Well… that’s a thing.

Here is today’s thingamagig.

It turned out okay, I guess. But my dissatisfaction with what I am producing continues to grow. I am getting tired of exploring form and want to start improving quality, but I am not entirely sure how yet.

I know that I have it in me to turn out top notch quality Web content that is funny, fun, informative, and whatnot, but I feel like I am, at best, stumbling in that vague direction, and that gets frustrating.

I am beginning to wonder, in fact, if I need to take still more time making them so I have enough time to polish and refine each working part until the whole thing runs like Swiss clockwork.

Right now, I am barely managing to put together something that sort of works. And that’s not good enough, not any more. I am tired of mucking about in the sandbox and I want to make something really good.

I suppose I should be more patient with myself and just take a “see how things grow” attitude, but I don’t think I can. I feel like I am in a growth period right now and that’s the time to stretch yourself and reach for the sky.

And what I really want is what I always want, clarity. Clear, concise ideas with simple and effective plans of action leading to a sharp, professional-looking, top notch product that I am proud of when I am done, and can’t want to show people.

Instead, my mind is filled with its usual fog. Part of the price for my creativity, I feel, is this lack of structure within myself. It’s difficult for me to make definite decisions which I then stick with till the end, especially if the process has more than just a few stages.

I want so badly to develop the skills to make truly effective use of my enormous talents. And I am getting there, a little bit more every day.

But the waiting is so damned hard. All my ghosts and demons are crying for release now that the way is opening up, and they all want out at the same time. It’s hard to convince them to pick a number and wait their turn when they have been waiting so long for someone to listen to them.

Oh well, discontent is a vital part of art. The artist goes through cycles of being pleased with their work, then finding flaws in it, then hating their work, then making something better, and being pleased with that for a while, and so forth and so on.

It is a very difficult process emotionally, which is why so many of us creative types are kind of insane. The creativity drives you directions that no sane person who only wanted to go through life in as pleasant a way as possible would ever go.

That goes triple for philosophers. To be a philosopher, you have to follow the truth no matter where the trail leads and ignore the damage you take as your pell-mell pursuit drags you along like a runaway horse.

That’s not how a gentle hedonist lives, and I am learning to make peace with the fact that, pragmatist that I am, there are deep passions within me that have nothing to do with my own comfort, pleasure, and ease, and have everything to do with pursuing things with as little encumbrance as possible and at maximum speed, and hang the consequences.

The strongest of those passions is for the truth, but I also seek beauty, understanding, spiritual growth, and of course, comedy.

To me, these are all, on the hedonistic level, the pursuit of mental pleasure, for me and for others. Of course, there is a lot more than pleasure to the search for truth.

But it is the transcendental and extremely mental joy one feels from those rare but wondrous moments when the truth becomes clear and the rapture of revelation is upon you that keep the beast inside going.

For instance, I have been pondering my strange relationship with my own powers lately, how I both take them for granted and forget they are even there, and I have come to the conclusion that a big part of the problem is that I am quite simply frightened of the power of my own mind.

It just seems so vast and potent and the potential for destruction seems so great and often it really feels like it wants to carry my sanity away in a flood of ego and rage… another case of holding something back because I don’t like where it seems to be leading, I guess.

So perhaps, in order to deal with this fear, I developed the habit of only allowing my mind to develop in ways that are not connected with reality… then I don’t have to take responsibility for them. I don’t even have to own them, not really.

And now, when I try to nudge myself in the direction of a more applied kind of thinking, something that actually would harness my wild talents to reality in a way that improves my life, I end up feeling this terrible panic rising up inside myself that manifests as, for instance, option paralysis.

But it’s really about the fear. The fear that if I really own and use my big big brain, I will end up hurting people, or becoming someone I don’t want to be, or just losing my mind entirely.

I am also, of course, afraid of getting hurt. Trying is, after all, the first step towards failure.

But at this point in my life, I don’t think I am really all that afraid to fail. I don’t expect overnight success. A rejection letter won’t kill my ego.

I think it is more about this strange relationship I have with this massive mind of mine. I have spent a lot time almost ashamed of it because of all the times it is led to my alienation from others.

Maybe it’s tuime to just own it and use it and get used to the feel of it.

Maybe then I could really accomplish something.

Tried my hand at a little virtual stand-up (well, sit-down) comedy today. It’s pretty rough but I think I got off a mildly entertaining rant about something that bugs me.

It was originally going to have a lot more of the little bits of text adding to the density, but I had a power drain (opposite of a power surge) and just plain could not stay upright long enough to think them up and add them.

Oh well, every day, something new, something better.

One odd thing : I actually napped this afternoon. That has become quite unusual for me. Thanks to the stimulating effects of Wellbutrin, I hardly ever sleep during the day any more. I still lie down and read several times during the day, and spend some quiet time just laying in bed, letting my batteries recharge.

But unlike before, I don’t actually sleep. I just lay there essentially till I get bored, and then I get back up and it’s back in front of the computer time.

And yet today, I napped. I am pretty sure I know why, though.

I stayed up quite late last night, watching videos with my besties, and so I did not get to bed till a little after 5 AM.

But then at 8 AM, I was awoken by a painfully empty stomach demanding food, and so I staggered out to have breakfast. And with my breakfast, I took my Wellbutrin and my Paxil.

That created a conflict between Wellbutrin’s wakening effect and the fact that I had only had three hours or so of sleep so far.

And that resolved itself with my surprise afternoon nap, I presume. It was some fairly unpleasant sleep, as it tends to be when I sleep in the afternoon (is it the heat?), but better than nothing.

Tomorrow is therapy day. I have some idea of what I want to talk about, which is nice for a change.

For one thing, I have decided that I fucking hate my father. And real hate, fiery hate, not the cold and clammy self-pitying hate that depression allows because it’s one more thing to be depressed about.

No, I hate his fucking guts. Nothing like Father’s Day to make you think about dear old Dad, huh? I hate him because he molested me when I was barely out of diapers, I hate him because his anger and his delusions made the home I grew up in a positively toxic environment, I hate him for making dinner as a family a tense and frightening ordeal, I hate him for taking his anger out on my siblings Anne and David, I hate him for verbally abusing my mother and destroying the self-esteem of a good, kind, sweet, competent woman who was worth ten of him, and I especially hate him for talking my mother into taking my brother David and I out of college so he could retire early, thus fucking up our entire lives.

And I hate myself for agreeing to it. But I was so conditioned to be agreeable and pliable and “understanding” that I would have agreed to damn near anything just for a few scraps of approval.

It feels good to let it finally emerge as pure white hot hatred. I feel like this is a vital step towards unlocking and expressing all that rage and pain that I have buried deep in the frozen ground of my soil.

Well it’s springtime, motherfuckers, and time for the thaw. All that rage has got to be externalized somehow or it will continue poisoning me inside and powering my depression.

Suppression breeds depression. Expression kills depression. It’s that simple.

And with my therapist’s invaluable help, I am growing increasingly confident that I can face all that rage/pain/anger/fear without it destroying me.

There will be many painful ascents and brutal falls to endure, but I can handle it. Emotional roller-coasters aren’t the most fun kind, but at the end of the day, they’re just a ride, and when the ride is over, there you are.

You’re the same person you have always been, just with a lot less baggage. It’s fair dinkum.

Emotional emesis might be horribly gross and disturbing while it happens, but it sure beats letting your demons poison your soul to death.

Let them little fuckers out. They can’t survive out there.

I feel like my mood has dipped slightly in the last few days. I am once more face to face with the idea that I might just plain have a mood cycle, and I will always go up and down like the tide, and I have to learn to just accept that and learn to cope with it.

Stop trying to impose linear structure on a cyclical thing, and instead of trying to make the curves flatter, instead make them smoother.

A cycle is predictable too, as long as you take the long view. When you are down, know that you will be up again soon. And when you are up, look not at the valley below, but at the next peak.

And know that you will be here again, over and over, for the rest of your life.

Viewed that way, dysthymic depression can be viewed as the exact opposite malfunction as bipolar disorder. Dysthymic depression seeks to hug the midline and would rather be down for good than face the normal ups and downs of a normal person’s moods.

Biplor disorder goes in the other direction, and would rather wild highs and catastrophic lows to the boring predictable sameness of a normal mood cycle.

These are not conscious choices, of course, just ways of characterizing the disorders.

As a deeply dysthymic type, my path to recovery involves learning to be more tolerant of variability and the unexpected, and letting go of the idea that I need to hyper-control everything in order to keep total calmness and hence self-medicate against my anxieties.

There comes a time when you have to stop tiptoeing around the sleeping giant, and start waking him up and cutting him down to size.

And that… is called “therapy”.

Bleh. The downside of my finally separating my depression from my physical complaints is that it kind of forces me to think about how physically sick I feel quite often.

It just seems to be my destiny of late to feel like crap for a good deal of the day. Right now, I have a nasty headache and I feel achy and sore all over. God, getting older sucks.

On the other hand, emotionally speaking, I feel pretty good. I have had a few moments of “I hate my life!” frustration lately, but for the most part I am doing better than I have in years.

Being more active helps. Spending a few hours every day making a goofy ass video certainly gives me more to focus on and express myself by than just fucking around playing Facebook games already.

I have an enormous amount of creative energy just waiting to be used. I have been too afraid to tap into it before, feeling like it was just too much for me to handle.

But fuck that noise. Sure, I can only handle turning the dial up slowly right now, but turn it up I will, and a little faster every day.

I have spent too long crawling on the ground. It’s time to get up and get moving, and for that, I need energy, and I have all the energy I will ever need.

Depression doesn’t take it away. It just keeps you from accessing it.

And all that bottled up anger might just turn out to be the solution instead of the problem, because I am still turning that anger inwards… but I am directing it at the depression itself. I am grimly determined to destroy this depression of mine no matter what it takes, and I will not be deflected, delayed, or deterred. I am willing to slog through any kind of negative emotion in order to get my true self back, and if that means confronting all the ugliness in my soul, so be it.

At this point, it’s a war of attrition, and I am winning. Victory is inevitable, as the depression can no longer grow and I am burning more of it out of myself every day.

So every day, I push it back further, and some day, there will just plain be none left, or at least, not enough to be a problem.

I have a lot of long-overdue growing to do, and I am eager to make it happen. I have been all stunted and warped and cramped inside a shell that has been far too small for me since I was a child.

Development delayed, but not denied.

Anyhow, video. here’s a funny bit about a little known but crippling disorder.

I have wondered whether this truly exists since long before I saw this video. Could it be that some people just look sour or angry all the time simply because of how their face turned out?

If so, imagine what it must be like to be one of those people. You would get a lot of negative social feedback through no fault of your own. You might end up becoming the person people treat you like. The urge to follow your social role is extremely strong, especially in people who aren’t conscious of the pressure in the first place.

Myself, I don’t have a bitchy or asshole type face, as far as I know, although I know that I seem scary to some people who don’t know me simply for being a great big fat bearded guy. Strangers who don’t know that I am a big teddy bear who is friendly and harmless think I am some kind of crazy homeless guy.

And I am not homeless!

Also, for some reason, when I am really deep in intense thought, to some people, I look angry. I don’t know if that is just a size thing or whether my face can’t quite distinguish between a “deep in thought” face and a “seething with brooding anger and ready to explode” face.

It hasn’t come up a lot, mainly because I spend most of my time around people who know me. And I only look like that when I am not socially engaged, in resting face mode.

When I am engaged, my general friendliness shines through, or at least, I hope it does.

Oh right, today’s vid.

Inappropriate Lip Sync did not turn out to be as funny as I thought it would. In fact, it’s a little scary. I have to learn to reign in these expressive powers of mine sometimes.

I may try it again, however, with something more absurd and less angry. The idea was to lip-sync something that looks completely ridiculous coming from the likes of me. Seemed like a great idea for simple comedy content. Preliminary results are…. mixed.

The middle bit is a chunk of standup comedy type stuff I have had lying around for ages. I need to try to capture that stuff on video more often. I have a lot of comedy in my head, but it doesn’t just show up when I call for it. It pops up when something reminds me of it.

I have never been good at random-access type memory, where you can just pull up all you know about a subject and have it all at your fingertips at a moment’s notice.

That’s for people with more structure, knowledge-oriented minds than mine. I need prompts, reminders, questions, things along those lines.

No wonder I always tested well. That’s exactly the right kind of memory for the modern definition of academic success. I retain what I hear and can repeat it when prompted. That makes me just the little tape recorded that the school systems reward.

I view today’s vid as a bit of a palate cleanser. Something random and experimental and goofy just to make myself stretch my technique a little bit and try something new.

The hunt for growth continues.

Because nothing is funnier than someone’s imminent demise, is it?

Seriously though, that is one of the all time classic comedic premises for the sort of list based comedy that is all the rave now. Famous Last Words. I had to do it eventually.

The whole beauty of list comedy of the one-liner sort is that by establishing a simple but very comedicly rich premise, the list entries can be very high density comedy because you can imply so much in a very small number of words.

The premise sets the stage for the power of the list entries. It’s what made Lettermen’s Top Ten Lists so powerful, and what makes certain types of improv games like “use this weird prop” or “riff on this premise” so packed with power and good performance pieces.

Note, though, that this is quite different from the Cracked.com type of list comedy. Their list entries are long-form comedy with many gags and are dense not because of their low word count but because they combine comedy and information in such an intoxicating way.

In fact, now that I think about it, whether it’s Cracked.com, the Daily Show, or even awesome science guys like CDPGrey and Vsauce, the name of the game in the world right now is to find ways to give people a dense information stream that goes down easy.

Food for thought for a content creator like me. I am more of thinker than a knower (though I know plenty, it’s just kind of…. random), so my content would be more about thought than information per se, but still, people need thought too.

Maybe I need to develop a high density form of political and philosophical discussion that lets people get a lot of top notch thinking in a quick and fun form.

Hard not to make that a platform for my own views though. So maybe I will make myself over to become the fastest pundit in the world.

I have some serious pondering to do!

Otherwise, life slides along decently. Still working on shifting myself from “my life sucks” to “my life is fine, but could be even better”. Switching the negative to the positive. Ruthlessly hunting down all my negative thoughts and burn them out like cauterizing a wound, or like burning out an evil vine.

The important part is the burning. Fire is pure. Fire cleanses all. Burn the garbage out of yourself and make room for the real you!

Another part of the program involves seeking out the positive and letting it in to counterbalance the negativity. Positive can push out negative if you let it. But you have to let it in. And you have to be willing to let go of the security of constant negativity.

The nature of dysthymic depression is to hug the baseline and to seek continuity and predictability above all. It is the coping strategy of lying flat on the ground and never rising because if you never rise, you can never fall.

But this is an inherently unnatural and unhealthy way to live. Growth is life, stasis is death. We are born to rise and strive, and when we fall, to just plain get back up and try it again. Like a child learning to walk for the first time, we fall down, have a good cry, then get up and get on with it.

Women understand this way better than men do.

Choosing to keep on crawling instead is a tragically life-destroying decision, although it may well be a choice that is forced upon a person by childhood trauma.

It has been well known for decades that trauma can slow or even stop psychological as well as physical growth. Children who experience a trauma often regress to a previous level of development, as if the trauma causes them to abandon their current state of development as being a bad idea and reverting back to one that they have already fully completed.

And that is easy to diagnose in, say, a four year old who suddenly starts wetting themselves and sucking their thumb, but a lot harder to see when it is a teenager who loses interest in the usual teenage activities and begins living more like a preteen.

I think that describes an awful lot of the nerds I know, and in fact might be the crux of the diagnosis. Our social development got halted some point along the line, probably by bullying but possibly because of other traumas as well, and society didn’t notice because our grades were still good.

And there is no SAT for social development, besides, of course, life itself.

And here is the really fucked up thing : puberty happens whether you are socially developed enough for it anyhow. So the stunted end up with a strangely juvenile sexuality, often conflicted between childlike simplicity and adult intimacy, and I think that leads to a lot of the ugliness that lurks in the psychosexual realm of nerd-dom.

Whether it is grown men wanting to marry anime characters or the horrific levels of barbaric misogyny that results from being both attracted to women and frightened out of your wits by them (think pigtail-pulling taken to a much darker and more intense level) and which has recently surfaced in horrific upsurges of hateful comments directed at various female Internet personalities.

They only attack because they are so scared, ladies. They feel, not without justification, that women can only hurt them by being something they want but get punished for even trying to get it, and so when a woman strays into their all male domain, they freak out and panic, and attack in the most painful, hurtful way in order to drive to drive you away, like you’re a leopard and they are a bunch of monkeys.

The best way to deal with them is to simply not engage. Don’t argue with them, don’t fight with them, don’t even acknoledge them in the slightest. Only deal with people who behave. That is particularly easy on the Internet.

Eventually, the monkeys will calm down and get over their initial fear, and realize you are just another monkey like them, and their desire to interact with you and be acknowledged will overcome their reluctance, and most of them will treat you as an equal.

And the ones who don’t will be shunned and ridiculed by the group.

But only if you do not engage. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t feel right, but it’s what works.