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.

I took another crack at the news and I think I am starting to get the hang of this.

Here it is. Warning, it’s over 10 mins long.

I think I am relaxing into the idea that I don’t need to try to do “headline and a joke” typic comedy like Kimmel or Colbert, because that’s not what comes naturally to me.

Instead I just need to comment on news items in my usual sarcastic snarky and insightful way and let that be the content.

I feel bad about not at least including some pictures and/or text, though, but I had a lot of video to edit and less time than usual.

Less time because today’s vid is not the first vid I tried to make today. I was originally doing an acapella of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler but halfway through editing it I decided that I did not like how it was turning out so I shelved it and decided to talk about the news instead.

So between spending 45 mins editing an acapella I ended up not using and then recording and editing ten minutes of news commentary, I did not have enough time and energy left to add any ornamentation to my ANN (And Now the News) vid.

Lame name, I know. It’s a placeholder.

I mean, I could do a lot worse but still, I want something a tad more original.

As for Sobeys, they were the grocery store at the other end of town from me so I didn’t go there much. We got out groceries first from Towers department store and then from the IGA that took over when Towers went bust.

That’s when the grocery department became an IGA and the department store part become a (sigh) Zellers.

Man what a downgrade.

Had a poke you in the eye appointment today. The usual palaver with the imaging my retinae (looks at the green X, blink twice, now don’t blink…. flash!) and testing my eyesight (first the right eye… good… then the left eye…. yikes) and testing the pressure within my eyes (just let me touch this thing to your eyeball) and then waiting in one of the little exam rooms for Doctor Vaezi to come give me the jab.

I am quite happy to report that it hurt a lot less this time. Instead of feeling like, well, a needle in the eye, it felt more like a fairly gentle poke in the eye, and that’s way better.

I wish I had thought to say to Doctor Vaezi, “Quick, write down everything you just did and give it to the other doctors here!”

It was probably helped (a little) by the fact that I took a Xanax this morning. I was feeling very strange when I woke up. Kinda tense and squirrely and spooked. And I had already been thinking about taking a Xanax to deal with the anticipation of eye agony, about which I was feeling anxious, so the weird emotional affect I was experiencing just sealed the deal.

I feel better now. But it was very unpleasant. I don’t know if it was just that I was feeling grumpy about having to get the eye poke or whether I had some kind of nightmare I don’t consciously remember or what.

But I was absurdly on edge and I dunno why.

I was also sleepy, which was a pain. Almost drifted off a couple of times in the waiting room for my eye appointment. Glad I brought a book.

Also my phone. At first the screen was weirdly dim, but then I turned on the “adaptive lighting” feature and suddenly it was bright and pleasant.

I guess I know why that exists now.

More after the break.

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Yet another ellipsis…

You know, an ellipses…. to indicate a pause of an unspecified length…

That’s how I feel at the moment : like I’m in an ellipsis, a time between times, a moment between moments, in a land between the walls of reality.

I could make a really good wimpy folk song from those images. Good thing I have already made my vid for the day.

I guess this means I am in some sort of transitory stage. I’m moving from one emotional state to another and right now I am on the slender road in between them.

Lord knows where I will end up, although I suppose if I was a lot better at traversing my inner landscape via its own emotional schema (as opposed to order rigidly imposed from above by my fascist superego) I might have some idea where I’m going.

But it’s not important. I don’t need to know where each road goes before I walk on it. It’s fine to walk into the unknown in order to see what’s out there for me.

Whatever it is, I can handle it. I’m a highly resourceful and adaptable fellow when I give myself a chance to be. I don’t need to be so afraid of the world.

The problem is that when you stay out of the world, it’s easy to imagine that it’s a horrible place out there, at least for you.

In fact, you have every reason to project all kind of horribleness onto the world in order to justify staying locked away in your hovel of a home like a good hobbit.

I mean hermit. Eh, either way.

Myself, I don’t consider the world to be a horrible place in general. I suppose I’m too realistic and pragmatic and logical for that. The world is too big and complicated a place to make sweeping generalizations about and any that you make, even ones that are completely contradictory to one another, can be proven with evidence if you are selective enough in your intake.

So why not at least try pretending that the world is a great place and looking for evidence of that instead of compiling a crap list of reasons life sucks?

Alas, it is never that simple.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I feel like right now. Like I am carrying an armload of rolled up blehs like an architect carrying blueprints and I’d like to be able to put them down, but I can’t.

As to why, I dunno.

Today I had therapy and today I did a vid about it :

I am trying to imagine behaving differently during therapy and my mind really does not want to go there.

I can’t imagine sobbing into the phone, or ranting and raving like a loon, or otherwise letting my guard down and just letting it all out.

I’d feel vulnerable and I’d be embarrassed. Yes, even though it would be my therapist witnessing it and if anything he would be very pleased that my emotions were coming out and want me to do it more.

But I guess my social persona is not that flexible. I learned at an early age to keep it all to myself and not let anyone see how sad and depressed and anxious I was, because like I say in the vid, I could imagine no good outcomes for that.

Hell, even if the person was 100 percent sympathetic and supportive and offered me a great big hug, I would still feel awkward and ashamed and I am not sure I would be able to accept further love and warmth from this person.

I might just need to run away and avoid that person for a while, even though they did the ideal thing in that situation.

Or at least the best that I can think of.

So I am not sure what would help me. I’m not sure I can even be helped.

I suppose a job would help a whole heck of a lot. It would lend structure to my life and give me an income, which would be nice, but mostly because it would let me finally pay my own way and not be a lumpen drain on society any more.

Like I told Doctor Costin, I still carry around an enormous amount of grief and guilt and shame about how my life turned out.

And it doesn’t matter how much others might tell me that I shouldn’t feel that way, that I should just accept that I have been sick for a long time and not able to earn my way.

And I will not dispute the truth of that statement and yet this heavy blanket of shame is not affected by it. I guess I just can’t forgive myself for this whole debacle yet.

Which means that on some level I must believe that I could have done better and that therefore I should have done better.

But that does not necessarily follow.

I made a lot of “mistakes” to get here. But were they truly mistakes? Maybe I have done remarkably well given my circumstances.

After all, I do a vid and a blog every day, and that’s technically productive. A little more productive each day given how fast I am accumulating TikTok followers.

Who knows, maybe my fame will snowball and I’ll reach the magical island of having a thousand followers and being able to make money offa TikTok.

I know that, ironically, making a video where I bare myself emotionally to the degree that I did today (not a lot) did me a lot of good.

I feel emotionally lighter now.

I dunno if I will ever be able to truly let down my guard and let loose. Maybe. I would like to think that it’s at least possible.

The fact that I can’t imagine it happening does not mean that it can’t. My imagination, as broad as it is, does not limit reality.

Sure would be nice to get this glacier off my chest.

More after the break.

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Again with the brooding

Or maybe that should have a question mark. Again with the brooding? Oy.

I’ve been in a restless, pissed off, fitful mood today. The kind of mood where I am just glad I spend most of my time alone so I don’t end up snapping at anybody.

Maybe today would have been a great day to record a political rant. Oh well.

A day kinda like this one :

The usual bitter nihilistic thoughts have been circulating in my head.

All the greatest hits, like :

“I hate my life. ”

“Everything is stupid and nothing matters.”

“Why do I even bother doing things?”

“I want to scream and jump out a window. ”

“(to the entire world) Stop it! Just… stop it! Lay off me! Leave me the fuck alone! FUCK YOU!”

now available on album, tape, CD, or my brain

And of course, as patient readers know, I know that this is part of my mood cycle and hopefully I will be able to harness some of this excess aggression into making some real progress on my mental health.

I was telling Doc Costin today that lately I have felt like I am on a speeding train heading nowhere in particular (except the grave) and the train keeps going faster and faster and there’s no way to slow down.

And it might seem like I could get off whenever I wanted to do so but in practice it feels like if I jump off at this speed I will die.

And that’s why this life of mine keeps going in a direction I don’t actually want to go and I am stuck here in this freight car trying to work up the nerve to jump off it.

But it’s always so much easier to just stay on the train. Just for a little while longer. After all, it’s warm and safe (and dank and smelly and gross) here and so we might as well just wait until jumping off isn’t scary or painful any more.

Aaaaaany minute now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. Today’s episode was brought you by italics.

Got some of my feelings about tax whiners and their ilk out today.

And even stretched my abilities a tad, in a couple of ways.

Here’s the scoop :

For one thing, this video required remarkably little editing overall. I think I really am getting better at speaking without a lot of ums or ahs or y’knows, and that pleases me.

And not just because it saves me a lot of work in the editing booth, so to speak.

But because it also means I am growing more confident in what I say. As I said recently, I’ve never lacked the courage to state and defend my opinions (just try and stop me) but my ability to put myself forward in the first place could use some work.

Speaking of editing, I was also able to do something I’d not done before, which was to record more video and edit it in when I had already finished the initial edit.

Very often when I have made these vids of mine a whole bunch more stuff I wanna say on the subject will occur to me while I’m editing and before now I have been too… I guess timid? to do so.

And too eager to get it done so I could go back to wasting my life, presumably.

Well it’s what I’m good at.

That, and not being bitter.

So the fact that I did it today is kind of a big deal for me on the personal front. It should improve the quality of my videos and help me to better express all I have to say on a given subject which will definitely help me emotionally.

And it means I have overcome a personal barrier, and that’s all for the good. Not a huge one in the grand scheme of things, but it’s very good to remind myself that these walls inside me CAN be overcome and need not dictate the terms of my life any more.

It was a good time to push myself to add more stuff because the fact that my initial speech on the subject of tax whiners took so little editing meant that I had the time and energy left over to add stuff.

I was aided by the fact that all the things I said about people bitching about their taxes is stuff I have had lying around in my head for forever. So it was already well articulated in my head before I even said a word about it.

I should rummage through my skull for more things like that. On a deep subconscious background level, I tend to feel like if it’s been in my head a while, it’s something obvious that everyone knows by now and thus not worth saying.

Makes no sense on a conscious level, of course. I have all kinds of extremely original thoughts that the world needs to hear. The fact that I have thought them for forever has no impact on that.

I have a whole lot of insights into a whole lot of things that as far as I know are fairly unique to me and should be shared with the global community.

Of course, getting anyone to pay attention to them is another question.

At this exact point in my life, all I can do is keep doing what I do and hoping to be noticed. And I do seem to be gaining attention on TikTok, picking up around 20 new followers a day.

Still a long long way from the 1000 I need to start making money, but still.

I hope to look up how to promote your YouTube/TikTok at some point. I’ve not had a lot of luck with that kind of thing in the past – it always seems so cheesy and tedious.

But this time I will go in knowing I’m not going to like it and I am going to want to just throw my hands up and stomp off, and try to hang in there long enough to find some things I could stand to do that might help.

And not turn me into a pest.

More after the break.

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Under the whatever

Today was another one of my flu-ish days when I did not make it to Wound Care or my exercising at the Kinsmen.

Which was disappointing. But I woke up with mind fog, a sore dry scratchy throat, aching muscles, and a headache, so I called it all off for the week.

Can’t risk spreading the potential germs et al.

But I dunno. I am beginning to suspect myself of psychosomaticism. I don’t seem to wake up with these symptoms when I am not facing a busy, stressful day.

Or maybe I do, and I just don’t notice it because I always feel like crap in one way or another and so it doesn’t stand out unless I have plans.

I dunno. I am a very complicated guy. The inside of my skull can be like an echo chamber inside a mirror maze with a smoke machine. Everything can be so hazy and blurry and reflected and distorted.

I wonder if that’s part of why I developed such a highly disciplined, logical, analytical, powerfully focused laser sharp conscious mind.

Like an existential hero from 60’s science fiction, I use my logical mind to conquer the turbulence and insanity of my inner world and force clarity to emerge from chaos.

Too bad it can’t do the same for happiness.

Would you rather be smart, or happy? Or can you even separate the two?

Regardless of my preference I have ended up smart. Very, very smart. Painfully so. And that razor sharp mind of mine cuts me to ribbons every chance it gets because it’s a tool of my corrupt and malevolent superego and it fucking hates me.

Ever so slowly I am learning to turn that shit outward so that I can actually heal.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I should get in a lot of trouble for this one, which means I won’t.

Like I say in the vid, I am sure I had a bunch more (tongue in cheek (so to speak)) advantages of men over women in mind at one point but when the camera was rolling I could only think of three.

And the third one’s kind of weak.

Now I didn’t truly mean this as a “recruitment” attempt. For me, it was more about poking fun at cultural assumptions by getting people to question their life patterns a teeny tiny bit.

I am sure a lesbian could make a similar “sales pitch” and I bet it would be hilarious.

I would be highly surprised if my words “converted” anyone. Sexual imprinting is nearly impossible to change and so you’re either into dudes or you aren’t.

After all, you don’t become straight, gay, bi, or whatever, you just find out. Nobody recruits you into it. You can’t be talked into wanting something so fundamental to our identity as our preferred gender any more than someone can talk you in liking a food you think is gross.

In fact, the whole notion that young men can be “recruited” into homosexuality strikes me as quaint and adorable.

“So you’re saying that you think one night of gay sex with me is so damn good it can make your previously completely heterosexual son into a cock loving flaming homo with no interest in women just like that? Well I am flattered, honey, but I’m not that good. Or is it gay sex itself that you think has this magic power? Say, just how amazing do you think gay sex is, anyway?”

I mean, just follow the reasoning. It’s clearly implied.

Today’s been another standard day for me. Video games and video making and blogging and hanging out on BlueSky and so forth and so on ad nauseum ad infinitum.

That’s Latin for “keeps going until you get sick of it”.

My digestive system has been making some ominously loud and moist noises and that has me a little freaked out.

Stuff like that can herald very troubled seas to come for me. But I have no other symptoms. My stomach feels fine, as does my low GI tract.

My appetite is a little lower than usual but it’s well within normal fluctuations. No ominous ceasing of bowel needs either.

That can REALLY herald bad times ahead and yet it’s so easy to miss because it’s something that doesn’t happen.

Then I start feeling ill and suddenly I’m all, “Wait…. when was the last time I pooped?”.

If it was more than 24 hours ago, yellow alert. Be cautious. Don’t eat anything that might stir things up.

If it was more than 36 hours, uh oh. Red alert. Time to take active measures to get things moving again, like aggressive hydration, eating a banana, jostling my torso about some, or maybe even, God forbid, “pushing”.

As an IBS sufferer, I am never ever supposed to try to “push” things along, If it’s not moving, trying to force it will only introduce chaos and tension into the system and quite possibly set of a chain of events that will echo within me for ours making me miserable.

But, ya know, desperate times.

Otherwise life is normal, which means it’s been another cookie cutter day of ding the same old things as always.

I might not be ready to jump off this stupid train just yet, but I am definitely eyeing the bushes beside the tracks and waiting for the train to slow down for a curve.

More after the break.

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No such thing as a good alarm clock

There’s never going to be an alarm clock that isn’t obnoxious and irritating because its very function is to force you to wake up and that’s inherently a very rude task.

Maybe these “dawn’s early light” type smart alarms that raise the illumination level in your room slowly and in accordance with your body’s metrics might be able to do the trick. They, at least, don’t jar you awake with a loud and/or irritating noise.

But I can’t guarantee you won’t still resent being woken up even if it’s by the gentlest of sunbeams. That’s just the nature of the beast.

For as any sleep medicine specialist will tell you, if you need to be woken up by an alarm, you’re not getting enough sleep. Clearly your body and brain need more than you are getting. If left to regulate themselves, you would naturally wake up whenever you were actually done sleeping according to your body and your brain.

But to be a modern human is to live by the clock, and not your circadian one. And the thing is, even billionaires have to live this way to some extent. Whether it’s your tee time or teatime or when the markets open and close, some aspects of your life are going to run on a timetable of their own and I am fairly certain that if you are a product of modern time-bound society you would find it quite hard to regulate your life any other way.

I know I would. For someone unemployable and pathologically idle like myself, I live by the clock to a degree some would find quite surprising.

The thing is, I’ve tried the alternative. Eat when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, drink when I’m thirsty, and so on.

In other words I tried “listening to my body”, as the 70’s health gurus said.

Turns out my body, like the rest of me, has no idea what’s good for it.

It felt like it was “working” at first as my life did start feeling more relaxed, but soon what I ended up with was a thick mental haze that made concentration nearly impossible and a feeling of being entirely lost in time.

What time is it? Is it day or night? AM or PM? I had no idea.

That’s why I live by the clock now.

Turns out I need it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.