To be honest, I could have spent all afternoon doing it. It was an exercise of will to stop myself because I was having so much fun.

Here’s the result :

I love getting to be funny with people.

Anyhoo, like the last time, this compilation of clips was the result of me prowling around my backup of my HD from a very long time ago, back when the Earth was bright and new and the wine flowed like water and Donald Trump was just some guy.

And I look fresh and new too. Partly because back then we lived next to a mini-mall with a barbershop in it and thus my hair was actually kempt for once.

But also because I was younger and cuter and more energetic.

And I had no idea that by eating like a fucking idiot despite my diabetes I was wrecking the future for myself.

Or rather, intellectually I knew that I shouldn’t be eating like that but because it didn’t feel like it was hurting me at that time, I ignored it.

Even when I got blood sugar result that stated I might as well have cold maple syrup in my veins and my legs were being devoured by cellulitis and I was still like, oh well, shit happens, thanks for changing the bandages on my ENORMOUS WOUNDS that I KEEP PICKING AT, nice nurse ladies.

I am so ashamed of how I was back then. And what a nightmare that must have been for my poor roommates.

I’m so sorry, guys. Knowing me can be real gross and weird sometimes, I know. Especially with my warm sunny personality telling such a different story then my often shockingly terrible life circumstances.

What can I say? I’m broken.

Anyhow, another thing our little clip trip above reminded me of was that I am a genuinely cute, funny, charming, wacky guy.

There’s nobody out there quite like me. I’m a bright and shiny original and I have a surprisingly large amount of screen presence for someone so shy and I could totally make a YouTube star of myself by personality alone.

All that AND a genius level IQ AND creative talent out the wazoo?

It’s really too much. But then again… so am I!

I still need to be reminded of all that a lot because while my self esteem is stronger than it’s ever been right now, there’s still a lot of darkness and negativity inside me and these little daily ego trips of mine are my attempt to erase that shit, drive it out, send it off to oblivion where it belongs.

Because I am freaking amazing.

And I am still making the transition out of the darkness and into the light. I’m getting over being afraid to even be alive, seeing as I was never supposed to be, and I still need encouragement to live out loud, take up space, draw attention to myself, demand my fair share of things, and be ready to fight for my right to be.

Against who? My inner demons, mostly.

If there was an actual person outside of me attacking me it would be a lot more fun.

Like I was telling Doctor Costin during Therapy Thursday today, I have gone largely unopposed in life. Nobody ever told me I wouldn’t amount to anything or told me I wasn’t talented or otherwise forced me to fight back against them.

I mean, how far could I go with nobody to spite?

Only now do I feel ambition growing within me and with it the desire to prove myself to the world and show everybody just how freaking awesome I am.

And get myself some god damned money! And respect!

Especially for myself.

More after the break.

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To finally level up

Like I told Doc Costin on the phone today, getting a job would let me finally become an adult. A real, honest to goodness grownup.

And that would truly be like evolving into a higher life form for me. The good it would do my self-worth and confidence is inestimable. I honestly think that if I secured solid employment, this whole nasty thirty years of nullity would disappear behind me like fog and I would at very, very long last finally begin my life, and I would be happy.

Or at least a more respectable form of sad.

So why don’t you devote every waking hour to making that happen?

Because it’s not that simple. Not for me, anyhow.

Something being highly desirable does not automatically come with the motivation to make it happen. As it stands, I am still living my life the bad old way, spending my time hiding from the world in video games, blogging, making videos, et al.

But even that has improved. At least when I spend hours on BlueSky, I am, in fact, in communication with other human beings, albeit through the safe medium of text.

I write tons of comments there, as well as on YouTube. So even on that level I am not entirely cloaked any more.

And sometimes people even comment on my YouTube videos these days.

And those people can actually see me!

Maybe in the long term, I could even do the ultimate activity for shut-ins : live streaming! Me and an audience, together at last, in realtime.

I am a little worried about overwhelm on that one, though. I hope people would understand if a creaky old Gen X fart like me can’t keep up with the comments.

But I could see having a lot of fun hanging out, answering questions, talking about whatever is in my mind, and just soaking up the attention in general.

What can I say… I may be a fox but I’m still a ham.

And deep inside I am still that little kid trying to get people to pay attention to him. Fewer things could bring me more joy than making an audience laugh and feel good.

As long as they then fuck off, because baby, I’m gonna crash.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Today, I managed to squeeze an entire minute of French out of my ancient brain!

Most of which was just me staring blankly at the camera while trying to cudgel another bit of French out of my long suffering grey matter.

It was very hard for me to do. But also very fun. And that is definitely worth noting.,

I could learn a lot from these things where I jump in with both feet and get in way over my head doing something that’s way harder than I thought it would be.

Why be so scared of that? I didn’t get overwhelmed. I didn’t end up helpless. I didn’t get devoured by the task and end up with some angry person yelling at me for it.

I got it done. Like I always do. And I had fun doing it.

And the difficulty was a big part of that fun. It was like fighting a tough monster in a video game. One that is within your capabilities but only if you really stretch yourself and give it your all.

I need more of that in my life.

It exercises a part of me that doesn’t get much release in my life. I am not sure exactly what to call it so I will fall back on “grit”. It’s that quality which responds to challenge by rising to it instead of just trying to escape it.

And I need challenge in my life. I need things which let me stretch my mental muscles and really grit my teeth and put my shoulder to the wheel and PUSH.

I have lacked challenge for my entire life. School was way too easy for me. I barely even tried and didn’t take it seriously at all.

How could I? It was all so simple!

And one of the many things that keeps me so addicted to video games is that they provide that sense of challenge. There’s evil to fight and goals to achieve and a story to participate in and that gives me the semblance of actually getting things done.

Except, of course, that none of it fucking matters.

It keeps me busy and entertained but it doesn’t really make me happy. It just distracts me from how sad I am and how unsuitable and unsatisfying a life I lead.

And it’s not enough. Not any more. So far I still have the electric teat in my mouth way too much but I am weaning myself off that slowly and learning to find the fun in things that my actually go somewhere.

Like, say, job hunting. Or participating in writing contests. Or sending spec scripts out to various gatekeepers. Or whatever else I can find that might use my many talents.

Obviously I would be a lot happier if I had stuff to do. Fun stuff that challenges me to work hard and be productive because they will result in money.

Or at least get me some freaking comments. Something. Anything. Scream at me if you want to, I just need validation dammit.

Video games can’t give you that. No matter how well (or poorly) I do in a game, it’s still just mental masturbation. There’s still nobody to see it but me. I’m still not getting anything out of it except superficial relief.

What a waste of a life!

But I’m workin’ on it. Right now I am still hiding in the world of video games from the big bad world out there but I am determined to make more of myself than that.

And that means leaving my cramped and clammy comfort zone and spending time online away from the video games and the YouTube and the BlueSky and doing stuff that might actually lead to something good.

Or at least to something new.

God, do I need new things in my life.

More after the break.

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Coin of the realm

So I am sitting on a dragon’s hoard of wealth. My only problem is one of, shall we say, basic currency conversation.

How do I spin intelligence and talent into gold?

On the face of it, it seems eminently possible. Lots of people are out there in various creative and thought-work fields making money with their gifts. On paper, at least, there’s nothing keeping me from joining them.

In practice, well, there’s hurdles.

Being 52 with no job experience is one of them. That’s how I know that traditional employment is not for me. No hiring manager will take a chance on someone like me.

Not when there’s a plethora of normal human beings to choose from.

I mean face it, a life like mine is tres bizarre. Most people at least spend their twenties looking for work and taking whatever they can get.

Not me. I lived off the kindness of my friends, stayed hidden from the world, made no waves, and lived comfortably (but toxically) under the radar for 30 fucking years.

The only upgrade I ever got was when I went on welfare way back in 1999. Then, at least, I became the province’s problem, not my friends’.

But anyhow, fuck traditional employment. I’m too cool for that shit anyway.

And the Internet has plenty of ways to get around that requirement anyhow. No, my real problem is, of course, my health.

Both mental and physical, but it’s mostly the mental health problems holding me back. One might even call them spiritual health issues.

I am sick in spirit. But I am getting better.

At this point in my life, I feel like I am fumbling around in the dark looking for the little string to pull to make the light turn on.

There’s still a lot of radioactive darkness in me and that needs to be cleaned out before my soul can truly fly up to where it belongs.

For now, I am still filled with basic animal fear of that big world out there and the idea of going out into the hubbub of the real, workaday world scares the life out of me.

But I am working hard and getting stronger.

And soon, whether it’s on sheer chutzpah or a massive ego trip, I will emerge.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In today’s vid, I go on a bit about Dumb Donnie’s new toy plane.

I really want the whole world to start calling him Dumb Donnie. I want it to become so pervasive that he can’t help hearing about it. Nothing in this world would enrage him more than everybody calling him stupid.

Because he is stupid. Very, very stupid. He is senile and demented and had regressed into his early childhood and reminding him of this fact would drive him insane.

Nothing would bother a Gemini like him more than being called stupid.

In fact, in my ideal fantasy world, I’d get together a bunch of tough guy mobster actors with New Jersey accents to sit around and say, “What’s Dumb Donnie up to today?” and then laugh at news about Trump and what a fuckin’ idiot he is.

We need to destroy people’s ability to respect him. He doesn’t care if you don’t like him, but he will care if people start looking down on him with pity and contempt and start calling him a loser and a wimp.

That would get under his very thin skin real good. 🙂

And that could have bad consequences, granted, but as long as his staffers don’t let him nuke the New York Times or send ICE after Stephen Colbert, it will work out for the best because it will goad him into making big mistakes.

The kind that the courts have no trouble handling. Blatant and unambiguous crimes, for instance, that everybody sees.

And most importantly, the kind that shock and offend his base.

It’s happening with the plane right now. Prominent right wing “thought leaders” are saying things like, “I would take a bullet for Trump but… this plane thing… ”

I must admit, I am curious about the plane itself. It sounds rad, in a “right before the Empire fell” kind of way.

Maybe once Trump and his ilk are expunged from the White House, we can repurpose it to bring in refugees and immigrants from all over the world.

That would be apropos, don’t you think?

Anyhow, back to the point. He is systematically alienating his supporters. They are running out of the necessary mental elasticity required to keep excusing the inexcusable and accepting the unacceptable.

His strategy of saturation bombing the media with shocking stories about him might just be backfiring in a really spectacular way. He’s pissing in the pool way faster than his self appointed filter fish can handle. He’s going to end up killing them.

And without right wing media, his empire will fall apart rapidly. He’s entirely dependent on them to spin his actions in just the right way, and without that, his base would see him for what he really is.

It’s happening already. His popularity just keeps going down. I am waiting for it to get below 33 percent so we can say that less than a third of the people support him.

But right now, he doesn’t have a reason to care. Until people in power (Republicans) are willing to stand up to him, his approval could be at zero and he wouldn’t care.

It’s possible Congress will turn against him. It would only take a relatively small number of Republican defectors (or abstainers) for impeachment to pass. And like I said in the vid, that could make some ambitious Republicans in the House and the Senate into instant massive international heroes no matter how much Trump screams and cries and threatens to “primary” them.

Fuck him. He’s a toothless tiger. He is way overdue to be overtaken by a younger, smarter, more agile rival.

Go for it, ambitious Repubs!

More after the break.

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What’s up with that rage?

I have realized that I told you about my recent rage explosion in response to someone’s stupid fucking advice but I forgot to go into what the fuck is up with that.

It seems kind of important.

This is far from the first time I’ve had a major meltdown like that, and they’ve all been in response to someone’s well-meaning advice or something like that.

Like when I joined that online depression community and saw all the people giving generic encouragement to one another and this roaring demon I did not recognize came screaming out of me and wanted to grab these people by the throat and scream into their faces and like, what the hell, man?

It’s clearly disproportionate to the trigger. I would never say these people deserved the bile-storm I unleashed just because they accidentally set it off.

But clearly when their words enter my mind space and attempt to address my issues, their utter failure to do so really hits me where it hurts.

It’s like I tried to open up to receive help and got febrile inanity instead, and all my hidden rage and bitterness came pouring out of the opening.

I am definitely angry at a world that can’t help me. A world that can’t handle me. Even mental health professionals like Doctor Costin can’t handle the real, uncensored, uninhibited me. Even with him, I have to restrain myself enormously.

And I guess that’s kind of my story. I’ve spent my life feeling like a giant among pygmies and having to force myself into spaces far too small for me just to be able to get along in a world very much not made for me.

And its hard for me to imagine that changing. Were I to unbottle myself, I might feel a better but I would cope a lot worse. The best scenario I can foresee is that I go off someplace remote where I can be batshit crazy without hurting anybody.

Because how does one truly deal with being exponentially more intelligent, more creative, more powerful, and just plain more than everyone else?

It seems impossible. I can’t conceive of a self that could contain that kind of knowledge. There are no blueprints and no role models for someone like that.

Even mega-intelligent supervillain types are still basically just magicians and offer no insight as to any healthy way to deal with having a mind like mine.

So some of that shitstorm of rage and bitterness definitely comes from that.

And the world just failing me in general. A family that didn’t want me around, teachers that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep me from being bullied, classmates who hurt me for what seemed like no reason at the time. school administrators who were as flabbergasted and useless as everyone else.

There’s never been anyone who was there for me when I needed them. And that just made me withdraw from the world even harder.

What else can I do? When an animal cannot escape their pain they despair.

And I’ve known little else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here we are again : Fru feels sick.

And as usual, I don’t really know how seriously to take it. So all I can do is monitor the situation and wait and see what happens.

Man my life is weird sometimes.

Did my first physiotherapy appointment earlier today. It went fine. A nice lady named Ekta asked me some standard questions about my health and then we did the usual “do this, then do this with me pushing in the opposite direction” testing.

She also gave me the standard seated exercises to do. “Marching” in the air, up on my toes for five seconds then up on my heel for five seconds. and the always faintly amusing “hold you foot up and try to draw letters of the alphabet with your toe”.

I got those exercises from my case worker before but I kind of ignored them out of my usual mixture of timidity and laziness.

This time, it’s from a real deal physiotherapist so I know that there’s no chance that doing them can hurt me, and so it’s just a matter of summoning the necessary wherewithal to forge a new habit.

Luckily they are the sort of thing I can do while sitting here at Mister Computer, so that at least minimizes the disruption to my life.

I hope to turn them into a nervous habit. A productive way to fidget. Ekta says I should repeat each of them ten times and no more often than once every two or three hours, so I can’t fidget them too often, but if I play my cards right, I can turn these little exercises into a treat that I look forward to every day.

Work doesn’t always have to be work. It can be a lot like play. Spoonful of sugar style.

Mary Poppins knows a thing or two.

Certainly all forms of exercise can, with a little mental reframing, be seen as fun as long as nobody is actually forcing you to do them. And they can also be seen as a form of relaxation because they get the tension out of your muscles.

And in general dissipate excess nervous energy.

Being a depressed sluggard only makes things worse for yourself. This is, of course, the exact thing that irritating perky people are always telling us but it takes a fair bit of work on yourself before you can accept that kind of truth.

You have to fight your way through depression’s lies.

I had another rage and bitterness explosion recently. I was watching some therapist talking about the neurology of depression on YouTube and it was all very good stuff but then we came to the “advice” on how to exit the negative brain state of depression and it was all the usual chirpy bullshit about journaling and affirmations and that one word that always sets me off like a Roman candle : gratitude.

So I went off on this poor lady in the comments. Just spewed all my Gen X depressive venom into my comment telling her how her advice was worse than useless and was like a slap in the face to someone like me and how it made me want to puke.

Hey, at least I stopped myself from saying I wanted to throw up in her face.

To be honest, she was no worse than a million other idiots telling me the way out of my depression is to do things my depression keeps me from doing.

Which of course only makes me feel worse. It’s like a very elaborate way to tell me I’m fucked. Oh, so sorry, did we give you a moment of hope? Well FUCK THAT.

And yes, I know that’s the depression talking, for the most part, But what always blows me away about these experiences is how they bring out this H-bomb of bitterness and rage in me that most of the time I have no idea is there.

I assume that these experiences are ultimate quite cathartic for me.

But I would be better off venting my bile in a less antisocial fashion.

But what the hell. I got to be me.

More after the break.

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The cutest damn thing

Apparently I left a comment on this video a year ago.

I do not remember it at all.

Which is going to seem especially odd once you’ve seen it.

How could I have forgotten something so incredibly wonderful?

The look on the little deer boy’s face as he holds up the cookie for Santa is so heartwarming it could melt a dozen Grinches.

The whole thing makes me want to hug it. It’s just so very me.

Who’s the best boy ever? YOU ARE!

---

The predictable update

I feel better now.

Not entirely better but I feel a lot better than I did earlier today. Turns out that this time, the magic elixir wasn’t water but food.

Eating makes you feel better. How very,,, counterintuitive.

I still feel vaguely ill but I don’t feel like my life force is ebbing away any more, and that’s kind of a plus. I probably just need more hydration and food.

I really wish my body has a diagnostics panel so I could tell, at a glance, what my various levels of important things are and thus be able to fix my ills efficiently.

“Oh, I see. My hydration level is in the red and my blood sugar’s trending downward. Time for a glass of refreshing orange juice. ”

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Instead, I have to make my best guess as to why I am feeling crappy.

The solution would be to develop a solid health routine. If you have a routine that supplies all your bodily essentials at a rate commensurate with their rate of use then you will probably stay hale and hearty all the live long day.

Or at the very least you don’t go thinking you have the plague when you just need to EAT. To pick a random example.

Mental note, hydrate AND eat before hitting the panic button.

Or well… I took a Xanax before going to physio, so… lack of panic button.

You get the idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Even though right now, we’re in Taurus.

But you get the idea.

If not, here’s a handy vid to guide you!

There are plenty of compilations of right wing media meltdowns over good ol’ Leo out there, but I won’t post one here because I’m too lazy to go find one.

But also because that seems a little too ill-spirited. Don’t get me wrong, I am a-tingle with joy at the panic and despair displayed by the forces of evil at this news, but I guess I am too Canadian to enjoy it too directly.

Turns out I have a schadenfreude limit. Who knew?

But that brings up an interesting subject, namely just how idealistic and “pure” am I? I have been doing a lot of defending Trump voters from baseless left wing bigotry lately, so obviously I am fairly far down the messiah path in my insistence in living by my ideals no matter the social reality I find myself in.

I will live by my beliefs no matter what. I will do so pragmatically and realistically because that’s my nature and because that’s how you get things done in the real world, but I still hold to very high ideals of compassion, understanding, and empathy.

And yet, I feel no guilt at all when I revel in the suffering of those I deem politically execrable. in general, I have never felt any need to pretend to be above that kind of thing, much to the occasional shock of my Aquarius mother.

I’ve always been a good deal more cynical and hot-tempered than her.

Than a lot of people, really. When I get into full on impassioned rant mode, most of my fellow Canadians, even those who agreed with every word I say and those who know me and love me and know that I’m a harmless floof most of the time, will want to take a few steps back from me.

Well, I am pretty big, after all. I just hide it by being a sweetie most of the time.

But lately I have been pondering my impassioned nature and how it has always made me stick out somewhat from my fellow Canadians and I have concluded that it must be my French blood.

I’m half Acadian, after all, and while I was raised Anglo, more or less, I do still have a Gallic streak in my genome and maybe that contributes to my being somewhat more emotive than is usual for Anglo culture.

Or maybe that’s too essentialist and it’s really just that I am kind of insane. I dunno.

But my hidden passionate nature makes me wonder about that French blood and whether it explains why so many top Canadian politicians are from Quebec because their culture allows for the kind of passion and drive that makes for great oratory, even if it just gets you dirty looks at the bar from people trying to watch the game.

Maybe you need to have a fire inside you that lights you up when you speak about what you believe in order to be charismatic in the political sense.

I keep telling myself that I should try to make that kind of video. Me in full on inspiration mode, expressing my beliefs with all my passion and articulacy and maybe actually making some kind of impression on the world.

So far, I’ve been too much of a wimp to do it. I know that such a move would not only mean entering a state of physical activation that I might hurt myself, or worse, say something really regrettable, but it could also mean crossing a line into a world of engagement that the sick part of me still fears.

I am still scared to leave my grotty grotto in case the big bad world out there snatches me up and I can never go run and hide again.

It’s a character flaw flaw that runs very deep, this need to be able to escape at a moment’s notice at all times.

I could call it cowardice but it’s more than that. There is a reason why I am so scared to be stuck in the real world and until I figure out what that is, I am going to keep refusing to stray very far from my tiny little comfort zone.

And I want out.

More after the break.

The raw life

I feel pretty ragged and raw a lot lately.

Like my soul has frostbite. That would track giving how much I have been talking about thawing out for a long time.

It’s not frostbite. It’s freezer burn.

Either way, it’s something that is always there lately. And it’s a major contributor to why I feel scared and desperate sometimes.

Life hurts. That sucks.

But I really don’t mind that much. To drag out an oft used metaphor, it’s like when your hand or foot is waking up after having fallen asleep.

Yeah it’s gonna hurt. Possibly a lot. But you don’t mind because you know that the pain means you’re on the way to feeling a lot better and most importantly you’re going to get your frigging hand or foot back.

There are definitely times when feeling pain beats feeling nothing, and I feel like I am in one of those times right now.

I definitely feel like I am on my way to something really big. Some kind of explosive liberation that will blast away all the ice and snow and dirt and filth and rust and decay that have accumulated inside me over the years and leave me open, exposed, and free, and ready to actually be a part of the world for once.

I just need to overcome the rest of that old fear of the outside world and convince myself that going out to play with the other kids can turn out really great, actually, and that everything I need to heal myself and feel whole again is out there waiting for me, and that there’s no predators waiting to destroy me the moment I let my guard down.

Yeah that means that I have been hiding for no good reason for a very long time. And there is nothing I can do the change that. The past has passed.

But I can do everything possible to stop doing it.

The past has passed but the future is not yet written.

And I am going to change the fucking script.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A.. slide show, if you will.

Like this one!

It was fun making one of those after all these decades. The last time I made a slideshow, we still lived back at Francis and One Road in the apartment we affectionately nicknamed “nerdvana”.

Ah, those were the days. Bigger apartment, more roomies, more energy, more excitement about life.

Also more depression, vastly worse health due to much, much worse diet (so much sugar and carbs), more health problems (like flesh eating infections) and in general life was, despite superficialities, a lot worse.

I’ve come a long way since then, even if it doesn’t always show.

I still remember being scared to walk along One Road because it’s a very busy street and it would be far too easy to, in a moment of weakness, walk into the traffic and end myself then and there.

I’m sure that’s part of why I started being afraid of heights, too.

I don’t worry about that sort of thing much any more. The void still calls to me every now and then but I know I will never listen.

Life is too much fun for me to want to leave the party early. And it’s only getting better. As I thaw out from the long Paxil winter that had me frozen in place for so long, I can feel myself reconnecting to those primal life forces that have lain dormant like roses in winter for all these years.

Oh, so many years.

Not that thawing out is easy. At times I feel like a glacier heaving and trembling as it melts, falling apart as it births its burden of ancient woes.

And I have to keep reminding myself that all that ice inside me is not a part of me. It’s merely the detritus of a dying disease taking its sweet time to pass out of me like toxins being filtered out by dialysis and as it goes out, health and vitality come in, and I open up inside a little bit more, and more health air and sunshine gets in, and the closer I get to being a true blue functional grownup.

Till them, I’m just this… thing. An odd, lumpen creature in the process of metamorphing from a far too aged larval form into something that might actually be viable in the world.

I used to think that could never happen. That things could only ever get worse for me and that I was going to have to, at some point, decide for myself when there was too little to look forward to for me to even bother living any more.

But I’m too stubborn to give up now. I am determined to spite the darkness that haunts me and push these god damned wet blankets off of me and rise up to face the world and let it see just what it’s been missing for oh so long.

Because I am fucking amazing. If I can get my ducks sufficiently aligned and my poop sufficiently grouped, I can show the world what a wild and wily wonder I am and make a very large splash in the world.

I just have to complete the process of convincing myself that it is safe to emerge from my own shadow into the warming light of day and that the resulting increase in stimulation will not, in fact, shatter my mind into a million pieces.

Just maybe knock some more of that god damned ice off of me.

Anything the light can kill is something I am far better off without.

More after the break.

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A soft landing

After getting some of my harshness out with Part 1’s foray into poetry in paragraphs, I feel somewhat better now.

Like I said recently, the bottom of my cycle is where I deliver my payload of negativity before heading back out of range of the enemy’s anti aircraft guns.

I may have taken that metaphor too far. Even for me.

The fact that I was able to get myself some pizza has improved my mood a fair bit. I’d gone this whole month so far without being able to order in and it was really starting to bum me out.

Our little pleasures are so important to our sense of well-being.

But tonight I remembered that I had “points” in Pizza Hut’s reward system, so I checked on their website and sure enough, I had just enough for a medium two topping pizza.

Huzzah! I got myself my classic, sausage and pineapple, otherwise known as the Fruvous Hawaiian because I don’t like ham.

So maybe it’s a Fijian, or something.

I’m making it through this five week month business okay. The lack of those little pleasures of ordering in has been a drag, as has been knowing my budget has remarkably little wiggle room in it.

I could only get tonight’s pizza because I very carefully checked my finances to make sure I could spare the $8 it was going to cost me.

The “points” don’t cover the delivery cost or tip, you see.

And Pizza’s Hut’s cute little trick is to have all these great deals on their website to get you excited then at the end they hit you with the $7 delivery fee at the end.

It ends up being more or less exactly what you would pay if you went through DoorDash, but DoorDash doesn’t give you points, so I go through the website.

Plus I have to go through the website if I need to pay cash, DoorDash only takes payment via credit card.

It’s funny how the tinfoil hat brigade thought that we’d all need a “mark of the beast” chip implanted to buy things by now when it turns out credit cards do the job fine without the need for surgery at all.

To the point where I go through the hassle of buying a Visa gift card type thing every month just so I can participate in the modern economy.

Fingers crossed, they haven’t stopped accepting cash in person yet.

But I have my beady little Gen X eye on them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s that time again.

Time for my usual hand wringing and agonizing as I figure out what I want.

What I really want is for my frigging keyboard to show up. Amazon says it has till 5:15 pm and right now it’s 4:28 pm so… tick tock, Amazon!

Their tracker says it’s two stops away. But it’s been saying that for 15 minutes.

Clearly, we have a hostage situation on our hands. Possibly armed.

Anyhow, back to typing painfully slowly about my birthday.

It’s sad that I have this strange inability to connect with my own desires. To me it suggests a deeply wounded and withdrawn soul, and well…yup.

That’s what it is alright.

Like I said in the vid, the things I want tend to be wildly impractical. And not just due to being unreasonably expensive.

Also sometimes due to not being within anyone’s power to give.

It’s not like someone can gift wrap a boyfriend and a job for me.

Ergo, I am trying really hard to think of reasonably priced things that would make my life easier and I am still drawing a blank.

The thermos is about it.

Maybe some kind of lightweight collapsible stool for the kitchen? That would let me sit down while things are cooking.

Sadly one I can use while cooking is not physically possible. The stool would have to be so tall it would take an elevator to get to the seat.

But a little stool that can easily be tucked away somewhere when I am not using it could work, I think.

More after the break.

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Animation done right

Julian introduced me to this and I am in awe of how perfect it is.

Obviously I seriously identify with our lil protagonist. I was fat, not scarred, and no pair of glasses can cover up that.

But I’ve been there, little fella. God have I been there.

You want to make friends so badly but you don’t really know how, like, at all, and once the initial burst of enthusiasm and courage fades all that energy turns into anxiety instead and the people you want to befriend seem alien and hostile and ugly and now you feel like you’re trapped behind enemy lines.

I wish I’d had a group of amazing people to help me through that. That’s why this little film is very therapeutic for me.

I was such a strange and lonely child. And I still carry around a lot of the pain and trauma from the long and deadly freeze that was my childhood.

No child should grow up so completely alone. No friends, no support, nobody to turn to when things got bad, no idea why I felt so bad that sometimes I felt like I wasn’t even real, or like I was crazy, or like the world was alien place now even though nothing had actually changed at all.

Looking back, I was a pretty mentally damaged kid.

No wonder I withdrew so deeply into myself. The real world was a harsh and lonely place where I had nobody – not family, not teachers, not any adults at all – that I could turn to for guidance, comfort, reassurance, or even just a sympathetic ear.

So I retreated deep into my shell, where at least I didn’t feel the cold so much.

Got to vent those negatives.

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The necessary update

Oh, and I got my new keyboard.

It has that weird new keyboard feel to it. Pressing the keys feels both too hard and too soft at the same time. And kinda squishy.

Oh well, the point is, it works. It was a rough and annoying 36 hours or so sans keyboard but I made it through.

I think the old one might be salvageable. I noticed that my “water” left behind some weird crystals that gunked up the keys and caused some of them to be stuck in the down position. If I clear those out, maybe it will work again.

If so, it will become my emergency backup keyboard in case the new one gets taken out of commission at some future date.

Might as well use the new one first!

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Another birthday idea

Oh, and I thought of another thing I want for my birthday : a cheap smartphone!

It can seriously be as cheap as they come because I don’t plan on using it for anything other than getting past two factor authentication on websites.

And maybe the occasional crossword puzzle.

But as long as it’s “pay as you go” and Android and can use our Wi-Fi for internet, I’ll be happy with it. I can just stick some money on it now and then for those rare moments when I actually want to use it as a phone and the rest of the time it’s just going to be used for logins and texting.

Oh right. It needs to do SMS texting. But it’s a smartphone, I assume they all do that.

A smartphone could also come in handy in the event that I end up in the hospital again, or even just waiting for a long time at the ER or UC.

It would not tempt me to use it nearly as much as getting my tablet fixed would. I do not want to go back to going from the big computer (my PC) to my small computer (my Amazon Fire tablet) and back again all day.

That was not good for my mental health, especially my sleep.

Plus, I have better things to do than zone out to video games all the time now.

There are job opportunities out there waiting for my extraordinary talents. There are new online environments to explore, new people to meet, new connections to make.

Video games are fun and all but no matter how much fun they are, at the end of it, all you did was play a game.

Why not get more out of life?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And a very little blog entry, too.

Here is why :

So you see, I am “typing” this in by clicking on a virtual keyboard , and boy is it a lot of work compared to using the real thing.

So expect this entry to be considerably shorter than the usual one thousand words.

Possibly by quite a lot given how much effort has gone into getting this far and this is only the 81 word mark.

Oy is this going to be a schlep.

Oh well. I’ll get it now keyboard tomorrow and this sordid escapade will be over.

I’m going to miss my fuzzy friends, though . I mean, in theory , I could log on to Tapestries via the same virtual keyboard I am using to type these words, but in practice it is downright maddening to watch the conversation zoom past you as you struggle to keep up at your typing speed.

By the time you finish typing a reply, people have forgotten the question!

It’s like trying to converse via semaphore.

Who knows, though. If I get lonely enough I might go for it anyhow. Limit myself to talking privately with one person after explaining why I am suddenly so slow.

You, my dear friends, will sadly be on half rations. 250 words now and another 250 with supper later on.

Because even getting this far has taken a lot out of me. Christ is this irritating.

It’s like masturbating with mittens on.

Only without the friction burns.

“Kitten soft” my ass!

More after the break.

The downward slope

I seem to be on the downslope of my mood cycle today.

As in heading for the bottom and gaining speed. That is not a problem unless you make it into one by thinking you’re supposed to be “up” all the time.

Nuh-uh, nope. Not possible, never going to happen. Everything has a natural cycle and fighting it only makes things worse.

Just let it roll.

So yeah, I am headed for the bottom but that’s cool. The bottom is where I dump out the next load of negatives and dreck, and that lightens my load so much that I go soaring on up into the sky again.

Lather, rinse, repeat until clean.

It’s a system that works if you let it.

There’s a whole lot of wisdom in just getting the hell out of your own way.

It takes a special kind of ignorant arrogance to imagine that you know better than millions of years of instincts and that absolutely nothing can go right without you direct and conscious control and that you alone can fend off the darkness with your mind.

It takes a lot of brains to be that dumb.

Stupid people have no choice but to rely mostly on their instincts and emotions because they ain’t got shit else.

And while that doesn’t help them with their SATs, it keeps them from REALLY screwing themselves up, too.

And amen for that because they’re the ones running things.

I’ll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s a click-worthy video title, n’est-ce pas?

I’ve already spoken to my friends (love you!) about this subject but I go a little deeper into the subject in the vid.

It’s lovely to contemplate, isn’t it? All those know-nothings with their low information lifestyles and their homespun politics hate his guts more than anything else.

Because ya know what? Being out of the loop on the news means they are not subject to Fox News “flood the zone” propaganda or any other form of mass indoctrination.

All they know is what they can see going on around them. And all of that is bad. Trump’s in charge, everything sucks, ergo Trump sucks.

It’s really quite simple.

And the demonstrations get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon the time will be ripe for me to try to launch my “#OccupyAmerica” movement.

That’s when the people fill the streets and stay there. Where they peacefully protest in a way that causes disruption and chaos and the powerful appearance of an army laying siege to the Capitol.

Obviously DC would be one of the main focal points. But the point is to send the message that life will not go back to normal until Trump is out of office.

It would be great if you could divide people into days, so that for seven days straight the crowds get bigger every single day.

And by that I mean, like, “OK, I can volunteer to do Day 3 onwards. The wife will be there on Day 5… Day 4 if she can get a sitter. ”

Can you imagine the impact that would have? The throngs outside every seat of government and every politician’s home and every other place where the billionaire class can see it just keep getting bigger… and bigger… and bigger…

The idea would be to give them the message that the flood waters are rising and the people are massing and there are far, far too many of us for their money to have a chance of helping them at all.

And all without violence. Hopefully.

The big problem, of course, is that I can’t exactly lead this movement because I am not American. With me at the helm, it would have to be more of an international thing.

Could it be #OccupyEverywhere? After all, the oligarchy is everywhere. Every nation in the world has put up with this crap.

And people everywhere are sick and tired of it.

And I have the perfect day for it – June 14, Trump’s birthday. Instead of a big fancy military parade to show off how tiny a dictator America has, flood the streets with people peacefully protesting him. Bring way more people than will be in his parade.

And be ready to be nice to the soldiers he’s forcing to dance for his obscene amusement. Bring drinks and snacks for them. Commiserate. Put everyone you can find who has ever served at the forefront of their reception.

Remind them what being a soldier in a democracy is supposed to be like. Have picnics and invite them in. Play music. Make it a real day for them.

And everyone else, of course.

The idea is to turn it into something undeniably wholesome and American. Traditional, even, in a non-restrictive sense. Fly flags, hang banners, serve food.

And make it absolutely crystal clear that everybody is invited.

Hell, even Trump himself can show up if he doesn’t expect to get to speak.

And ideally this big blowout protest party would be on Day 7 of my little plan. June 14. Trump’s birthday. A day when, no matter where the billionaires look, there are throngs of people who are very clearly not very happy with them.

We’re going to take it all back from them. We are going to break their stupid system wide open and change all the rules and burn all the corruption and pollution out of the body politic and remake the world into a bigger, better, brighter place.

So help me God.

More after the break.

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The big idea

Everything I just wrote about Occupy America and/or Occupy Everywhere is an objectively fantastic idea. It could, no lie, change the world.

Too bad it was me that came up with it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an amazing guy. And some day, maybe I will be healthy enough to be able to take an idea like that and really run with it.

But that day ain’t today.

And that’s tragic and sad. It could be a history making movement, the kind that not only goes down in the history books but that ends up being a national stat holiday along the lines of Bastille Day, or other celebrations of revolutions past.

Today, we mark the day when everything started to get better.

What a lovely idea.

But I don’t have the energy to get it started let alone keep it going. The best I can do is put it on BlueSky and maybe make a video about it and hope against hope that I can somehow get the ball rolling despite being at the bottom of the hill.

I will try to summon what vitality I have in order to breathe life into this thing of mine, but sadly I am not a very robust organism yet.

That’s often the way with us dreamers, isn’t it? The big ideas come from fragile flowers like me who have invested enough of themselves into dreaming that they can think big, but that doesn’t leave a lot left over for a robust connection to the real world.

Perhaps the few of us who become successful revolutionaries and/or the thought leaders of entire world changing movements are the ones who are lucky enough to hook up with a high energy type enthralled by our big ideas and ready to invest their overflowing energies into seeing them brought to fruition.

Now where would a guy find someone like that?

I really should get back on to Discord.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote this and not an AI, I swear!

It was interesting to write my video instead of recording and editing it, but I doubt I will be doing it again any time soon.

I need to be in front of the camera! I need it to be about ME ME ME!

What can I say, I gotta shine.

Descript does seem to have exactly what I am looking for, though. It can take my recorded video and add images and even b-roll to it to make it more professional looking for those who want to actually watch something while I talk.

It would thrill me to no end to be able to create something that looks like a documentary.

It would make me feel all wise and stuff. Like I’m on the BBC! Like my heroes David Attenborough, Desmond Morris, and James Burke!

I am a-tingle just thinking about it.

I’m too modest to claim I don’t have a big ego. At least potentially. I certainly don’t have any limitations as to how high I want to go.

Although I supposed I’d settle for “God-Emperor of Earth”, for the time being at least.

More seriously, the whole territory of my ego is confusing and complex. I am still in the process of integrating my extraordinary abilities into some kind of stable self-image and let me tell you, that’s not easy.

I have to tread the narrow middle path between wretched self-loathing and delusions of grandeur on a daily basis.

In a way it would have been easier to just keep hating myself. But I deserve better than that. I have my flaws but I am overall a truly amazing human being and I deserve to escape this grotty little grotto of mine and get some kind of employment going so that I can finally support myself like a genuine grownup and real human being.

I have so much potential growth all scrunched up inside me, like a rootbound plant.

I need to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

Also, “cockburn” sounds like something supposedly heterosexual teenage boys give to one another in the locker room.

Now where was I? Oh right.

I have pondered just setting my ego free and seeing how high it would go. Maybe all my worries about delusional psychosis are wildly exaggerated and I would have a bit of a swelled head for a bit then things would rebalance and I’d be perfectly fine.

Better, in fact, because I would have healed a huge wound in my psyche and formed the basis for a much healthier self-image.

But it can be very difficult to separate what will probably happen from what feels like it would happen, and we are, fundamentally, creatures of emotion.

Even big brain types like me who can seem so logical and wise.

No matter what, all human action derives from emotion and there’s nothing wrong with that. Logic is just a tool, a guide toward effective action, but the actions are still going to be driven by emotion.

I could go on and on about that but you nice people have read all that from me before.

Maybe I will do a video about it some day.

If I want to get what I want from Descript, I am going to have to pay for a full membership, and yikes, I just looked it up and it’s $35/month, in USD I assume.

They know what they got is golden. Dammit. I was hoping it would be like other sites and thus be like $15/month or thereabouts.

Well I will pay for a month and then judge whether it was worth the money. If it can do what I want it to do, I suspect it will be.

Unless someone makes a free equivalent!

More after the break.

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They got me

It bugs me that the people at Descript are going to get a hair under $50 from me for one month of their service at an actually useful level.

And even that is far from unlimited. Granted, making 30 hours of clips a month is more than enough for my modest needs, but still.

My grumpy Taurus nature is just rankled by the feeling of getting plucked by these people. I’ll get over it.

I suppose I could look for another, similar service. A poke around Google might show me a cheaper way to get the same thing done.

The problem is that the thing I want from Descript doesn’t have a single, searchable name. I want something to add images and video that go with what I am saying in my video and thus enrich the experience as well as make it seem more professional.

And feed into my dreams of being a documentary host, of course.

I’ve Googled “like Descript” and got some hits but so far none of them do that thing I want it to do.

I know that some fantastically lucky talking head type people have magical people they call “editors” who do all that kind of thing for them.

Oh how I would love that. I’d feel like I was living a charmed life!

Well, semi-charmed, anyway.

Who knows, maybe if I keep honing my skills at putting my thoughts and wisdom out there, I will reach that magic point where the water seeps through the rock and suddenly you emerge into the public consciousness

That whole, “it takes a lot of time and work to become an overnight success” thing.

I at least am hooking my content up with the wider world via YouTube and TikTok these days. So there is, at least, a chance that someone will notice my stuff and spread the world about me.

I’ve already gotten some comments on my YouTube stuff. That’s a start.

Maybe I need to lean in to doing political rants, like Rick Mercer.

Seems like the time is ripe for those.

And there are worse ways to make a living.

I’m just going to keep doing what I do and see what sprouts up.

Because really, who knows?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.