Gonna try to make this a weekly thing. Might make it easier to keep up.

Now, let’s see how many videos I have made since the last time I did this…. wow. 15. Eep.

Better get down to it, then!

First we got this handy little rant about those Southern neighbours of ours :

Might be delusional of me, but I feel like I am speaking for a lot of people in that video. All us poor benighted people in that insignificant part of Planet Earth known as “Not America”.

I have thought about the subject more since then, and the problem is not that they are barbarians, it’s that they are children. Autistic children, poorly socialized and spoiled. They are the rich kid who has no idea how to get along with others and is way too aggressive. America, World Bully.

Next, some music! Damn, I love the sample at the beginning and throughout this thing.

That bright brass loop. It’s just so cheerful and strong. Been wanting to use it for ages. So… I did.

And it was sort of successful. As usual, the weakest part (at least from my POV) is near the end, when everything comes together. Did it sound good? Sorta, maybe?

It didn’t sound horrible, at any rate.

Aaaand here we have another entry in my practically famous series, Sarcastic Slideshow.

I like doing those but they are a lot of work compared to a talker or even cobbling together a minute of music. My video ambition level has dropped lately and I want to fix that.

That said, don’t expect big shakes from today’s video, because Sunday.

Next up, things get up close and depressing.

That was not a fun period of my life. But that’s life as a depressive. Whether you are on the road to recovery or just straining to maintain, there are going to be times when all the bad stuff you still don’t know how to express and hence release builds up and you have no choice but to feel crappy for a while.

Next up, more of the same, with added background noise.

That was a very bad day. Like I have said before in this space, thank goodness I have you people to talk to (well, at) so I could write out my troubles. That did me a world of good.

And I am so glad that I have learned to do that. Expressing yourself is the key to recovery. Find what works for you and do it. Do it all the damned time.

Our next item is one of those adorable hybrids, the Musical Slideshow.

Yes, when Musical Minute meets Sarcastic Slideshow, the result is a thing. Basically, they’re a Musical Minute with something to look at as well. The usual MMs only have a static image because I don’t want to distract from the music.

But sometimes, I like to mix things up.

And for my next trick, I have this perversion of all that is good and pure in the world :

Can’t believe it took me this long to realize I should be doing cartoons instead of soap operas. I have loved cartoons my whole life! And there’s so much to work with in a cartoon.

I might start doing dubs instead of subs, though. Subtitles go by so fast, it’s hard to keep up.

Oh look, more music.

Love how that one turned out. It wasn’t quite what I was trying to do, but the contrast between the high energy techno bass and beat and the slowly dawning pad is sublime.

I love it when my work gets gorgeous.

Brace yourself : there’s a lot of talkers coming! Starting with :

Yay for pants! Pants are very important to my modern, hip, non-naked lifestyle. I know it’s controversial to say this, but I prefer to keep my genitals covered in public, and pants are a key ingredient in making that dream come true.

Talker Number Two : I talk about my fave podcasts.

I remember that night. Video time rolled around, and I had no clue what to do about it. But I had just been listening to podcasts, so I figured, what the heck, let’s talk about those.

It’s a hip and current topic, and I really do love me some podcasts. They’re like great radio, but freed from any commercial considerations and serious government people looking over their shoulders.

For the next vid, I decided to appear limned in divine radiance :

In other words, I am backlight by sunlight. It looks quite nice, don’t you think?

As for the topic of my talk (I have those sometimes), I am still trying to figure out exactly what I am talking about there. No doubt, so are you. But I definitely feel like I have hold of something important there, and when I finally figure it out, you nice people will be the first to know.

And now, as foretold by prophecy, there’s this little number :

Bleh. Not my best work. That’s what I get for shooting from the hip like I usually do with those things.

Making that video led me to a depressing conclusion : I have no way of describing what it means to be Canadian that is not a direct or implied comparison to that spoiled rich kid to the south of us.

And that makes me feel like the United States and Canada are twins, one wearing a T-shirt that says “America” and the other wearing one that says “Not America”.

Why is it so hard for us to find ourselves? Is it just the noise from down south drowning out our own unique voice? Or is there something fundamental to the Canadian character that makes us shy away from defining ourselves?

Hey look, I found more music!

Maybe the bassline should have been a wee bit louder. I am very happy with the beat, though. I brought a bunc of elements together to make it work, and I am particularly proud of the little clang at the end of each… loop? Beat? Whatever.

Sure, it’s silly, but that’s what I was going for. Sometime bouncy and silly and fun.

Then there’s this from last Friday :

Cost me two bucks for that bottle of water. But hydration is serious fucking business, especially for me, especially in summer, so it was worth it to make sure the trip back from therapy wasn’t as miserable as getting there had been.

Finally, one last bit of music :

Quite happy with that one. Simple, just two instruments. Gentle and calm and green. Lovely.

Phew! That’s it. We are all caught up for now, at least until I do today’s vid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Nifty title, eh? Bet a paper with that title would get someone funding.

Okay, here’s the problem.

The further the modern world continues to grow, expand, specialize, and deepen, the more human knowledge is being applied than ever before. This knowledge covers an ever-wider scope of human knowledge, and the percentage of said knowledge that any single individual dwindles accordingly.

At the same time, these various forms of knowledge and understanding become more and more powerful, and have a larger potential and actual effect on the lives of individual citizens of democratic societies.

And every citizen of a democracy is expected to have an informed opinion on matters of public importance.

So as we progress, more and more issues of greater and greater importance require the very kind of specialized knowledge and understanding that eludes the average specialized citizen. The idea of an informed public making informed decisions is confounded daily by the inability of any one person to know enough to understand all the facts surrounding certain complex issues.

Take climate change. There are, at most, a million people in the world who truly understand the science behind climate change. There’s maybe a hundred million more who, like me, understand science well enough to get the gist of it.

The rest of the world can’t examine the facts and draw their own conclusions. We science types often think they should, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that they can. They simply do not have the aptitude or the inclination, and we can sit on the sidelines shouting “But this effects us all!” all we like, it will not change this fact.

But say you are quite good at science, and can examine and analyze the facts despite being outside the scientific community dedicated to climate change.

What about nanotechnology? How about self-driving cars? How about economics? Politics? Law? International trade?

There might well be people out there who could know enough to have an informed opinion on all those matters and more, but they are a tiny minority of the population whose lives are influenced by them, and for the rest, informed opinion is impossible.

But what of education? Surely we can educate people on these matters! But the thing is, if you can’t evaluate the facts and draw your own conclusions, you can’t decide who to believe. Sure, experts can do what they can to inform the public, but without the ability to truly understand the subject, all experts are equal and therefore all expert opinions are equal.

And that’s how in the modern world, expertise gets treated like opinion. The existence of true expertise and hence true experts who should be trusted on matters becomes harder and harder to establish in the modern ultra-connected world, where no matter how honest and well informed an expert might be, there is someone with similar bona fides saying the exact opposite.

Therefore, it has never been easier to simply find an expert who agrees with whatever it is you already believe or are inclined to believe. Not even the rough democracy of expert polling can fight this phenomenon. Thanks to the spread of a kind of lazy paranoia, people are well equipped to declare that everyone who disagrees with them is part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, and thus belief is maintained no matter how broad a consensus there is amongst experts on a topic.

As long as there is a single expert, however inept or corrupt, who agrees with you, the rest of the world is wrong. After all, everyone used to think the world was flat, right? (

So what we have is an ever increasing gap between what people ought to know in regards to important issues that have a deep impact on our lives and what it is reasonable to expect them to know.

There are the communicators, true. The various people in the chain of public understanding that can understand things well enough to explain it to people who are less specialized, and so forth down to the public.

But that only goes so far. There is an irreducible complexity to most subjects that no amount of simplification (or “dumbing down”) can solve. The average person will never grasp more than maybe one or two of these, in their areas of interest and/or expertise. Everything else will require simply taking someone’s word for it.

This goes against the very roots of democratic thinking. Democracy is inherently hostile to authority. The very idea of believing someone else without examining the facts oneself is considered to be, in a sense, a failure of one’s duty as a citizen of an individualistic, pluralistic society.

We are expected to make up our own minds. What exactly that means, nobody knows.

This conflict between what is required of us as informed citizens and the percentage of what effects on which we can actually be informed is a major paradox of modern life. And we all feel the effects.

Nutrition experts say one thing, then the other. Politician change beliefs like a supermodel changes clothes. People gravitate to news sources they can trust, which in modern terms means ones that will never disagree with them. Professional sophists are hired by shadowy powers to try to mold public opinion through obfuscation, misdirection, and emotional manipulation. And through it all, objective truth becomes more elusive than ever.

Unfortunately, I have no solution for this problem. It is not as if modern societies can have officially sanctioned experts, and even if they did, nobody would believe them. The very people who seem solid and reliable today might get their opinions changed by commerce or professional pressure tomorrow. The more an expert is trusted, the greater the incentive for their corruption.

And so we are back to simply deciding based not on the facts but on who seems trustworthy to us, and that will always have a lot more to do with whether they are likely to say something that upsets us than it does to whether or not they are telling the truth, or even know what the hell they are talking about.

If you have any ideas for solutions, please leave them in the comments.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To me, all science deniers are the same.

To me, there is no difference between someone who thinks God created the Universe in seven days, and someone who think the Great Mother or Mother Nature created it in the Cosmic Womb or such. Neither claim is supported by evidence, neither is even vaguely plausible, and both require a great deal of magical thinking to even entertain.

Both deny the evidence of geology, astrophysics, and orbital mechanics, and that makes both sides the same to me.

To me, there is no difference between someone who doesn’t believe in climate change and someone who doesn’t believe in nuclear energy. Both require a passionate denial not only of the truth of science, but the existence of objective truth itself. If you refuse to believe in something that is demonstrably and reliably true, I don’t care what your politics are.

You are anti-reason, and that makes you all the same to me.

To me, there is no difference between getting your morals from picking and choosing the parts of an ancient text or by picking and choosing from modern New Age gurus. Morality is not a bouquet, it is the truth of what is the best way for humans to express their desire to lead moral lives. Hiding behind any text both denies the reality of natural human ethics and betrays a fatal cowardice in the attempt to win moral arguments without having to even think about it.

Either way, you are trying to get through life without really thinking about anything, and that makes you all the same to me.

To me, there is difference between thinking you are morally superior because of your particular connection to God and thinking you are morally superior because you live in harmony with Mother Earth. They are both mere status games disguised very thinly as morals, and it doesn’t make a difference if your smugness comes from all the crucifixes in your home or the amount of fair trade coffee you drink.

Either way, it’s just middle class status competition in pursuit of feeling like you are better than other people, and that is about as far from morality as you can get.

Meditation retreat or Jesus camp, you’re all the same to me.

To me, there is no difference between claiming you get your beliefs from your close personal relationship with Jesus or from lots of yoga and Chai tea. Either way, as with the texts, you are attempting to claim authority over others in order to both aggrandize yourself and protect your arguments from reasoned criticism.

Both sides are pretending intuition is information, and that makes them the same to me./

To me, there is no difference between believing the crucifix around your neck protects you from the Devil and believing the crystals in your jewelry deflect negative energies. In both cases, you are externalizing your emotions and thus transforming them into belief in the patently absurd and completely undemonstrable.

Both are forms of mistaking metaphors for truth and hence thinking the map is the territory, and that’s all the same to me.

Similarly, to me there is no difference between thinking a priest has the power to turn wafers and wine into the blood and body of Christ and thinking that drawing a circle and sprinkling salt and sandalwood around transforms your living room or back yard into some kind of magical space.

Both require mistaking ritual for reality, and that makes them both the same to me.

To me, there is no difference between thinking homosexuality is wrong because it’s “unnatural” or thinking plastic is wrong because it is “unnatural”. “Natural” is an ethically and scientifically meaningless word. All you are doing is putting a cheap tinsel halo on your unthinking and unexamined sense of disgust.

Both sides mistake an unreasoned twinge in the stomach for actual moral thinking, and it doesn’t matter to me who you vote for. You’re all the same to me.

To me, there’s no difference between thinking a priest can absolve you from your sins and thinking a five day purge can clear your body of toxins. In both cases, you think a ritual can cleanse you of the results of the evils you have done without having to do a thing to actually make things right.

Both represent a cheap moral shortcut to absolution without right action, and that’s all the same to me.

To me, there is no different between thinking only prayer can cure illness and thinking only “natural” or “alternative” medicine can do it. Both are merely a daft rationalization of a child’s superstitious fear of the doctor and the hospital. Anyone capable of figuring out parallel parking should have sufficient reason to understand that scary things can be good for you and that fear is not evidence.

Both cases are depressingly thin rationalizations of irrational and self-destructive fear, and thus, the same to me.

Note that I do not hate either of the sides I have presented. Nor do I necessarily deny the truth of any of the beliefs listed here. I am merely drawing parallels I consider useful.

All I am truly saying is that both sides are roughly the same in terms of rationality. Both sides deny evidence in order to preserve belief, both sides mistake internal emotions for outside reality, and neither side is particularly good at facing unpleasant truths that do not fit their carefully curated world view.

As someone who has never at any time in his life on Earth been religious, all supernatural beliefs are the same to me. To me, something is either true, and thus bound by the rules of logic and science, or false, and therefore does not exist.

There is no third option. Belief in the supernatural supposes that something can exist that doesn’t have to follow logic or science. And that is simply not the case.

I make these comparisons not to attack anyone’s beliefs but to show that true belief in science and reason unifies people.

But most importantly, I want to make it absolutely clear that nobody has a monopoly on reason and sensibility and therefore nobody has the right to poke at the other side’s flavour of irrationality before examining their own’s.

Left and right are dead. Science and superstition remain.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no word about the fate of my friend “Toby”. I have made a few connections among the staff here (being able to help them with their children’s homework helps) and when they know something about how he is doing in his new life in the Powered ward, I will know too.

I don’t know what I am expecting to hear. From all I have gathered about the Powered ward, his fate will be identical to all the other chemical zombies there.

And to think, the people in charge here consider that the humane option. After all, the patients are easy to manage and they are, in a highly insipid and demeaning way, “happy”.

I, for one, would rather die.

Speaking of death (always a favorite topic around here), my main worry for my friend is that his slippery, clever personality will find a way to play games with people’s minds even in the Powered ward, and he will get himself in enough trouble to get transferred to that most dreaded of wards, the Uncontrollable Powered ward.

The powers that be deny it exists, but my people in the Powered ward have seen patients disappear and never come back. Shortly thereafter, their records disappear from the computer, and people who ask about them end up facing disciplinary action on one trumped up charge or another.

The message is clear. These people were never hear.

This happened to someone I worked with once, whom I will call The Minotaur. There was no question of him being in the Unpowered ward. He is indestructible, has unlimited stamina, is strong enough to throw a small building into orbit, and can dominate people with his mind.

He is also an excellent cook and plays a very cunning game of chess. We got along well enough.

And to his credit, he fooled them for a while. He acted like a drugged out zombie, even though the drugs barely had any effect on him, and blended into the flock while he planned his escape.

My people claim they were never fooled (as people do) but didn’t think it was important. They learned different.

One day, an orderly dropped a tray right into the game of chess the Minotaur was very slowly playing with a fellow inmate, and the Minotaur unthinkingly backhanded him into the nearest wall.

The orderly, I am told, will recover. His legs, however, will not.

After that, the Minotaur was subjected to all kinds of tests that proved he was not controllable, and within an hour of the incident, a doctor none of them recognized came to transfer the Minotaur to a “special facility” for “individual treatment”, and all the paperwork checked out, so they had to let him go.

And now, he only exists in people’s memories.

Rumors are rife as to what happens to people like him. There are dark tales of tortuous devices draining their victims of life force and keeping them on the very edge of death so they can be studied anyhow the scientific sadists please.

Personally, I assume they just kill them. It’s what I would do in their place.

So I worry for my friend “Toby”. A lot of people would assume that for people of my ilk, true friendship is impossible because there is no way we could ever trust one another.

I would argue that the lack of trust makes our friendships all the stronger. When you go into things knowing that both of you would kill the other in a heartbeat if it served their needs, you can build your relationship with that in mind.

I know I could never trust “Toby”. He is, after all, an alien life form genetically programmed to loathe humanity with his entire being, to the point where he looks at us as an exterminator looks at bedbugs.

And of course, knowing this, I view him similarly, and would end him in a moment if they opportunity arose.

And yet, I am also quite fond of him, and I think he feels the same about me. We respect one another. We recognize in the other qualities we value. And most importantly, we enjoy talking to one another.

Perhaps that doesn’t fit the usual mold of friendship, but it works for us. Oh, and sex and romance work similarly.

Had a visitor today. A former foe. Not sure what the policy is on using their names, so I will call him Solomon. He visits now and then, whenever he wants to relive his glory days.

At first, I enjoyed these visits as much as he did, and for the same reason. But over time I have learned to dread them, because his deterioration upsets and depresses me. He is clearly drinking again, and getting into senseless fights, and who knows what else. He just cannot adjust to civilian life.

If I had know that this would be the outcome of my stripping him of his powers, I would have…. well, I suppose I would have done it anyway. But now… I feel responsible.

That’s why, despite my dread, I could never turn him away. That’s unthinkable. Not only because I feel responsible for his condition, but the way he talks sometimes gives me the impression that our visits are the only things keeping him together.

I have no idea what would happen if I turned him away. Maybe nothing. But he and I have a long history together, and I have always admired and respected him despite his proclivity for foiling my plans. He was a strong and noble warrior fighting for the highest ideals when we clashed swords, and I never begrudged him his enmity for me. I didn’t even share it.

After all, I would feel the same if I were in his position.

And I refuse to let someone like that fall apart if there is a single thing I can do to prevent it, or at least slow it down.

My worst nightmare concerning him is that he does someone drastic and ends up in a place like this.

I have now “journaled” the requisite number of words, and thus, I conclude.

For the most part, privacy concerns operate as superstitions.

They have to, because the harm involved is such an ephemeral thing. They exist in a very abstract area of the mind that it is nearly impossible to apprehend rationally.

It is hard to make a solidly rational argument about something that doesn’t hurt you and probably never will.

I mean, say the government wanted to put security cameras in every room in every house everywhere. It would mean the annihilation of the very concept of privacy from the point of view of the relationship between citizens and their government.

We would be horrified at the very thought of it. Someone seeing our most private and intimate moments? Intolerable.

And yet, if the government somehow pulled it off despite the public outcry, you would soon get used to it. Sure, in theory, you have no privacy at all any more. But most people would never be otherwise effected about it at all.

The cameras would be there, but you’d forget about them soon enough. Most people don’t actually break the law in their own homes, so the police would never come busting through the door of your average family dwelling. Most people would never hear a peep from the government at all.

Why is this? Because our social privacy remains intact.

Sure, maybe some government employee somewhere sees what goes on in your bedroom (and your bathroom, ick) but you don’t know them, will never hear from them, and it will never impact your life in any way.^[1]

So what, exactly, have you lost? The concept creeps pretty much anyone out, but it’s hard to argue why.

Hence, superstition. We get a profound sense of unease and possibly even terror at the thought of such an invasion of our personal domain, but the facts supporting it are nebulous at best.

The only way to make a logical argument is to start from the position that human beings, however rational or irrational it may be, have a strong instinct towards privacy.

This is easily demonstrated via cross-cultural analysis. There are two things that, regardless of all other variables, human beings simply do not do in public : mate, and defecate.

There is no culture on Earth where people routinely have sex in the street, just like there is no culture on Earth where people do not seek privacy for acts of elimination. The exact operation of these deep taboos varies from culture to culture, but just as there is no society that does not have marriage, there are no societies without these taboos.

So clearly our privacy concerns stem from something far deeper than reasoned argument or pragmatic concern. We want it because we are driven by deep instinct, the same kind of instinct that makes us want sex, status, and freedom.

We don’t physically need any of those. But any conception of human happiness that doesn’t take those into account is laughable.

And so it goes with privacy. Regardless of actual consequences, we will react very strongly to any invasion of our privacy. The development of our modern conception of privacy, where our homes are the place where we can escape the larger social structure and “be ourselves”, and where in our bedrooms and bathrooms we can even safely violate our nudity, sexuality, and toilet taboos in rooms we have all agreed are the proper place for those activities.

But these taboos are part of our social instincts. As such, they are dependent on social context. That’s why the full surveillance program I described above would fade into the background of most people’s lives. Without someone to, in essence, point and laugh at us, or react in horror and shock, our shame is not activated and therefore our privacy instinct isn’t either.

When we are speaking strictly of privacy from our government, things get a lot trickier.

Because all we have to deal with that kind of privacy concern is instinct and superstition, the people arguing against any expansion of government powers will always come across as irrational and paranoid. The argument that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear, will come up and it is a powerful one.

And it’s not always wrong, either. One only has to imagine turning that thinking on the powers that be to understand that.

A lot of people worry that any expansion of surveillance will lead to an Orwellian nightmare society. This is a very common and strong response, but it is not actually rational. It is, instead, a veneer of reason concealing a superstitious fear.

At the core of this fear is a misunderstanding (or outright ignorance) of what it is that protects your privacy right now.

Sure, most of us get that we have rights and those rights protect us from the government on some level or other. This is true, but it is only a small part of the picture.

What truly keeps your privacy intact is the moral principle of reciprocity. We all, deep down inside, understand that we don’t peek into other people’s windows because we wouldn’t want our own peeked into. When we imagine doing wrong, we imagine it being done to us, and thus we are stopped.

In short, what really protects our privacy, and everything else we hold dear, is the moral character of our neighbors.

This not a concept readily accepted by the citizens of a modern individualist society. Individualism breeds suspicion of others by isolating citizens from connection to what their collective does (none of us had to get together to build that road, we just had to pay for it), and so the notion that it is not law or ourselves who create society but the collective moral nature of all our fellow citizens does not seem sufficient to us.

It is nevertheless true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am really depressed right now.

No mytery as to why… I have had some unique stressors lately. If my ATC was low last week at this time, it’s buried the needle at E today.

The main stressor lately is wardrobe, or rather, lack thereof. First, I ripped the crotch out of one of my three pairs of pants when I tugged too hard trying to disentangle it from the agitator of our washing machine.

Then, first the cuff, then the left inside seam of one of my two remaining pairs of pants gave out.

So I am sitting here in my one remaining pair of parts. One. That’s it. One pair of pants is all that stands between me and being sartorially housebound.

This makes me feel very insecure.

And no lie, it’s a legit emergency.Anyone would be stressed out in my position. But for me, it goes much deeper. It taps into some deep issues stemming from the particular kind of childhood I had.

Specifically, neglectful. When I was only eight years old, I was put in charge of buying my own clothes. My parents would hand me the money from the monthly Child Assistance Credit check (known coloquially as the “baby bonus”) and tell me to go buy clothes for myself.

Who the hell does that to an eight year old?

Oh right, parents who wish you had never been born and are doing the best to simulate that experience.

This made me responsible not only for buying the clothes, but making sure they last.nbsp; When you know that if your pants rip, you won’t be able to buy more until next month, it makes you very self-conscious about your clothing’s durability.

And I didn’t know how to shop for clothes. I felt acutely out of place even trying. I never knew what to get when. At that age, I just didn’t have the mental hardware to put all the pieces together.nbsp;nbsp; An inventory of my clothes, how badly worn they seemed, what season it was and what it would be for the next month. It is the sort of thing that adult me would find easy and possibly even fun. But at that age, and given that every time I went clothes shopping I had a massive panic attack, plus the fact that I was a fat kid and normal clothes didn’t fit me, it was a nightmare.

That is why when a piece of clothing breaks, I get this massive burst of terror and shame. I feel like I am a kid who is in big trouble, and that isnbsp; very bad feeling. In short… It freaks me out.

And down goes my mood.

Then today, I got good news and bad news.nbsp; The good news is that I have been accepted into Kwantlen. Like there was any doubt.

The bad news is that I have to come up with $250 by July 2 for the desposit.

It is like the universe said “Well, we destroyed his clothes. What other things freak him out and destroy his mood? Oh, that’s right, MONEY and BEING HURRIED. Time for the Kwantlen letter!”

And the thing is, I knew this was coming. I was definitely told that I would need $250 for the deposit. But that information disappeared from my consciousness like all those medical appointments I keep forgetting.

And I am not truly worried about where I will get the $$$. I have a lot of options.

But the insecurity remains. I feel exposed and fragile. Just a scared little animal looking for a way out ofnbsp; the trap.

Darkness and fire. Depression and anxiety. Too little and too much.

And the Sense 8 episode where lack of Hernando drives Lito to attempt suicide didn’t help either. ^[1] That is probably what got my emotions to this heightned state in the first place.

But I don’t miss the numbness which might have protected me. I want to live life instead of staying out of its way and that means the numbing fog has to go. Once I reach the other side of the mood valley I am in, I will be rid of another load of emotional baggage.

And I will have gotten another piece of myself back. I am stronger than I used to be precisely to the degree that I have unburdened myself.

Catharsis is never easy (unless, I suppose, the only thing you have been suppressing is happiness^[2]) but it’s always worth it.

More on this when I get home.

(—)

769 words this time. A little less than last time. But I have a lot on my mind.

I feel better for all that catharsis up there. Walking home in the cool night air with my mp3’s going on in my headphone helped too. I had a real bad emotional pressure buildup there, and writing about it really helped me release it in a safe and healthy way that makes me feel better and doesn’t involve the police.

And for that, I am so very grateful. The fact that you brave few read my soul graffiti every day fills me with humility and gratitude. Like I have said many times before, none of this could happen without you. If I had zero readers, then I wouldn’t write at all.

What would the point be? I can express myself to myself without having to write anything down. If I was ever to start the old school kind of diary, where you don’t immediately post it to the Internet for all to see, but keep it locked away somewhere, I would have to convince myself that eventually it would go someplace where people would read it, or I just would not be motivated enough to write it.

I would just ask myself, “Who the fuck cares what I think?”

And the answer, dear readers, is that you do.

And I am eternally grateful for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Really didn’t feel like doing my White Spot thing today. The last few days have been quite emotionally draining for me, and that left my reservoir of ATC (Ability To Cope) at drought level lows.

But fuck that shit. The truth of the matter is that my sense of how much energy I have is wildly unreliable and crushingly conservative. Miserly, even. Therefore, it is pointless and highly counterproductive to let it call the shots.

Plus, personal energy is not like a currency, where the less you use, the more you have. Use it or not, it will not accumulate. Therefor you cannot hoard it.

It is a lot more like a muscle. Unused, it atrophies. Use it, and it grows stronger. The more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more energy you noot only have, but feel you have.

Don’t you wish money worrked like that? The more you spend, the more you get?

And most importantly, every time you overcome yourself and do something you don’t feel like doing, you strengthen that muscle too.

So I am proud that I overcame the resistance of reluctance in order to make it to White Spot tonight. Here I am, writing, sitting down, eating,nbsp; and listening to music, all at the same time.

It’s all the comforts of home, plus people bring me food.

I am listening to music via my newly arrived Just Plain Headphones. They are by Koss, cost me eight bucks, and they work. Boffo.

I am still planning to get a modern Bluetooth set in the future, but it gives me great comfort and pleasure to know that,nbsp; if all else fails, I have a pair of Just Plainnbsp; Headphones that Just Fucking Works.

I should start a tech company named JustPlainShitThatJustFuckingWorks.com! Or JSPTJFW for short(er).

It would make a million dollars overnight.

Been feeling medium crappy today. Trying hard not to let it influence my mood. No reason I have to be feeling the blues just because I am feeling a little under the weather. Fuck that random crap.

I am working hard at becomibg happy by default.

Western society says happiness is something you have to earn. Why? What would be so bad about being happy all the time?

People think that if you were happy all the time, you wouldn’t do anything. But people are at their happiest when they are fully engaged. Happy people can do all kinds of work because they never lack motivation.nbsp; They engage with life without fear because they know that no matter what happens,nbsp; even if it’s truly horrible, they will be okay and happiness is always just around the corner.

I would argue that happy people do more than most people,nbsp; not less.

In a way, that is why so many of us are on antidepressants. They provide resistance against the downward spiral of depressopn and sadness, and in doing so, give us a constant feed of unearned happiness.

Clearly, the earned happiness system is severely flawed. There are so many people at every single level of achievement that are deeply unhappy that it becomes quite clear that whatever it is that society tells us will lead to happiness often does not.

And what makes us happy at one stage in life will not necessarily keep us happy forever. We learn, we age, we grow. We ascend Maslov’s pyramid.

Note that happiness is not the same thing as euphoria. Happiness is the state of feeling like your life is great. Euphoria is a function of immediate pleasue. Hapiness makes you feel like everything will be alright. Euphoria merely makes you feel that everything is fine right now, and keeps you from even thinking about the future.

Happiness is functional. Euphoria is not.

And happiness is sustainable. It renews itself. Euphoria cannot last. No matter how strong the pleasure, no matter what kind of pleasure (mental, physical, emotional), the mind will adapt to it and it will fade into the background, like a repeating sound fqading into the background noise.

Thus the futility of trying to fix your depression with its opposite, euphoria. It’s like dealing with a leaky bucket by pouring water into it really fast. It might temporarily give you the illusion that the bucket isn’t leaky, but the second you run out of water, the illusion is shattered.

And guess what? Pouring water through it that fast made the hole in the bucket bigger. Now it leaks faster than ever, and you would have to pour water in even faster in order to achieve the illusion of a non-leaky boat again, and of course that will make the hole even bigger….

People can spend their whole lives digging themselves deeper and deeper like that. And drug addicts are only a tiny fraction of that population.

We are all junkies.

More on that when I get home.

(—)

Wow, I wrote 800 words in White Spot. A new record. Hopefully, I will get to the point where I write the whole thing there.

Now back on what I am pleased to call the subject.

We have reached a level of understanding, in this modern age, of the perils of consumerism. The idea that trying to purchase your way to happiness is a very poor long term strategy is hardly new or controversial.

But when we speak of such things, we tend to think in terms of obvious things like going to the mall and buying stuff we don’t need. And that is a big part of it. We convince ourselves that a bigger TV or a new outfit will make us happy, and it will, but not for very long.

The deeper problem is that we treat everything like that. Relationships, jobs, places we live… we talk ourselves into thinking that a new one will make us happy, even though the last ten did not.

What we are really addicted to is hope. Purpose. A direction in life. Modern life does a shockingly poor job of providing this for us that we are left fumbling in the dark for anything that seems like a solution.

No wonder so many of our solutions are just plain wrong. We have no idea what we are doing.

Time someone fixed that.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.

I am really afraid of what will hapen to people if they get too close to me, or I to them.

And I have no idea how reasonable a fear that is. But it is very strong.

I don’t want anyone else to touch my poison. I feel very toxic most of the time. Radioactive, even. Raw plutonium. And my deepest and most potent shame revolves around that toxic burden.

If it was to poison another, I would die of shame. Others, probably healthier people than I, have the option of dumping their evil into others, because they have the luxury of acting purely on emotion, without understanding why, or needing to.

But I don’t have that freedom. I know what is going on. I can forsee the consequences of my actions on a level which is completely invisible for most people.

Lucky me, I know how the sausage is made. Stare long enough into the abyss, and you find out it’s been staring at you the whole time, waiting for you to notice it.

Had therapy today. Talking about recent stuffs. Got some good advice on how to proceed. Better armed that ever.

One thing that came up was how I feel about the whole affair in which I am currently entwined. And I had to tell him that, if things go as they inevitably will, all I can see is it increasing my already considerably bitterness towards the world.

To go someplace where I was sure I would be safe and fit in and to then, through absolutely no fault of my own, be rejected from that group only reinforces the lessons I have learned from a lifetime of being rejected through no fault of my own.

All my life, I have tried to get along, be a nice person, understand people, be a good student, all of that. And all I have ever gotten from it is rejection from most and pity from the rest.

No wonder I think I’m toxic.

Signing up for class required an enormous lowering of defenses. Actually showing up required exponentially more. I was very pleased with the progress I was making socially and emotionally, and looking forward to getting to know these very cool and funny people with whom I thought I had a lot in common.

Depressed and funny? Check and double check.

But no, it appears that even amongst the mentally ill, I will get singled out and rejected. There’s just something about me that threatens and unsettles people to the point of them not being able to cope with me being around.

And I am pretty much done feeling bad about that. I’m far from perfect, but I do everything I can to get along and fit in, and people still can’t fucking handle me. Or respect me, because I’ve been such a fucking pathetic doormat too.

Well from here on in, I am going to hold my head up high, fight for my right to exist as I see fit, and if people still don’t like me, fine.

Better to be loathed and respected than loathed with contempt. I am a force to be reckoned with, and I will use all my considerable powers to make a place for myself in the world, no matter whose toes I have to step on.

I have spent a long long time feeling ashamed to even be alive. Like I never deserved to even be here, let alone take up space and resources that could go to someone who mattered. All my life, I felt like people would be better off without me.

I have never known how to value myself. After all, nobody else did. Where would I have learned? Even my teachers treated me like they didn’t want me around. I didn’t stand a fucking chance.

I didn’t even have Jesus to love me.

Well it’s high time I healed that wound. And if it takes my hopes and dreams crashing to the ground and burning like the fucking Hindenberg to make it happen, so be it.

Sometimes it takes a forest fire before the forest can return to life, fresh and new.

And I know increased bitterness is not the enlightened or correct response, but I honestly can’t imagine any other reaction. I can’t see past this, or around it. The only conclusion I am capable of drawing from this is that I have to go it alone and have nothing to do with others at all, my friends excluded.

Apparently, you have to have some kind of mutant superpower to see my worth and not just be put off my strange, electric vibe and conclude that I think I am better than everyone else simply because you are frightened of me.

I’m done with trying to appear harmless. It’s not working anyhow. People will be scared of the giant no matter how gentle he is. So fine, be scared. Throw your spears at my spaceship. I just don’t give a shit any more.

If I am going to terrify people no matter what, I might as well do it in a way that leaves me with dignity and self-respect. I used to think I had no use for either of those.

But the truth was, I just didn’t think they were an option.

Now, I see that I have nothing to be ashamed of, and that I am entirely capable of fighting on my own behalf, and not just on the behalf of others. I am getting fucked over for no good reason, and I am going to rain hellfire on the person (or people) doing it and make them wish they had not picked on the seemingly harmless guy.

I’m a steam locomotive aimed at the heart of darkness on an expressly express route. I’m a landmine that never stops exploding. I’m the monster lurking in the darkness just outside the path of the righteous. I’m the slow, devastating poison of a bad conscience rotting inside you like last year’s leftovers.

I’m Darkwing Duck.

Let’s get dangerous.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay. Let’s do this.

My name is Ichigo Natsumori, but most people call me Itch. It suits me. I’ve always been a restless, twitchy type. Like I’ve always got an itch that I can’t figure out to scratch.

In a way, it’s true.

And the reason you are reading this is that people seem to think I know more about the Guardians than everyone else. It’s berserk, I can’t go anywhere, light or flesh, without people asking me a million freaky questions.

So I thought I would write this text for you so you could all get your peep at the same time and maybe I could get some freaky peace for once.

Also, I really need the money. Damfool.

So let’s see. You all know the story, I guess. I was super bored one day and decided to find out what the hell the capital G crowd did and where they went when they weren’t breaking up bar fights or stopping wars.

I ain’t the first to wonder about our sudden saviors. People have been trying to follow them and figure out what the fudge they are since they showed up seventeen…. no, eighteen years ago. All kinds of top brains got their brows all furrowed trying to figure out where they came from, what they want, what are they made of that makes them able to shrug off a nuke to the love basket, all that shit. None of them came up with a damn thing^[1]. One day there weren’t here, the next they were everywhere. And suddenly it was damn near impossible for people to hurt one another. They could yell and scream all they wanted, but if they so much as tried to throw their drink at someone, there’d be a G there to stop them.

Anyhow, I got to following this one G whom I named Chris because he reminded me of this big kid I knew in my middle grades. Great guy, Chris. Big as a house but gentle as a lamb. Never even seen him mad.

Just liked the G’s.

And for a while, it was different, but it wasn’t interesting. Sure, it was fun to keep up with him (her? it?) on my zipboard when he did that freaky running like a rampaging rhino thing, but for the most part, I just watched him get in between two hot-heads or keep some woman from attacking another woman over some damfool thing, and that got old real fast.

So to try to keep my interest up, I started making notes of this and that, and my implant sends everything to Forebrain as a default, so it starts putting things together, and the next thing I know, I got people following me around and crowding me in and
touching my board and fudge, and my lifestyle has been severely compromised.

I don’t know how many times I told people that if they wanted to know so bad, they should just ask Forebrain. But you can’t worship a public brain like in the old days any more, so I guess I am the closest thing they have to a Messiah of the Guardians, and they’re all that people worship these days, so that makes me their Jesus.

That’s all I fucking need.

Anyhow, here are the “personal observations” about the big G’s that people have been clamoring for. A lot of this is shit you probably already know, but I don’t get paid unless I meet my wordcount, so suffer.

First, the basics. They are all exactly three meters tall, two point something meters from shoulder to shoulder, and built like Hercules. They are all the exact same shade of dark neutral blue, they are all as naked and sexless as an unprogrammed holoform, and they all have black eyes with no holes in them.

Slow me down if this is getting too technical.

As far as I can tell, they are total pacifists. And I mean total. They can stop a maverick rail rocket without anyone inside even getting their ‘do wrinkled. They can make an out of control buzzhead with a busted implant become limp and meek just by looking at him. They could take a dude who had just taken a fifty story fall out of a commapt window and put him back together just by touching him and closing their eyes.

That was a bad day. You know, when I put it all together like that, I can see why people worship them.

Oh, and of course, nothing can harm them. Nothing. When I was a buzzhead teen, we liked nothing more than to start a fight to make a G show and then throw everything we could think of at it. Nothing even got a reaction, even when we poured Vas-X oil all over it and light it on fire.

So that’s the basics. Now, to correct some vacant cranium fudge that people think about it.

It’s not true that they never talk. It’s just that they only talk when necessary, and brothers and sisters, they don’t think it’s necessary very often. I followed Chris around for two days before I heard a word, and that was just “Stop. ”

Oh, and it’s not true that they beat people up in secret or torture people into confessing or any of that hot fudge. Anyone who tells you it happened to them is just pulling cred and should be met with compassionate disdain. As far as I can tell, they don’t do anything in secret, and they don’t give a damn what information you have or what you plan to do in the future.

All they seem to know or care about is what you intend to do right now, and they seem to know that without asking anyone.

As for the “powers” debate, for my part, I do think they have some kind of freaky mind powers. Not that, I care, or anything I got nothing to hide. But they are way too good at being around when the fudge is about to go down for there not to be something we can’t see going on.

And what about that healing shit? Nobody knows how they do that, either.

I guess that’s it for now. My flash-high is dying and I gotta go spend some time in Greytown.

Maybe I will do this again tomorrow.