Alright, enough cunting

Posted on March 31, 2013 by MJB

Trying to summon up my spirit to get things done. Clean my room, get my short stories organized and make that grid I have been thinking about (ten markets, ten stories, every story gets to every market until someone buys the damned thing), maybe take another look at my books with an eye to getting better at editing them as a whole. That kind of thing.

So far… not so much luck. But I will keep trying.

Took my first 300 mg dose of Wellbutrin (or as it’s called at home, buproprion) on Thursday night, after Thursday’s therapy session.

I told my therapist that I did not feel demonstrably different on the 150 mg dose, and he agreed that it was time to go for the 300 mg which, as far as I can tell, is the standard dose.

And that first 300 mg dose was kind rough, actually. Afterward I felt quite flushed, I was sweating a fair bit, and I had this vague tingling sensation all over, but most pronounced in my fingertips.

That was worrying, to say the least. But that seems to have been a one off thing. I took my second 300 mg dose last night at Denny’s with the usual gang, and I did not have any of the same symptoms.

I felt kind of weird after taking it, but in much the same way that taking Paxil made me feel kind of weird and disconnected when I first started taking it.

After all, this soggy mass of bad wiring I call a brain is integrating a new drug into my consciousness. This one is supposed to boost my norepinephrine levels, and I have no idea what that is going to be like. I don’t even really understand what the heck norepinephrine does, really, so I can’t quite wrap my brain around what, exactly, higher levels of it will do for (or to) me.

My therapist tells me it is intimately involved with motivation, and I sure as hell need help with that. It would be a great comfort to know that the lack of motivation that has basically kept me from doing anything with my entire adult life was not a profound lack of character or courage, but a lack of chemicals in my brain.

It would let me off the hook, more or less, and potentially do a great deal to help with the problem of getting over just how little life I have lived and how far behind my age peers I am and how I have never had a job or supported myself or been in a relationship and that whole downward spiral of shame.

I would be able to say to myself “It’s not all my fault. Medical science had to advance far enough so that there was a cure for my genuine illness of not having the right levels of the fundamental chemical that gives people motivation. ”

And here is the big one : “NOBODY would have done any better in my situation, and some would have done a hell of a lot worse. ”

It all sounds very good, and feels good to type, and I think that if I keep at it, I can even push this message through the intense, dense fog of negativity and get myself to actually believe it.

It won’t be easy. Depression is easy. It is the easiest thing in the world for someone who has been depressed as long as I have to fall back into self-loathing and self-defeat.

It’s familiar. Comforting. Normal. It takes no energy. It is, at this point, my default state.

But from time to time, I have whatever it takes inside me to fight it and when that happens, I go for broke and fight it as hard and as well as I can, and while it might end up being ten steps forward and nine steps back, I will keep that one net step forward forever and never, ever let it go.

And it is by such a dance that progress is made. It might be crazy complicated, nonlinear, convoluted, and hard to see the end of the path from any point on the path, but it is what I am stuck with now.

Who knows, maybe after I have been at this dosage for a while and it has had enough time to work all of its powerful psychoactive magic on me, I will be all straightened out and be able to just go straight at my goals and pursue them with all the intelligence and creativity I know damned well I have.

I know that I have powerful tools at my disposal. I know there are a million and one ways to apply them to the world which might result in money. I know that I could really kick some ass out there. I know I could be a real mover and shaker in the creative fields.

But something has always held me back. Fear has always kept me in a perpetual state of stalemate with myself. The forward force has always been stopped by equal pressure on the brakes.

But maybe this new drug will increase that forward power and ease off that brake. I have the Paxil working to somewhat subdue my penchant for anxiety, and the Wellbutrin trying to start up my engine and get this rusty old bucket of mine moving forward for a change, instead of just forever idling and grinding my gears but getting absolutely nowhere.

I have so much potential right at my fingertips. I always have. But I have never been able to tap into that potential before. I guess I have always sort of taken it for granted or even seen it as a burden or a sad and bitter joke.

But I want to be different. I want to be open and ready for the world and able to stride forth strong and pure and solid and leave this cloak of fear and inertia.

And with Wellbutrin by my side, I just might.

Friday Science Whatsoever, March 29, 2013

Posted on March 30, 2013 by MJB

Hidey ho, neighbors! We here at the Scienceville Welcome Wagon are pleased as particularly pleased punch to welcome you to out picturesque little town and I will be glad to give you the grand tour of the neighborhood and introduce you to your new neighbors!

First off, over there in that charming little neodymium Quonset hut, is our youngest resident, a 19 year old boy who recently designed a ocean array that could clean up millions of tons of plastic waste.

The existence of vast patches of conglomerated plastic waste just floating in the oceans of the world like vast drift of immortal yet toxic seaweed is an international disgrace and a stinging rebuke to humanity in general. It reminds us of just how often we human beings shit where we sleep.

So it would be a great service to both the ecology of the world and that of our ethical beings if we could clean that stuff the heck up. But the problem is so massive that attempts to come up with a solution have foundered in the early planning stages.

Enter Boyan Slat, who has designed a vast ocean-going array of booms and nets that would encircle the garbage patch and funnel the plastic waste towards a series of processing platforms, where workers would then sort and process it for recycling.

Obviously, this would not be cheap. And the money earned by selling the plastic to recyclers would probably not even come close to paying for such a massive operation.

But young Boyan Slat’s idea at least makes it seem possible.

Next door to Slat, in that gorgeous magnetically levitated Buckyball, lives Dean Burnett, whose main claim to fame is a recent article he did for The Guardian summarizing the criticisms of the widely used Mybers Briggs Personality Index, or MBTI.

Full disclosure : I like the MBTI. I like it for fairly personal and anecdotal reasons, granted, but I still like it. See, it worked great for me.

Before I took the MBTI in college, I had little faith in personality tests. All the ones I had taken up to that point (I had to take quite a few when I was a child for reasons I will not go into here) gave results which were either blindingly obvious, or wildly inaccurate, or some combination of the two.

Then I took the MBTI, found out I was an INTJ, and read the official description… and was powerfully illuminated. It not only described me extremely well, it described in detail aspects of my personality and thinking that I thought, up until that point, were unique to me and me alone.

So it was quite the extraordinary experience to find out that there were other people out there with the kind of independent and relentlessly pragmatic minds as me, and made me an instant convert.

Ergo, I am biased towards it. And nothing in the article seems like a legitimate and cogent criticism of the test itself. In fact, they strike me as criticisms cooked up by someone who did not like their result.

Instead, the main criticism is of how the test is overused in situations where it is not even applicable in corporate environments, and honestly, there is no tool which is safe to use by those who use it blindly and by rote, without knowledge or understanding of the nature of the tool and how it works.

Across the street from Dean Burnett, in that adorable little neolithic igloo in between the Laser Testing Range and our award-winning Holographic Community Center, lives the team of scientists who recently found a surprising link between intestinal bacteria and obesity.

When someone gets a gastric bypass surgery (ugh), the bacteria in their intestines changes. This discovery began when someone had the bright (and gross) idea to take some of those changed bacteria and put them into the intestines of some mice that had not had the bypass, and see what happened.

And lo and behold, the mice lost weight!

This means that it is possible that the weight loss associated with gastric bypass (meaning, taking a big chunk of your gut and just throwing it away) was caused merely by the gut bacteria change it spurred.

Roll THAT one around your brain for a bit.

It also means that the futuristic high tech treatment for obesity might simply be one of those yogurt drinks with the helpful biota in it.

According to those wacky scientists, that would cause the right kind of microbes to multiply, increasing our basal metabolism rates and improving insulin response and blood glucose levels.

The rats lost 30 percent of their body weight. For me, that would be like 110 pounds. Boffo.,

My theory for why this works : these helpful microbes pre-digest the food for us (ick), making the nutrition more available, and our body perks up and says “Time to party!”.

But possibly our most promising residents live over there, in that enormous replica of the human genome with every human base-pair sequence carved into it.

There lives the scientists who recently managed to convince patients’ immune systems to attack and eliminate their cancer, and that has truly breathtaking implications for the future of oncology.

It is, of course, a small study, with only five patients. Obviously, you start small when testing a new therapy on very sick people. But the results are so strong that it is worth noting anyhow.

Three of the five patients have been cancer free for at least five months and up to two years.

How sick were these people?

The patients all had B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and had relapsed following chemotherapy. The outlook for patients in this category is typically bleak.

Amazing. They took people with very bleak prospects and made them cancer free.

Who knows? This might be the first solid blow of our eventual victory over cancer!

Well, neighbor, that concludes our tour of your new home. Feel free to pick a drawer in the hyperspatial portmanteau we use as guest housing, and settle in. Don’t worry, they are quite spacious and well-appointed on the inside!

See you at the next Vat Gown Barbecue!

Only the news

Posted on March 29, 2013 by MJB

Well, it’s Thursday, I don’t feel like talking about what went down during therapy (although it was pretty productive, actually) and there’s some stuff hanging around the browser looking impatient and bored, so I guess it’s time for spring cleaning.

First off, hey, let’s argue about guns! I’ll start us off.

Cold Dead Hand with Jim Carrey from Jim Carrey

First, hey wow, Jim Carrey. Still around. When is the last time he did a movie? I think the last thing he did of note was Mister Hopper’s Penguins, which tells ya something about career trajectory.

I am not a fan. I was, back in the heady days of Ace Ventura, which I thought was hilarious when I saw it in the theater but I am pretty sure I would hate now.

After that, did not have much use for him. The last straw was when I followed him on Twitter, and found his twitter ramblings weird and offputting and kind of dickish.

Much like the man.

But to give him his due, I really liked Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and I Love You Philip Morris, so I can’t poo-poo his career too much.

So that’s Jim Carrey. Let’s talk about the sketch itself, as comedy.

Well, like pretty much everything JC does on his own, it is brilliant in many ways, but marred by that psychotic intensity of his and his tendency to amp everything up way beyond 11. Because of this, even his legitimate satire comes across as more abusive farce than anything else, like he is a Spitting Image puppet brought to life by a well meaning but terminally clueless fairy godmother.

Also, and relatedly, it means that it lacks the most important ingredient in satire, which is accuracy. Satire needs to be accurate to be funny and not just mean. As with libel and slander, its main defense is the truth. Satire works because it exposes hypocrisy and thus resolves the tension in our minds between, for instance, what someone says and what they do, or what they said then as opposed to what they say now.

This resolution feels great, and that, to put it simply, is why satire is funny. But in order to get at that tension, your aim must be true. You have to hit the target dead on so that people recognize the hypocrisy you are satirizing, and then, boom, comedy.

So while I agree with the general sentiment Carrey is putting forth, he does it in a really sloppy and disturbingly tweaked way. So as comedy, the skit is deeply flawed.

OK, so let’s talk guns.

I agree that gun culture in the USA is destructive macho bullshit, grown up men acting like little boys who can conjure up any number of imaginary aliens to justify their building a pillow fort and running around the house goes pew pew pew.

That is why gun culture and paranoia are so intimately linked. They pretend they need the guns to protect themselves, but in reality, they want the gun because guns are cool and make them feel powerful and dangerous and such, and they will invent whatever phantoms they need to invent to justify getting them.

It is also why gun culture and right wing politics are so intimately linked. In general, conservatism is based on anger and fear, whereas liberalism is based on guilt and compassion.

And so the conservative emotional primitivism, where only primal emotions like rage and fear are trusted and anything more complex or nuanced are mistrusted to the point of loathing, works perfectly with gun culture, which is founded on anger and fear.

Truth is, crime is rare. Very rare. Especially in suburbia. That is why that gun is more likely to hurt you than any criminal. It’s not that you are an idiot. It’s just that crime is so incredibly rare that gun accidents can’t help to be more likely.

So I don’t think anybody “needs” a gun for self-defense. That is pure self-serving delusional bullshit, akin to a man claiming he “needs” a new power tool for some project he will never do because he can’t just admit he bought it because power tools are cool and he wanted to play with it for a while.

Or a woman claiming she “needs” more clothes when she has a closet full to bursting with outfits, and in reality, she just enjoys shopping.

That all said… a lot of gun control legislation is pointless and punitive and kneejerk, purely based on some politician’s need to be seen to be Doing Something About It.

So yeah, background checks. That makes sense. How else do we make sure crazy people and felons do not get guns? Also basic licensing. Nothing too damned complicated.

It should be roughly as hard to get a gun license as it is to get a driver’s license. In both cases, we want to make sure that we can trust this person with a dangerous and potentially lethal machine.

Hmm. This blog entry is going to go long.

Next news item : some great news from Ottawa. Stephen Harper’s government is fraying around the edges as some of his MPs go rogue!

Sure, it’s only a few socially conservatives complaining about the Harper government leaning hard on them to make sure they do not have to talk about abortion in Parliament, but still.

Of course Harper does not want to talk abortion. It’s a third rail topic and a real vote loser for anyone right of center. The problem, of course, is that there is only so long you can string the social conservatives along and pretend you care about their concerns without letting them actually get anywhere near getting anything done.

How rapidly Canadians forgot the entire reason the Reform Party came into existence in the first place. It was because socially conservative voters were shut out of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, and that set the stage for Preston Manning to come along and gather up all those dissatisfied folks and lead them under his banner.

But no, then the same kind of bastard that wrecked the Progressive Conservative party forever, basically destroyed it, started up this whole Unite the Right thing, and somehow managed to convince all those Reform people that this time it would be different.

Well guess what? They are not different at all, are they Steve? Just another bunch of crooked businessmen out to loot Canada and keep it all for themselves and their cronies, jerking the social conservatives along by the nose and basically saying “You have to vote for us because we are the only ones who will even pretend we are going to address your concerns.

Now obviously, I don’t want their concerns addressed either. I am a social liberal, after all. So I don’t feel too badly about these people being jerked around by the Conservatives.

But I do wish they would wise up and split the right again. And who knows, maybe that is coming.

I have said before, the only thing that will take the Harper government down is if enough of his own people are willing to turn against him and toss his ass out on a vote of confidence like they did many years ago to that cunt Diefenbaker.

And Stephen Harper is just the kind of smug prick who thinks he is invulnerable to make it happen, too.

So pray with me, for Canada’s sake, for more rancor, divisiveness, and chaos in the Conservative camp.

What’s left… hmmm… I know there was one more thing.

Oh yeah. KISS is hooking up with Hello Kitty.

For reals, y’all. Click the link. I shits thou not.

Seeya tomorrow folks! with SCIENCE!

Well catered dreams

Posted on March 28, 2013 by MJB

I am getting sick and tired of dreaming about food.

I mean, it is so damned stereotypical. Fat guy dreams about food, ha ha ha. He probably dreams of eating a giant marshmallow then wakes up and his pillow is gone!

Har de har har har. Sheesh.

In the latest food-filled dream, I was circulating at some party in someone’s ranch-style house. It seemed like a furry event in a vague sort of way. There were a few local furs that I know there.

(Hi Marzi! Thanks for visiting!)

And admittedly, the dream was not entirely about food. There was some stuff in there about trying to watch a movie with people but the movie didn’t make any sense to me and nobody would explain what was going on to me.

In fact, in general, in this dream, I was not “getting on” too well. I was doing my best to use my charm on people but I was largely getting the cold shoulder. I remember thinking, in the dream, “Oh, they will get used to me eventually and then I will more welcome.”

That might sound sad, or ravingly egotistical for that matter, but that is generally how it has worked for me in the past. I am a fairly unique guy with a big personality, and people often do not quite know how to handle me at first.

But eventually, they realize that I am a sweet, funny guy who is just a little weird, and at the same time I sort of tune in to the local frequency, so to speak, and so we meet in the middle and get along.

Anyhow, the dream had non-food content in it, but a hell of a lot was just me browsing all the food, and there was tons of food. There were big bowls of various snack type foods pretty much everywhere, plus the kitchen area had a big buffet going in it, so there was plenty to sample.

Of particular note : a huge bowl of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I have to admit, if I came across one of those at a party, I would be fairly impressed at this ghetto largess.

So I am wandering around the party and stuffing my face with all the sorts of things I can’t eat in the real world. It really says something about the power of sugar over our psyches that just giving up that potent high-reward food can haunt our dreams.

Then I wake up from the dream, and for those first confusing minutes in the hypnagogic twilight between sleep and wakefulness, and I get that stab of loss that normally I feel a few hours after having been at something that was all you can eat or buffet state where I suddenly wish I was still there.

Yup. For a fat guy like me, leaving a buffet is like losing a loved one. Sad, innit?

And of course, I wake up very hungry. Granted, it was past suppertime when I woke up, so I would have been hungry anyhow. Presumably my blood sugar goes down as I sleep and when it gets low enough, suddenly my dreams are all about the munchables.

But it just seems so sad. I could do anything in my dreams! I could have my dream job! I could have my dream life! I could have amazing sex! And what do I do?

I eat. How tragically small-minded!

Oh, another odd thing about the dream : as the dream progressed, the food started to disappear, as if I was arriving really late to the party. Bowls and chafing dishes were becoming empty and I started becoming more frantic as I looked around for stuff that was not all gone yet.

Even though I had already eaten enough for like, five people. Oy.

And so that is when the dream turned from pleasant to anxious, and guilty. Guilty because I became fixated on the idea that I had arrived at 8:30 pm and that is why everything was gone. I had been late!

So I guess that meant I deserved there to be no more food? Or maybe my dream was getting me ready to wake up and go make my supper. I don’t know.

Seems kinda fucked up, anyhow.

What else. Oh hey, check out this trippy animated GIF.

You have entered the Paisley Zone

Pretty eye-bending huh? But what is even more fun is what happens if you look at the image while blinking fast, like at least two blinks a second.

Then you just see individual frames of the animation and it looks like you are seeing a different “mandala” every time. Also trippy!

I put “mandala” in quotes because I don’t like the way stoner Buddhism throws around the word mandala like it is a specific sort of pattern that you can plaster on stuff and sell it in head shops.

A mandala is a very personal pattern that a certain kind of practitioner makes with sand inside a circle that represents their Self. The idea is that, just using a stick and colored sand, the practitioner turns the sand inside the circle into a symbolic representation of themselves, working and reworking it until it feels right, until it is perfect and there is nothing they would add or take away from it to make it better. It is them, in mandala form.

They then contemplate their mandala, becoming one with it so that the distinction between themselves and their mandala disappears, and the two are one in their minds.

Then, and only then, they erase the mandala completely. Thus, they overcome themselves and learn that all things are temporary, even that which they call themselves, and to let go of the material world and accept the way of the Buddha.

At least, that is the theory. I have not tried it, but it makes sense to me. It must take a lot of strength and determination to erase your first mandala, especially since serious practitioners will spend hours upon hours perfecting them before erasing them forever.

I would want to shellac that thing and keep it forever.

But we only truly own what we can give away freely. Otherwise, it owns us.

Again… that’s the theory.

Somewhere in the middle

Posted on March 27, 2013 by MJB

I don’t exactly feel bad or good today. Just sort of wandering around the middle of the mood spectrum, neither descending nor aloft, just browsing around the midway point like cows around an old fence.

I guess that’s OK. Beats feeling terrible, I guess. I am just feeling bored and sort of restless and low level anxious. That is increasingly feeling like my default mood. I really need to learn to find, and more importantly accept, more activity into my life.

I desperately want more meaningful action in my life. I want things to do which mean something to me, as opposed to stuff designed merely to make the passing time go more easily.

Hence all the video games I play, and the amount I read, and all that time I spend keeping up with my Facebook feed, and most tellingly, all that time I spend asleep.

I know it is wrong, but I find myself hoping it is as close to a meal time as possible when I wake up after a nap. And what do I do after the meal? I often go right back to sleep, so as to fast forward through time as much as possible and give myself the minimum number of hours awake with nothing to do but fill time as possible. It’s like I want to go through life sedated.

This is clearly a terrible way to go through life, essentially skipping as much of it as you can so you only have to be awake for “the good bits”. It goes a long long way towards explaining why I can be damned near forty without having done much of anything with my life.

How can you do things when you spend half your time asleep? When the hell would you do it?

Today, after lunch, I went right back to bed. And even as I was laying there, not sleepy at all but trying to get to sleep anyhow, I was saying to myself “I am not sleepy. I could just get up right now and get my writing done and maybe even do a few of the errands I keep putting off like phone calls and stuff. There is stuff I could be doing. Yet here I am, taking an entirely unnecessary nap.”

And yet, I still napped. I could do nothing else. I was actively afraid of staying awake with time to fill all afternoon. Afraid? Of what?

I mean, there are worse things than boredom, right? Might even stimulate me to do something productive with my time instead of just fucking around doing nothing and getting nowhere and hating myself.

Maybe that is what I am really afraid of, though. Doing something productive means leaving the comfortingly meaningless (and hence, zero risk) world of my cancerous little cocoon. And as we have discussed, that risks waking the angry giant of my free flowing anxiety. I might end up in one of those horrible states of mind where I feel incredibly scared of everything and I want to run and run and run until I can’t run any more and I don’t know where I am any more and therefore nobody can find me.

What am I running from? What am I so scared of when I get like that? Who is “coming”? I don’t know. Maybe it is my whole life that I want to flee. My whole self. Just run away and stop being me and work on becoming someone else, someone worthwhile, someone happy, even.

And leave this absurd mess of a life I have created via my patent neglect of myself behind. Just run run run down the road of life and never look back.

After all, why should I be stuck being who I already am? I didn’t ask to be this person. I had no creative control. I just ended up like this via the blind and arbitrary hand of fate. How fair is that?

I should get to start over and decide exactly who I am going to be.

I am not looking to re-roll my character sheet (because frankly, a few of my stats are very impressive) but I would like to start the game over with what I know now.

I actually dreamed that yesterday. I dreamed that I had a watch that let me access the saved games of my life, and that I could, via the watch, “load” myself into any point in my life where I had saved my game.

So I went back in my life, loading saved games and figuring out if I wanted to live my life again from that point on.

Eventually, for some reason, I settled on starting over from when I was fourteen years old. In the dream, I was walking up the street in my home town with both my elementary school and junior high on it (Summer Street, I think?). It was raining, and I was trying to figure out when and who I was.

I actually remember having the time traveler’s dilemma of wanting to know “when” it was but not wanting to seem like a crazy person by asking people what year it was.

So instead, I thought “Well I am fourteen, so it must be…. 1987?”.

Then I got a little depressed when I realized that this would mean that I had to go through junior high and high school all over again. But, I reasoned, I had no choice. The job prospects for people who do not graduate high school are not wonderful.

And it’s not like I could just take some test to prove I already knew it all and didn’t need school and they should just give me the diploma right now and save the taxpayers a lot of money, and me a lot of time better spent developing those social skills I sort of neglected before.

This made me second guess my decision to load this particular save point of my life, so I started fiddling with my watch (which was very cool and advanced for 1987… sweet!), and then the dream branched into a weird realm of trying to find the right options screen in an increasingly complex and improbable interface, and stopped being about the whole personal time travel thing.

Still. Wouldn’t it be great if life really worked like that?

Some this n’ that

Posted on March 26, 2013 by MJB

Took an extra Quetiapine last night (three total as opposed to my usual two) and so I have slept all day. But it was very good sleep. Restful, relaxing, refreshing. So I don’t mind sleeping that much.

But the fallout is that I am still pretty sleepy, despite it being 8 pm on a day where I have already slept something like ten hours. I am going to try to stay awake at least till my midnight snack, when I will, ironically, be taking more Quetiapine.

Only two this time, though, I think. I do want to be awake at some point tomorrow!

I will be going to OA again with Felicity. We will see how THAT goes.

Tiredness and being in general a little bored with the navel probing lately means I will be sharing links with you tonight. Less of me to think up, and all that.

First off, we have this very funny article from a Jezebel writer about vagina murder.

See, recently, Amanda Bynes, who is apparently some sort of singer/actress type (never heard of her before now and this is not a good introduction to you, little Missy), tweeted the following about rapper and potential vagina assassin Drake :

I want @drake to murder my vagina

— Amanda Bynes (@AmandaBynes) March 22, 2013

Man, I love how you can embed tweets now. That looks so classy!

Anyhoo, this bizarre comment prompted Jezebel writer and inquiring mind Erin Gloria Ryan’s brain to go into overdrive with questions, which luckily, she shared with us.

Here are some of my favorites :

8. Is Drake a known murderer of vaginas? If so, why are we only paying attention to his vagina murder when a pretty, rich, famous girl publicly brings it to our attention? How many thousands of non-famous, non-rich, possibly non-pretty vaginas has Drake murdered? What does this say about us as a society?

12. Is there any way that vagina protective services can intervene and perhaps seize temporary custody of Amanda Bynes’ vagina, since she’s calling for its murder and clearly shirking her responsibilities as the caretaker of a vagina?

14. Is Amanda Bynes really mad at her vagina or something? I feel like the vagina must have done something to make Amanda angry with her, otherwise Amanda publicly call for her vagina’s execution.

And probably my all time favorite :

18. What if Drake tried to murder Amanda Bynes’ vagina and it didn’t work because her vagina is tenacious and then her vagina came out of a coma and was like, Now it’s my turn, bitches, and then Quentin Tarantino made a movie about it? I’d watch. No, I actually probably wouldn’t.

I totally would watch that movie.

Damned funny stuff, and brilliant comedy writing. It is the sort of comedy that seems simple, and structurally it is as simple as it gets. It’s just a list of questions in no particular order. Hard to get much simpler than that without resorting to armpit fart noises.

But true genius does not required elaborate structure. Just talent, baby.

Upping the weirdness factor, we have this pretty extraordinary series of bits from Will Sasso (MADtv alum and lad from Ladner, BC), who has taken to the strange new medium of Vine (Twitter’s service for six second video clips… makes no damned sense to me, but whatever) and used it to create a series of six second skits that are as strange and hyperkinetic as they are lemony fresh.

Here they are all in one YouTube video. Warning, as they were originally designed to be standalone short skits, this goes by brutally fast, so make sure you are ready to pay close attention and do not be afriad to watch it a few times over to make sure you get it all.

Kind of like shotgunning a case of comedy, isn’t it? Trippy. If Vine inspires funny people to make incredibly dense and fast-moving comedy like that, I guess it can’t be all bad.

And it is good to see Will Sasso is still around and kicking and making with the comedy.

I love this lemon stuff because he took a very simple gag that any moron can do who has a lemon and a big mouth and turned it into this bizarre and hilarious premise for rapid fire comedy.

And it is perfect for Vine, because it is exactly the sort of thing that would not be all that funny if it was not done at breakneck speed.

Done at Vine speed, I love it to bits. Slower, prolly not. You would see it coming every time.

Lastly, we shall bury the needle on the weirdness gauge so hard that it breaks the damned thing by discussing a very bizarre offering from David Lynch.

And I am not talking just plain old weird. All David Lynch stuff is weird.

I am talking weird compared to everything else he has done. Including Lost Highways.

It is called Rabbits. It’s about rabbits. (It’s also 45 minutes long. Fair warning.)

It’s like David Lynch doing Becket with bunnies. It is very weird and definitely hard to follow, but I quite like it. It is a strange and disturbing trip, but I quite like those.

Maybe it is pleasurable catharsis for my strange and disturbing self. Who knows.

It seems to me that with Rabbits, Lynch completed the trip towards maximum strangeness that he has been on his whole career. Every movie was a little bit weirder, until this, which is arguably roughly as weird as it can set without being completely incomprehensible.

Of course, your mileage may vary on that. A lot of people think he has been incomprehensible all along.

It is also the closest thing we will ever get to a furry movie by Lynch. That is probably for the best. I don’t want to see a bunny Isabella Rossilini getting raped by a bunny Dennis Hopper yelling “Don’t you look at me! Don’t you dare look at me!”

Makes Watership Down seem downright family friendly, doesn’t it?

Drown another day

Posted on March 24, 2013 by MJB

Still not feeling all that great, although I do feel better than yesterday, which is something.

I guess I will just be eternally doomed to a light and dark cycle. Part of me thinks I just need to learn to accept that and that if I can just relax into the cycle and not try to fight it, I can reach a state where the ups and downs are not upsetting to me at all.

They are just the natural way of things, and the down periods will be soft quiet times and the up periods will be bright active times, and both are good.

That requires that “faith” stuff, though, and that is something I have yet to achieve. Faithlessness makes one a slave to the known and the knowable, and that is a far more profound limitation than us intellectual atheist types like to admit.

And I am not talking big F Faith in God or Jesus or any kind of established church. I am talking about the more simple faith of trust in the universe. Trust it not to be malign, and to even work out well sometimes.

Otherwise you will be crushed by the strain of the kind of pervasive paranoia that a view of the universe as malign and fraught with peril implies.

You have to at least believe that some kind of safety is at least possible before you can find the spirit and the strength to go forward in life.

You have to think that it is at least possible to move from your current position of relative safety (but not happiness) to another, even safer position, where you are not just surviving but truly happy.

I do not have such faith yet. Not deep down, where it counts. Even in my sad little life, I never feel truly safe. Even as I sit here and type, I am aware of a deep and terrible fear that lurks in my mind all the time and which could overwhelm me and make me feel like I want to run and hide in the deepest, darkest hole I can find and pull the hole in on top of me.

A fear which is so profound, it makes me want to disappear inside myself, hide like a turtle inside its shell, except inside that shell is another smaller shell, and so on till I am infinitely small inside.

And I suppose that is what I have done, metaphorically speaking. ^[1] A long time ago, I retreated deep deep withing myself, and now I am a bystander in life, watching it out the window and wishing I could be one of those real, valid people out there, but I am stuck inside this little fortress of mine and terrified of what will happen if I leave it.

I mean, will it even still be there if I need it again? What if the door locked behind me like in some sex farce and I am stuck outside my comfort zone, naked and exposed?

Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fears
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
– Pink Floyd’s The Wall

I guess I would just have to get used to it somehow. Adjust. Adapt. Find a new way to live.

But I am nowhere near ready to tear down that wall of mine yet. I am barely ready to even imagine what it might be if it was gone.

Part of me wants to just throw myself into the pit, tear down the wall and throw away the bricks in a mad rush of spiritual ambition and sheer pent up insanity. Force myself to deal with it by burning all my bridges behind me, give myself no fallback position, and therefore no choice but to learn to deal with life exposed to the world.

But I am not sure if that is even possible. I would like to shed this suffocating layer of cold wet numbing cloth with which I have swaddled myself and stand naked and proud, finally able to dry out and feel the sun on my skin, and truly breathe free.

But it is hard to imagine. Truly imagine. I can imagine doing it, but then what? What do I do after the pleasure of freeing myself has worn off and I now have to deal with the world without my armor?

All I can think of is wanting very badly to go back to my deep dark hole. To put that suffocating suit right back on before I could even think of doing anything else. I just cannot conceive of life without it.

I mean, then I would have to actually learn to cope. Learn to deal with things in a way other than running away and hiding as quickly as I can.

I would have to face things head on, instead of sideways. Look my problems straight in the eye and deal with them, instead of only ever glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye as I try to sidle along without them noticing me.

So much fear inside me. And not just simple fear, but fear of fear, which tends towards maximal complexity as it self-references its away past the far horizon.

Who knows. maybe all this existential endoscopy does me more harm than good, and I would be best off if I just left all the higher questions on the side of the road and just tried to make a good life for myself somehow. Out of whatever I could get my hands on. Whatever came down the road.

But it is my nature to analyze and ponder and speculate. You cannot just give up on being deep. I already know too much to ever abandon it all for a happy-go-lucky life.

But it’s nice to think about.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Do I even need to say that any more? This blog is practically one long clusterfuck of metaphors when I get like this.↵

Way down deep

Posted on March 24, 2013 by MJB

Not doing so great today. In fact, frankly, I feel quite depressed.

Why? I have no fucking idea. Just the winds of fate and my unstable brain chemistry, I suppose. Perhaps I am going through another period of processing deep grief and long suppressed rage.

Or maybe I am just plain destined to go around and around in ever widening circles without ever being able to escape my inevitable return to his dark and fetid emotional state. I don’t know.

Maybe it is just a case of needing to vent the dark stuff now and then. I hope so.

There’s a few rogue factors in play right now. For one, I am still adjusting to the lowered Paxil dose, which means I feel things more strongly than on the higher dose and that means the lows are lower.

Unpleasant, but you cannot escape your past and your problems without feeling the things you kept yourself from feeling all these years. You pay that debt or you stay in jail. Period.

Having less Paxil in my system simply means that I will be paying that debt faster. Hopefully, I will even get to the point where I am paying it faster than I am accumulating it, and actually run at a surplus instead of a deficit.

And then, somewhere along the line, you might even live debt-free. That sounds like heaven to me right about now. More than heaven. Nirvana.

I have been thinking a lot about emotional instability lately. Specifically, about how a lack of emotional stability can rob a person of control over their life and ruin not just their own lives but the lives of the people they love and who love them because it makes the person unreliable, untrustworthy, and unable to even really be the same person from one day to the next.

And that is so incredibly difficult to convey to the outside world. It is impossible for someone who has not experienced it to comprehend what it is like to have one’s entire sense of self, the very bedrock upon which all else is rooted, constantly fluctuating.

And so they cannot understand why some things are so damned hard for you. Why you cling so hard to the wretched little island you have cobbled together from the flotsam and jetsam thrown clean of a storm tossed sea. Seemingly simple activities that might well lead you out of this cage are fraught with unseen peril because the slightest thing might rouse the angry giant within and send the delicate house of cards that is your fragile sense of self tumbling down.

And a basic truth of the human psyche is that loss of self is death to us naked beach apes. That is why people react to potential loss of status as if they were going to die. Why they fight like hell against things that offend their sense of self, including the prejudices that form the deep down root of their egos (Well, I am certainly better than THOSE PEOPLE…. ), even though objectively speaking, these people are no threat to them whatsoever.

And it’s why depression makes life so hard to live. It either causes or is caused by a terribly weak sense of self that leaves the inner life of the depressive subject to an extraordinary level of flux and makes us very reluctant to do anything which would jeopardize whatever small stability we achieve.

Hence the notorious and noxious conservatism of the depressed. We are terrified to do anything or trying anything outside of our shaky little worlds. Things that seem simple and easy are a source of great fear and anxiety to us, and we make up a million and ten reasons not to do things, but they are all just tissue thin justifications covering up the real answer :

New things scare us. They might bring the whole world down on our heads, not in objective reality, but in our reality, and that is the only reality in which we will ever live.

To be a depressive is to have your world dominated by your need to escape your terrible emotional burden. To keep that angry giant asleep. And such is your fear of your fears, such is your desire to keep that fragile stability you have achieved intact, that you will sacrifice absolutely anything, opportunities, friendships, your own life and potential, to keep the seas calm.

And because this all involves a fragile and threadbare sense of self that is constantly under threat, it really does feel like you are saving your own life when you do all the things it takes to keep your anxieties under control.

Even if that means having a life like mine, where I do very little every day, spend as much of it as I can asleep and then fritter away the rest on Internet chat and video games.

Sure, there are millions of things I could be doing to improve my situation. I have loads of potential. I have an amazing brain, buckets of creativity, a warm and likable personality, my own brand of personal charisma and charm, and one heck of a sense of humour.

There are countless applications for that sort of thing. But they all involve risking increasing the amount of flux inside me, they all amount to pushing against the walls of my universe, and so the idea that I cannot choose amongst them because there are too many is actually a facile lie.

The truth is, I can’t choose because they are all frightening, and they are all frightening because every single one of them would involve moving out of the safe space I have carved into my mind, this paralyzing spotlight which freezes me in its light and meager warmth because all around me seems dark and cold and dangerous and unknown.

And you can waste a lot of your life waiting for some magical “change that is not change” to come along and give you a way to leave your cell and take it with you at the same time.

But the truth is, there is no escape without facing your fears.

And for some of us, that is no escape at all.

Friday Science Cattywampus, March 22, 2013

Posted on March 23, 2013 by MJB

And with a mighty screeching of well-worn tires and a gigantic whispery hiss of escaping hydraulic fluid like a Leviathan of a whale blowing offshore, the Science Bus pulls up to take us lucky science loving tourists on another tour of that big wonderful world called Science.

On today’s route, we have such diverse stops as how to get an extra octave with a sex toy, the truth about doctors and placebos, the official medical opinion on gay adoptions, how rude comments on Web stories change your opinions, and the latest news in the exciting new world of 3D television.

So climb on board! Feel free to take all the pictures you want, but please, no flashes.

Our first stop is that sex toy thing. Sure, I could have teased you with the sex toy story and then saved it till the end like some cheap Action News broadcast, but I want you all relaxed and paying attention.

And relaxation is the name of the game. A voice coach from the University of Alberta (go Canada!) named David Ley has been using a sex toy to get extra octaves from his voice students.

We have reserved this portion of the tour for you all to giggle, whisper amongst yourselves, and speculate about just how one uses a sex toy to get better vocal performance.

Sadly, the truth is a lot more boring than any of our more colorful and anatomically intriguing notions. He just uses a small egg-shaped vibrator on the outside of his student’s throats in order to help relax their throat muscles and hence help them hit those high notes.

Reportedly, the device works like a charm for this purpose:

Toronto Actor Sara Farb, who is currently in three productions at Stratford, swears by the device and says she bought one online moments after being shown how it worked by Ley. “It was almost immediate,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

I like this story not (just) because it is titillating, but because it represents the sort of novel thinking that I admire.

And who knows? A little vibro-massage now and then might save the voices of future actors and singers from the ravages of time!

Continuing our tour, if you look out the windows on your left, you will see a story about what percentage of doctors have prescribed placebos.

The percentage? Ninety seven percent. 97 out of every 100 doctors in the UK has sent a patient away with a placebo instead of a genuine pharmaceutical.

Shocking, isn’t it?

Well, no. Not really. Doctors have long careers and so most will end up in the situation where a placebo is the proper procedure at least once.

And the truth becomes even less shocking when you realize that the study cited includes prescribing an antibiotic for a viral infection in the category of “placebo” treatments.

And I am fine with that. After all, the antibiotic might not be the classic sugar pill, but it is definitely not going to do a damn thing for your viral infection. And a modern GP can be forgiven for doing this now and then when faced with the occasional very insistent and/or overwrought and upset patient with a viral infection.

After all, if the useless antibiotic helps the patient calm down and let nature take its course, then it has genuinely improved the patient’s life, and that is what medicine is all about.

And of course, none of us want to think our doctor has slipped us a placebo, and the odds are, they haven’t. The situations where they are called for are quite rare.

Next, on your right, soars the majestic towers of this story about how the American Academy of Pediatricians says same sex couples should be allowed to marry and raise children.

And the science is firmly on their side. They say there is absolutely no evidence that being raised by a same sex couple is any different than being raised by a traditional mixed gender couple.

Furthermore, the Academy has always had the opinion that stable, committed two parent families are better for raising kids, and letting gays marry can only increase the odds of this.

Way to go, AAP!

After that brief stop, we forge onward to gaze upon the exotic splendor of this story about how nasty comments on a Web article change your opinions on issues.

Basically, researches cooked up a fair and balanced story about nanotechnology, and then posted two versions of it, one with polite comments, and one with rude and nasty comments.

They found that people who read the story with the nice comments had no change of opinion, whereas the rude comments version made people’s opinions more extreme than before.

This is a known psychological effect. It comes from the tension between two parts of our psyches, the top level truth-seeking thoughtful part, and our more primitive and emotional oppositional instincts.

In the realm of pure logic, absolutely no opinion could change our opinion merely by being exposed to it. Only sound logic and reliable information could change your opinions.

But down here in the real world, rude and aggressive opinions make us feel like we have to dig in and fight them, and we do that by, in effect, pulling just as hard but from the other side.

To put it mildly, this is not the best way to get to the truth. But when we argue, we are defending our own intellectual integrity and world-view far more than we are seeking the truth or even trying to win the argument. Unopposed, human beings merge their senses of reality into one picture.

Which was fine when we were talking to each other about where the best food could be found. But once we got a serious sentience upgrade and became truly human, that got… complicated.

And for our final stop before I let you all off at the gift shop, we can all feast our eyes on this surprisingly realistic story about a form of 3D television that does not require glasses.

Yup. This story again. Like flying cars, fusion, and a dishwasher that really works, this is the something that has been promised many times before.

The basic problem is this : we seen in 3D because we have two eyes. Each eye sees a slightly different view of the world, and our brain combines these into a single 3D image.

So if you have ever wondered why everything has two eyes and not just one… that’s it. 3D!

This presents a rather sticky problem for would-be 3D pioneers, though. How on earth do you get a different image to each of the viewer’s eyeballs with a 2D screen?

The classic method is to put both images onscreen at the same time and get the viewer to wear something that separates the two images and gets them to their proper eyeballs.

But that is somewhat cumbersome and nobody really enjoys wearing dorky looking glasses. I would do it if the effect was impressive enough, but then again, I am already a dork.

The dork effect also rules out another method, the “goggles” method, which would involve wearing some form of goggles where each eyepiece is a tiny computer monitor and beams the image directly into your eye.

Such systems have been developed, but are expensive, heavy, uncomfortable, and a host of tricky issues pop up when you put the image that close to people’s eyes.

Then there are the famous holograms, currently making a big comeback on our credit cards. Those work great for still images, but moving images just do not work. Our eyes are very clever when it comes to tracking motion in 3D.

So the world has been looking for a way around the glasses or goggles problem for some time, and according to the story (remember it?), the big brains at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California have come up with a new contender for that long sought after prize.

They claim that their technology allows for the true “fishtank” experience, where one could have one’s 3D TV on and walk around your living room and it would still look fully 3D.

Color me skeptical. Also, honestly, people sit when they watch TV. As long as it works for being sprawled on their couches, it works fine, honestly.

Still, if they can pull it off, it would be the biggest improvement of the TV since color.

For me, though, I am not all that interested until I can put on a VR helmet and watch TV from the inside.

That’s it for this week’s tour, folks! See you next week for more science goodies!

Cleaning out, again

Posted on March 22, 2013 by MJB

Once more I have a ton of interesting stuff cluttering up my browser, so it’s time to clean up.

First off, we have a little naughtiness : the Global Internet Porn Habits database from PornMD.

Via that handy interactive infographic, you can find out what the top ten porn searches are for almost any country in the world, and have fun speculating as to what this reveals about their national character, the repressiveness or permissiveness of their cultures, and just exactly what kind of perverts they are growing over there anyway.

Fair warning, though, it’s quite addictive, and you can easily lose a lot of time cast a prurient eye over the nations of Earth seeing what people there are “into”.

One thing I immediately noticed is that a lot of nations have a very high percentage of gay-related searches in their Top Ten. This makes sense to me, as there is still a great deal of the world in which gay men are isolated, with no way to get in touch with each other that is safe, and for such gay men, Internet porn might well be the only way to express their sexuality.

Certainly, when I was a gay youth in small town Canada, porn was my only safe outlet.

That’s not the fun stuff, though. The fun stuff is country-specific.

Like India. It has, as it’s number 3 search, “Indian aunty”. How intriguing. I know that in Indian families, the “aunties” wield a fair bit of power and influence. Childrearing is often quite communal. Could it be that a lot of Indian men have their sexual awakenings in the care of their Aunties?

South America, on the other hand, forces one to learn a little Spanish or Portuguese. For example, I learned that in Chile, the number 3 search is “Gordos (gay)”, which means “fat”.

So apparently, in Chile, they like their gay men fat. Mental note : visit Chile ASAP.

But, by far, the result that puzzles me the most is “straight (gay)”. Sounds like a classic oxymoron, right? But then I remember that there are gay men with a strong fetish for straight men, and hence there is porn starring supposedly “straight” guys having sex.

Seems awfully complicated and confused to me, and the obvious question, namely “how straight can these guys be if they are boning gay dudes?”, remains. But hey, whatever floats your bobber, man. No judgment.

Then we have this charming little tale of swift justice.

Seems that rowdy Irish group the Dropkick Murphys were performing in New York City when, via a complicated route I will not bore you with, a skinhead fan of theirs got on stage and started doing a Nazi salute.

Whereupon the lead singer of the Murphys, a certain Ken Casey, promptly kicked the ever-loving shit out of him in front of thousands of screaming fans.

Now, this is clearly assault. Casey is clearly in the wrong here, legally speaking. He delivered a savage beating to a man who was no threat to himself or his people. Surely, security could have handled this fellow in a more legally acceptable way.

But good luck, Mister Skinhead, on getting a jury to see it that way.

It’s not technically fair, but if I was the racist jackhole in question, I would not go getting a lawyer and planning to sue Casey and the Murphys for everything they are worth just yet.

It is highly unlikely that you will find much sympathy within the legal system for your poor, beat down, busted up Nazi self.

But maybe you were just doing it to be funny. Maybe you are no Nazi. Maybe you were just drunk.

Too fucking bad. Some shit, you can’t come back from like that.

Then there’s this interesting bit of speculation about the role of single-gender workplaces in rape and the abuse of women.

As usual with Jezebel material, I feel the article is on to something, something valid and real, but does not quite have the right grip on it.

They are right that single-gender environments tend to foster a feeling that the other gender is not real or valid. To a lesser extent, that is also true of any monoculture. Similarity breeds contempt.

But gender unity in particular produces some very disturbing feelings towards the opposite gender. Furthermore, I think single-gender environments actually promote a kind of regression into the pre-adolescent, homosocial, schoolyard mentality that inevitably leads to one kind of action to threats from the presence of the outsider : bullying.

Much of what I have seen and read about the abuse women face in hostile work environments strikes me as pure bullying. We don’t see it as that because we are even more blind to adult bullying that we are to childhood bullying, but the exact same dynamic creates the exact same teasing, tormenting, humiliating, and punishing type behaviours.

Rape, in that context, could be see as the worst form of bullying. It sends the unmistakable message that to the dominant group, the opposite gender is only valued for their sexuality^[1], and everything else about them is offensive to the dominant group.

Thus, institutional rape as seen in the American armed forces and the Steubenville case. The homosocial dynamic would prefer none of the other gender in their territory at all, but if they are forced to accept a minority gender presence, they will respond by bullying that gender in an attempt to rectify the situation by driving them away, or at least punish them for disturbing the dynamic.

And if the victim(s) cannot leave (because this is their school, their job, etc), then what you have is the potential for an extremely destructive dynamic that will escalate and escalate until the unthinkable happens and it turns into serious violence or even rape.

This also explains “hazing” scandals. In that case, the offense is not being the wrong gender, but simply being new to the existing dynamic.