Today, I talked about whether or not I suffer from SAD.

I certainly feel more perky and cheerful now that the sun is out.

And this is a golden time of year for me because we have sunshine but it’s not too hot out yet. That’s perfect for a polar bear like myself.

So I will try to arrange some outside time for myself. I know it won’t be easy to convince myself to really do it. The scared little animal in me still wants to remain hidden and not be noticed and always retreat to the position of least fear.

That’s the real definition of safety that the anxiety to depression continuum runs on. You can only feel “safe” when nothing is triggering your flight or freeze responses.

And they are so very, very sensitive. And heavily prone to hallucinations.

I was talking about that with my therapist, Doctor Costin, this morning. About the relationship between anxiety and depression, and how he thinks that I don’t suffer from major depressive disorder. Instead, he thinks the main issue is anxiety, and I agree.

The theory gets pretty complicated at this point. I mean, for instance, you could debate endlessly which came first, the anxiety or the depression. Blah blah blah.

All I know is that it’s not depression that has kept me in suspended animation for three decades. It’s fear. Anxiety. An anxiety so pervasive that it makes even dealing with the mundane aspects of everyday reality seem fraught with peril because that constant drumbeat of terror makes it so hard to think.

Adrenaline is a harsh mistress. It makes you dumb because it pushes you to use the fast circuit of the brain which only cares about the immediate moment and does its best to empty your mind of everything else.

Anyhow, I’m an anxious dude who manages to hide it from others by spending most of his time alone in his room on this effing computer. The rest of the time, I am with at least one friend and only going places I am super familiar with, like the living room, Wound Care at the CCC, and of course Denny’s.

I can’t think of the last time I went anywhere new. And that makes me sad.

Not SAD. Just sad.

Well I am going to change all that. I am ready to go looking for excitement and a big part of that will be trying new things and going new places.

We need variety and variance in our lives. We can’t afford to let things become so routine and predictable that our nervous system just tunes them out and we end up feeling like the world around us isn’t even real. Nor are we.

So I am going to shake things up a bit. Try to find work on FlexJobs. Polish up those Onion headlines and send them in. Try once more to make friends with Discord.

Yadda yadda yadda.

All in all, I am trying to be more hopeful and it seems to be working. The sunshine seems to have perked me up and made it easier to be positive and for that I am grateful because I have been sans hope for a long long time.

Well, no more. I am looking around, looking up, and looking forward to things. For once in my life, I can view the future as something other than a blank grey horror.

I am sure that this world has a place for me, someplace where I can shine.

And if it doesn’t, I’ll make one.

More after the break.

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Various irons in the fire

So let’s see…

I have the tab with the Onion job in it. That’s the big shiny prize in my life right now. I honestly think I would kick ass at a job like that.

Even if it meant moving to Chicago. Not that I am at all eager to be a foreign national in Trump’s America. Not a great thing to be.

But at least I’m Canadian, so I blend in.

And Chicago isn’t super far from New Jersey, where my sister Anne lives with her husband Dean and various and assorted cats. So that could be a fallback position.

Hmmm. According to Microsoft Co-Pilot, it’s 12K km or 806 miles. 12 hours road time.

Maybe not such an easy escape route after all.

In another tab I have this thing, which is an open call for animation scripts.

And I did take Writing for Animation at VFS, so I am slightly qualified for it. Plus, of course, I would love to see my words turned into animation.

Then there is Substack, which seems to be structured to be a subscription based newsletter platform but whether you charge people to subscribe is up to you.

A lot of people don’t. I think I could only get away with that if I started writing classic serial stories with cliffhanger endings.

How do they survive? Subscribe to find out! Mua ha ha.

And I have a couple of tabs relating to AI image and/or video generation. There’s exciting new stuff out there but it requires being a touch more technical than I am capable of being and so I am waffling on whether it’s worth it to me.

I will probably get a furry friend or two to help.

Like I said to a friend of mine today, I am not a “do it yourself” guy as I am a “let someone else do it while you sit there and look cute” guy. 🙂

I know my strengths. Competence is not one of them. Between the dyspraxia and the mind fog and the generally not being mentally present in the world, dealing with the realities of existence is not my forte.

Makes me wish I was better suited to coding. I could bypass all my coordination issues by developing technical skills.

But I don’t swing that way at all.

I have to find my own kind of path. One where my amazing intellect and creativity and wit and so forth can really shine.

I’ll figure it out eventually.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wanted to do something other than the usual talking head blah blah today, so I decided to push myself a little and poke fun at the style of a certain YouTube channel.

Et comme ca :

And I like how silly and goofy and high density it turned out. It was fun to make and definitely not my usual blathering on so that’s a good thing.

But I wish I had come up with more gags. I wanted there to be a minute’s worth and there was only like 32 seconds. Lame.

They are some jam packed seconds, but still.

I wonder how jam became the standard unit for how packed something is.

I assume it refers to the act of jamming things in and not the fruit spread.

But my brain just ran out of gas. This is something to remember for my potential future career as a comedy writer for The Onion. Even I can just plain run out of ideas.

Makes me ponder a return to my caffeine drinking ways. There would definitely be times when my daily buttload of Onion content would be due and I would be running on empty and I would need to recharge pronto.

That’s the thing about the dream of doing what you love for a living.

Will you still love it when it becomes work? When you have to do it whether you feel like it or not? When you have to do it the way someone else wants you to do it rather than just expressing yourself when and how you feel like it because that’s what pays the bills? Is this dream of yours really worth it?

There is a strong argument to be made that people should keep what they love to do and what they are paid to do entirely separate. That way they can keep the thing they love to do pristine and unsullied by extrinsic concerns.

I honestly think that the whole “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” idea, while well intentioned, has caused a lot of pain and suffering in people who go into an endeavor with that dream in mind only to discover the harsh reality that for most people, most of the time, it just doesn’t work out that way.

It’s not impossible that if you work extremely hard that your natural talent and luck will be enough to get you to that magic place where you somehow are getting paid to do exactly what you want to do, no more and no less.

But it’s not bloody likely.

Even globe spanning super rich authors like Stephen King have had to write what the publisher wanted instead of what they wanted to write.

And yet, there is still nothing keeping you from making whatever art is inside you except for the dream of somehow harnessing your talent to make a living without killing it.

Work some dumb McJob like the bohemians of old just to pay the bills and then do your art when you get home at night.

And make peace with the fact that your art may never make you any money. The market may completely fail to assign it any value. You may never get anything from your art except personal satisfaction.

That is why it is so important to focus on the art you have the most fun making. That way, you will get rewarded for your art immediately.

And, of course, if you enjoy making it, you will make a lot of it, and that means you will get better and better at it.

So fuck trying to please the market and its gatekeepers. Just keep having fun. You don’t need to be paid to do it any more than a kid needs to be paid to play Xbox.

If the money comes, great. But if not, that’s okay too.

Because you already got rewarded for doing it.

Everything else is gravy.

More after the break.

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The 8:30 pm attack

Lately, it seems like I have an allergy attack at around 8:30 pm every night.

Usually not a big one, as these things go. Thank God, I haven’t had a really major attack in decades. Now, I get like a half dozen sneezes at most.

But it does remind me of my oft repeated but never heeded admonishment to myself to get the heck back onto to antihistamines so I can avoid not just the sneezes but the whole body wide inflammatory effect.

I get the feeling that said effect has inobvious effects all through my body, possibly including my IBS and other gut symptoms.

Food for thought, one might say.

Or not. You do you.

Today’s been the same ol’ same old. I am glad I mixed things up somewhat with today’s vid. That made things a bit more exciting.

I am still getting used to the idea of looking for excitement. I spent so many years wrapped up in the clammy comfort of my semi-somnolent state that the very notion of seeking to raise my adrenaline level would have seemed beyond insane.

But I’m awake now, and alive, and I am aiming to stay that way, at least some of the time. I am no longer willing to stay half-dead just to make doing nothing in particular more comfortable and relaxed.

I wanna do stuff, god damn it. I have all this magic inside me and it’s straining to get out. I want to show the world just how god damned amazing I am.

After all, the world needs me!

Someone’s got to talk some sense into the masses. I see so much in the world that cries out for my particular POV and insights.

At the very least I could make useful contributions to the discourse. Get people examining their assumptions, like a good little trickster.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, make some freaking money.

I have a lot of unmet needs.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote this as a sample for an AI program to use to make a video.

I thought it was pretty good, so I am preserving it here.

File it under the further adventures of my gay hardboiled detective.

---

It was a hot thick drizzle that slid down the window pane in obscenely bloated drops and clung to the underside of anything horizontal as if daring gravity to try to make it drip onto the greasy pavement below.

It was the kind of hot, wet weather that makes you feel like you’re too large an animal in too small a cage and even the slightest of annoyances make you want to yowl like a baying hound at anyone or anything daring to come near.

The city was on edge. So was I. It often works out that way, somehow.

And that’s when he came in. Impossibly and immaculately beautiful, like something painted on a church ceiling by an exceptionally homosexual Renaissance artist. There was a otherworldly freshness and untouchability about him like he wasn’t really here with us in this filthy old world but just appearing to us in a vision to warn us about the latest candidate for American ‘s Top Messiah. He was blonde, and beautiful, and softly feminine like a lamb or a fawn.

In other words, he was exactly my type. And that made me suspicious.

Time for a month that sucks.

I thought I’d complain about it in the day’s video because you lovely readers are probably sick of me writing the same old stuff every time this happens.

You know, this sucks, unfair, easy to fix, crazy to expect us to live for five weeks on what normally only has to last four, and so on.

It’s all in the vid.

Hopefully I will get some $$$ for my birthday. That would help a lot.

Of course, being the prudent type, I’m not gonna spend like I usually do assuming that I will get enough money to pay for that final week.

That would just be silly.

But I did spend like usual in this last week because it didn’t occur to me to check whether it was a five week month until yesterday.

They sneak up on me. It’s like they come along just at the moment when I have finally let down my guard after the last one.

What I really should do is go through the whole list of deposit days for the year to identify these five week fuckers so I can plan ahead or at least so they don’t come as a shock each god damned time.

I crunched the numbers and I am not in too bad a shape. I got $150/week or so to live on, which covers my stable expenses.

1 trip to Denny’s, $30. Two McDonald’s runs, $40. Groceries, $70. 30 + 40 + 70 = 140, leaving me with a whopping $10 in leeway.

Time to paint the town red! Woo hoo! Bonanza!

I have a small problem : I have two days to cover and only one entrée. I did my grocery budgeting last week assuming I would be ordering in tonight and as I probably shouldn’t order in at all this month that leaves me in a bit of a pickle.

So I might end up ordering in tonight anyway, but with a real eye for value. Maybe look for a good high yield two for one deal so I can cover a meal for Friday night as well and thus avoid one McD’s run.

My clever foxy brain is working on it. I can play with the numbers and make it all work out. Trust me.

Otherwise, things are going fine. I continue to try to get the gas giant that is my cold and bloated soul to ignite into the big shiny star it’s supposed to be.

I feel like I’ve hard partial ignition. Didn’t last long as the flame didn’t really “catch” but I am sure that I am on the right track and it’s only a matter of time.

Heck, maybe I’ll get the Onion job and my life will be transformed. I’ll be able to rent a house and decorate it and pay someone to keep it clean and maybe invite the occasional gentleman caller over to dally with me in the drawing room.

And then fuck me up the ass.

I was reading the job listing and it mentioned “being familiar with the Onion editorial process”, so I decided to look up just what the heck that meant.

Basically, quantity. All the writers are expected to produce a lot of everything – story pitches, headlines, full stories, video ideas, and so on.

And I was like, HELL yeah. Demand much of me and WATCH ME GO. I will blow your god damned socks off.

I sure as fuck wouldn’t want a job where I am only expected to do a little. I’ve not been developing my writing muscles through blogging for all these years to just submit one little story a week or something.

Pretty sure they wouldn’t be paying me $100K CDN/year for that either.

So the mystery of how they can be so sharp and funny all the time is solved : they have an enormous amount amount of all kinds of inputs and from there they choose the best stuff and presumably combine, refine, polish, and so on in order to create the incredibly high standard of satire for which they are known.

And I could one day be a part of that.

They’d be fools not to hire me!

More after the break.

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I ordered in

I probably shouldn’t have, but I did.

Got myself some lamb shawarma from Uncle Sal’s Shawarma and so far it tastes great. Has that “grilled” taste I love so much.

For some reason, I like slightly singed food.

And it is, of course, lamb. If lamb is an option, I get lamb, 99 time out of 100. There is just something about sheep meat that makes my soul happy.

Eh, it fell apart. Probably my fault. Uncle Sal is blameless.

But if I get this again, I am going to make sure I have a clean, empty bowl handy in case this happens again,

Right now my shawarma wrap is in a bowl all right, but it lies atop a layer of trail mix left over from my lunch. And I am eating it with a spoon.

Such are the small indignities of life.

Otherwise today has been typical. Video games, meals, video, blogging.

Another day ticks by while I sleepwalk through life.

Actually, that’s not fair.

Sleepwalkers actually get somewhere.

But I am, in my own intermittent way, striving to change that. When I find myself in a moment when I can push against the walls of my enclosure, I do.

And for the rest of the time, I lie there, plotting my escape, and saving up the energy for my next big push.

Big changes are coming. Transformational ones. Ones that will finally unmoor this barnacle existence of mine and let me find a real place in the world.

Maybe it will be the Onion. Maybe not. Maybe I need to get back to the world of freelance writing. Get myself a cheap smartphone so I can sign up for UpWork or the like again and get myself out there.

I would be so much more sane if I could earn money.

And I know it’s possible.

It’s just a matter of making myself do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am still just a..

Thought I would vent some of my life frustrations today in order to :

a) Let out some of the steam so I can face my problems more calmly, and
b) Make them more “real” by putting them out into the world where I can’t just suppress them all over again

It’s called “externalization” and it can serve many purposes.

On the face of it, finding remote work for myself does not seem like the craziest idea in the world. I’m sharp, I’m resourceful, I am hardworking, I am determined. There’s all kinds of remote work type jobs I could do.

So as is usually the case with me, the barriers are 90 percent internal. It’s that classic problem of mine that I don’t want to face the maelstrom of possibilities and options and potential risks and hazards of the world in order to pursue that goal.

And I know that’s mostly madness. I mean yeah, on some level, that means choices have to made from all the stuff the internet has to offer, but there’s nothing wrong with just going with whatever tops the Google search and giving it a try to see how that works out, and if it doesn’t work out, I just try the next one.

All of that is perfectly sensible and logical and in many ways obvious but that doesn’t keep that scared little animal inside of me from scrabbling at the walls trying to get away from the idea.

Because I know it’s going to hurt. Busting out of this cage is going to require a degree of self-overcoming that cannot help but be very painful and that scared little animal (SLA? Nah. ) is, of course, afraid of that.

But pain is just pain. It sucks but then it’s over and you got what you wanted and stopped letting a very temporary sensation keep you from getting it.

Avoiding pain at all costs is not only childish, it’s life-destroying. Being a grownup means understanding that sometimes the pain is worth it. Some deals are genuinely worth making. Sometimes the reward really does justify the effort.

And in order to find those sufficiently rewarding things, you have to be willing to try stuff that might not pay out.

That’s why it’s best to do all your trying stuff when you are young and energetic and resilient. But the next best time to do it is now because you will only get less capable of it as you get older.

Easier said than done, I know. Consider it a stretch goal. Something to reach for.

I feel like I still have a lot of stored trauma and deferred life-grief and despair at my situation to work through. A lot of my psyche is still invested in this hypnotic loop I have been in for 30 years and that part does not want to have to wake up and activate and deal with reality any more than it already does.

Which is, of course, as little as possible.

So it’s a slow but inevitable process of blooming as a person. I will apply for that Onion job and go looking for other opportunities and slowly I will open the door of my cold dark vault and let the sunlight and the pure waters and the sweet smelling breeze into my life and my soul.

I am not filth. And I can be clean. The filth is just something that has happened to me over time and I can shake it off like a husky shaking off snow when I want to.

Underneath it all I am a shining, wonderful, scintillating star who can’t wait to finally get up out of the mud to climb into the sky and shine for everybody.

But first my light has to burn away all the sick miasmic fog clinging to me.

And that will take some time.

Go, sunbeam, go!

More after the break.

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Burn, burn, burn

Of course, shining stars don’t just shine. They also burn.

And that’s how I feel lately. Like the raging fires within me are finally rising to the surface of my soul and burning all that accumulated mulch and gunk away.

And that does hurt, though maybe not as much as you’d think. The fire does burn but it also cleans and purifies, and that feels great, so the net pain is not so bad.

And I am actively stoking that blessed flame. I want it to burn hotter and hotter until it bursts free of my funky grotto and burns all my limitations away and sends my demons and my ghosts screaming into incinerated oblivion.

You know. If that’s an option.

And it is.

I’m still “learning to fly”.

That is, learning to transcend the limitations of what reality decides to give me in order to simply give myself sufficient buoyancy to stay out of the depths and establish a minimum mood level that allows for hope no matter what.

But reality is a hard habit to break. I have spent too long taking cold, concrete, cruel comfort in not being “deluded” and focusing solely on what I “knew to be real” for me to have any level of comfort with leaving that logical, provable, “sensible” world behind.

At some point in the process, I will have to accept as real that which I cannot prove or deduce or verify to be real, and that seems impossible.

Maybe it is. Maybe I am too old to learn faith now.

But I have to try. It’s my best bet for replacing that piece of me that has been broken all these years. For closing that gaping wound at my core, the one so deep that at times I can feel a cold hard wind blowing through it.

Reality can help. If I improve my life so that I am not so locked into this hypnotic loop of mine, that will help shrink the wound or at least remove impediments to its healing.

But I know in my soul that it will take more than that to actually close that damned wound. And merely intellectually accepting the need for faith does nothing.

It will take being willing and able to believe it to be closed without needed to justify or explain why or how to really complete the healing process.

Believing in things unseen. Denying the need for evidence and proof in order to preserve belief. The power to make something true by believing in it.

That’s what faith is, and I am finally learning that it is not optional.

Even people who have angrily rejected the faith they were raised in and consider themselves to be total atheists still retain that all important seed of faith within them that closes the gap in their soul that people like me fall through to our doom.

There are worse things than believing things that are not “true”.

But it’s not going to be easy to get myself to accept that.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, here’s today’s vid.

My friends have already heard this story but it’s too good not to share with the world.

I swear to God that really happened. I had been listening to those ladies converse because as it turns out, the conversations of stupid people can be quite fascinating in a sort of psycholinguistic way.

Like, what nonlinear thought processes led to that conclusion? How did we get from the previous subject to this one? How does one communicate despite a limited IQ?

Because no matter how poor a student you were or how much you struggle to deal with the complexities of modern life, there’s still a certain amount of information you have to somehow get across.

Even just to socialize.

Anyhow, that’s not the important thing today. The important thing is that after I made the video above and uploaded it to YouTube, I then uploaded it to TikTok too.

And that was painless enough that I then uploaded a bunch more of my vids to it. Not all of them, not yet, but a whole bunch of them.

So I have done it. I have put my stuff out there on TikTok where the people who follow me there can take a gander.

And let me tell you, TikTok is sooooo much easier to use on Windows then on a stupid Android tablet screen.

On Windows I can just make the vid and upload it. On tablet it was way more of a pain in the ass, and as for editing it after recording it, forget about it.

There’s a video editing program for mobile devices the kids use called Cap… something but I tried and tried to learn to use it and it was just too different from what I am used to for it to make a lick of sense to my old brain.

Too much to unlearn!

I mean, there is a reason I paid $80 for the video editing suite I actually like. With it, I can do all kinds of stuff.

I currently only use it for simple linear editing, but I know how to do more.

I was especially sure to upload my political provocateur stuff to TikTok in the cheerful but probably vain hope that I will stir shit up and maybe even provoke a bunch of nimrods into launching reams of incoherent vitriol at me.

What fun that would be!

Yeah, I know I’m weird. And possibly a tad psychotic.

But in some ways this is my very weird way of trying to get the other kids to play with me on my terms. Grappling with others verbally and challenging their opinions and making them think about what they believe and why while dodging their slow and clumsy attempts to bash me into silence brings me enormous joy.

Basically, I am a verbal-only Spider-Man. And I love it. Give me some verbal sparring partners and I can truly express my combative side that just wants to get in the ring and go’er without having to hold back.

I could totally imagine being one of those guys who goes out to bars looking for a fight if I had gotten a different start in life.

But instead I keep it to video games. One of the factors in my video game addiction is definitely that they give me an outlet for my craving for feisty fisticuffs.

I shudder to think of what I would be like if I didn’t have that outlet. Way harder to get along with, that’s for sure.

I’d probably get increasingly volatile and quick to anger before blowing my top over some stupid little thing.

Or I would just embrace my destiny and become a raging arsehole most of the time. Sarcastic, arrogant, superior, dismissive, obnoxious, pushy, and selfish.

God, I would be such a nightmare.

Good thing I got video games!

More after the break.

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Take a deep breath

I would if I could.

Often, when I wake up, I am already out of breath. That’s what happens when you have obstructive sleep apnea, it’s completely untreated, and you smother dozens of times an hour while you sleep.

I suppose it could be worse. It could wake me up every time it happens. Then I would barely be able to sleep at all.

I shudder to think.

I am getting better at recognizing that I feel crappy when I wake up because there’s a lot of used air that has accumulated in my lungs and if I want to feel better and beable to breathe properly, I need to empty my lung to make room for fresh air.

The kind with oxygen in it.

And I know that this is bad. That I really, really should make yet another attempt to make friends with my CPAP machine so I can sleep and breathe at the same time.

It seems impossible but it’s true.

And I am trying to work up the nerve to do just that. Give it another try. I know that, obviously, not asphyxiating in my sleep all the time could make a huge, huge difference in my quality of life by improving my quality of sleep.

Not to mention my blood oxygen levels.

And I think it’s been long enough since “the incident” where a kink in the CPAP hose made me wake up completely unable to breath until I ripped the mask off that I am at the very least no longer terrified of trying again.

Just very, very nervous.

It’s a hill worth climbing, that’s for sure. But a tough one. Getting used to having the mask on my face and that rather loud machine near my bed and a hose connecting the two that makes it so I can’t just roll over onto my other side without yanking the machine across the room – PLUS the worried about the hose getting kinked – makes for a daunting challenge, especially for someone as flighty as I am.

And as lacking in self-discipline.

So for now, I will just think about it, and wait for the next parting of the clouds in my internal weather system that leaves me feeling good enough to really push myself.

Until then I will just keep sleeping as badly as ever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the usual rattling on.

I really need to find the energy to do more ambitious videos because my usual talking head bullshit is beginning to bore me. It doesn’t scratch that creative itch very well and I want to have more fun with the whole thing but by the time I have edited the video I am pretty much done in.

But less so than before, which is encouraging. As I exercise my video editing muscle every day, the editing of that day’s vid wakes less and less out of me.

So hopefully it will become a minor enough thing that I can take on trickier and more fun kinds of projects.

Daddy needs to fly.

I’ve been feeling especially restless lately. The sort of mood where nothing really satisfies you and you end up grumpily switching between activities in a vain search for something that doesn’t bug you.

My crappy mood started last night. See, I ordered pizza. Pizza did not arrive. I checked the Pizza Hut site and it said the pizza had been delivered. But the phone never rang.

So I went to call Julian to ask that he pick up my pizza when he and Joe got back from Joe’s parents’ place. Only to discover my phone was not working.

Ah. So that’s why my phone didn’t ring. I guess the delivery person tried to call but my phone was out of service so all they could do was leave it outside the building.

Not fun. But that’s not what put me in a bad mood.

That came when Julian reported that there was no pizza waiting for me down there, meaning that someone took it.

Son of a bitch. Now I am out $22 for a pizza somebody ELSE ate.

The weird thing is that I never heard the phone in the kitchen ring. Now I was very deep into my video game so I might have simply missed it.

But it’s also possible that my delivery person decided it smelled so good they would help themselves to it.

Unlikely, but possible. It would be a neat if ultimately doomed scam. Report it as delivered, wait for roughly as long as it would take for a porch pirate to show up and take it, then dig in. Bon appetit.

You’d get caught pretty fast but for a time you’d dine quite well.

Knowing I paid for something some thief got to eat really pisses me off. It sticks in my craw something fierce and I know it will take days for me to get over it.

It’s a Taurus thing. We have strong feelings about our money.

There’s no solution, either. Pizza Hut held up their end of the bargain. It’s not their fault some evil person helped themselves to a pizza they knew was not theirs.

Even if we had CCTV footage of the crime, we wouldn’t know who the hell that person was, so what could we do about it?

It was the perfect crime. With MY FUCKING PIZZA. Grrr.

And all because my portable phone was on the fritz and I didn’t know that until it was too late and my pizza was gone.

Talk about being fucked over by fate. AGAIN.

Anyhow, since then I have felt cranky and out of sorts. And that has made me restless and irritable and I am choosing to see this as a very good thing.

It’s when I am pissed off that I become capable of serious change. Hopefully this little incident will help fuel my attempts to rise up out of this pit I’m in.

Oh, and I have completed my list of 30 potential Onion headlines. Now I will spend some time polishing them before I send them off to The Onion for evaluation.

They really are quite good. God damn am I clever.

They’d be fools not to hire me. I’m amazing.

More after the break.

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As the wheels grind on

I feel like I am going through the wringer lately but that’s not a bad thing.

Because means things are moving. Emotions are being processed. The wheels of this bus are going round and round, albeit slowly and reluctantly, and all the gunk that has accumulated in the engine and the fuel line and so on is being burned out of there by the motion and the heat, and things are beginning to move forward.

Now all I need to do is avoid the temptation to slam on the brakes and crawl back into my deep dark garage when I start feeling like we’re moving too fast.

No, we’re not, we’re just not used to moving at all. It is true to say that our rate of speed has gone way, way up relative to what it was before.

But that’s because my speed before was zero. Everything is infinite compared to zero, even the tiniest increase of all.

So like I keep telling myself, I just have to hang in there and not freak out and run away so that I can adjust to the change and maybe learn not to be so damn flighty.

That’s a word I have been testing out applying to myself lately : flighty. It really seems to fit me. What else do you call flying off in a panic at the slightest provocation? Giving up on and abandoning things entirely when I encounter the tiniest of problems? Returning games on Steam when I don’t instantly fall in love with them?

The urge to flee is strong in me and it’s got to stop. The ability to stay and fight and deal with things has to be there too. Being skittish as a deer in hunting season all the time is deadly. So much of life can only be experienced if you stick around.

So I am working on developing my “stick it out” muscles. I go into situations knowing I will probably have the urge to flee and I am therefore ready to delay my flight instincts long enough to at least start to enjoy myself.

Delay is the right word. Directly opposing the urge to flee only makes you panic even more strongly. But saying, “Yeah, yeah… in a minute… ” works because it doesn’t make you feel trapped.

This is all part of my trying to stop being such a scared little animal.

If I stick with it long enough, I might even become a real little boy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, a few things I got off of TikTok recently.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to embed them, so links will have to do.

How very Web 1.0! Anyhow…

First. a most excellent overview of biological sex. The combination of her accent, her earnest approach, her academic acumen, and her cool British beauty really makes her presentation powerful to me.

I don’t know if it would convince any gender skeptics or other transphobes. Those kinds of people probably slammed the steel doors of their tiny minds shut the moment they realized someone was trying to put knowledge in there.

But I found the whole thing delightful.

The other thing is a piece by the incredible poet Ren.

The dude is a wizard. The words, the style, the presentation, everything. It all combines to make his work mesmerizing and compelling every damn time.

God did I miss TikTok. You know how you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Well sometimes you don’t know how much you missed something till you get it back.

And I plan on being active on the Tok again too. My webcam is right here 24/7 and so it should be easy to record replies to vids and so on.

Oh, and I will eventually upload my current vids there too, or at least the ones that I think might be of interest to people.

Time to see if my charisma really works!

Anyhow, here’s today’s actual vid :

Some of that is actually from as far back as 2008!

And it was nice going through the clips and remembering, though of course, nostalgia is always bittersweet and so it made me a little sad too.

I seem so young and energetic and full of life compared to now. And yet, the weird part is that I know I was actually a lot more depressed back then.

As nice as it would be to have the energy and hope back, that would be too high a price to pay. I was often suicidal back then.

But way more socially active.

I don’t think the two things are related.

I had to include what I consider to be the stupidest thing in a movie ever, the whole “removal all numerals except six” thing.

That’s so gobsmackingly dumb that it beggars the imagination. There is no way that I, as a very talented comedy writer, could have thought of something that amazingly, beautifully, thuddingly stupid.

Other than scouring the backup I made of the HD I had before this one, today has been pretty routine. I am happy that I did a video that was NOT just me talking into the camera for once.

I started off thinking I would maybe do a karaoke. But I tried a few songs and I did not like the sound of my voice, so I decided it was not a good voice day for me and went looking for a better idea.

The point is that I did something new (ish) and had a lot of fun doing it. I let myself go in an unexpected direction and it turned out great.

I went exploring for once in my life! In a pretty minor way, but still.

And I have going back on TikTok to thank. And to think, I went years without it because I thought there was no way to access it on a PC.

But there totally is. There’s a Windows TikTok app. All I had to do was download it from the Microsoft store. It was crazy easy.

I feel like such a fool! But whatever. It’s good to be back.

Time to make some waves. 🙂

More after the break.

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What is dis praxia?

For me at least, dyspraxia is a barrier.

One that has been there all my life and lies between myself and whatever motor skill I am trying to learn like an invisible force field and keeps me from being able to do it.

The motor acquisition center of my brain is just plain broken. For all I know, it’s barely even there. It certainly feels that way.

Any attempt I make to learn to do a physical thing has to go through the conscious rational mind and that is just plain not good enough. We human beings are supposed to have mental hardware dedicated to that kind of thing. Society presumes it is there.

But mine ain’t.

So it’s a learning disability. One I wish I had been diagnosed with a very long time ago, like say when I was in elementary school, where the right kind of intervention might have corrected it.

Or at least I would have been officially designated as a person with a disability (albeit an invisible one) and I could have been better understood by the world.

I picture myself carrying business cards that explain my condition like some deaf people do. They’d say, “Hi! I have dyspraxia! Here’s what that is… ”

The thing is, not only is it an invisible disability (like depression), but I can go long periods without it having much of an effect. It’s not like we learn new motor skills all the time. It’s actually pretty rare.

What it would mostly do is explain to people why I’m such a spaz.

If I was a kid today, I would probably have one of those individual learning plans (forget what they are called) and that would explain the problem to my teachers and give them tips as to how to help me with them.

Not that I would need a lot of assistance. Despite all odds, I did manage to learn to write and type and dress myself and so on.

But I’ve heard some kids get someone to take notes for them because they can’t write fast enough, and I’d be all over that.

AI can almost sort of kind of do that now. The auto-captioning on YouTube is getting better and better and there are programs out there that claim to be able to transcribe what people are saying accurately.

Honestly, I would probably just record the whole thing with a smartphone. That way I would get the prof’s body language and tone of voice, too.

Maybe I should be taking some online courses…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It shall be a Day of Reckoning!

My biggest worry about tomorrow is that people will think, “Meh, big deal, we already did that. And he paused the tariffs, so we won, right?”.

I don’t know how likely that is. I am too anxious to rationally assess that, and I supposed that even if I was on a triple dose of Xanax, that can’t be figured out anyhow.

I mean, there’s millions of variables, and they’re all human beings.

But obviously I hope the turnout is simply massive. People on BlueSky are saying ten million, which would mean that everyone from the first one would have to bring a friend.

The positive forecast, as I see it, is that the first protest caught a lot of people off guard, seeing as it was organized in like three days, and a lot of people who wanted to go could not because of work, family commitments, logistics, or just plain not hearing about it or not being able to make up their mind about it until it was already over.

But now they’ve had two weeks’ notice to get their act together. They’re arranged sitters, watered the plants, packed a nice picnic lunch, and are ready to protest.

Heck, even if you don’t care about politics, you might want to go just because so many other people are going and you like to be where the action is.

Or maybe you just want to sell food there. No judgement. This is a capitalist society and the reason we have all that we have is that someone can make money doing it, whether it’s running a pizzeria or a hardware store or a dry cleaner’s.

Wanna change the world? Do something profitable.

Anyhow, that’s my hope and my fear about tomorrow’s protest. My fear is that it will be smaller than the first one because people are all, “been there, done that, whatever.”

A very Gen X fear, now that I think about it.

And my hope is that the protests will be so huge they can be seen from space and some aliens will be like, “What’s going on down there?”

Just in case, let’s play this on a loop :

But if they ask, maybe we should skip the whole “take me to your leader” thing, at least if you are an American.

Take them to our now and future PM, Mark Carney, and tell them he is the President of Earth. I am pretty sure he could pull it off.

Anyhow, like I say in my vid, I want the powers that be to be scared. As scared as it takes. Historically, big change only happens when the people in power feel like the alternative is them getting strung up on a fucking lamp pole while mobs cheer.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. But it might have to get close. I have little faith that the billionaire tribe actually knows what is good for them and understands that millions of people beat billions of dollars and that if we decide to come after them, all that money won’t mean a god damned thing.

Hell, if the people are mad enough, we can make it illegal to buy from or sell to them, and go after any “friends” helping them out, too.

Luigi Mangione’s killing of that health CEO was just the opening shot.

Sometimes has to be done to show these people that they are not untouchable.

I’d much rather that was done via law enforcement. And that’s a real possibility. The legal establishment is super pissed off too. Especially judges.

But I am open to other possibilities as well.

More after the break.

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An average Friday

Normally I would resort to personal reportage right now but I don’t have much to report.

Had Wound Care this morning. Somehow screwed up setting my alarm so I woke up at 9:35 am for an appointment at 10 am.

Had to get dressed real quick. Didn’t even get to eat first.

That tiny burst of excitement aside, the only faintly interesting part of it was that, because it was Good Friday, the health center wasn’t actually open and I had to ring the doorbell so that one of the nurses could let me in.

Oh, and when I was waiting, I heard someone say my name, so I got up and went into the usual room only to have a nurse stop me and say, “I don’t think she’s ready yet!”

To which I said, “Well then who called me in here? Because someone said my name. ”

Luckily she was close enough to ready that I could just sit on the examining table and wait for her to finish getting ready.

I’m kinda glad I got cranky about it, though. I rightfully asserted myself.

Don’t make me get up then go back to the waiting room then have to get up and come back to the clinic AGAIN.

I’m already in pain.

Let’s see. Oh, and after that I wanted a vanilla cone from McD’s, so we pulled into the drive thru at our local McD’s only to be told “we’re not doing ice cream today”.

Today? What the conceivable fuck? No ice cream for an entire day?

Luckily the other McD’s, over near Lansdowne Mall, had ice cream.

I guess our local McD’s ice cream machine was broken?

After that I came home and ordered groceries. It would have been convenient if they had arrived super early again this time, so of course they were on time instead.

Got everything I ordered, which is always a plus.

Then I made the video you see at the top of this entry. Which was tricky because I was so sleepy I was nodding off in the middle of editing.

Oh well. Got the damned thing done and took a nap.

And for everything else… you were there!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or was it the other way around?

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

So yeah. I think I am ready to start living for fun. And not just the sad, weak fun I can get from video games. Real fun, the kind that comes with thrills and excitement.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of video games over the years, and some of them have been truly great experiences, but they were still safe, tame, controlled experiences with very little in the way of real, physical stimulation.

Which was kind of the point, in a way. No physical, all cerebral, nice and cozy and contained and guaranteed not to upset the status quo.

Said quo being “do nothing but play video games all fucking day”. Every day. All the time. For decades on end. Like I was in a prison cell for fuck’s sake.

Well that’s not good enough any more. Fuck that shit. I’m not in prison, or cold storage, or suspended animation, or the witness protection program.

I’m a living, breathing mammal who is finally ready to increase his stimulation level.

Shake off my lethargy and do stuff. It doesn’t have to be some kind of world shaking megaproject or magnum opus or anything.

It can just be me fucking around with some AI tool or another. For example.

It just has to be new and fun and exciting. The world is a toy chest right now and I can’t wait to find what wonders this new age of AI will produces in the future.

Because this shit’s just getting started, folks.

Speaking of which, I made another little thing with Vidu that I like.

It’s just so wholesome that you’d suspect Vidu had a lot of restrictions. 😛

Just for the heck of it, I tagged it as being made for kids. I mean, why not? Kids might well enjoy this lovely little snippet.

I just wish they would rephrase the question. No, it’s not made for kids. But it is safe for kids. It’s as G-rated as it gets.

Heck, most of my vids would be SFW if I didn’t swear so much.

But I express myself in the manner of my people. I grew up in a swearing culture back on Prince Edward Island, and I am proud to carry on that tradition, for fuck’s sake.

I will consider stopping my swearing when and if I get the requisite 500 subscribers necessary to be able to monetize my videos.

Which would presumably involve promoting them somehow, and oof. That is not something that comes naturally to me at all.

My instinct is to just put things out there and people can decide for themselves whether they like it or not.

But of course, they have to know it exists and see it first.

The other unappealing solution would be to work really, really hard to make videos so damned good that anyone who sees them not only loves them but absolutely must get all their friends and family to see it too.

That does not currently seem likely. Though my discontent with how plain and boring my videos are visually continues to grow.

Which reminds me… I found out there’s a Windows TikTok app!

So I am back on TikTok. Most of my vids would fit in there quite well. Most of the videos on TikTok are just people talking.

It’s what is expected there.

I dunno if there’s a time limit on videos on TikTok but I am pretty sure there is not. I recorded some fairly long vids back when my tablet was working.

I might even start uploading all my current vids to TikTok. I mean what the hell, I technically have a following there too.

I am just happy to be back on the Tok. I really enjoyed my time there.

Who knows, maybe I’ll become famous that way.

More after the break.

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`In the middle of a thought

That’s how I feel right now.

Like I’m a CD that got stuck between tracks. My brain is looking for something to say but it’s not coming up with anything. I feel alarmingly blank.

Oh well, I know this too shall pass. Just like my attack of mental thickness last week. it seems upsetting now, but once I am rested up and hydrated, I’ll fine.

Slowly I am learning not to freak out about stuff.

But that means finding other uses for that energy. I had another “bad moment” earlier where I felt like could jump out of my own skin out of sheer frustrated nervousness

This time, though, I was able to really focus on the “what would make things better right now? ” question and I got an answer :

Running. What would have made me happy would be to go full tilt running across a grassy field that stretches out infinitely so I can just run and run and run and not have to worry about turning or slowing down, just running as fast and as hard as I can for the sheer exuberant rush of letting all that pent up energy out like a wild stallion.

Not an option, obviously, but it gives me a clue as to what the problem is.

If the goal is to release energy, there are probably ways I can do that which fit within the confines of my disability.

I am still worried about hurting myself via my undiagnosed and apparently uninteresting muscle disorder. But I am weighing that against the benefits I would undoubtedly get from exercise, such as tension relief, mood elevation, better vascular health, and so on.

There has to be some form of exercise I can make myself do that won’t make my condition worse and will give me some form of relief.

Pity that the physiotherapy place hasn’t gotten back to me yet.

I really want to consult a professional about this.

But I guess they don’t find my case interesting either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.