Title obviously a reference to this.

Today I ended up talking about being sleepy all the damned time lately.

What I should do is just keep sleeping, apart from waking up to pee, and see if what I need is the right kind of deep, restorative sleep I rarely ever get.

For reasons. Good ones.

I mean, I have my receptacle so I have all I need to minimize the disruption caused by the need to urinate short of a god damned catheter.

Some day, maybe. But not yet.

I usually don’t go right back to sleep after I pee because my brain needs time to “cool off” after all that overheating I do in my sleep. So I usually get up for a little while, or maybe just play with my synthesizer or read.

But that’s optional. Maybe all I really need to do is to keep a wet face cloth in a basin of water nearby so I can water cool my poor heat sick brain off quickly and easily after I pee (or while I pee, I suppose) and then go right back to sleep.

Problem is that I often wake up agitated too. So it may be that I have no choice but to get up and do something until I calm back down again.

Something about smothering in your sleep a hundred times an hour makes me tense.

Hmmm. I probably get dehydrated in my sleep too, given how sweaty I get. The obvious solution to that would be to drink some water while I am awake.

Which would just make me need to pee again all the sooner. Le sigh.

Why does life have to be so god damned complicated? So many factors to balance. So much stimulation threatening to overwhelm. So much scariness outside my tiny realm.

Guess I really should leave my cramped and squalid cave and go out there in search of the life satisfaction and sense of comfort and belonging I so desperately crave.

And sex. Loads and loads of sex. Oh, so much sex.

And I am sure I will make that big leap beyond my inner walls real soon now.

You know. When I’m good and ready. And I have my head together. And my health has improved a fair bit. And I am feeling confident and strong.

In other words, half past never.

I feel like I am on an infinite approach. Like I am in one of those dreams I’ve seen in movies and TV where the person is running toward some objective but no matter how fast they run, they never get any closer to it.

It’s just a target painted on the horizon. The carrot dangled in front of a donkey. A rat running in his wheel.

It’s like I am making just enough progress to make it feel like I am getting somewhere without risking the tragedy of actually going anywhere.

Because that would mean leaving (gestures to filthy roach-ridden fetid surroundings) all of this behind.

And like so many before me (and after me, and during me), I constantly choose the familiar but terrible over the new and scary but maybe better.

And it’s all because I am so god damned withdrawn. I am so withdrawn, in fact, that any potential activity that requires becoming more engaged and activated is automatically rejected and marked “impossible” by the bureaucratic bastards of my depression.

Why, I just plan can’t do that…. given the hidden set of rules I live under. The rules I don’t even know myself, let alone transmit to anybody else.

The rules that, on some level, I feel keep me “safe”.

Well a ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.

What was I made for?

More after the break.

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Our special purpose

As patient readers know, I have a big problem with the ideas that our lives a meaning and that there is some kind of purpose for us being here.

I can’t seem to find the blog entry where I wrote about the meaning of the meaning of life, but rest assured… it does exist.

I’m almost positive it does.

I think it must be our deep social programming, the stuff that operates on a level so far beneath the surface of our minds that we don’t even know it’s there, that insists to us that there must be some kind of purpose to our existence, that there must be a job we are meant to be doing, a role we are meant to fill, and we need to figure out what that is and start doing it in this global tribe we call humanity.

But like… whose purpose? And why would there be one? Where would this purpose even come from? And who says life has to mean anything at all? Meaning to whom?

Logically speaking, there is absolutely no such thing as a meaning or purpose to life, no matter how much our social instincts make us want these things to exist.

But that only covers cosmic, universal, inherent meaning and purpose to life.

We can create our own no problem. Who or what is to stop us?

However, it occurs to me that I am perhaps being too logical and reductive about this whole thing. After all, I’m almost as as human as everyone else [citation needed] and I have those exact same social instincts, so maybe I should try to fit myself into them.

So what is the meaning of my life and/or its purpose?

Fucked if I know.

Maybe this is painfully Gen X of me, but I resent the question. Who the fuck am I to question myself like that?

That aside, if there’s anything I am meant to do in this world, it’s communicate. Express myself. Think thoughts and transmit them to humanity at large.

I have at least figured out that much.

So I write, I make videos, I leave an absurd number of comments on BlueSky and YouTube and occasionally TikTok, and that’s still me trying to figure out how best to do this whole self expression thing in a way that works for me.

And on good days, I do feel like I am slowly figuring the whole thing out. Like I am homing in on what it will feel like I am “supposed” to be doing because it will fit me so well and let me express myself in a clear and simple way that lets me really get whatever messages I have for humanity out there in the world.

I have a lot of them. Humanity should really check its voicemail more often.

Some day, I will figure out how to get people to listen.

Is that not every visionary’s burden?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m quite happy with how this one turned out.

I think I made my points strongly and well and came across with the level of concern and seriousness I was intending.

My only regret is that, in retrospect, I maybe should have warned people that I was about to fuck with their heads, possibly a lot.

Oh well, there’s always something.

My intent is therapeutic. Confronting my own irrationality was unpleasant and scary but it opened the way to fight so much of the craziness in my head that it was way more than worth it.

Because once you know and accept that you are, in fact, crazy, and that therefore all your perceptions and beliefs are suspect, you are empowered to say to yourself, “No, that’s not true. That’s crazy. That’s a product of my insanity. ”

And as you do so, you separate yourself from your illness and that is a vitally important step for recovery. It reminds you that you are not your illness, it’s just a bad thing that has happened to you, and you can safely mobilize against it because despite what your depression tells you, what hurts it does not hurt you, in fact, quite the opposite.

And then you can begin the process of slowly eliminating depression from your mind. It’s like dialysis – the healthy part of your mind (yes there is one) slowly eliminates the toxin of your depression from your mind.

At least, that’s how it’s been working with me.

But I admit that, as the saying goes, the truth shall set you free, but first, it will piss you off. My words in that vid are strong medicine, and like I said, it should probably come with a warning label, but I forgot.

So um…. consider yourself warned, I guess.

In my own brain (not yours), I’m still going through a lot of emotional stuff. I still have moments of intense frustration that make me feel like screaming and leaping out a window, and possibly punching a hole in a wall first.

And I know why. That shit happens when your passionate emotions lack outlet. All my steam stays trapped inside me without a pressure valve to release it and thus the pressure inside of me is really quite shocking.

The only upside is that I am pretty sure that’s what fuels my endless creativity. Imagination is my one and only outlet for all that steam and so I always have absolutely oodles of it at my disposal.

Hence my adding videos to my daily routine. That gives me another outlet for all that steam, one which is a lot more draining than typing to you fine folk.

I could add a third thing but no, not yet. I am still getting used to doing a video every day. Once that becomes completely easy and routine I will ponder adding a third thing, or maybe just come up with a way to make my videos a lot better by putting extra effort into them somehow.

No idea how that would work, other than just not doing them daily.

I suppose I could do the talking in the morning and the finding pix and clips in the afternoon and put out a more professional looking product that way.

That makes a startling amount of sense.

But not yet.

Of course, what I really need is more physical release. Otherwise known as moving around more. And I know I can and I know I should.

Doesn’t mean I will, though.

I have three decades of lassitude to overcome first. My brain is still stuck in “run and hide” mode and that mode screams that the only safety is in immobility.

Even though that’s what is fucking killing me.

More after the break.

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The freezing disease

I’ve been a medically unsound sluggard for so long that at this point it’s kind of hard to imagine myself living life in motion.

Not impossible. I’ve been busier before, though admittedly that was when I was younger. And truth be told my current life is not as idle as I make it sound.

Writing 1000 words a day and making a video is a fair amount of work. It’s not eight hours of work, but it’s usually around 4, and that’s every single day with no weekends off, so that’s 28 hours a week.

Which is not quite full time but it’s not too far off.

So it will do me a lot of good to remember that my being idle all the time is one of those lies my depression cons me into believing and it’s just plain wrong.

Which reminds me. Something I wanted to mention but it didn’t fit in the vid is the way that depression’s “evil magnetism” forces your soul to assume whatever shape makes it easiest to survive in its influence.

In fact, let’s switch from magnetism to gravity.

(Fruvous switches a comically oversized knife switch from MAGNETISM to GRAVITY)

Because the shape it forces on you is, in a general sense, flat. It flattens you to the ground and then keeps you there because when you try to stand back up or resist it in any way, you feel that same enormous crushing weight that forced you down there.

But if you stay as flat as possible, you can move around at the bottom of that gravity well and live a very limited sort of life defined by a force most people don’t feel.

So they, no matter how they try, can’t really understand what you’re going through, and unless you’re a scintillating communications genius like me, you can’t explain it.

Though if they are nerds, you can say, “It’s like living on a heavy gravity planet!”.

Imagine how much that would suck. Especially if the beings living there didn’t even know what gravity was and so had no idea that it could be different somewhere else.

So there you are, flat on the floor, and they’re mystified and just keep telling you to stand up already.

They’d probably think you were sick. Or crazy.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth.

I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Warning, this one is really quite long.

Like, a whole 12 and a half minutes!

So please forgive my presumptive use of your time.

Anyhow, here it is :

I felt like the wind was blowing in the right direction for me to go for some serious catharsis so I gave it my best shot.

But there’s more. I need to go deeper. Deeper, and more raw and honest. I need to express some of the really deep and nasty stuff lurking deep in the pits and crevices of my soul, and that’s going to take some serious digging.

I’m up for it. I am way beyond giving a shit if it hurts or paints me in a bad light or otherwise is the sort of thing most people suppress.

Fuck that. I’m in it to release my demons and air out old wounds and excise the diseased and infected flesh underneath those wounds so I can dig out all the poison and then cleanse the wound and close it then put a nice clean bandage on it.

There is an exit for all my pent up emotions if I just keep digging and keep struggling with my bad side and keep opening myself up as much as I can.

I’ve been really exploring just how paranoid and mistrustful and closed off I have been.

Not without reason. I have been betrayed and hurt in terrible ways in the past. I can remember having some hope and joy and zest for life as late as junior high.

But then Heisler and I stopped being friends and I was all alone again and life became a long dull grey trudge from nowhere to nowhere as my body moved through the world but my soul stayed cooped up deep inside the icy fortress I’d created.

Not on purpose, mind you. But as an instinctive response to my increasingly cold and vacant world, I withdrew deeper and deeper into myself, and that left a lot of me behind as each time I withdrew deeper, I shrank.

I feel like for my whole life, I have been trying to keep warm with a blanket that is way too small for me, and desperately trying to squish all of myself under it anyway.

Dunno how to give myself a bigger blanket. Maybe by growing up. I have no idea.

And lord knows I am trying. Trying as hard as I can to rise and transcend and leave all my petty poisonous bullcrap behind. I know that I could be something truly amazing if I could only cut all this excess baggage weighing me down loose.

And maybe that’s what I’m afraid of and why I cling to this tortuous collection of old, old sin and bruises. I’m scared of what will happen when I finally get enough of my marbles together and rise to my true potential.

Or at least a financially successful portion thereof.

It’s fear of the unknown, and, I suppose, that fear that I might be powerful beyond the ability of my meager soul to control and as a result I would finally go insane.

Or transform into something entirely unrecognizable to my current self, which a fixed sense of self cannot help but view as death.

I completely lack the capacity to simply trust that whatever comes next will be a better version of me. I lack faith even in my own developmental potential.

So the idea of leveling up scares me because it’s like opening a door into the vast and sinister world of the Unknown.

And if it isn’t known, how can you possibly trust it?

More after the break.

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Fear of the unknown

The irrationality really becomes evident when you realize that you instinctively assume that if something is unknown, that means it’s against you. 

As if there was a pervasive force acting with malign intent dedicated to hurting you in all ways possible and the only way to be safe from it is to only go places and do things where you can know they are “safe”. 

And like I have said before, there’s precious little in this chaotic universe that is like that. Everything worth doing has some degree of risk. Nothing is guaranteed. Life is a gamble and all we can do is play the odds. 

And you have to ask yourself, “How small does a risk have to be before it is not worth considering?”. There’s all kinds of things that could happen to you. You might get hit by a door that fell off an airplane. You might get blown up by some psycho who is angry with your landlord. You might get electrocuted by a short circuit in the power bar you plug your computer into. 

But all of those things are extremely unlikely, and therefore, not worth considering. 

And yet, if you’re like me, you’re kind of worried about all three of those things now. Not because they are likely but because they feel more likely because I have put those images into your head, even though they are no more likely now than they were before I typed anything about them. 

And the thing is, anyone with a little imagination (and maybe a morbid streak) can come up with thousands of other examples. All equally unlikely, all equally scary, and it’s mentally impossible to worry about all of them. 

On some level, you have to work probability into your calculations. You have to be willing and able to override your emotional response and assert your right to not worry about things that will, in all probability, never ever ever happen to you. 

At least, that’s the only way I know of to conquer those insidious fears. 

And if you find yourself unable to do that, ask yourself this : Why is my mind fixated on this incredibly unlikely thing? 

What am I avoiding by obsessing over it? 

What does filling my mind with this push out of my mind? 

And how bad must that thing be if being terrified of nothing seems better? 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

I made some points about my poor relationship with reality.

Not the ones I set out to make, or at least, not all of them, but still.

Here it is :

I guess that’s the problem with my “start with a topic and just talk about it till you’re done” method of making videos.

Sometimes it results in a very natural and honest free-flowing style that is both evocative and easy to listen to and I end up with sometimes I am quite proud of.

But sometimes I just end up lost, forgetting what I set out to say because I just can’t brain that day and I end up with sometimes still good, but less so.

That’s how I feel about today’s vid. In retrospect, I wish I had given myself more time to think about the subject.

Oh well, live and learn.

It’s gotten bad enough that I am actually contemplating writing down a few words about the points I wanna make and using those notes when I speak.

Which smacks of… dare I say it…. PREPARATION??

Perish the thought. I would lose some of my fresh, spontaneous charm.

On the other hand, it might fight that feeling that I have not said what I wanted to say as well as I wanted to say it that I get after each video lately.

Artistic growth always comes with a certain amount of pain. For every moment of transcendent bliss as one truly levels up as an artist there are a thousand fitful middling aggravating moments where you’re trying to figure out how to say what you are trying to say, whatever that is.

Or at least that’s how it is for a writer like me. I suppose painters don’t sit there agonizing over the next brush stroke.

Or maybe they do, I have no way of knowing.

Today’s been an average normal cookie-cutter day for me, apart from therapy. Way too much time spent playing video games instead of doing something more productive or at least more new and exciting and stimulating.

Maybe I should start uploading my videos to Instagram as well. Those videos seem to get around pretty good.

Of course, to really promote my videos, I’d have to…. promote my videos.

And that means I would have to work a hell of a lot harder on them so that they don’t embarrass me when others see them and they definitely could not be daily.

Maybe a couple of times a week.

Or at least I’d want to. That brings us back to the question of what, exactly, I could do to make my videos more likely to catch on with people.

Preparation would help. As would the oft mentioned pix and clips. The audio quality could be better – something seems to be lost when I upload them to YouTube.

But maybe all I really need is to talk about things I am really passionate about and let my natural flair for oratory do the rest.

Right now, I am sleepy. A thrilling update, I know. When I have made my word count I am going to need to lay down for a nap even though I don’t wanna.

I’m 52 years old and I am still having internalized arguments about bedtime.

Kid : (literally mostly asleep with Xbox controller in hand)
Mom : OK, young man, time for bed!
Kid : (snapping awake) Nuuuu, I want to stay up and play!
Mom ; You’re already half asleep.
Kid : (snapping awake again) No I’m not….

Luckily, I am a grownup now, technically, so I know that when I am this tired, I am better off napping whether I want to or not.

But I don’t have to be happy about it.

More after the break.

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Dark clouds of the soul

I feel like I’ve got dark clouds rolling through my soul today, leaving me in a glowering kind of mood that I have decided to try and just sit with rather than doing what I usually do, which is to bury that emotion and pretend like it never happened.

As a form of emotion self-regulation, it sucks hyena taint.

So instead, I am going to ask myself why. Why do I feel this angry darkness, this hungry void, this black hole spewing Hawking radiation inside of me tonight?

Frustration. That’s definitely a big part of it. I feel pent up and frustrated, like a zoo animal in too small a cage that is just waiting for the next opportunity to snap and suddenly savage a zookeeper.

Like I keep saying, I have a lot of anger and lust and ambition and pretty much every other energetic and passionate emotion bottled up inside me without a way to release them and that’s extremely corrosive to my mental wellbeing.

And as things currently stand, those emotions have literally no way for me to express them. I am that emotionally constipated. That clogged up inside. It’s all locked away deep inside me behind the mask of sweet little cheerful Fruvous.

The problem is that the person I pretend to be is the person I’d rather be. He’s the main way I escape from having to be myself and the main reason my true self hides behind so many layers of shadow and illusion.

I try to pretend he doesn’t exist. Just like my family did with me.

That can’t be a coincidence.

Maybe I deeply internalized all that neglect and negation and I treat myself like I’m not welcome or wanted too. I certainly treat myself like I’m not worth time or effort.

I don’t know how I fix that but I know where to start :

I did not deserve how my family treated me as a child. It was unjust and unfair and abusive. I was a perfectly wonderful child, bright and cute and sweet and charming and lovely, and they made me feel like a god damned cockroach. The way they treated me reflects nothing about me or my intrinsic nature or worth. They neglected a truly exceptional child and all for the crime of being unintended and inconvenient. I never asked to be here but once I got here I should have been treated with love and respect and patience and kindness, just like any other kid. The magnitude of the injustice perpetuated against me is incalculable, and I am finally ready to carry it.

Here’s hoping that helps.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Talked about an aspect of my childhood today.

That last bit about being an unwanted child was really cathartic for me so I should probably dig deeper into that.

In hindsight, I feel like I spent my whole childhood apologizing for existing. The fact that I should not be there was woven into the very fabric of our family dynamic, and woven so deeply that nobody ever had to actually say it.

After all, if they’d said it out loud, then they’d have to own it. They would hear how appalling it sounded and be forced to confront how they treated me versus how they technically thought they treated me.

Better to maintain deniability.

But it explains why my father always seemed even more pissed off than usual when he had to buy me a winter coat or new boots or the like.

I wasn’t even wanted. They never planned to happen. I defied a tubal ligation to be conceived. I was unintended – an uninvited guest who had vastly overstayed his welcome but could not leave.

I guess that, like a Christmas puppy, I was supposed to disappear when I stopped being cute and started requiring effort.

Because I wasn’t always unwanted. My childhood was great up until the point where I was raped at the age of four. I was the center of attention wherever I went because I was so cute and precocious. And because I was so charming, people loved to take care of me and I felt safe and secure and loved.

And then I was raped and my world was shattered and nothing would ever feel safe and warm and secure for me ever again.

Because that day I learned that monsters are real and there was nobody to protect me from them and they could hurt me in a way too terrible for me to comprehend whenever they felt like it.

Later on, bullying would confirm this basic truth.

But back to my home life. I really wonder what those years after I was raped but before my first day of school were like.

Lonely, for sure, because my friends Trish and Janet were both a year older than me and therefore went to school a year before I did, leaving me all alone.

I wonder if they got to go to kindergarten? I have a fairly indistinct memory of them being gone in the morning and me being excited when they got home.

But mainly I remember being very nervous and fragile. Still a sunshine-y little kid, but in a way that was brittle and skittish, like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh.

Someone has to have noticed. Betty my babysitter has to have had some notion that I had changed fairly radically in a short people of time. Gone was my easy charm and effortless charisma. In its place was a jittery, skittery, painfully shy kid.

But nobody knew what a change like that meant back then.

Then there was the fateful day when I was sent to my first day of school and basically thrown to the wolves.

Maybe that’s when the feeling unwanted really began. Before that, no matter how much my family might ignore or neglect me, I had Betty. It was her job to look after me so she always had time for me.

But then she went away and there was nobody to take her place.

More after the break.

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You’re on your own, kid.

I guess my family spent so long either resenting my existence or forgetting me entirely while Betty was looking after me during the day that it never occurred to them that I could possibly need anything from them now that Betty was gone.

After all, I wasn’t even supposed to be here it all. They were barely tolerating me as is, and now I dared to actually…. need things?

The sheer gall of this unwanted and uninvited child, to show up and make demands of the people who are supposed to be alive merely by existing and having needs.

What’s next, actually wanting things?

Well then we’d have no choice but to take him behind the shed and shoot him.

I exaggerate, of course,

Our shed wasn’t big enough for that.

So I grew up with the very clear message that I wasn’t wanted and I didn’t matter and I didn’t deserve literally anything and I could never ask for anything, not even support or advice or even just a hug, because to do so would be to remind them of my existence and they hated that.

My birth was a terrible, horrible, massively inconvenient mistake and it was vitally important that I didn’t keep reminding people of the awful day by existing.

So I tried not to.

I learned to minimize myself as much as possible. To say very little, ask for nothing at all, stay quiet and unobtrusive, and be glad for anything that happened to fall from the heavens onto my plate because someone was feeling generous because I sure as hell wasn’t owed anything.

Certainly not an equal share of anything. When I came along, the (intangible) resources that sustained three kids should have been redistributed evenly to the four of us.

But nope. Nobody dealt me in. And I was certainly not temperamentally equipped to fight for what I wanted.

Then, as now, I tended to just adapt to whatever happened rather than taking an active part in making them turn out the way I wanted them to.

I really needed someone looking out for me. Someone who took on the role of guiding and protecting and advocating for me when I was too timid and small to do it myself.

Someone who could see that no matter how smart I was, I was still a kid.

Betty got that. She got a first hand view of how scary smart I was but she also knew I needed love and attention and the very occasional bit of discipline.

I still miss her to this day. In many ways, she was my real mom.

But to her, I was just a job.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did not have as much time as usual to make a vid today so I just yakked about whatever was on my mind at the time and this is what came out :

Now that I am thinking about it, I think I did talk about that stuff in video form at least once and maybe more in the past. Oh well, not about to make something new.

Ya get what ya get with me, I’m sad to say.

Been worried about something that has popped up before, a long time ago, and that has made a highly unwelcome return.

Sometimes, when I lay down, I get an attack of shortness of breath as my body shifts to a lower level of activation.

If I stay calm and wait, things go back to normal fairly quickly. The whole thing lasts less than five minutes. But those are some freaky and scary minutes.

If it keeps happening, I will have to tell Doctor Chao about it as it definitely feels like it could be a heart issue and you don’t fuck around with those, especially when you have the extensive history of heart disease I’ve got in my family background.

In fact it’s hard for me to talk about it without triggering a full on panic attack in myself due to my morbid fear of suffocation brought on by my untreated sleep apnea.

Which is also a big problem, of course, and one that I can’t see myself doing much to correct any time soon.

I could tell Doctor Chao that CPAP does not work for me but he would probably just tell me to go try it again because any other option might involve him having to talk to other doctors and that’s way too scary and hard for him.

I could make an appointment with Doctor Sheri, my sleep apnea and diabetes doctor, whom I have not seen in years now because she keeps leaving it up to me to make the appointment despite my telling her that’s a bad idea for me.

Do not leave me to my own devices because my devices suck.

And now that it has been this long with no contact with her, I face the additional substantial barrier of having to explain why it’s been so long, and for someone with social anxiety like myself that’s a real dealbreaker.

Funny how something so small could create a wall that tall between me and what I know I should be doing.

But knowing what I should be doing doesn’t mean much because extremely little can motivate me to do much of anything out of my rigid routine and my long term non-immediate health does not even make the top 100.

Another factor in my day today is that I have been very sleepy. To the point where I start to doze off while typing to you lovely folk right now if I pause for too long.

This has been a problem for a few days now, although mostly it strikes at around 10 am and makes me go back to bed for more Z’s.

Today, it was making me drift off at the Kinsmen. That was a little embarrassing but thanks to the warm embrace of Xanax it did not bother me much.

I am sure nodding off is a fairly common occurrence there.

Still, if I am having oxygen issues, they might be related. OR maybe my body is just being stressed out by the heat and I just need to hydrate.

I have no fucking idea.

I am singularly unqualified to look after myself.

I should start small, with something low maintenance. Like a pet rock, or a ficus.

More after the break.

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Dragged over the rocks

That’s the somewhat melodramatic way I feel right now.

I keep telling my therapist about feeling “rough” but I don’t think I have properly conveyed what exactly I mean by that to him.

And he’s not here right now and you are, so I’m gonna tell you.

It’s this psychological feeling of tenderness and abrasion, like my mind and soul have either been dragged over rocks or newly born or, I suppose, both.

It tracks. I am going through a slow, painful psychological transition at this point in my life and so in that sense I definitely am being reborn, albeit at a glacial pace, and so it makes sense that it’s left me feeling rather raw inside.

That’s been the main long term noticeable effect of my lowering my Paxil (paroxetine) dose over time for me. As the dose lowered, the feeling of rawness intensified, and I am now at the point where I don’t think I want it to get any worse for a while.

That could be the wrong call. Maybe if I just keep leaning in and lowering the dose, I would finally make it through this rough patch and pop on through to the other side of it as a changed man.

Maybe I am capable of spiritual transformation after all, even sans religion and mysticism and so on.

But for now, I do not want to rip off that psychological Band-Aid just yet. Maybe in a month, I will reassess and decide it’s time to go down another notch.

It might be worth feeling even more “raw” if it also leads to things feeling more real and getting better access to my full range of emotional responses, even the healthy ones.

Oh right. Today at Kinsmen was especially good because I was more social and present than ever before and it went quite well. I got along fine with these “normal” people and enjoyed their company and managed to resist the urge to disappear into my phone or a crossword for like 90 percent of the time.

Which is what the Xanax is for, really. To let me have positive social interactions that can overwrite those bad old tapes from my childhood and give me something more wholesome and connected and current to draw upon.

I can’t wait to see what I find when I go further down this lovely road.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, there’s problems inherent in doing a video every day.

Mainly, the daily video thing means I never have the chance to really polish or refine anything I do. The process becomes unnecessarily linear as I do not have the time or energy to go back and fix things past a certain low minimum.

Take today’s pharyngeal cry for help. If I was serious about singing (I am not), the sane and obvious thing to do would be to practice the song until I could do it properly and only then try to record myself singing the damn thing.

And even then, I would do a whole bunch of takes so I could string together the best bits from each and even then I might decide that none of the takes of a certain bit are good enough and rerecord those before including them.

And of course, there’s always vocal cleanup and autotune and other production tricks to make myself sound like I can sing way better than I really can.

And then, at the end, I might have something that sounds passably professional, or at least, not acutely painful. This is the well known and easily deduced “right” way to do things and not at all a mystery to me.

But for better and for definitely worse, that’s not how I do things.

In order to do things “right” in that way, I would have to spend days doing it, and for complex psychological reasons, I can only do things on a daily schedule as part of my routine, and so long term projects are not an option for me right now.

This, needless to say, is severely limiting. And that’s starting to really bug me.

I have taken one small step towards getting around that. I currently have some terrible lyrics for a song open in another tab. They’re terrible because, in a rare move by me, I was more interested in getting the important rhymes down in “rough draft” form than I was in coming up with something already good to record.

Or at least good enough for me. Le sigh.

One of these days I will take another look at the lyrics I have written and do my best to make them actually good and then feed them to Riffusion (now Producer.ai) and have it make them into a song.

But for now, I am leaving the lyrics to set while my subconscious mind beavers away at them, occasionally adding a couplet when it occurs to me.

I’m determined to do my best with this particular song for reasons which will become obvious once I actually make and release the damned thing.

So I have taken at least one step on the road to everything I make not being a sloppy first draft which has lots of talent and other good stuff in it but it’s very…. unrefined.

In the sense that mineral ores straight from the mind are unrefined.

The fact that I am completely without class, manners, or even the faintest traces of being of “good stock” goes without saying.

Considering how good I can make things when doing them in my usual halfassed one draft sloppy sideways manner, it really seems like if I could just get my shit together to work harder and longer on these things, I could make something truly amazing.

Or maybe the whole thing would fall apart the second my initial burst of enthusiasm faded and now I never want to see the thing again.

What I really need is partners who can handle the refinement for me, at least some of the time, and keep my idea from dying when I move on to the next thing.

I’m a creator. I just give birth to the damned thing.

Raising them right is someone else’s job.

More after the break.

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Use your muse

And let your muse use you.

I firmly believe that great art happens when you surrender yourself to your muse. Muses need to be fed to be robust and happy and you feed them by indulging them.

And I am definitely still working on that.

I have gigawatts of mental energy and creativity and my mind is fertile farmland for regular bumper crops of all kinds of ideas, but I still don’t ever just follow my muse on impulse to see where it wants to take me and what it will do when we get there.

I get the feeling that, like with being able to buckle down and truly finish projects, following my muse would or could lead to some pretty amazing things.

But I dunno. There’s something to be said for remaining true to your basic nature and it’s entirely possible that I am just not made to be impulsive and spontaneous.

I’m made to think about stuff.

And that’s how I indulge my muse, too. My creativity flows from my having been a bored and lonely child with a lot of time spent doing nothing but thinking as I had finished my classwork in a flash and now I had to wait for everyone else to do so.

So I ended up roaming the inside of my head instead. I would rather have been reading but for some bizarre reason that was not allowed.

A pathological response to the horrors of seeing a child quietly enjoying themselves when they’re in school, I suspect.

That’s where both my creativity and my insight come from because both stem from having a mind that makes connections between things and processes what it gets in input on a very deep correlational level.

It’s always why I talk like that.

So I dunno. Maybe I should stop trying to make myself into something I am not and concentrate on being the best version of who I really am that I can.

Whatever the fuck THAT means.

Don’t ask me. I just work here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I wasn’t terrified of copyright lawyers, I totally would have used this song as the intro to today’s vid :

Here’s my sadly unadorned vid instead ;

I do wish I could add production value to my vids in general. I mean, my talking to the camera vids are fine for TikTok, in fact, if I made them any fancier they would stick out like a sore thumb.

So my vids that do have a bit of panache, like my LOS music videos, do not really fit in with the rest of TikTok.

But on YouTube, all my fave YouTubers have at least a bit more than just them talking. And I want my videos to be more fun too.

I could take a cue from m’man John Michael Godier and mostly use the same clips of space type stuff in each video.

If there’s video relevant to what he’s talking about, he’ll include it, but for the most part it’s the same stuff each time.

And I’m fine with that. It’s what he is saying and how he is saying it that is the draw for me. Most of the time I don’t even watch his videos, I just listen to them.

So maybe I am making a big deal over nothing.There’s lots of listenable content on YouTube, in fact it’s quite popular to make stuff where the visuals are quite optional.

Which is ironic, when you think of it. The world’s video host being used for content you could put on the radio.

I think part of why I want to make my videos fancier is simply so they can express more of my creative energies and generally exuberant nature.

Making a video every day is definitely a good investment because it takes so much more of my creativity, engagement, and energy than blogging does.

To the point where on a lot of days, making the video makes the blogging seem very relaxing and mellow.

There’s so much less to keep in my head!

So if I had a way to make my vids genuinely better, I might find that I have to stretch my daily video making over two sessions in order to get it all done.

Oh no, that would require a sacrifice of more of my time spent wasting my fucking life playing god damned video games.

Oh, the horror.

Of course, insert standard Fru boilerplate about wishing I had an editor so I could send my “just me talking” vids to them and THEY could add the visuals for me.

There are people out there who do that, and enjoy it.

I just don’t know how to get one.

I need people skills dammit!

But what occurred to me recently is that it’s not like I can’t add images and video clips to my videos to make them more visually appealing.

Heck, I even added an image to today’s vid. Yay me.

So it’s not that I can’t, I just don’t want to put in the work. Finding enough pics and clips to fill even a three minute video would be such a hassle.

Maybe I should start small, with YouTube shorts.

Those are less than a minute!

More after the break.

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I have a question for my beloved audience : does this look like a real video to you?

It’s a video of a ridiculous number of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline and it is, of course, very appealing, and it looks real, but I have grave doubts.

Like, how would you get them to all bounce in sync like that? For that matter, how would you even get them all on the trampoline at the same time without any of them hopping away to get away from the crowding? Why was it filmed at night?

I suspect AI shenanigans. And maybe that’s the joke and I am just too old to “get it”.

What do you think?

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From the inside out

I’ve attempted to explain this before but I’ve not managed to do it to my own satisfaction so what the hell, let’s try again.

It is fundamentally about an escape from self-consciousness. I want to live my life from my emotional core outwards, so that everything starts from my real emotions and who I truly am and not some preconceived idea from the glowering malevolent eye of my overweaning superego of how I “should” feel or who I “should” be.

I suspect all self-consciousness comes from the same root : a desire to prevent social pain by controlling ourselves from what we imagine is how others see us.

This is invariably highly distorted by the inherent feedback loop from the fact that our perceptions feed into our self-image and thus change that which is being perceived.

What I want is to stop that (literally) maddening loop so I can finally detox and live a natural, calm, relaxed life without so much fucking feedback in my head. To return to life as it was when I was a child and simply lived life.

That’s what I mean by living life from the inside out. If everything is rooted firmly in my true self and what I really think and feel, then all the artificial constraints and vain attempts to control outcomes fall away and harmony and unity come within reach.

But self-consciousness is going to be a hard habit to break. That voice screaming that if I close that scowling disapproving eye in the sky forever terrible things will happen has been ruling the roost for a very long time and talking myself into turning that damned thing off and going “out of control” anyhow will not be easy.

What if I go crazy? What if I hurt people? What if I humiliate myself? What if I create so much chaos in my life and in my head that I never find my way out again? What if without that omnipresent oppression I don’t even know who I am any more?

To do so is to take a step into the complete unknown and only one thing can convince a person to do a thing like that : faith.

And I ain’t got none.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In which I, your friendly neighborhood (small v) visionary, reveal unto my flock the shocking truth of who is really in charge of this crazy old world of ours.

A lot of people really will not like what I have revealed. As I said on BlueSky :

People prefer to believe they are powerless against the evils of the world because if they weren’t, they would have to disrupt their lives in order to fight them. And it’s true that what you can do is a drop in the bucket. But get enough of those drops together and you get a tsunami.

— The other Michael Bertrand (@fruvous73.bsky.social) August 9, 2025 at 3:01 PM

People would rather cling to the false belief that they are powerless and use convenient socially received dodges like, “but what can one person do?” to hide the fact that the real issue is that they know they should do something but they just don’t want to.

Because doing something about the evils of the world would require personal sacrifice – of money, of attention, of our oh so precious leisure time – and somehow we have become people who are so spoiled that even the slightest suggestion of personal sacrifice makes us bristle with our backs up like a razorback boar and whine. “Why should I have to give anything up when it’s… (insert your designated scapegoat for evil here)” who should do it!

So we, at the behest of our owners, readily accept a narrative of our own powerlessness so that we don’t have to do anything about anything.

Let the bears pay the bear tax!

The problem is that individualism does not and cannot handle problems for which there can only be a collective solution.

One that involves a certain amount of letting your individual identity (and goals and needs and… ) be subsumed into a collective for collective action.

The very question, “what can one person do?” betrays this truth. Why does saving the word have to depend entirely on your own heroism to be worth your time? What is wrong with being one drop in a wave of change? Isn’t it enough to know that you are part of the solution and not part of the problem?

Of course not. Where’s the glory in that? Where’s the fame? The money? The glamour? The sex? What’s in it for ME?

It’s chillingly close to societal sociopathy and it’s not because people are evil or apathetic or stupid, it’s because consumerism caters to us so much as atomized and isolated individuals that it literally becomes impossible for us to imagine anything outside our own individual needs.

And if you accept that limitation, we, as individuals, are powerless to change things.

But we don’t have to remain mere individuals. We are human and to be human is to be capable of banding together for collective action. Most of civilization would be outright impossible if this were not true, though in modern times, collective action is achieved ideally through taxation.

After all, money is labour.

But if we can’t (or won’t) make our taxes do it then we have to do it ourselves and a lot of us just plain won’t. If it requires giving literally anything up, count us out.

Except maybe money. The great thing about money is that because money is labour, we feel like we’re “doing something” without hardly doing anything at all.

A couple of clicks and our money is off to do the work we won’t and we can go right back to a life of toil and self-indulgence.

What a racket!

More after the break.

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School and fun

Patient readers with long memories will recall that I have tackled this subject before, a long time ago, when the world was young and the birds sang show tunes and I could walk without assistance,

You know. The good ol days.

The subject in question is how our childhoods establish this pattern of a dual life where there is school, which sucks, and home life, which is okay.^[1]

A whole lot better than school, anyway.

And this is the received, approved pattern of daily life that gets ingrained in us on such a fundamental level that we continue to see life that way as adults.

We just replace school with work.

And in most jobs, this is the only acceptable way to see things. Woe betide you if you like your job. You will stick out like the proverbial sore thumb and everyone will at the very least think you’re weird and at worst think you’re a suckup trying to ingratiate yourself with the bosses or some kind of emotionally deficient robot with no life.

Even though, on paper, a job we enjoy is what we all hope to have some day. We go to college and spend four years of our life getting a degree with that exact goal in mind.

But not if it’s the wrong kind of job, evidently.

Whether it’s school or work, the line of demarcation is clear and remains the strongest one in our lives and I think this is what gives us this attitude that every heartbeat of our leisure time must be hoarded with draconic zeal and for absolutely anything that doesn’t seem like “fun” to ask for any of it feels like the utmost in presumption.

Including the things that might just save the goddamned world.

I claim no exception and I don’t even have a job. Admittedly, with me it’s more about mental illness making me a hermit, but still.

Imagine if we could break down this barrier. What if we could take the attitude, as some do, that you’ve got to make the most of every situation and that you can enjoy yourself wherever you are if you just hunt for that spoonful of sugar.

Which makes a startling amount of sense, though changing such a fundamental setting in how we see our lives would not be easy.

Imagine going to work with the attitude, “OK, let’s have fun!”.

Wouldn’t that just be the weirdest?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A simple tale of a man, BlueSky, and a cat of debatable intelligence.

It really does illustrate two parts of my nature that don’t fit together super well.

There’s my sweet, soft, sensitive side who genuinely never meant to hurt anyone and who should have thought about what he posted before he posted it. My saintly side, who wishes nothing but love, understanding, and harmony on all of humanity.

And I like that guy.

But there’s also my “come at me, bro!” side who really, really loves to get in the kind of trouble I got in because boy, do people come at me, and I get to counterpunch without guilt (but not without restraint) and really get some much needed release.

Because as patient readers know, I know I have a very combative side. A side of me that wants to fight. The side to whom combat sports appeal, in theory at least, as a way for people like me to get that aggressive energy out.

Instead I have video games. Not much of a substitute. I mean, I do get to combat and defeat evil a bunch in them, but it isn’t much of a physical release, you dig?

Now being a civilized and responsible person, I have kept this fighting side of me on a very short leash. I avoided the trap of thinking that just because I feel the strong urge to fight that the world has volunteered to be my sparring partner.

I could have easily gone down that route. Maybe if I had been born into a much rougher and more physical family, I would have ended up as one of those guys who goes to cars and gets into fights every weekend.

Sounds unlikely given what I am like in THIS life, but I can totally see why they do it. Our society is short on official, acceptable ways for young aggressive types to test themselves against one another like mountain sheep butting heads.

In fact, it occurs to me that we don’t acknowledge that phase of life at all. Between the ages of 18 and 25, young people are going to feel the urge to seek challenges to throw themselves into as a way of channeling that youthful aggression and as a way for them to find their place in the social hierarchy.

Not the official one, of course. The primitive one. The fact that such reptile brain nonsense has no place in actual modern adult society does not keep those instincts from rising and making young people do foolish or even dangerous things in order to satisfy these primitive instincts.

Hence the ages between 18 and 25 being the “crime years”. The vast majority of crimes are committed by people between those ages.

We’d be a lot better off if we acknowledged the difficulties of that phase of life like we do with childhood and the teen years and made sure that young people had plenty of non-criminal ways to test their limits, scrap with each other, take risks, and get their butting heads energies out of their systems.

As for me, like I said in the vid, maybe I should find some forum somewhere where I can “get into trouble” in a non-destructive sense and find verbal “playmates” I can wrestle with and vent some of this latent aggression.

It would quite honestly probably make me saner in the long run. I talk about all my latent anger like it’s all from bad things that happened to me that I couldn’t react to with anger at the time, but maybe a lot of it is just plain reptile brain urge to compete.

Come at me, bro.

More after the break.

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Locked away in a cell

That’s where my crazed and fever’d id has been for all these years.

All because, at some point, my ego, my intellect, staged a coup and pretty much cut the id entirely out of the equation.

So no impulses, no instincts, no motivation, no desire, no drives, no motive force, no stuff of life, no living breathing wanting needed raw and bleeding heart tissue at the core of my being. No passion, no joy, no celebration, no wanton abandon, no running free in the sun, no acting on impulse (what impulse?), no falling in love, no pursuing my lust, no human connection, no feeling of presence, and very, very little warmth.

Because where the hell would that warmth come from? I turned my furnace off a long time ago. And it sure wasn’t going to come from outside of me, not with my issues.

People love me. This I know. But I can’t always feel it. I have to comfort myself with the knowledge that it’s there for me if I can tunnel through my numbness to find it.

I think at this point I am afraid to be alive. I have been this cold creature who emits more warmth than he can feel for so long that to a very old and sick part of me, being alive, with desires and drives and such, seems like insanity. Chaos. Bedlam.

It seems like being “out of control”. And part of the hegemony of my intellect is a deep and primal belief that being out of control means death, or worse than death.

It all comes back to not being able to step on a road if I don’t know where it’s going. If I can’t predict the end then I can’t begin, or at least, that’s how I have been.

And that is profoundly and stultifyingly limiting. There has to be room to explore and that means having faith in your own ability to handle whatever you come across.

You don’t need to control outcomes if you can handle the unexpected. It’s a matter of not needing a straight smooth road if you have good shock absorbers.

And I am pretty sure I can only get those by going out into the world and getting the sort of experiences that will toughen me up.

Even if that’s just online.

I don’t want to be a hothouse flower any more. I want to be hearty and strong and able to survive any climate.

And that means going out there and getting hurt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.