Once more, it’s time to get caught up on my videos.

Ambition level seems to have dropped lately, and I am going to try to fix that. Towards that aim, I am writing my blog entry before supper again, and I hope to make this my new pattern,

That way, I have all evening free for the daily video.

I had been doing everything in the evening, which meant I ended up doing the video at around 10. That tended to make me panicky about posting the thing before midnight, and that led to highly counterproductive hastiness.

And it’s not like doing nothing all afternoon is particularly fun.

OK, videos, in the order of their creation.

I have shared that theory (well, two theories, sort of) of why we humans love celebrity gossip before, but not, as far as I can recall, in video form.

I think the “fascination with the alphas” is a larger factor than the “lack of neighbors” one. I think it plays a large role in the social value of information, period. The more important (in others words, the higher status) the players, the higher value the information accrues, regardless of content.

Most people would be a lot more interested in hearing about the mayor’s affair than the dogcatcher’s.

The other variable is salaciousness. This seems to rely on shock and/or titillation value. Our social instincts give us a thrill when we learn social information, and that thrill can be enhanced or even multiplied by the contents giving us another kind of thrill, like a sexual thrill or something for us to tut-tut about and thus reassure ourselves and our peers that we are normal and have the normal emotional responses to things.

This other variable can overcome the social status factor if it is high enough. People might not care about the dogcatcher’s affair…. until they hear his lover was one of his dogs.

Celebrities fill this role so well because they are very clearly socially dominant, yet there is absolutely no chance that gossiping about them will have any social consequences to us. They are not actually connected to our lives. That’s why people are so willing to ignore their humanity. They’re so much higher status than us that, for a lot of people, it is impossible to imagine them being hurt by things like paparazzi or TMZ.

It is very hard for humans to care about the feelings of those we envy.

Next up, we have this juicy subject :

That video may or may not have been inspired by recent events, but the subject has been on my mind for over a decade. The rampant childishness and blatant counter-populism of modern conservatism only exists due to a clear lack of competent or even interested opposition. The right has only been able to drag things so far in their direction because the left is a bunch of squabbling, diffident cowards who are only liberal in the Team B sense, and when it comes time to have courage, resolve, and the ability to make tough decisions, they are nowhere to be found.

Hence, herd mentality sets in. That is what happens when there is no strong leadership. When everyone is following the herd and trying to fit in, the movement turns into something as fickle and insubstantial as the wind.

The irony and tragedy of our times is that courage and resolve are found almost exclusively in the hands of the people who represent the side of stupidity, cruelty, and moral devolution.

Clearly, this has to stop. The world needs liberals capable of not just passively resisting the ethical imbeciles of the right, but disciplining them like the spoiled children they are. Liberals who are not so afraid of seeming aggressive or mean that they are incapable of dealing damage to the enemy.

Liberals who can hit hard and just keep punching.

To do this, one must separate from the herd. Do things they might not like. Risk scaring them. And that might happen. The true liberals may be viewed by the mainstream left as “too aggressive” and too “strident”.

But if you stay true to your ideals and firm in your commitment to the fight, they will get over their fear and begin to follow you. People need leadership, even liberals, and a strong enough leader will gain followers from the disenfranchised and the disillusioned on the left.

Then there’s my most recent video :

Clearly, I have politics on the mind lately.

This y axis business is another thing I have been pondering for a long time. This whole notion of left versus right is ridiculous on the face of it. It’s practically useless as a political measure. I’m mostly left wing, and yet I don’t feel I have any commonality with the science deniers who decry the evils of modern medicine and talk about things being “unnatural” with absolutely no basis for comparison.

A modern city is no more “unnatural” than a beehive or a beaver dam.

That;s why my Y axis is science. I have long thought that I might very well have more in common with moderate conservatives than radical hippie dippy lefties, and adding a “belief in science” axis might clarify that. It could be that there are moderate, sensible conservatives who actually do believe in science and therefore would align with me on many subjects better than the loonies on the left, whom I view as being as irrational and unsuitable for leadership as any bible thumper.

We can disagree on a lot of things, but if you do not believe science produces truth and doctors heal people, then I don’t want to associate with you. It is too fundamental a disagreement. My world view is entirely scientific, for as far as science goes (it sure as hell doesn’t cover everything), and I view people who don’t trust scientists as people who have an instinctual sense that anything representing objective truth might reveal the inherent ridiculousness of their beliefs, and they would rather choose the easy way out and shoot the messenger.

My, I’m feeling strident and aggressive today!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a complicated relationship with change.

Being a depressive, I have a tendency to instinctively fight it. A lot of us depressed people feel like we are just barely keeping our heads above the deep dark water of total insanity, and people in that position are going to react very poorly to anything that rocks the boat even the tiniest bit.

So we cling. Odds are, our situation is nowhere near as precarious as we think it is. But chemical imbalances are notoriously impervious to logic and common sense, so we have these feelings anyway. Therapy can reduce them over time, both the kind you get from a therapist and the kind you do on your own, but at no moment can you simply wish the bad chemicals away.

You know they’re wrong. But it doesn’t matter.

So no matter how progressive our politics and no matter how open and innovative our mind, our emotions are extremely conservative and they are always, always the one in charge.

There are no Vulcans.

On the other hand, I deeply desire change. Yes, at the same time I am resisting it. I both long for and deeply fear transformation. I want to transform and become a new butterfly instead of a very old caterpillar. But a deep part of me does not trust what it cannot control or predict, and it is always there saying, “But what if it goes wrong? What if you turn into something you don’t like? What if you become a bad person, or one that is even less happy?”

And so, I resist. And the butterfly within me grows and grows, constantly seeking the light, but trapped in the walls of my internal prison, and so the growth pressure increases with no end in sight.

And that pressure causes pain. A deep down pain of the soul. As deep as bone cancer, and as fundamental to one’s being. A pain we can neither see nor acknowledge because to do so would be to see that the real problem is one of suppressed growth, and that would tend to suggest that we need to stop clinging and let transformation happen, and our entire personalities have been rearranged by the illness to stop that very thing from happening.

We must cling. Clinging is everything. Sane or not, we feel like we are dangling over the cliff of oblivion, and only by clinging to our tenuous perch with all the strength we have can we escape the unthinkable annihilation below.

This is what accounts for our often paradoxical and irrational ways. We hate our lives but resist all change. We hate ourselves and yet suppress the slightest amount of internal growth. We blame ourselves for everything yet take responsibility for nothing.

We’re really fucked up.

As I grow stronger, I become more open to the idea of transformation. My progress thus far has been slow and gradual. It has to be in order to not set off my fears of change and the ground shifting beneath my feet. As I recover, the pace of change increases and my sense of danger decreases. But it still takes a long time.

A big spiritual transformation would sure speed things along nicely. But it doesn’t seem to be something I can generate on my own. It takes something external to get things moving, whether it’s events in my actual life or something from a movie or a YouTube video that slips through my defenses and unlocks another room full of suppressed emotion and outmoded thought.

And that only happens at very specific moments, when the stars are aligned, my shell is at its thinnest, and the right thing happens at the right time. It’s a one in a million shot, and so it doesn’t happen all that often.

But the stronger I get, the more I am willing to lower the odds and maybe let those big things happen to me more often. While they are rarely pleasant, I always feel a whole lot better after, and for a while, the growth pressure is abated.

And my burden gets just a little lighter.

And part of me really wants to throw open the floodgates and release the floodwaters from all sides, and let there be thunder and lightning and fire and war on my inner seas, and at the end, when seas are silent, I will become whatever’s left.

Really tempted to link that Peter Gabriel song again. Not going to do it.

But I guess I am still too afraid of unpredictable outcomes to push the button. The problem is a profound lack of faith. I can’t just tell myself that everything will be all right. I lost the ability to believe that when I was very young. For good an definitely ill, I learned that there is nobody out there whom I can trust to protect me or support me or even just tell me that everything is going to be alright.

There’s just me, and there are some things you just can’t do for yourself. Normal people seem to have a sense that somehow, it’s not all them. That they can act on emotion all the time without worrying about not knowing where it leads.

They didn’t have to learn existentialism when they were elementary school.

But I can’t do that trick. I can’t convince myself that everything will be all right without solid evidence to support that conclusion. I have the deep paranoia that says things will only be okay if you make them be okay, and otherwise, the cold and thoughtless world will crush you the moment you let your guard down.

It’s a hell of a way to live. No wonder I can’t sleep right.

I’m not sure opening the floodgates is something you can choose to do in the first place. The whole idea might be hopelessly naive. But if it is possible, someday, I will get there, and push that button firmly and decisively.

Because really, what have I got to lose?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lin (Linda May Testert) was almost finished rubbing the high-SPF suntan lotion into Lan’s (Lancaster Edwin Morris) shoulders when a feeling she could not name rose up inside her, and an unfamiliar voice whispered Why him?

It startled her so badly that she dropped the lotion bottle right onto her new husband’s back. He flinched. Automatically, she said “Whoops! Sorry dear, seems I’ve gotten the bottle all slippery. ”

Lan hmphed, and looked like he was about to reprimand her, but swallowed his anger at the last moment and said “That’s okay, my dear. These things happen. ”

How easily you lie, said the new voice. And did you see that? Married three days, and he’s already treating you like the help. What a lovely marriage this will be.

Lin looked up and down the beach, looking for the source of this new voice. But that was silly. The voice was whispering in her ear. She would have known if anyone had gotten that close to her.

She finished rubbing the suntan lotion into Lan’s back, and paused for a moment, thinking maybe he would… but no, of course he wouldn’t thank her. She should have known.

After all, if the situation were reversed, neither would she.

Lin lay back down on the blanket they were sharing (isn’t that the kind of thing married couples do?), but couldn’t get comfortable, so she sat back up. But then she felt conspicuous, so she laid back down. Then sat back up. This cycle repeated a half dozen times before she caught hold of herself and forced herself to lay down and stay there.

Lan, of course, neither noticed nor cared.

Which was typical of him. She wondered how on Earth she could have missed how fundamentally selfish he was when they were courting. She realized now that he had always been distant and aloof, even when he was down on one knee proposing to her. It was as though he was an actor in a play who was just a little too tired to be convincing. And he was like that all the time.

But when they were courting, all she could thinking about was how suitable he was. Unbelievably handsome, extremely athletic, from an excellent family with a long history of turning out world leaders in every possible field.

He’s a person, said the voice, not a racehorse.

And it’s not like she had been forced to marry him. She chose him and fell in love with him, in that order. A girl in her position had dozens of suitors, of every possible kind. And of all of them, she had chosen him.

She just couldn’t quite remember why.

Because you knew your father would approve of him, supplied the voice. So handsome, so well-bred, so well-educated, so presentable, so… nonthreatening.

Unbidden, all the rumours about him that her venomous cousins had been all too happy to tell her began swirling around in her head. Rumors that Lan had no interest in women. That there had been a long string of incidents involving him and the other boys at school going all the way back to his first year of school. That he was a nasty boy who liked nasty things, and that she would have been better off marrying a toad, “because at least the toad has a chance of turning into a prince some day”.

And what about that “men only” lodge he’s so fond of? said the voice.

Could she really have married…. a homosexual?

She thought back to their wedding night. It had been a disaster. She had bathed and cleansed and primped and preened and dressed up in the wonderful frilly things she had bought just for this occasion, and joined him in bed, libido racing.

And he had just stared at her in the strangest way, like she was a dangerous animal.

Then he’d abruptly gotten out of bed, mumbling something about needing to freshen up, and locked himself in the bathroom.

And didn’t come out again for three hours.

When he finally emerged, he was fully erect, and said “Okay, let’s do this!” then entered her roughly and clumsily. A dozen thrusts, a hasty ejaculation, and he was spent.

And the way he had looked at her after, right before determinedly going to sleep. That look that said “Say one word about my performance, and you will regret it for the rest of your life. ”

But he’s so suitable, she thought. And it was such a lovely wedding.

She looked at her “catch” of a husband with new eyes. So he wasn’t her knight in shining ardor. So what? A girl… no, she corrected herself, a woman… in her position had many other ways to get her needs met discreetly. Her cousins had told her about those, too. Certain spas that offered special services for those in the know. Fully qualified private tutors who came with a satisfaction guaranteed and extremely clever cover stories for why they spent time alone together. And so on.

And she was sure he would be ready and presentable for social appearances. Nobody need know a thing about his… eccentricities. He could spend time at his “lodge”, she could busy herself with highly suitable charity activities, and they could lead their separate lives in peace and harmony.

Sure, she had hoped for true romance, but while romance was lovely, it was hardly necessary. She was perfectly capable of living without it. She would simply do was was expected of her, and make her own arrangements for everything else. The world would see a perfect couple, her father would be proud of her, and everything would be just fine.

Suddenly, Lin remembered where she had heard all this before. It bad been a punishingly cold winter day, and she had been having tea with a woman she had barely met and had hardly known.

And at that same moment, she recognized the voice that had been whispering in her ear.

It had been her mother.

Her mother had been right about everything.

I’m writing my blog before I eat dinner instead of after tonight.

I know, I know…. I’m amazing. Please keep your gasps of astonishment at my brazen audacity to a minimum. After all, I am trying to write here.

Not a huge heck of a lot has happened since yesterday. Oh right! I did a video, natch.

(Video) Editor’s Note : It turns out that Google Translate DOES have Tagalog. But it’s not called Tagalog any more, it’s called Filipino. So the statement “they do not have Tagalog” is technically true, but actually false.

Sorry if that blows your mind.

On a personal level, I am doing okay. The drama shitstorm has most definitely taken its toll on me emotionally, and it hasn’t exactly been fun, but it got my emotions flowing and gave me something to get energetic about, and that is all for the good in terms of my long term mood.

So in a perverse way, part of me is happy all this came about. It’s got my juices flowing and provided highly necessary catharsis that I don’t seem to be able to generate myself on anything like a regular basis. Now that I have opened up my life to the world a little bit, what do you know, it’s come rushing in like a herd of elephants.

And I could not be happier about it.

Urge to flee : minimal. I would be lying if I said there was none. I am not that healthy yet. But I am not going to listen to it. In fact, I will pointedly ignore it. I’ve listened to that Jagoff inside me for way too long, the one that is willing to sacrifice everything in the future, including dignity and self-respect, for escape now.

Fuck you, Jagoff. I’m filing for divorce. And I’m keeping the kids.

Plus, I now have a powerful ally in the fight against escapism : spite. It would make certain people all too happy were I to give in to the urge to back out and flee from certain projects, and like hell am I going to give them the satisfaction.

Never underestimate spite. It can keep you going when nothing else will.

There is one thing bothering me about my recent need to balance my enlightened self-interest and my righteous fury : I feel like it has made me somehow more dangerous. At the very least, I feel like I have shifted into a dangerous mode.

I will try to explain as best as I can, given current information blackouts.

Where to start. Well, it has been my theory for a long time that true deviousness comes from three ingredients : intelligence, rage, and a reason not to act on said rage directly.

That reason is often cowardice. The person is not brave (or stupid) enough to face the object of their rage head-on, so their rage gets directed into their intelligence to fuel their plotting and scheming and so on.

Relatedly but far from identically, the reason might simply be that the person is a thinker and planner, rather then a realtime actor and reactor. Indirect action gives them time to use their planning abilities to level the playing field.

That’s how it is for me. I have plenty of bravery when my dander is up. Arguably, I have too much. I’ll say anything to anyone and not give a fuck about the consequences.

Not hard to see how that could get me in trouble.

But I am a deep thinker, a planner, a hyper-focuser. This is a great and mighty power, but it means that I am not so great at dealing things in realtime, when there isn’t enough time to think.

I’m not helpless, but the sudden and unexpected throws me for a loop until I get my bearings. Give me time to catch up to what is going on, and I can kick ass. But without it, well, things get random and stupid pretty damn fast.

So when I say I feel like recent events are pushing me in a dangerous direction, it means that my anger under restraint is getting redirected into deviousness, not just as a weapon but as an emotional state.

And when that happens, I am capable of damn near anything, or so it feels. When the anger goes from hot to cold with me, it doesn’t die, it turns into long, thin, but oh so sharp icicles of solidified rage, and the side of me wielding them feels, for lack of a better term, evil.

Maybe that’s just because our culture is full of the anti-intellectualism of fantasy, where the good guy is always of the realtime action variety, and the villain is always the scheming and devious one.

So it’s not like I have a lot of heroic planners to act as role models for me.

But it’s hard to imagine that the urge to cold-bloodedly plot and destroy someone, however non-literally, can been seen as entirely good. Even if the cause is just and the person really deserves it, it will still leave us with a cold and uneasy feeling, no matter how hard we cheer at the results.

Even beyond that, there is a side of me that is just plain crazy. The part of me that identifies with the Joker, and the Kingpin. Part of me that is willing, even eager, to tap in the dark side of my intellect and use all my insight, empathy, and intellect to not just harm but destroy. To become an evil they can’t even comprehend, let along counteract.

I call it an evil because it’s malign, and because it would scare the hell out of all who witness it, including myself. The most hated and despicable villain is always the one who is truly devious and operates on an entirely different level than the hero. The one who is so intelligent that he knows exactly what you are going to do in any situation and can manipulate you like a puppet on a string.

I could be that guy. Not on a supervillain level, obviously, but still. It’s one of my facets, one of my potentials.

And I don’t wanna be that guy. The consequences of me deciding I don’t give a fuck about anyone anymore could be harsh.

And I like being sweet little ol’ me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, last night’s video :

Man, that ending sucks. Why is it I can’t see these huge flaws when I am composing the thing in the first place? I swear, music is the art form where I have the most problem being objective. Probably because music is so very right-brained, unlike words.

Anyhow, tonight I want to talk about blame.

I have been watching TED talks lately, and tonight I watched a few that dealt with blame in their own way.

One was by a man who had, in the prime of his youth, been crippled in an auto accident. It left him a hemiplegic, meaning only one side of his body works. He eventually tracked down the man who was driving the vehicle that slammed into his, and found that the man had no regret for the accident, only pity for himself for the ways he had suffered from the accident.

He forgave the guy anyone, which is more than I would have been able to manage.

The other was by a man who had murdered someone when he was young and spent 20 years in prison for it, 7.5 of the years in solitary confinement (which is barbaric). He talked about how when he was in prison, for a long time he blamed everyone but himself for his problems, and that kept him back.

And that made me think about my own blame structure and how it holds me back.

My siblings have told me I need to get over my childhood. Their reasons for saying so aren’t entirely altruistic, but they are right. The problem is, it’s not that simple.

Blame comforts people. The worst thing for a human is pain without meaning. When we blame someone for our predicament, it makes us feel better. It makes us feel like we have control of the situation and can keep it from happening again. Blame makes us,. in a way, feel powerful.

But when it goes on too long, it does something else : it keeps us from taking responsibility for ourselves. Everything, even things we do quite voluntarily, are somehow the fault of all the people in their blame structure, like their parents, society, lousy luck in love, an ex-spouse, and so on.

This blame structure is then shaped into an impenetrable wall against responsibility. People will abdicate all power and control of their lives if it gets them out of having to assume responsibility for their lives.

Because assuming responsibility for you life means fully acknowledging their own adulthood. Being in control means growing up, and there are a lot of people who will do anything to keep that from happening.

I’m one of them. I see that now.

Being in control is scary. It means that whatever happens to you short of the totally random is your fault. It means that you have to face the world without that impenetrable wall of blame to shelter you, and that can make you feel all alone in the world, and even abandoned.

But abandoned by who? You’re an adult. There is nobody whose job it is to care for you. Therefore there is nobody who has abandoned or is abandoning you.

And yet, I have felt quite abandoned for a long long time. By my parents, my schools, life in general. That made a lot of sense when I was a kid getting beaten up daily in school, but that was a long time ago, and there has to be a statute of limitations on certain kinds of pain.

This leads me to conclude that I have been actively resisting growing up for a long long time. For all my lofty talk of wanting to grow up, take on responsibilities, and face the world, when it came down to it, I balked, and I have been balking ever since.

I have, in fact, been balking ever since I was taken out of university half way through.

I wasn’t ready. Having to become an adult two years early was too much for me. It’s not just that I was facing the world two years early, but I was doing it without a college degree. I had no column for that in my mind. For most of my life, I thought the sequence was : get good marks in school, go to university, get a degree, use that degree to get a job.

Instead, I found myself back in my home town, complete with its chronic sky high unemployment rate, and without the kind of personality to go out there and take on that world, and, to be honest, still with middle class job expectations.

So instead of this being what spurred me to adulthood, I regressed. I can see that now too. I regressed to being the same sort of person I was before university, and that person had never truly made it out of childhood.

Bodies always mature. Everything else is up for grabs.

And that is the person I have been ever since. A child with a splendid mind and no life. I never lost that feeling of being pushed out the door when I wasn’t ready, and so I have been fighting adulthood ever since.

But all that shit went down twenty five years ago. How long does it take to get over something? The answer is : forever, if all you are interested in is having an excuse not to grow up and face the facts.

And blame and excuses are the bread and butter of depression. It’s amazing that millions of my fellow depression sufferers can simultaneously believe that they are powerless (and hence without responsibility) and yet also suck because of all the things they have never done and/or don’t have.

I am seriously pondering the possibility that depression comes from not growing up. At least some of the time. Why, exactly, a person fails to grow up is an open question. A lot of things could lead to it.

But I will guarantee you one thing : most depressives will be absolutely sure it wasn’t their fault.

And they will know exactly who to blame.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have fallen behind on my posting of the videos I do every day (honest!), so tonight, we’ll catch up.

But there’s only 3 of them, so there will be other stuff mixed in too.

First off, we have this video where, if YouTube fixes the lighting properly, you will see me try to tell jokes.

Yikes. Oh well, I am just a beginner. There’s a reason comedians practice each joke a million times in front of a mirror. The natural sounding delivery in your head does not come out of your mouth the first them sounding anywhere near as good.

You gots to get it down.

Somehow, I stepped on a landmine full of drama this week. I had a Facebook argument with my brother Dave (love you so much, bro) which thankfully was brief, and which honestly I am glad happened because I have been talking about my childhood in a vacuum, without anyone who was actually there, for years and years now. I genuinely would like to talk with my siblings about the whole thing and hear their perspectives about life in the 135 (Belmont Street).

I know they probably weren’t a hell of a lot happier than I was. Different problems, but misery all round.

Also from the uneasy bowels of the Drama Llama, a person from my past (and that of my three friends) popped out of nowhere to accuse me of being socially retarded and get super mad that I stopped returning his messages.

Well, that’s because this person (let’s call him JB) repeatedly agreed to meet with us then flaked out at the last minute, and I don’t play that game. Fans of this blog know that I handle disappointment very poorly, and there are only so many times I will try to kick the football Lucy is holding before I tell her to go fuck herself.

He’s also embarrassed to be seen with us. That’s kind of off-putting. I tried to ignore it for as long as I could, but the evidence kept piling up. Like, him being obsessed with which door we used to enter his apartment building. He tried to tell us some doors didn’t work (a classic example of his reality issues, which I will get to next), but it was very clear to me that other people came in and out of all the doors and he wanted there to be the least chance anyone in his expensive building will see us, or even worse, see us going to his apartment.

And the worst part is, he just flat out denies all of it. He won’t admit to flaking out on us at the last minute (oh no, he had “bad seafood” every single time, but didn’t realize that until it was time to leave), he denies that he is embarrassed to be seen with us (yeah right), and he has the nerve to get mad at us for not returning his messages.

It’s because I don’t want to deal with you any more, JB. I can’t deal with that kind of crazy.

And now, a video.

Not a lot to say about that one. I really needed to vent my frustration at that time. I loathe being thwarted by the unexpected and seemingly arbitrary. It’s that disappointment thing again. Any time my plans get completely derailed like that and I have to think of a whole new plan, I get grumpy and resentful.

I had it all planned out in my head, dammit.

The third bit of drama is the biggest one, but I can’t talk about it. It involves the accidental breaking of a rule followed by someone’s wildly disproportionate response to it and people having a lot of unfair reactions.

And that’s all I can say. It has me in a very emotional and brittle state, and filled with anger which started out hot and wild but which now has cooled to be a tight little burning ember ready to burst into flames and start a wildfire at the drop of a hat. I won’t see myself or my friends treated unjustly and I will not be anybody’s scapegoat either.

I have had enough of being punished for not being part of the in group to last me ten lifetimes, and I won’t let it happen again.

But sadly, I also have to keep my own best interests at heart. And the best interests of my friends as well. If I didn’t have those concerns, I would have unleashed the righteous fury of a thousand angry archangels on the situation.

But I have a plan and a future to think of, and that means I can’t afford to let loose. Dammit.

One last video :

Daaaamn I love that song! It has everything I want in… a song from whatever tiny subgenre it belongs in.

I’ll go with “industrial”.

So yeah, that’s the slideshow I was trying to make when the sound output ceased. It’s working now, and if you watch that video all the way to the end, you will find out the humiliating truth about what the problem was.

Plus, you will hear the end of that awesome, awesome song.

So my life has suddenly become quite stormy. I went from nothing to like, everything. From the point of view of my all too quiet life, this has been a hell of a week.

But I am not complaining. In fact, honestly, I am enjoying it. Not only does it make my life more interesting and hence makes me feel more alive, but it has given me people to legitimately and ethically butt heads with, and honestly, I enjoy that way too much. I love a good argument, and for now, I have things to defend with my awe inspiring mental and verbal skills, and I will defend them to the gates of Hell and beyond.

I know that loving a good verbal battle makes me sound bad, like I am some sort of verbal Klingon, but I yam what I yam.

And I am Michael John Bertrand, Word Warrior.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mind has a lot of echo and reverb on it, and I don’t know how to turn them off.

Thoughts echo. Feelings reverberate. I can’t put anything out without it coming back to me in some sense. It’s a hard thing to put into words because its interiority level is so high. I don’t know if anyone else has ever experienced it.

But for me, it’s everyday life, and I think it’s key to my needing low stimulus levels in order to remain calm. Stuff coming in reverberates as well. And you can easily imagine that my echo can turn a relatively mild stimulus into a really strong one without even breaking a sweat. Every echo that happens before the last one ends adds to the amplitude.

I am guessing that did not make things any clearer for most people. Le sigh. Oh well, hopefully you get the idea.

And this echo works for all forms of input, including the social and emotional. This has the effect of amplifying my emotions and hence my mood, at least some of the time. I can go from placid to overwhelmed in an alarmingly short time.

This is the first time I have told anything about this, even though it’s been happening for as long as I can remember. I remember it happening when I was a toddler. My parents would be trying to say something to me and I couldn’t understand them, even though in other situations I could understand them just fine.

Then, when I went to school, it would happen at seemingly random moments. Or rather, it would intensify. I eventually learned to control it and damp it out, but until then, it was hell. Imagine every sound you hear echoing in your head and getting louder, without end. It was a nightmare.

It was so weird that I was afraid to tell anyone about it. I know that makes no sense, but I also know that most people have been in that situation at least once in their life. The desire not to seem weird and thus end up alienated is a very strong urge in most human beings, even us outside the envelope “there is no box” types, and I was already a somewhat timid child, so I kept it all inside and never breathed a word of it to anyone until right now.

So…. lucky you, I guess.

Looking at it now as an adult, I wonder if there is some kind of defect in my brain. Some important circuit that in a healthy person keeps this recirculation of thought under control is busted in me, and so things bounce around in my head way more times than is actually useful for maintaining a train of thought.

In fact, it is this echo overload that often leads to my train of thought getting derailed. Or at least have a switch pulled on it at the last second so it ends up on a completely different track. Some thought, idea, or emotion will unexpectedly grow more intense and all I can do is try to remember not to go there any more.

But why? I don’t know. I remember that when I was a kid, the theory about stuttering was that stutterers heard their own voice coming back to them on a slight delay, and it made it very hard to get words out.

And I had a stutter when I was a kid. It got worse when I was nervous or overexcited. I grew out of it eventually, or if you prefer a more individualistic narrative, I conquered it. I definitely remember getting pissed off at it and deciding I was going to stop myself from doing it, and it seems like I did.

Now it only comes out when I am very tired.

Still, I remember that feeling that my words were coming back at me, and struggling to get my words out while that was going on. Maybe that problem went a lot deeper than a typical childhood stutter. Maybe it goes all the way to bone.

Well not the bone. Brains don’t have bones. All the way to the brain stem.

Now this echo is not a sensory hallucination type of deal. I do not literally hear the same things over and over again. Thank goodness, too, because I would be batshit fucking crazy by now if it did.

As opposed to now, when I am, at most, off-brand fertilizer crazy.

No, it happens in the mind. That is what makes it so hard to put into words. Like I said, interiority. It is easier to describe what it is like to suffer from depression, and I have been trying to do that for decades.

The results of which you can read in like, two thirds of the entries to this very blog.

If this really is a brain thing (and it sort of has to be, unless aliens are hacking my brain again… damn kids), I wonder if there is any kind of treatment. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you can fix with surgery (eep), but maybe there is some damned clever bit of mind trickery that fools your mind into turning it off.

Failing that, I suppose I could just experiment with illegal drugs till I find the one that turns off only that part of the brain, and develop a crippling addiction to it.

I’m just kidding, I would never do something like that. I could never, ever afford it.

I will have to bring it up with my GP next time I see him. That will be soonish, as I am almost out of my non-psychiatric meds. I have no idea how I will explain it to him, and doctors are not the greatest listeners, but I have to give it a try.

In the meantime, I suppose I can try to research it myself. But I am leery of that. Attempts at self-diagnosis are very dangerous for a recovering hypochondriac like myself.

Maybe I just need to disconnect the amplifier’s power source….

Either way, I will do my best to remember that this is a thing with me, and deserves my attention.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, last night’s video. It’s music.

Listening to it again, it’s not my best work. The layering is less than subtle and there’s not much of an ending. I really should try harder to make these things sound professional.

Nevertheless, I am insanely pleased with it, because I have finally made some high-energy ass kicking adrenalized music. It’s the kind of music I have always wanted to make, but never seemed to manage it because I got too lost in the details of making the music. Last night, though, I felt different.

I wanted to make something that made your pulse quicken, and I did! Yay me.

I also forgot to post this :

Got real pissed off with Larry. Nothing gets me quite as mad as people I consider to be rational, decent people on the side of reason and enlightenment selling out. And in a way that can only make the world a worse place! If everyone got over the irrational ick factor of reclaimed water, there’d be no such thing as a drought because the city systems would be so much more efficient that we would have a huge surplus that could go to farmers.

Amazing what it takes to get people talking about efficiency.

Here on the home front, I have assigned myself the task of combing through those skit idea files I compiled many a lifetime ago when I thought it was possible to get a bunch of slackers together and get anything done, and look for jokes.

I am still pretty bitter about that, as you can tell.

Anyhow, back in those starry-eyed halcyon days, I would type up all our brilliant skit ideas and save them, 100 ideas to a file.

And there’s 16 of them. 1600 skit ideas, some of which can be turned from comedy skits to standup bits. I am putting it all in a master joke file, which also contains a bunch of stuff I came up with recently.

In fact, that’s where I started. I went through my notes on each of my tablets first, then dug into the skit idea files. I have done two of them so far, and I have 26 jokes and ideas for bits.

When I go to class tomorrow, I will be very well prepared. For once.

What I really need is some kind of cross-platform note-taking program, so that it’s the same set of notes whether I am on one of my two tablets or here on this ancient computron of mine.

As has somehow become a tradition, today (Monday) was an extremely sleepy day for me. Dunno why Mondays are so sleepy for me, but the one thing that makes Monday different is that I ate out the previous night.

So decent nutrition for once might just be a factor. It would be weird to discover that I would sleep better if I ate better, but I would not really be surprised. My diet, while not as bad as some people’s, is still pretty crappy. Not a lot of protein, calcium, iron, and other good stuff.

So it’s entirely plausible that when it gets a decent meal, my body is like “finally!” and makes me sleep a long time so it can make maximum use of this unexpected nutritional bounty.

It’s just a theory.

I’m sleepy right now. Maybe my body isn’t done with its renovation project and needs more time. Or, it could just be that my sleep apnea has caught up with me. Who knows.

Makes it a lot harder to write, though. I keep getting lost in my own thoughts and forgetting that I am actually writing. Then I blink and realize I haven’t typed a thing for two minutes.

It just happened again.

I feel pretty good lately. I have gotten over the hurdle of not wanting to sit down and write jokes in any formal way. I am getting better at remembering to write down funny thoughts when I have them. The goal is to make it as natural and easy as possible so I can just do it and then go back to whatever I was doing.

But I also have to let it become a desire, an itch, so that it feels less like an obligation and more like a need. If I feel the urge to write down funny thoughts, and a related feeling of nervousness and anxiety until it is done, then that should be enough to keep me doing it.

The defining moments will be the moments when I have a funny thought and recognize it as something I should write down, but don’t feel like interrupting what I am doing in order to do so.

If I do it anyway, I move forward. I want to kill my laziness and this is exactly how that is done. And the less it gets its way, the faster it will die.

It’s no magic bullet, but it will kill the beast.

It’s not like being lazy has ever made me happy. It seems like it does if you stay locked in the game of feeling good because you are avoiding work (gee, you’re so smart) instead of getting any actual sense of accomplishment from life, but if there was no chance you would do it in the first place, then what are you really avoiding?

And maybe, just maybe, you’d be much happier actually doing things and expressing your pent up energies.

In my case, I know damned well that I am happier and calmer and more truly content when I am physically active and getting things off my to-do list done. But I am still somewhat in the grips of the whole panoply of issues that keep me from doing stuff, like that feeling that I have that whatever I do, I will just fuck up and someone will have to come fix it and it will be clear to all that I shouldn’t have tried in the first place.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty big one. Should probably bring that up in comedy.

Er, I mean therapy.

Meh. Same thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.