Or maybe that should be “the feelers”, or antennae.

I got onto the subject of empathy by way of one of those “when was your gut feeling about someone right?” Reddit videos I am so fond of.

Being a strongly intuitive rational materialist, those things appeal to me.

Like I said in the comments, I use my empathy and/or intuition (my “gut feelings”) to give me leads about people. If I have a bad gut feeling about someone, I then investigate the people to see if it’s right about them.

It usually is.

And I am quite good at sussing people out. I can ask perfectly innocuous sounding questions that will nevertheless tell me a lot about someone just by how they react.

Man, I really am creepy.

Oh well, this is the soul I got so that’s the person I am.

C’est la vie.

Being science minded. I sometimes wonder what, exactly, it is I am picking up from people. What could be traveling between them and me?

To me, it feels electromagnetic. Like my nervous system acts as a receiver for some kind of broadcast from other people’s nerves.

And that’s not completely ridiculous, but it’s not too likely. The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the live electrical system that is our nervous system is pretty small so that “antennae would have to be quite sensitive in order to pick up that transmission.

But like I said, not impossible.

My only other idea is pheromones. And those seem even less likely.

I am sure there is a whole galaxy of things we don’t know about how pheromones work and how they affect our minds and our moods. Indeed, they could be the source of the very “bad gut feelings” I mentioned above.

And they must surely be how dogs sense our moods. And be why I sometimes get a bad feeling about places, too.

There were houses I delivered papers to where I am sure some bad shit was going down. But you can’t very well call the cops based on a bad vibe.

But my experience of empathy is too immediate and dense with information to be something that wafts over to me whenever.

Pheromones are definitely part of the equation but they can’t be the whole thing.

And with that I am out of theories. The fact that my empathy reflects people’s real emotions is attested to by the very “creepy” things I mentioned in the vid.

I would not have been able to freak out my siblings by casually mentioning things I saw in their heads if my strong empathic powers were delusional.

And of course, my own subjective experience is really all I need. Like I said in the vid, other people’s emotions are just there for me.

I suppose I could have followed some career path based on my empathy. That’s basically what I would have been doing had my life gone as planned and I would have become a practicing psychologist.

I really want to help people, and with my natural abilities augmented by a college degree plus whatever other education I’d need, I would have been a very good one.

But my parents wanted early retirement instead. Fucking Boomers.

I suppose I could try to become one now. The psych courses would be a breeze for me and my aptitude for the subject would be more than evident.

My handicap would make things tricky. Probably best to take the courses online.

It’s a possibility I shall ponder. Spending my days helping people with their darkness and their demons by shedding some light into their worlds sounds so good to me.

And talk about good karma!

More after the break.

---

Ooh pretty horsie!

I made this here in Vida and I love how it turned out, so here it is!

I’m jealous of both of them. 🙂

---

The spooks in the shadows

Got that “haunted” feeling again.

Oh well, whatever. Shit happens. Excrement occurs. Sometimes I feel spooked and strange and alienated for no apparent reason. Big deal.

A mind as powerful and unique as mine is bound to have some eccentricities.

It could be sundowning. That’s something people at eldercare facilities discovered about the elder they care for that some of them are fine all day but when the sun goes down they become fearful and/or difficult and/or just plain nuts.

Same thing happens in mental health wards too.

And I have noticed that a change comes over me when the sun comes down lately. And it seems to match sundowning. I feel twitchy and nervous and spooked. I feel like I am one sudden loud noise from shrieking hysteria.

That might do me some good, come to think of it. Blow through a bunch of latent emotions all at once. Clear out the cobwebs.

But I am too damned stable for that.

Sad. But stable.

So I just trudge along my therapeutic path like I’m a tortoise hoping to outrun a particularly stupid hare.

Only in my case the hare is death.

The truth is that I am unwilling to abandon the safety of stability for the potential of renewal. I fear the chaos that lies in the darkness of my mind too much for that, and I have no faith that things can be okay unless I consciously and logically make them OK.

I’m too old and broken and poor to go off on any sort of life adventure where I get to find out who I really am by dealing with novel situations that teach me to rely upon myself.

The only way that’s going to happen is if I’m rich, or marry someone that is. Traveling when you’re disabled pretty much requires assistance that ain’t gonna come cheap.

Though from what I have seen, people are quite nice to us cripples. So there’s that.

Still, I rather like the idea of traveling in the lap of luxury, with porters to carry things and fancy little staircases to help me get in and out of vehicles and a handsome nurse/assistant to keep me alive and happy.

I could see the world if I had that.

But I kind of need to get rich first.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Today, I gave storytelling a try.

And the video turned out fine. But I’m not happy with it.

I could have sworn that the story I tell in the vid was a lot funnier. But somehow it doesn’t seem all that humorous to me now.

Perhaps I’m too close to it.

Or maybe I need to add a laugh track.

Still, I have loads of anecdotes so I am glad I broke ground on telling them. I’ve never done much comedic storytelling but the internet runs on stories so there is definitely a market out there for funny stories told well.

Heck, maybe I could just record myself reading one of my short stories out loud.

It would be the closest I’d ever get to working from a script!

Today has been mellow. Did Wound Care this morning. Everything went smoothly as usual. The wound on my right foot remains closed.

I am supposed to be painting it with iodine once a day. Such a charmingly old fashioned kind of treatment. Like applying a liniment or taking headache powder.

So far, I have not remembered to do that even once. So if the dang thing ends up infected, I will have only myself to blame.

Well, myself and the germs, but they can’t be held legally liable.

Mood wise, I am doing okay. I still have moments where I feel scared and/or lost and/or like I wanna scream, but my brain is struggling to rewire itself so these things are to be expected, I suppose.

Which reminds me…

The way up

That’s what I am looking for, in my own way.

I’m searching for a way to raise my mood and I think the first step in that is convincing myself that it’s safe to be up.

Or if not safe, then good.

That’s how seized up my internal engine is in my ego’s quest for “control”. Being up might lead to doing unforeseen things on impulse, and that’s strictly verboten.

It’s like my mind has been occupied by a fascist regime that oppresses and suppresses me in the name of “national security”.

Safety uber alles. It’s a terrible way to live.

And it all leads back to that primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 and that convincing me that the world was a horrible place that I should have as little to do with as possible in order to not disturb the big part of me that went to sleep back then.

And it’s still sleeping now, the poor thing.

The bullying was the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with reality. Especially when it happened outside of school.

That’s when I concluded that the only safe place was home, and the only truly safe place at home was alone in my room, reading.

That way I wasn’t in anyone’s way and nobody would notice me and I wouldn’t feel ignored, dismissed, neglected, or like I was getting on someone’s nerves.

It’s always better to feel alone when you are alone that to feel alone when you are surrounded by people who technically love you.

Man I’ve led a lonely life. No wonder I’m so god damned weird.

And even now, I only feel safe when I am alone. That does not, sadly, keep me from being lonely. I want to be with people. I’m happiest when I am around the right people.

But I still isolate myself because anxiety doesn’t give a shit about happiness and it’s going to enforce the edicts of my inner regime come what may.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

---

I finally did it

I bought a new game!

It’s called Rogue Trader and I mostly got it because it’s by Owlcat Studios, who made the two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, that I absolutely loved to bits.

Plus the reviews are good and it was on sale for a non-insane price of around $40.

So far it’s pretty cool. They are really leveraging the awesome “fantasy meets science fiction” vibe of the Warhammer 40K^[1] universe on which the game is based. The setting reminds me of Dune that way.

Plus it is that rare thing, a science fiction (ish) RPG, and I am enjoying the hell out of that. Finally I can play a turn-based isometric RPG that doesn’t rehash Tolkien.

I have nothing against elves and orcs and stuff but it’s EVERYWHERE in my preferred genre of game and I am sick of it.

And I am very, very definitely a science fiction guy deep down. I’ve read a fair bit of fantasy too but science fiction is and always be where my heart is.

My character is a close combat specialist. I figured I might as well do something different that my usual wizards and sharpshooters/archers.

Though I dunno. In a universe with guns, melee skills might seem a little quaint. I assume I will have abilities to compensate for that.

Like deflecting blaster bolts with my light saber or something.

Do you suppose that there’s such a thing as a heavy light saber?

I’m just glad I finally frigging picked something. I’ve been dickering and dithering for weeks with like $60 sitting there on my Steam account waiting for me to make up my mind and find something!

I’m also glad that, if I want to, I can stop playing Tyranny. It’s not a terrible game but I don’t find it very inspiring to play.

Part of that is the dark and semi-evil tone, part of it is the lack of an overall noble quest, and part of it is the drab and depressing brown and grey art design.

I might keep playing, I dunno.

But Rogue Trader is turn based and Tyranny is “real time with pause” so it’s not really a fair fight. I’m a thinker, and thinkers prefer turn based.

In fact I wish the real world was turn based.

I’d be so good at it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today I decided to talk about sleep.

I am still feeling the itch to make something more fun and ambitious, but if I want to do something like that, I’m going to have to do it earlier in the day, or in two sessions.

Because I keep sliding up on 2 pm with pretty much exactly the amount of energy I need to do what, for me, is a fairly minimal video like the one above.

So I am pondering doing my vid at 10 am instead, at least on the days I don’t have Wound Care. That way if it ends up being something fairly elaborate, I can put in the necessary effort then take a nice long nap before blogging at 4:05 pm.

That will take a certain investment of self-discipline, of course. I know that initially I won’t want to get my creativity in gear that early in the day.

But it beats running my brain on idle by playing fucking video games.

They are, at long last, starting to feel very pointless to me. Why am I investing my enormous brainpower into something that amounts to running in place?

I still enjoy my games, but not unreservedly. The moments when I say, “Is this really all I’m going to do with the day?” are growing more frequency and more potent.

Who knows. Maybe I am on the road to outgrowing the whole thing. The truth is that I would rather be doing something fun and exciting and new, like messing around with AI tools, or writing a short story, or making a funny video.

Thanks to the vids, I am out in the world now. People notice what I put on YouTube. Occasionally they even leave comments. It’s amazing.

It’s almost like I am a valid entity! Can being a grownup be far behind?

Yes it can. But whatever.

I’m working on it.

The secret, I think, is to let myself become excited and/or inspired. And that means I have to stop being so terrified of being disappointed.

I have to stop laying in the dirt for fear of falling and start being who I truly am, someone who recovers, recharges, and is back on their feet in no time.

I just have to tap into that eternal spark inside me and let it drive me instead of wrapping it up in wet blankets and smothering it because it might make doing nothing uncomfortable for me.

Seriously. I’ve been treating it like a chronic illness. Like it’s this horrible affliction that seizes me now and then and makes me anxious and tense.

Well then DO SOMETHING. dumbass! Even just lying on my back on the bed and flailing my limbs around would be better than stupidly suffering out of stupefaction.

Get some frigging exercise for once. It’s good for you!

There are so many ways in which I am my own worst enemy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to untangle all the ways in which I have tied myself into knots just to avoid the temptation to actually do things.

I’m tired of being all balled up inside myself. I want to be reckless and restless and wild and free. I want to seek and find excitement and enjoyment and joy.

It’s no longer good enough to just subsist, like some kind of filter feeder stuck to a rock in the Atlantic somewhere. I’m not an invalid in a back ward being kept like a potted plant by bored nurses and whose entire life revolves around pudding.

Not yet, anyhow.

It’s not too late for me to learn to live another way. A way that opens its arms wide and embraces life instead of shrinking away from it.

And I will get there, god damn it. I will burn the gunk out of my engines and work the kinks out of my muscles and finally stand up and be counted.

Because I count.

And that’s a good thing.

More after the break.

---

A better attitude

I need one.

But lordy, will it be hard for me to get.

I’ve been a cranky, depressed, nihilistic Gen X loner and loser for so long that it’s hard to remember that there is any other way to be.

I’m too old to learn to be perky, god damn it.

I can probably manage to be a more upbeat version of a downer, though.

“Hi there folks! We’re born astride a grave and death is the only salvation any of us will ever know, but until then, why not try our new huevos ranchero burritos?”

Seriously, though, I know there’s a happier and more optimistic version of myself who stubbornly refuses to be “down” hiding in me somewhere. buried under decades’ worth of emotional detritus and broken cognition.

And I want to be that guy. He would be way better at dealing with life than me. He’d be optimistic and hopeful and resourceful and he’d be geared towards seeing solutions not just problems and everyone would love him because he makes people happy just by being around spreading sunshine!

He’s so cool.

Honestly, I feel like he’s the person I was supposed to be. The person I was before a stranger’s cock shattered my little four year old life. Someone bright and hopeful and ready to take on the world with nothing but his wit and his personality.

Both are formidable weapons.

But all I can do to try to become him is to keep pushing myself in that direction and removing or burning through any and all things that get in the way.

I’ve got a lot of blooming to do and I am already late.

The thing is, I obviously have no doubts as to my intelligence and talent. It’s clear to me that I could do great things if given the chance.

What I doubt is my ability to do what it takes to get that chance.

I’ll need one HELL of an agent.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This time it was Coldplay. Sorry.

Dunno what the hell key I sang that in. The Key of Me, I guess.

But that’s what came out when I started to sing the song, and I just kind of went with it because I was managing to get an okay tone and I knew that I sure as fuck couldn’t sing in the original singer’s testicular torsion range so what the hell.

So it ended up kind of weird sounding. Call it a “personal interpretation”.

I’m not happy with the video, though. I feel like I should either commit to just having a still image for the whole thing or put the effort into putting the lyrics on screen so that people have something to look at.

I chose that sunset picture today because I thought it gave the whole thing a “karaoke feel”. Like I’m right there in the bar with you!

The stuff I put on screen for the instrumental break is pretty much me in full on Jesus mode. My big warm gooey heart on full display, which is rare for me.

But I really like that side of me. In a way I wish I could be that way all the time. Just go around being sweetness and lightness and love all the time and inspiring others to let go of their anger and their hate and join me in the clean green meadows of love.

I would have made such an amazing hippie.

But of course, there’s a lot more sides of me than that, and I am still hard at work trying to come up with a single sense of self that includes all of them.

I mean, sure, I can go around saying, “I am not my facets, I’m the gem” and that’s certainly true. It’s all me, as complicated as that can be.

Maybe I am just too bizarre a creation for a singular sense of self to be possible. I get the feeling that developing one of those means cutting off a lot of yourself that does not fit and I am just plain not willing to do that.

I am too firmly committed to indecision for that.

Plus I have always been very definitely myself. To a fault, really. If I had been more willing to bend in order to learn to fit in, I might have actually gotten the fuck over myself and made some god damned friends and had a peer group.

But it feels like that was never really in the cards for me. I was just too weird a kid from the get-go. Maybe kindergarten would have taught me the social lessons I needed so badly but that was not in the cards for me either.

I was destined to be weird little critter, I guess. One of a kind.

But at least I have superpowers. That helps. I might be weirder than a snake’s luggage but I am also incredibly intelligent, powerfully creative, supernaturally articulate, glowingly charismatic. and humble.

By all normal measures, I should be able to harness my extraordinary abilities to walk astride this little world of ours like a giant, or at least make a life for myself.

Billions of people would sacrifice major organs to have what I have, etc.

But for some reason I just can’t do that. I could call it indecision and I could call it lack of will and I could call it having a very underdeveloped id, but whatever it is, it keeps me from being able to leave my grotty grotto and find my place in the world.

I’m too scared. Scared of doing the wrong thing and getting hurt, perhaps. Scared of ended up overstimulated and confused and scared and lost. Scared of having to cope on my own and be my own person and develop my own ways to cope.

Scared of being out there, being seen, having to deal with that big bad world.

Everything about that scares the shit out of me.

But as God as my witness, I will overcome that. I will rise. I will escape.

And this phase of my life will finally be over.

More after the break.

---

What makes you happy

Mulling over our strange relationship with happiness again.

Ask people if they want to be happy and they will, of course, say yes.

And most people have at least some notion of what will make them happy.

And yet, we don’t do those things. It almost seems like we avoid them. Why?

Is there something about modern society that makes us demand new sources of happiness all the time? Because the ones we already know about are… boring?

I feel like on some level, society makes us ever-hungry little piggies eternally worried that if we stop and appreciate what we have we might miss out on stuffing our greedy little mouths to the absolutely maximum amount.

You fool, in the time it took you to stop and smell that rose, you could have stuffed your gullet with TEN MORE TONS OF FOOD!

That’s why one of the most radical and liberating things we can do is settle for less.

To say, “I have enough, thank you. I know that I could get and/or have and/or achieve more but I am perfectly content with what I have and don’t need any more. ”

Odds are, just reading that made you uncomfortable. I know typing it did it for me. It is such a radical heresy that even an outré weirdo like me feels weird about it, and I am the person who came up with it.

But why? Why do we have this universal assumption of full on feckless greed that states that, of course we are all constantly trying to get as much as we can all the time?

Looked at objectively, I find it very spiritually depressing. Not that I am claiming to be immune. I’m a greedy little piggy like everyone else.

We’re simply not allowed to say “enough”. There’s no such thing as enough. Because if there was, then at some point you might stop getting as much and that’s unthinkable.

The very idea of “enough” is unthinkable, as in we can’t even imagine having enough except in a detached, abstract sense.

Sure, we can imagine a nice little lifestyle for ourselves and say to ourselves, “Yeah, I guess that would be enough. ”

But never ever could be imagine turning down more.

That would be absolutely beyond the pale. The sort of thing that leads not to outrage but blank incomprehension. Most people don’t even know that’s a thing you could do.

Before long, people will invent reasons it’s somehow wrong. But the real reason will be that you’re making people uncomfortable and they want to punish you and make you start acting normal again.

All because you dared to have enough.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. .

First, I have, of course, made a vid.

You know, sometimes I have a vague idea what I am going to talk about but a lot of the time I just start talking or typing and see what comes out.

It’s one of the way I prevent writer’s block. When you know you’re going to start writing no matter what, your mind is forced to come up with something.

Or at least that’s how it works for me.

Before I started blogging in 2011, I would sometimes do literal “write anything” exercises. Just typing whatever came into my head with absolutely no forethought and no concern for whether it was “right” or coherent or made sense or anything.

The only goal was to keep typing.

And that was super valuable because it helped to unclog the verbal pipeline between my mind and the world and get me used to putting my thoughts into words on a page.

And sure, it was incoherent and nonsensical…. at first.

But the more I did it, the more coherent and structures this seat of the pants writing ended up being. To the point where I wrote an entire short story of around 800 words in one nonstop typing session.

Which is pretty impressive, don’t you think?

It was not a great short story, mind you, but it had a beginning, middle, and end, and it all made sense.

It was readable.

And I have carried that lesson forward to this very day. It’s how I learned not to second guess what I am writing, because that road leads to paralysis.

I write what I write, and I rarely look back. For better and for worse.

It has its drawbacks but it’s made me very productive. I can write damned near anything and I can do it fast.

Anyhow, this is what I am REALLY excited about posting…. look what I made!

It’s ME! It’s Fruvous strutting the stage as lead singer of a rock band and he’s doing it in front of an audience of FREAKING MUPPETS.

Word cannot describe how much that means to be.

Relatedly, I seem to have made my first YouTube Short.

I guess it became one because it’s only 4 seconds long? What I like is that I didn’t have to worry about the aspect ratio. It did that itself.

So all I have to do is find a way to say something worth listening to in 60 seconds or less and I, to, can make Shorts.

Works for me.

I used a site called Vidu to make Fru’s fabulous debut. It’s been amazing to play with. All it needed was a reference photo for Fruvous (which I generated via image generation) and a description from me and boom, I’m a Muppet!

That wasn’t even in my description. I just told it to give me a rock and roll band with all anthropomorphic animal musicians, and pow!

It is, no exaggeration, something I will treasure forever. And it’s great that I know that I can make Fruvous animations any time I like!

I wonder if it could handle the four footed version of him. Could make some pretty darn cute “fox on the beach” animations for the coming summer.

Of course, Vidu doesn’t do NSFW stuff. If I want to do that kind of thing (and I really, really do!), I will have to find some shady AI that doesn’t ask questions.

But get this : I tried to get it to animate with a male furry nude as the reference, and it refused to do it!

HOW DID IT KNOW? It must have a penis detection formula or something.

And just thinking about the math involved makes my head spin.

Well it’s sort of half a sphere on top of a cylinder…

More after the break.

---

Doing dumb shit

Right now, I am sitting here waiting for dear Julian to bring me the food I ordered.

It took about 20 mins to get here. I’ve needed to poop since before I ordered. That 20 minutes would have been the ideal time to go poop.

But I just kept playing my video game instead.

Now the food hath arrived and I am eating it and I still need to poop. But apparently I lack the self-discipline to make myself get up and go poop BEFORE I eat and blog.

In the abstract, I am sensible and pragmatic, like a good Taurus. I always know what I should be doing.

I just don’t do it a lot of the time, and generally speaking, the reasons are emotional.

Quite often it’s simply a matter of lacking the will to overcome myself and make myself do something. My lethargy and indolent indecision make it hard for me to simply decide to do something a fair bit of the time.

That’s part of why I rely so heavily on routine. Routine really cuts down on the number of decisions you have to make, especially that most dreaded one : what do I do now?

I follow my routine, of course. And any spare moments I have, I stuff with video games.

That way I almost never have to decide what to do with myself, and it’s ever so easy to just let the days click by like numbers on a clock, each day seeming a little shorter than the last, until they all become a blur and it seems like whole weeks blink by in a snap.

And then you die.

They say that when you’re over the hill, you pick up speed, but seeing as death lies at the bottom, that’s not such a good thing.

For most people, anyhow.

Lately I have been harboring some “not technically suicidal” thoughts about how I am looking forward to being old enough to die a respectable death because then this whole sordid mess will be over.

That’s a heavy damned word for me. Over. It’s like the ultimate expression of unhealthy escapism, the desire to escape literally everything so you don’t have to deal with living at all any more.

Those are the rocks I work hard to avoid. I keep myself busy with my routine and my games and my creative output so I don’t think about that kind of thing too much.

And I am most definitely not making any plans to harm myself.

But when deathcomes for me, many years from now I might not put up much of a fight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was supposed to be rap lyrics, but whatever.

Don’t mean to be crude, and
With all due respect
When the perfect pink girl
Decides she wants sex
She’s not the honey sweet virgin
Or Daddy’s little girl
When she wants a big man
To rock her little world
All those ribbons and lace
Kept her pent up inside
So when she finally left home
She went buck wild
She was burning up down there
Which is why, at her peak,
She was sleeping with a dozen different guys a week
She wanted to try every man in town
It took a pregnancy scare
To get her to slow down
And so the pretty pink princess
Is gone for good
And she’s got a reputation
In the neighborhood
But it seems like she finally satisfied her whim
And now she’s looking at her best friend Doris and thinking, “Hmmm. ”

There’s an AI music generator called Mureka^[1] and I wrote those lyrics to try it out but when I went to create an account it turned out I already had one and I had used up all my free credits so I couldn’t make the new song.

So I decided I would get a paid membership. What the heck, it was only $10/month USD (so a hair under $14 in real money) and for that I would be able to render 400 songs, as well as a lot of neato features I’d never seen anywhere else, so I figured I would give it a shot.

But they wouldn’t accept my credit card, so fuck’em.

---

Anyhow, here’s today’s vid.

The feeling of brain congestion has eased some since I recorded that, so I guess it really was dehydration or whatever.

I was pretty worried there for a bit. Visions of early onset Alzheimer’s or something even worse were dancing in my head.

And that would be so unfair given all the mental exercise I get!

But no, it turns out I was overreacting, like I often do. I honestly think my body and brain just need the excitement now and then.

I’m high strung. I need something to get super excited or totally freaked out about on a regular basis in order to burn off all that excess mental energy I generate.

I am learning to live with that. It would be better to turn that overcharge into excitement or even happiness, but I don’t have the knack for that yet.

Oh well, flipping out for no good reason every now and then isn’t the worst crime.

More worrisome, for now at least, is these pains I have been getting in/on my head. They are brief but pretty intense and I am wondering WTF.

So far there’s been three. So, not panic worthy yet.

Luckily, they are at the surface, just below the scalp, so I am not worried about this having a totally different cerebrospinal implication or anything.

But all three have been in very different locations, and they definitely don’t feel like a skin thing, so I am still wondering WTF.

They’re like a toothache of the skull. And that can’t be good.

A few more and I will definitely consider a trip to Urgent Care or the ER. It’s some pretty serious pain so this is one thing I will not ignore.

In general, I only go to the ER when I’m scared. It’s not smart, but if I went to the ER or UC every time my health did something weird, I might as well move in.

Most of the time it’s just dehydration anyhow.

More after the break.

---

Growth and pain

Growth – real growth – pretty much has to hurt.

At least if your psyche is as rigidly structured as mine. When I pulled myself together after my psychological meltdown in my early 20’s, I create a version of me that could function at a very low level – and that’s still the version of me that is running 30 years later – but in order to create that version of me, I had to install a sort of exoskeleton to hold myself together given what my life had become.

And like a lizard having to shed its skin as it grows, I have to more or less break myself open to let myself grow now and that is bound to hurt.

But I don’t care. Pain like that means very little to me any more. I want to grow and thrive and rise and if pain is the price for that, so be it. Bring it on.

I’m learning to weaponize my innate stubbornness and it’s glorious.

So I am having my bad moments. Moments when I feel confused and anxious and like I don’t know what is going on any more.

But I do. The feeling fades and I remember that I am fine and nothing bad is happening and I can just relax and feel safe.

Well I can try anyhow. High strung, remember. Truly relaxing would probably require a much, much bigger expenditure of effort than I am used to doing and I am very much still adjusting to the whole “effort is not the enemy, idleness is” shift of POV.

I know I have to make myself do more so I can drain the curse that is frustrated energy out of my body like squeezing poison from a wound and that means overcoming this absurd tendency to be a miser when it comes to effort.

As if that’s something you can hoard. It’s not like being idle or aimless now means you can be super energetic and purposeful later.

Rather the opposite, in fact. Lethargy is a disease and the more you feed it, the more it grows and takes over.

I’m going to try to shake that shit off and bring myself to life once more. A life where I have hope and ambition and a life to lead.

Cold sleep is over. Time to wake up and run this starship of mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s that sad song by the Tragically Hip again.

Making that vid was fun, and it taught me an important lesson :

I am completely incapable of knowing whether my singing is any good.

The whole thing was a surprisingly emotional experience and it set off a war between my traditional destructive self-loathing thinly disguised as analysis and my stubborn refusal to let that side of me win.

It’s better than just hating myself but the back and forth between the two combatants makes it impossible for me to settle on an opinion.

There are things that sound good in my performance, and things that sound bad. I know I sang better than some people but not nearly as good as a lot of people. If I do another one of these, I will try to prepare my voice more, because just singing the song all the way through once was apparently not enough.

There was still a lot of rust in these ol’ pipes of mine. I can hear it clearly.

But that’s not what is important. What’s important is that I like singing and it felt good to express myself that way as well and it’s something other than me just talking.

Not that I am not a spellbinding orator, but I wanted to mix things up.

And in many ways it was a lot less work than my usual blah-blah. Less editing to do. Pretty easy to find an appropriate visual.

And the background video was not only royalty free, it was just plain free. I expected the site, pixabay, to want to charge me money for a royalty free vid.

Let that concept roll around in your brain for a bit.

But no, I was able to download it.

I wanted to put the lyrics in the vid too but I ran out of energy. Plus I know what a pain it can be to get the words on the screen and not looking like ass.

At least I have figured out how to center things in my video editor. For some reason the usual buttons just spaz the fuck out now. I click center and it draws a box across the top of the screen or hops to some arbitrary corner or whatever.

And in a previous era I used those buttons a lot to correct for my wonky vision.

But there’s another way. A convenient crosshair that appears to guide you to the center. So my on screen text should look less like an incorrectly loaded slideshow now.

I keep playing with the idea of doing my videos in multiple sessions in order to raise the quality to more than my roughly one hour of editing energy can handle.

But so far I am just too damned lazy and/or addicted to video games.

It’s already making the sick part of me feel panicky and infringed upon just to make a video every day. I am going to give myself time to get used to that before I push things any further in that direction.

But the seeds of progress have been planted. I have been askng myself whether gaming is necessarily the most fun I could be having for a given stretch of time.

Maybe I would be happier doing something creative, like messing around with all the neato AI toys out there, or writing something big and fictional.

Games are fun and they keep me busy but they’re not something I can really get excited about. I am too much of an old and jaded gamer for that.

Maybe I need to do new things more often. Wake myself up inside.

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

More after the break.

---

Rust in the gears

I had a bad moment earlier. .

I was between activities and about to start playing games (what a shock) when I had this moment of intense physical frustration. Like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, or maybe out the window with a madman’s sanity-shredding shriek.

This happens now and then. That’s not the unusual part. Presumably the urge to get up and move around and express my physical energies builds up behind the dam that is my depression and sometimes that become impossible to ignore any more and overflows into my conscious mind for a moment or two of ARGH.

A moment that playing video games would do nothing to relieve.

No, the unusual part was that this time, I had the wit and the perspicacity to ask myself, “Well, then what WOULD make me happy?”.

I didn’t come up with an answer in those few moments, but it’s a great sign that I am beginning to think along those lines.

I have lived in silent despair for far too long. It was a major breakthrough when I realized that I wanted more out of life – a lot more – than my stable but smothering lifestyle could give me.

But it turned the lowered Paxil dose to make me feel like it was possible. As the numbness retreats, new life springs up in its place, and while the healing spring is sometimes painful to experience, it’s worth it all to finally wake up already.

The time of cold storage is over. I locked myself away to protect myself from a cruel and callous world a very long time ago. It’s the version of myself I was left with after my breakdown in my early 20’s ended and it’s the person I have been ever since.

But it’s… um… help me here, Jean-Luc..

Yeah. Exactly. Well said, mon ami.

And hopefully this spring will be MY spring. The spring where all my permafrost thaws out and all this black and stinking ice that I have mistakenly thought was part of me will melt away and the real me will emerge, like the Iceman from his cave, and step out into this wild and wonderful world he’s never truly known.

And I will be reunited with my long lost other half, and be whole again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Linked here as a reference of my reference.

Anyhow, on with the show.

I read a quote once that said something like, “after each work is finished, there is that little dissatisfaction that is the seed of the next one”, and that’s certain how I feel about these videos I have been making.

I’m not satisfied with what I have been putting out. I’m not declaring all my recent videos to be utter crap or anything, but I want something more out of them.

Maybe it’s time I mounted my soapbox and did a big rabble rousing speech about bringing the billionaires down.

Billions of us, hundreds of them, and so on.

That sounds like it might scratch this newly hatched itch. Get my passionate beliefs behind my oratory prowess and hope to really reach some people.

The political climate seems right for the rousing of the rabble, n’est-ce pas?

I could see myself becoming a Malcolm X type figure. I am certainly in a very, very “by any means necessary” mood right about now.

It’s going to happen. The oligarchs and plutocrats ARE going to get the hell out of the way of democracy and the will of the people. Consider that writ in stone, assholes.

How much damage you take and how bloody it gets is up to you.

Just remember the odds. Your private security forces and your high tech alarm systems and your helicopters aren’t going to do a god damned thing to save you if the people are out for your hide.

Because we’re the one with the tanks, bombs, and rocket launchers.

And the numbers, obviously.

Now where was I? Sorry, I got into firebrand mode there for a minute.

I really feel French when I get like that.

As indicated in today’s vid, did the therapy thing today. 2 pm on a Wednesday instead of the usual 1 pm on Thursday.

My therapist has travel plans this week. Whatever. I am fine with moving the appointment around if there’s a good reason.

It’s chaos and uncertainty that bother me. Moving an appointment is a matter of going from one certainty to another.

That said, if he did this all the time I would get annoyed pretty fast.

I told Doctor Costin about how I am trying to warm myself up inside and thaw myself out so that my emotions can flow and through that find their own level.

We also discussed my cerebral escapist tendencies and how desperately unbalanced they have left me.

I escaped being raped when I was 4 years old by retreating into the depths of my mind and in truth I have never fully emerged again.

Even when I was a schoolboy, I was dealing with reality as little as I could get away with. I would read books while walking to and from school (not recommended). I would spend my time at home watching TV or reading or playing video games. At school, I escaped the boredom of being way, way. WAY ahead of my class by escaping into the world of my mind and thinking about stuff.

I still pass the time that way in places like waiting rooms. It’s great because I don’t actually get bored until I have caught up with the backlog.

---

Where is my mind today? I totally forgot that I wasn’t done with this part yet. The mind fog rolls thick today I guess.

Now I am sitting here about to eat supper when the lunch half of the day’s blogging ain’t done yet. How embarrassing!

Oh well. Onward and upward!

More after the break.

---

Absence of mind

I try to make light of my absentmindedness but the truth is that it can be very scary.

Because it erodes your whole confidence in reality. In the back of my mind lurks the constant paranoia that I am forgetting something important. On a subjective emotional level, I feel like everything in my umwelt could vanish at any moment. Just wink out of existence because my attention was focused elsewhere.

No wonder I feel like my focus is never where it’s supposed to be. Like I am always looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My gut says that is somehow related to my inability to multitask.

It must also be part of my general background of anxiety, as well as my tendency to rely on routine to keep my shit together.

I don’t have to wonder what I am supposed to be doing if I do the same things at roughly the same time every day.

I would benefit greatly from some kind of assistant whom I could trust to be, essentially, my extended memory. Someone who is good at keeping all my details in their head and at the ready so that I could feel secure in the knowledge that I’m not forgetting anything.

That would be such a load off my mind!

As is, I can only do what any of us can do : the best that I can. I try hard to keep the important things in mind and when I screw up anyhow, I say oops and make whatever apologies I need to and do my best to get over it with a minimum of excoriating self-loathing and recrimination and all that jazz.

I joked recently on a BlueSky thread that my absentmindedness is at least one third of the reason I’ve had to develop an endearing personality.

People are quicker to forgive you if you’re both sincere in your apology and cute.

I’ve always pitied those people who can never admit when they’re wrong. Like my late father. That seems like such a terribly limiting way to live.

I am no paragon or anything but I apologize right away, every time. I can’t imagine doing anything else. Not only is it the right thing to do, it gets it over with before it can hang around and fester.

And whatever it is, I do genuinely feel bad about it. It’s not performative.

I dunno, I just try hard to be a good person.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

This one ain’t much, but they can’t all be gems (PRODUCTIONS!).

Note : I am not in any sense or in any way, shape, or form, advocating for or encouraging anyone to shoot President Donald J. Trump in his big fat stupid forehead order to see him and all his evil disappear in a fine red mist for his crimes against you and those you love who supported him for so long.

I repeat : I am NOT saying anyone should do that, even though you’d be remembered as a hero by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

Don’t do it. It would be wrong.

But it’s perfectly fine to think about it as a way of dealing with the voices screaming in your head at the madness infecting the world today.

I find it to be very effective in relieving a certain kind of tension. The kind that comes from having a lot of primal animal rage and no place for it to do.

And of course, it doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s just thoughts in your head. Thoughts can’t hurt anyone, no matter how satisfyingly bloody and gruesome they are.

I mean, I don’t even own a gun.

Besides which, killing Trump would just make him a martyr. And just think of how disgusting it would be to have to pretend to miss him and say nice things about him in order to not speak ill of the dead.

Of course, it might be more like this :

But really, who’s to say?

It would be far better, morally and politically, if he is taken out politically. Like, for instance, if he is not just impeached, but impeached with almost every single Republican and Democrat voting to toss his ass out of there.

I say “almost” because you just know that, no matter how strongly the wind is blowing the other way, there would still be a few idiots so indoctrinated to Trump worship that they couldn’t possibly vote against him lest he strike them down for their impiety.

Conservatives are cowards, after all. That’s why they can’t ever stand up to real power, and why they can’t help kowtowing to the rich.

Though that might just be changing. Real populism is rearing its magnificent head and the billionaires better learn to play nice or it could be their head on a pike.

But even more than them, the Republicans in the House and Senate who have been selling the GOP base to the rich by feeding them a bunch of crap had better watch the fuck out, and that also includes Fox News.

I think Fox News is on this, though. They are at least intelligent enough parasites to know that they can’t afford to be too out of sync with their viewers so even that band of billionaire lackeys are expressing grave misgivings these days.

I actually have a tiny bit of room in my heart for pity for those idiot hosts who are stuck with trying to come up with ways to make the tariffs sound like a good thing.

They really seem like people struggling to find nice things to say about a recently deceased relative everyone hated.

“Well he was always very…. passionate in his opinions. “
“Yes… you always knew exactly what he thought about various groups of people….”

Of course, what I am really looking forward to is when they finally break. When the tension becomes too much and they snap and let loose with what they REALLY think.

At least one of them is going to do that soon. And the rest of them won’t openly agree but they won’t disagree either.

I know how Fox News and other dysfunctional families operate.

More after the break.

---

The ghosts inside my haunted head

As far as I know, she wasn’t singing about me.

Anyhow, I think I have some clue as to where my “haunted” feeling comes from. It’s not a fully fleshed out and coherent notion yet, but here’s what I’ve got :

It definitely has something to do with my mind subconsciously processing emotions. The “ghosts” flickering around inside my skull like moths flapping around a lantern are emotions moving around as they try to get expressed despite the ferocious and tenacious lock down I have on my heart in the name of “control”.

Ha ha ha.

The “haunted” feeling is, therefore, the strange effect of my mind fighting itself to create a state of mind where those emotions can make it through. It feels spooky and unnatural to me because it’s so different from my usual artificial cold and calm reality.

It has a lot more in common with the vast dark and mysterious forest that exists outside of the bright cold light of my incredibly powerful mind with all its logic and analysis and deduction and insight and all the rest of its tricks.

The place that I have, traditionally, been too terrified to so much as look at let alone enter. The subconscious mind, Jung’s “shadow”, the inner realm below and beyond the febrile world of so-called “reason”, call it what you will.

It’s where all but the coldest, brightest, most clinical emotions live and it’s always where the real us truly lives and that means that we can’t go on pretending that it isn’t there or that it doesn’t count just because we can’t handle it.

So for a long time now I have been trying to open myself up to that world so I can learn to navigate it and maybe get some healing done when I am down there.

Certainly, my issues exist on a level far below anything my overweaning superego and its high intensity laser beams can reach.

It’s down there with my most warm, tender, intimate feelings, the ones that were there long before my bullying intellect took over, back when I experienced the world through my emotions instead of locking them away to keep myself “safe”.

I have to open up my haunted head and let the ghosts fly free.

And that means expressing them. The only cure for emotions is to feel them.

And I do that through this blog and you, my wonderful readers.

And who knows, maybe the video too, eventually. I haven’t spilled my guts in them yet but it honestly might do me some good.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my freaking legs.

And when I think about my legs, I think about how angry I am about the total lack of diagnosis as to what the fuck went wrong with them.

Their degradation has made my life so much more constrained and dependent and lacking in basic human dignity.

I mean, I’m a cripple now. That’s still new. And it sucks.

For instance, I can’t even have a bowl of soup because I have no way to transport said soup from the kitchen to my seat in front of Mister Computer where I spend the majority of my waking hours.

I really wish I had exercised more when it was still an option. A nice long walk in a part or even a little light jogging sounds so good to me now. Being tied to a walker has vastly reduced both my mobility and range, and more importantly, my independence.

I hate having to rely on other (mostly poor Julian) for basic things. Not only do I feel super guilty for being such a burden on people^[1], there’s the simple fact that doing things yourself is always faster and simpler and easier than doing things through others.

So even if I was a completely selfish oral retentive sociopathic seat moistener, I still would want to do most things myself.

And I’m not.

I want my legs back, damn it. I’m not going to tell you to be grateful for the functional legs you presumably have, because well yeah, but the number of misfortunes we do not have is functionally infinite, but I will say this :

Use it while you have it.

I want to be free to roam the world on my own, too. It is the bitterest of ironies that I am only getting my head together enough to socialize outside of Le Gang and maybe even talk to people I don’t even know way after the point at which my crumbling body will let me do that.

At least, to do it without help. But I’ve already covered that.

I long to be able to pay someone to push me around in a wheelchair and take care of my simple needs. I would feel so much better if I was empowered like that.

I have lived far too much of my life in a state of cringing gratitude instead of coming into my own and building pride in my ability to handle whatever comes along.

But I can’t get back all the life I’ve lost. All I can do is let it go and start living now. I might not have all the options I should, but I ain’t dead yet, and there’s fun to be had.

Slowly but steadily, I prise open the door to the vault around my heart, hoping to one day finally be born unto the real world so I can, at long last, be alive.

I don’t feel fully in possession of myself yet. Not by a long shot. I still have a lot of healing to do before I can exit my semi-sleeping stupor and truly awaken from the spell I have been under since I was raped when I was 4 years old.

Like Pinocchio, I hope to some day be a real little boy.

But until then, I will continue to be the strange and magical being that I became.

Shhh. The Prince is sleeping.

More after the break.

---

About that pet thing

Let’s take another crack at this.

It comforts me greatly to think of myself as a pet (of sorts) or even a mascot to my group of friends because at least then I have a role and a use.

And that goes a long, long way towards shouting down that voice in my head that tells me I am a parasite and a blight on all that know me and a drain on society and everyone would be better off if….

Yeah, you know where that’s going.

I know that those thoughts are crazy. Lots of people love having me around. I may not have a job but I contribute in my own special way.

I spread my special sunshine as Fruvous on Tapestries. I leave tons of comments on YouTube, BlueSky, and (ahem) other places. I write on this lovely blog every day, and lately I also make a video every day.

I might not reach a lot of people (yet), but it would be wrong (and dangerous) to say that I don’t have any impact on the world or that I don’t produce anything.

The world would be a poorer and sadder place without me. People definitely would miss me if I was gone. And I could never do that to those whom I hold dear.

Suicide is such a brutal, selfish act.

Besides which, there’s still a lot of fun to be had. My life might not be all I want it to be but I still manage to have a somewhat good time.

And there’s always room for more. My life is far from over. And as long as I live, I am going to keep pressing forward toward the light, even though it blinds me and burns me and makes me afraid sometimes.

I know that this happens only because I’m not used to the light, having lived in the cold and the dark of my Midnight Tundra for so long.

And if I keep pushing forward then giving myself time to adjust, some day I will emerge from my cave into the world where the rest of humanity lives, and I will, at very very long last, get to go play with the other kids.

Maybe I was destined to be both special and strange. It certainly does seem like I had no chance of being normal – I was an eerie over-bright toddler.

So maybe I just walk a different path than most.

That would make sense.

And who knows where this road might lead me?

I just have to open myself up to inspiration.

Because when I am inspired, nothing can stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.