all very groovy and harmonious like a Taurus like me desires.

What can I say, I am a complicated dude with a lot of elements in his chart which quite frankly do not fit together at all.

Back to the vid. It took a major act of will to resist the urge to put the lyrics on screen in that vid like I usually do.

But that’s one hell of a lot of work and by the time I had the MP3 of the song done it was already 3:15 pm so I decided I would resist the urge this once and just put it out there with the vinyl loop as a background and see how that worked out.

Well I still have the urge to put the damned lyrics on the screen. And relatedly, I have the urge to tell myself that if I want to do a song I need to do it before it becomes time to make the video of the day.

That probably won’t happen. I am too much of a slave to routine right now to subtract from my oh so precious gaming time in order to do something creative spontaneously.

Even though somes I get really bored in the morning and don’t feel like playing a video game, I want to do something more.

One day, that irrepressible energy will break through and force me to do more with my life because the alternative will be to go completely insane.

Until then I will trudge along like usual, I guess.

That same old death march to the grave, no detours, no side trips, no looking at the scenery too much, just moving forever inwards until one day time and obesity fbnally catch up with me and I just plain drop dead.

That would be nice. Skip the whole slowly dying while fulla of tubes eking out my last in total terror and misery thing.

Just, “Well, I guess that’s all for this life. I’ll never talk to you nice people again. Bye!”

And then I just keel over and fall apart.

More after the break.

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Such wanton profligacy!

I ordered in tonight. And I am probably going to do it again on Saturday night.

Truly, I am a dissolute spendthrift with nary a thought for all that is good and decent!

Seriously, though, I had to crunch the numbers today to figure this out and even with my crunchiest numbers it’s gonna be close.

Basically, to stay within my means, both meals must be less than $25.

Tonight’s Donair Dude repast was $24.47.

Not bad considering that I got a veggie samosa for an appetizer and a massive order of fries smothered in lamb donair meat and sauce for my main.

I could have gotten a donair wrap instead, or poutine for a few bucks more, but this is what I was in the mood for.

Fries, donair sauce, and MEAT.

I like having the occasional especially carnivorous meal. Not only does it let me assure myself that I am, indeed, getting enough vitamin B12, but there is a certain atavistic satisfaction to having a belly full of meat.

Perhaps some hidden evolutionary lever is telling me I’m a good hunter.

Today’s been good. I am more or less back to my baseline of misery. My nose is still running but that’s a seasonal allergies thing.

But otherwise, I feel fine. Even better since Julian noticed that the thermostat in my room was set to “medium”.

No wonder it felt like it was super hot out when it was only 25 degrees! D’oh.

Oh well, I am not a sensible person and so while maybe I “should” have thought of that when it seemed weirdly hot in my room, I didn’t, and odds are I wouldn’t.

At least not for a while. It might take a long time for it to occur to me.

I just have to take a few deep breaths and remind myself that I am, in fact, a genius, and we genii often have trouble with the here and now realities of life.

For the millionth time : I need an assistant. Someone to cope with things for me so all I have to do is make good art and they take care of the rest.

I guess that’s what all us dreamers want, whatever our speciality. Someone to watch over us as we live in the space between our ears.

Maybe some day I will have that. When I can pay for it.

Till then I will muddle through like always.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s all Robin Williams’ fault!

Well, not really.

I talk about it here :

To be clear, I wish I could be a more positive person. And maybe I will be when I finish venting my bile and ridding myself of this emotional excess cargo.

I’m done with letting this stuff out at a slow trickle or even a steady stream.

I want to vent on an industrial scale so I can get this shit DONE.

G’won! Giddout! Amscray! All you suppressed emotions have been freeloading off my precious mental resources for way too long, and now your ass is being evicted.

Whatever that takes.

And that includes violating my usual fluffy cute and harmless persona for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I still strive to be that way.

But I won’t be able to truly be Fruvous until I shed a lot of ugly emotional weight and that means being pissed off a whole bunch.

My backlog of unexpressed rage stretches for miles.

But all of that is not the true reason I feel cranky today, or at least, not all of it.

Because I am also sick. It’s my usual syndrome. I feel drained, and my muscles feel like they are just hanging off of me. Everything I do takes considerably more effort than usual both due to the energy drain and my muscles being really stiff. My nose is running, of course, and occasionally that makes me cough.

Blah blah BLAH. All the usual bullshit. None of it is what I would call severe, although the muscle stiffness is really a bitch when it comes time to use the bathroom, but they were enough for me to decide not to do Wound Care and exercise at the Kinsmen Center today, damn it.

But this syndrome of mine is quite possibly viral, something my weak immune system can’t quite seem to finish off, so I am not going to expose sick people at the CHAC to it, let alone the old folks at the CHAC.

Is it possible have just like a mild case of long COVID?

I don’t think it’s dehydration alone this time as I have been hydrating aggressively and while that has eased the muscle stiffness somewhat and I don’t feel nearly as bleh as I did this morning, but I am still pretty sick.

Oh wait, I have naproxen. Time for one of those.

Basically, overall, I feel very poisoned and toxic and bleh. Like I should leave a trail of slime wherever I go, or maybe leave glow in the dark footprints.

And apparently, this is just something my body has to go through periodically. And I use that term loosely because it’s not like it happens at regular intervals.

That would imply mercy.

If it’s not the produce of an inimical microorganism, then I dunno. I can’t imagine anything in the body that could malfunction in a way that causes that particular constellation of symptoms all at once now and then.

Possibly some obscure gland ain’t doing its job.

Well at least I finished my “Because… ” trilogy. And who knows, maybe there will be more of those in the future as I rummage around in my emotional attic and find more stuff I have to throw out.

And for an emotionally stunted writer like me, there’s only one way to express my emotions and that’s by writing (or otherwise expressing) them.

And that’s where you fine folk come in. Without someone to receive, I can’t send, so thank you, my loyal fans, for making this whole thing possible.

I literally could not do it without you.

More after the break.

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Any other things?

Well I returned that “Tactical Breach Wizards” game when I realized that there was no circumstance in which I could imagine playing it again.

So I might as well get my money back and get something else.

Then I bought a game called Geneforce 1 – Mutagen based solely on the fact that my good buddy Maelkoth is a huge fan and I have to say, I’m enjoying the game so far, but um, not unreservedly.

Because the concept is great. You’re a wizard who summons creatures to fight for you.

There’s two other character classes, but when summoning critter like that is an option, I am going for it.

I mean, who wants to be a fighter in a game like that? Not me.

And so far the plot is interesting, the writing is good, the world seems well fleshed out, but there’s one little problem.

The game looks like this :

And I get that it’s a remake of a much older game and a lot of people are nostalgic for that kind of “retro” gaming, but I am old enough to remember when that’s just what games looked like so in my mind it doesn’t look “retro and cool”, it looks “old and crappy” and I find that depressing.

So I might not keep the game. I dunno. I feel like returning an otherwise great game for purely aesthetic reasons would be shallow of me but I suppose if playing the game depresses me, that is reason enough.

I’m just glad Steam isn’t a person because they would be getting SO sick of my buying and returning things by now.

I am still playing Darkest Dungeon a fair bit. It’s wild how the devs who made the game managed to make something so enjoyable to play out of such basic ingredients.

Your characters are basically animated paper cutouts. The missions you go on are procedurally generated (random). There’s only like three location types, so three kinds of backgrounds and critters. You spend all your time in either a room or a corridor between rooms. Everything about it is very basic.

And yet, somehow, I love playing it. I love the Edgar Allen Poe-esque dramatic horror of it all, I love the many character classes for your heroes, I love the battle system, the voice acting for our macabre narrator is superb, and the writing is great at conveying the kind of dark and grim atmosphere on which the game relies.

Apparently there’s a sequel but it’s nothing like the original, presumably because this time they had an actual budget.

Still, it shows that I can find a game and settle on it sometimes.

I’m not a total flake!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.