Monthly Archives: May 2017

Ten bullshit issues

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I’ve been thinking about public delusions lately and that got me onto the subject of the various forms of moral panics that have gripped the world, faded away, and left people wondering what the heck that was all about.

And a lot of them do not stand up to the slightest bit of verification or logical examination. In other words, they don’t make a lick of sense, and they never did.

So I have put together a little list of ones I have observed in my life along with a basic description of why they were so very, very stupid.

  1. The Amazon Rain Remember this one? People were all over this bullshit. Someone would quote a number of football fields a day of the “world’s lungs” disappearing every day, and there’d be scary pictures of a bulldozer moving menacingly towards a jungle. You know, like this L

    Look out, it has a knife!

    But it was 100 percent bullshit. What nobody mentioned was that the Amazon rainforest is so huge that you could deforest at double the peak rate and it still would take thousands of years for it to have a noticeable effect on the rainforest, let alone its role in creating oxygen.

    Oh…. and oceanic algae produces most of the world’s oxygen anyhow.

  2.  Pornography

    It’s sad that the American right wing has brought this one back to life seeing as they lost so definitively on the issue the last time.

    Back in the Eighties,. Reagan put together the Meese Commission. They spent many years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to find a link between pornography and violence against women.

    At the end,  The head, Attorney General Edwin Meese, was forced to admit that they hadn’t found one…. but he was sure there was one.

    That tells you all you need to know about motivated reasoning forever.

  3.  Landfills / Overpackaging / Biodegradablility

    Another one with a stock set of tropes. A bulldozer pushes a huge pile of garbage to another spot in an enormous landfill. Pictures of plastic and Styrofoam packaging  littering the side of a highway. Talk of how fast garbage is added to it, with the clear implication that if we don’t do something right now, we’ll be hip deep in used diapers by Tuesday morning.

    Bullshit. There is plenty of room for landfills. Most of what goes into landfills is yard waste anyhow, and that’s super biodegradable. But even if that wasn’t true, even places like Tokyo and New York have plenty of room for trash. There’s no danger of running out of room. This was NEVER A THING.

  4. Illegal Immigration

    This one never dies because xenophobia appeals to people who can’t handle the reality of diversity and want a tiny bit of a fig leaf to cover up their naked racism.

    The rhetoric always goes that some group of immigrants, legal or non, is some how going to “take over” and force the dominant culture to live THEIR way.

    That’s as mathematically impossible as squeezing a lemon into the ocean and turning it into lemonade. A tiny percentage of the population cannot change a massive culture and any claims to the contrary should simply be taken as ready to be “I am a pathetic coward who is too stupid to handle there being a lot of different kinds of people who are all equal and so I am racist as fuck. “

  5. The Ozone Hole

    Another blast from the past. People got all freaked out over the fact that a small patch of Antarctica was getting unfiltered solar radiation. Like in the other examples, this small nugget of truth was then projected into the future via only the most overdramatic misuse of statistical analysis until it spelled IMMINENT CATASTROPHE. What do you know, the world’s about to end… AGAIN.

    This was also never a thing. Yeah, it would be horrible if we lost the entire ozone layer. But that was never a possibility. We could have tripled our use of CFCs and it would have only made the hole a little bigger. As it turned out, getting rid of them entirely was not that big of a hassle, and so we did that. But there was never any danger of a naked Earth.

  6. Gay Marriage

    See, not all my examples are from thirty years ago. This example is quite recent but it follows the same pattern of ludicrous claims exaggerated to the point of hysteria. Many otherwise sane and normal citizens somehow convinced themselves that society would go down in blood and flames if two people who happened to have the same gender chromosome pairing could sign a government document that made them legally married. Trying to imagine the mechanism through which that could happen boggles the mind. And here we are, in the era of widespread same-sex marriage, and what do you know, nothing changed. The straight couples are just as married as they were before and the only real difference between a straight marriage and a queer one is the quality of the catering.

  7. Water Conservation

    This one also goes under the category of “how the hell would that work?”. Some subnumerate individual takes the amount of freshwater in the lakes of the world, divides it by the water usage of the world’s population, and declares that we are like five minutes from the WHOLE WORLD DYING OF THIRST.

    And people start taking shorter showers, they stick bricks in their toilet tanks, and get pissy at people for watering their lawns.

    But the thing is, we’re not hamsters with water bottles – it’s not like there is a finite amount of water and when that runs out, we’re fucked.

    What anyone should be able to see if they have any sense is that water comes back via an exotic process called rain. It rains, the local aquifer fills up, goes to your house, you drink the water, pee, the water goes through the sewers and into the ocean, where it evaporates, forms clouds, and rains down again.

    That’s Grade 7 science people, and even if you don’t understand the process, you have to understand that everything alive needs water and there must be some reason we haven’t run out yet.

  8. Kids These Days

    This one has been around since the ancient Greeks. The lyrics change but the song remains the same. Someone takes some report of a few youths doing something bad (or even just weird) and blows it up into dire predictions about how the world is doomed (again) because this entire generation is horrible and sure to destroy the world when they take over…. which is ANY MINUTE NOW Aaaaagh!

    Every single generation has had this said about them by older people who can’t handle the fact that the world will go on just fine without them when they are dead, so they latch on anything that says that isn’t so and that their generation will be the last one and the world will crash and burn without them.

    And every single generation then forgets it did that and does it to the next generation that comes along.

    Oh, but that was different.

  9. Anti-nuclear Activism

    Has there ever been another movement that shot itself in the foot so thoroughly as the environmental movement did when it opposed nuclear power? And for no other reason than what amounts to “nuclear things are scary? ” By any sane measurement, nuclear power is the answer to every environmentalist’s dreams… well, the more logical  dreams, anyhow. Even via the old fashioned Homer Simpson cooling towers method, nuclear power has a microscopic environmental impact compared to generating the same power versus oil, coal, or natural gas. Sure, other techs like solar and wind can compete with nuclear now, but what about the forty years worth of carbon dioxide that got pumped into the air just because a bunch of namby-pamby art major liberal types couldn’t look at the numbers and realize we were way better off with nuclear? Sheesh.

  10. Terrorism

    Terrorism is not an important problem.

    It just isn’t. Terrorism is scary but that’s not the same thing as important. Terrorism kills way fewer people than alcohol, cigarettes, or even vending machines. The media loves terrorism because it’s very dramatic and visual and it makes it easy to whip people into a frenzy that makes them want more media. Politicians love it because it lets them get away with taking away all kinds of freedoms and not only get away with it, but get reelected for it.

    But it’s just plain not important. It’s certainly not important enough to let minimum wage fascists make life increasingly humiliating and aggravating for air passengers. It’s not important enough to justify anyone invading anyone. It’s not important enough to label some nations “terrorist nations” just become someone from there did something crazy and wrong.

    I mean, how racist is that?

    So fuck terrorism. The only way to beat a terrorist is to refuse to be scared. They thrive on the fear and chaos they create and revel in all the hatred and vitriol aimed at them. That just proves how powerful they are.

    Ignore them instead. Take precautions, but treat it like the rare bad thing it is, like a freak windstorm or someone famous dying in a car accident.

    It’s the best way to take all the fun out of it.

And that’s my list. I am sure there are many more – I never even touched overpopulation or desegregation – but this thing has already gone on long enough.

The main thing I want you to take away from this is that all these inanities have the same formula : a tiny or nonexistent problem is blown into a massive panic by the fact that it confirms or at least is consistent with people’s existing beliefs and the result is a period of time that history reacts to with a laugh and a shake of the head.

And all because people were so eager to believe this confirming lie that they never even gave one thought to whether it was backed by any evidence or whether it even made sense in the first place.

So here is your mantra for today, kids : there is no relationship between how much you want something to be true and whether or not it’s true. None.

And with that, I bid thee farewell as I have other stuff I should be doing

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

The tale of Philip the Ghost

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It was like any other seance. People linked hands around a table and assumed a relaxed, open state of mind. . The spiritual medium called out to the spirit world and beckoned a spirit named Philip to come and answer their questions. And sure enough. the table rose off the ground and the group’s questions were answered by way of loud knocks on the table – one knock for no, two for yes.

It all went exactly like the seances you have seen in the movies and on TV. But it was different in two important ways :

  1. this seance was done by ordinary people with no particular talent for spiritual matters as part of a rigorous scientific experiment conducted by Doctor George Owens in 1973, and
  2. they made Philip up. He was entirely fictional. Before the experiment began, they had. as a group, come up with his name, his era, and his tragic biography as a man with a frigid and unloving wife who fell in love with a gypsy girl, only to have his wife discover their affair and have the gypsy burned at the stake as a witch. This drove poor Philip to commit suicide.

No such person ever existed. He was no more real than Sherlock Holmes. And yet, all the phenomena associated with contact with the dead via seance occurred. The participants swore there was no trickery or stagecraft involved. Observers found no evidence of fraud and many of them went away with their fundamental beliefs badly shaken.

It was called the Philip Experiment, and it rocked people’s foundations.

Seems like the sort of thing you would have heard of before, doesn’t it? Seems kind of important. But alas, this research was doomed to disappear for three reasons, presented here in ascending order of outrage : \

  1. The research was Canadian, and people don’t listen to us. Especially Americans.
  2. The forces of pseudo-rationality and false skepticism would want the research discredited then buried in a deep deep hole. and
  3. they didn’t document anything

That’s right. All we know about how these experiments went down is from eyewitness accounts. Scientifically speaking, they didn’t do a damned thing. ARGH.

Now in their defense, the experiment took place over a long period of time and involved a group of people who would become very good friends meeting once a week for years.

I can understand how that would promote a relaxed, party-like atmosphere that is largely incompatible with such things as careful observation and precise documentation.

But still. ARGH. Write shit down, people! Listen to this man!

Now as a few of you may know, my approach to this kind of phenomenon is what I call the phenomenological approach. That means that I view these things  from a point of view that does not demand that such simplistic valuations as “true” or “false”. Rather, it simply studies them as phenomena – things which occurred on some level.

And that is one of the fundamental tenets of my brand of parapsychological inquiry : that however we explain these phenomena to ourselves, they happened. These are not in any sense unreal experiences. If they were not real, we would never have heard of them.

Why? Because unreal things can’t possibly have any effect on real things.

If these events were not real, then there is no logical way in which they could have any effect on the real world. Something caused these phenomena. Something objectively real. Something you can point to and say “That did it. ”

Whether or not they took place outside people’s heads or inside them is another matter.

So something causes this group of people to believe in the events they described.  Whatever your explanation, the mere fact that this happens – that people come to believe they had experiences which defy rational explanation – is fascinating in and of itself.

From the psychological angle, what I find most interesting is how the behaviour of the Philip entity – which, again, was entirely fictional – changed over time. It became bolder, more rambunctious, more eager to show off what it knew or could do.

Now, Owen’s theory was that human beings can develop things like telekinesis if the conditions are right, and that therefore everything Philip did was a manifestation of the collective unconscious of the group.

The same sort of thing has been used to explain the results of the Ouija board.

And to me, that is the most interesting thing. Even if we suppose that all of the unusual phenomena had some kind of rational explanation – people were doing things to cause them unconsciously, say – the fact that a group of people who know one another well can merge their unconscious minds into this sort of gestalt is mind-blowing.

It calls into question our very idea of what it means to be ourselves. We live in a very individualist age and we tend to think of ourselves as separate islands in the same river.

But drain the river, and you can see that we all spring from the same riverbed.

As individualists, we live in fear of anything that threatens our sense of individual autonomy and identity. This brings us freedom – and isolation.

But what if we could access this collective subconscious at will? Bring it out of the realm of mysticism. poetry, and religion, and into the light of science and the everyday?

Imagine if everyone learned how to access it at the same time they were learning their ABCs and 123s. It could become a spiritual Internet, where people can connect with one another in a way that defies isolation and instead brings people closer to the sense of oneness that is key to transcendental religions worthwhile?

I think the first step towards that goal would be to gently deconstruct the idea of absolute individuality just enough to let in the idea of “separate but still part of a whole” into the public mind. The idea that there is more to human life than individual atoms of humanity passing one another in the night.

And opening ourselves up to the notion that there is a level of closeness – of humanity – beyond our personal circles of friends, family, and colleagues.

That there is a thread connecting every human being to every other human being on Planet Earth, and none of us are ever truly all alone in the world.

You just have to open up and let people in.

Take it from me…. someone on that same path myself.

It’s worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

Ruling by outrage

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We have to stop paying attention to the outrageous things Donald Trump does.

I’m as addicted as anyone else to his antics. As the exploits of supposed prudes has taught us, you do not have to approve of something in order to enjoy it. You can be vehemently against it and use that as a cover to keep enjoying it.

And I think we are becoming addicted to the shock and outage of the Donald Trump Show. And that makes us all a tiny bit complicit in his Horrible President Show.

And I think he understands that on some primitive level. He groks that his safety lies in keeping people shocked and stunned by what he does and that encourages him to keep acting out in order to keep us (secretly happily) shocked and woozy.

Being outraged can be fun, just like being frightened or disgusted can be fun. Outrage gives us a little adrenaline level spike and the feeling of utter righteousness that comes from the observation of behaviour far outside what we consider acceptable. This comes from comparing ourselves to the misbehaving person and feeling, very strongly, that we are way, way, way better than them.

And the worse the behaviour, the better we feel about ourselves. And because the bar has been set so low the bottom is visible in China, even relatively shitty people can get in on the fun of towering moral superiority.

Thus, Donald Trump gets the oodles of attention that any bratty child wants (remember, all the brat cares about is that it’s all about THEM), and we all play along by being shocked, saddened, or enraged by what they do.

And that means that we who oppose him have to get smart about these thing and refuse to play along with him by rewarding him with attention.

In short, we need to learn to ignore him.

That’s not going to be easy. We’ve been watching his Watch Me Do Bad Things show for over a year and we will miss it when it is gone. It has been rewarding us with fun outrage and the feeling of moral indignation (and hence, superiority) and it will be hard to give that up, especially when you know that there are  a billion people still enjoying it.

I mean, just think of how hard it will be to ignore the link to something awful Trump has done that a good friend posted on Facebook. Imagine said friend saying “Have you heard the latest about Trump?” nd how hard it would be to say “No, and I am not interested. ”

You would be so damned tempted to say yes, wouldn’t you, even though you know that what you hear will only upset you and that you have no power whatsoever over whatever it is he did.

You have to ask yourself why you would seek out such an experiece.. What is it you are getting out of it? What would happen if you stopped cold turkey?

Don’t feed the trolls, man. It’s one of the most basic rules of the Internet…. and the hardest to follow. Fighting with the trolls feels good. It help us vent our suppressed anger at all the little indignities of life in a way that has no personal consequences.

But the only way to cure a brat is to ignore them. No matter what they do. Even if you have to intervene when they do something damaging or dangerous, don’t pay any attention to them. Don’t make eye contact, don’t react, don’t engage, and do not say a single world. Treat them like they aren’t even there.

And keep it up for as long as it takes for them to get the idea and stop misbehaving. The minute they are doing the right thing, reward them lavishly with attention. Make it crystal clear that behaving poorly gets them ignored but doing the right thing gets them all the attention they want.

Granted, this will be nearly impossible with Trump. The media love him and they are going to keep people as outraged as they can because that’s what drives clicks. Every media outlet today wants to be your source for your next hit of outrage and is actively spinning every story to be as outrageous as possible.

And no matter how much we publicly denounce such shoddy and destructive journalism,. we still tune in, and that is all that counts in the long run.

The best attitude towards both the media at Trump is to ignore them as unimportant and not worth dealing with. That will drive them crazy and at first they will escalate their efforts in order to get a reaction out of you. If you do react, react with placid acceptance of whatever it is they are4 doing to get your attention. “That’s nice, dear. ” you say, not really paying attention or taking them seriously. Make sure your tone is faintly but distinctly patronizing. Never pay direct attention to them or treat them as important at all.

Of course, this only works if you can get enough people to do it to have an impact. In the grand scheme of things, this will be very difficult,  because I have said most people are now addicted to the Trump Outrage of the Day and most of them don’t know it, and even those who do know it don’t grasp the role they play in it.

I’m not sure even I could do it. It would mean not watching Colbert and the Daily Show any more. That’s too high a price to pay,.

SO perhaps what we need is a show that treats Trump like he is not important at all. That replaces “Can you fucking BELIEVE what this asshole did today?” with “Oh, and that silly harmless old man did something pathetic to get attention today. ”

Done right, that attitude could be infectious because it give people a way out of that cycle of outrage that takes such a toll on people.

We are addicted. But we are not happy about it.

People need an escape route.

Maybe I will build them one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

I got paid

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I have successfully earned income. And I want to tell you all about it.

But first, I have to share this.

I ordered some food from Pizza Hut tonight. I played Skyrim while awaiting its arrival. The phone rings, and it’s the delivery guy.

But it’s the wrong ring. It’s the normal ring, not the special intermittent ring that tells me someone is at the door down on the ground floor and lets me dial 6 to let them in.

So I pick up the phone and tell him he has to call back on the building phone. He asks me the number. I tell him 601, even though I am positive it was there on the receipt.

Eight minutes go by. I have no idea WTF he was doing when he should have been immediately dialing on the right phone, but it takes him eight minutes to do it.

I let him in, get up, grab my wallet, take out $25, and go wait by the door.

And I wait. And I wait. And then, more waiting.

And to make things worse, I really need to pee.

That’s when inspiration struck me. I would pee in Joe and Julian’s bathroom, which is right next to the front door. And one of two things would happen : a) I would get to relieve myself, or b) the delivery dude would knock on the door, interrupting me, but ending with me having my frigging food.

But I knew it would be option b. And I was right. With an astounding level of precision that would be too perfect to be plausible if this was a movie or a TV show.

(WARNING : Explicit language about male urination ahead)

I swear to God, it was the half-second before actual release when he knocked on the door. I think there was urine in the pipes between the bladder and the penis. 0.5 seconds later and I would have been actively urinating.

So I did it. I forced the universe to give me what I wanted. I actually said to myself, “I know, I will go pee and that will make him arrive. ”

And it did. Flawlessly.

And I am way too proud of myself for that.

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah. I got paid!

I currently have a little under USD $70  sitting in my PayPal account, ready to be spent online. I got paid for that crazy ass job from a couple of weeks ago, and I transferred the money from my Upwork account to my Paypal account.

I would rather have the money go directly to my bank account, but that turned out to be a freaking nightmare, so Paypal will have to do for now.

In fact, ideally,. the money would go directly onto my reloadable VISA card.  That would be the most easily spendable form it could take besides having it go into my bank account and then going to the bank and withdrawing the money as cash.

I feel like at some point, I will do that, because on some level the money I am earning on Upwork won’t seem really REALLY real until it is in cash in my pocket form.

But for now, I am happy just having it sitting there, ready to be used to buy stuff online.

The problem is. I don’t know what to buy!

I have spent so long in tightly restrained circumstances where there was little room for discretionary spending that I have no idea what I really want any more. I face the same problem when my birthday or Xmas roll around. It’s such a potent form of option paralysis, and I am a guy who knows his option paralysis.

There are so many ways I could have phrased that.

I keep trying to think of what would aid my current freelance writer lifestyle, but I always draw a blank. It’s not the sort of career your can accessorize easily.

I suppose I could buy myself a fancy slick oversized keyboard for my computer. I obviously do fine with a normal sized keyboard but it would make typing easier and I would make fewer typos if I had a keyboard sized for my big ol’ hands.

If I get together enough cash, I might start looking into footwear as well. I still dream of shoes that actually provide both arch support and full protection from the ravages of the road and that can bear my ginormous weight without being crushed.

But that means orthopedic shoes, and my doctor is not sure whether those would be covered by my government medical plan, so I might have to earn them.

Whatever it takes. The right shoes could radically alter my life because I am a lot more likely to walk for exercise if walking is not intensely painful. In fact, I might be so euphoric over being able to walk without pain that I would go walking all the time, just for fun.

It could happen.

What else. Well, sugar free stuff is always good. I eat FAR too much sugary shit. I went years avouding it almost completely, but at some point, my self-control just plain melted. It would be way easier to resist if I knew I had tasty sweet stuff at home.

So maybe I will order the Splenda and flour I need online. Seems silly to order it online when I could get it at the supermarket, but it would bypass my laziness and indecision by making it ridiculously easy.

So I will probably do it. Eventually.

The important thing is that I now feel like I have worth. It’s funny how money can do that for a person,. I am being paid for my work, and that means I have marketable skills, and THAT means I am worth something at long last.

This is the first baby step towards self-sufficiency, and from here, I will build up my career as a freelancer until I don’t need the government or anyone else’s help any more.

Then I won’t be worthless any more.
Then I won’t be useless any more.
Then I won’t be a burden any more.
Then I won’t feel like people are unlucky to know me any more.

And I will finally be….. a real person. A legitimate adult, even.

And that is going to be the best feeling ever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

On the Road : User Hostile edition

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Well, here I am, at my favorite White Spot, at my favorite table, blogging into a text file because I can’t figure out how to make Linux Mint connect to the local WiFi.

In fact, I can’t figure out how to make to connect to anything.

When I double click on the connection thingy, I can see what network it thinks it is using, and I can ring up this lovely list of known connections, and White Pot Wifi is right there on the list.

And from there, I can add a network, edit the settings for a known network, or delete a network.

What it doesn’t let you do is CONNECT TO THE FUCKING THING.

How hard would it have been to add a “connect” button? But that is not the Linux way!

That’s the Network Connection window.,which displays settings. Out of desperation, I tried theNetwork Setting menu.

Of course, it has the connections on it.

And a nice big area where the usual list of local connects should be. But there’s nothing there and no way to make it poll the environment like a normal device.

But look…. a button that says Known Networks. I will click it. Wow! There’s White Spot! Surely salvation must be at hand!

I click the White Spot WiFi entry. A little X appears next to the network. And that’s it.

There’s STILL NO FUCKING CONNECT BUTTON.

Oh, but I can access the fucking settings.

So I give up. Linux has defeated me. I really should format the HD on this thing and install Windows, because compared to Linux, IT JUST FUCKING WORKS.

Back home and with only an hour to write the other 730 words of this thing. Oy.

Update : when I got home, it wouldn’t connect to the home network either. So I rebooted my laptap and it worked fine after that. That probably would have worked at White Spot.

Still, I stand by my rant.

Tech rage aside, it’s been a busy day. In the morning, I worked on theses tests I have to do for the penny a word job. I’m doing a lot of work for this job I am not all that keen on.

But what the hell. It will be good to have someplace to get work when I need it, or when I am bored, or whatever. The pay is lousy but my needs are modest, so the money goes directly to little things that might improve my lot.

Like paying for my paid membership in Upwork, for example. Granted, I haven’t been using it much lately because my plate is already pretty full, what with writing five episodes a week for the Uno gig, doing my part to contribute to SI and Paragon, and blogging.

I will be going to an SI meeting tomorrow. A few of us are getting together to talk about business plans. I will be there in my capacity as the fellow who is going to write the dang thing. They will give me the data but I will be the one to turn it into solid, serious, forthright business language that is persuasive and impressive without being overbearing.

Quite frankly, it sounds like a lot of fun.

I don’t have occasion to use that kind of manfully pragmatic tone in my own writing. Where would it come up? But for this, I get to reach deep into the businessman part of my mind, access the alternative timeline version of me where I did get a business degree and start my own business, and write from a very Taurus place.

What’s not to love?

In the afternoon I had therapy. I told him all about my recent breakdown. That took half of the session. And yet I still feel like I didn’t really convey it. Or he didn’t pick it up, I suppose. I was trying to get across just how broken and lost and depressed I was that night, but all I ended up doing was stating the bare facts of it. Then it felt like we skipped the actual emotion part and started talking about meaning of it.

And that was useful. But I think I need to change my emotional display rules in order to get the sort of empathic and sympathetic response I crave. When I am talking with someone about some very negative emotional event, I tend to do it in a cold, affectless tone, like Linda Hamiliton in the opening sequence of Terminator 2.

You know, like this :

I am not sure why it comes out like that. Part of it is for effect. As you can see, the dead-inside voice really magnifies the effect of  the horrors you are recounting.

And were I excessively glib, I would leave it at that. But I hate that kind of glibness. It violates my preference for thoroughness and depth of perspective.

So it also has something to do with what I need to do in order to get the story out. Like I have to go to this dead quiet place in order to be able to handle the emotional power of the things I am trying to convey and not “lose control”.

And we can never, ever, ever lose control. That would be Bad.

It’s part of the emotionally constipated spoiled-ego Western viewpoint that declares emotions to be the enemy that must be conquered so that you are always in control of yourself and never let go on them or you will experience great shame.

Yup. That’s pretty anal. We Western males are emotion-retentive.

And I am very much in that camp, despite knowing its flaws. I am always struggling to stay in control – defined as acting only from reason and will – and not “lose it”.

I have even convinced myself that this is necessary because if I was to lose control, I would become a horrible threat to myself and others.

And that might be true for a little while.

But eventually the flood would abate, I would be empty – truly empty – and feel ever so much better for it.

I would just hope not to be in jail at that point.

That would be a bummer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

 

 

 

Just hangin’ around

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Fun fact : when I can’t think of a title or subject for a blog post, I just use the title of whatever song is stuck in my head at the moment.

I seem to be more musically sensitive lately. This is a known phenomenon. I am always super into music, but there are times when the wall between it and my mind are unusually thin and it becomes very easy for music to really engage me and there’s always one song or another playing on the Walkman in my head.

I’ve stopped wondering what triggers them. Everything. Nothing. The random motion of the chemicals in my head. Something about processing memory. Whatever.

This time around., I find myself wondering if this is what life is like for people of a less phlegmatic and stolid nature than I. I can just barely wrap my head around what it must be like to be someone whose emotions drive their actions and for whom there is no safe part in the sea of emotions…. nor does there need to be one.

What would be panic inducing chaos to me might be everyday life for others.

Today’s been quiet. Not quite as sleepy as yesterday, which is a relief. I am beginning to feel more alive again. I feel like I am digging my way out of whatever avalanche of madness and illness had me snowed under since last Friday night.

Frozen water imagery!

Like I keep saying, I know I will come out ahead on the whole deal. I will have processed a whole bunch more of the emotional backlog that powers depression. All that snow and ice that Friday night shook loose will melt and another portion of my heart, and my soul, will be free to feel the sun, and come to life.

And more of my systems will be activated and integrated, and I will become a more whole human being as the numbness that makes me feel like I am not a real person wears off, and the reconstruction of Michael Bertrand will continue.

It will continue at roughly the same speed at which medieval artisans built cathedrals, but it will continue nonetheless.

I have seen the animation that resulted from my first script. It is, sadly, still done in GoAnimate. The new “animator” is no better than the previous one in that regard. But he does seem to use it in a more sophisticated way than the other fella.

Still. It’s a tool meant to let non-animators make animations for board meetings. It’s not meant for anything like real animation. Creatively speaking, it’s limiting.

The big problem, though, is that we still do not have a voice actor. It’s still the stupid computer voice. And that just isn’t going to work. I would be ashamed to be associated with something of that level of crappiness.

I try to remind myself that I am just the writer in this arrangement, and that I am therefore not responsible for the quality of the project. All I am responsible for is the script. I write good scripts. It’s not my fault of they are not executed right.

But I am not that kind of artist. What I write is like a part of me, and I want the final product to reflect my genius. I don’t want to be associated with something aggressively terrible.

So I am going to have to push (politely) for an addition to the team. I wish I could do the voiceover myself, but I can’t handle both writing and performing it right now.

I can’t exactly explain the nature of the conflict that would set up in my head, but trust me, it’s a thing with me.

Other than the voice work thing, the animation is decent. A few bugs to work out. I won’t link to it here because it has not yet been released.

And, to be honest, I am too ashamed.

Oh well, work’s work. I will keep writing the scripts no matter what, making $10 each, and chalking up more Upwork time, and what the hell, making $50/week too.

And that’s in American buckerinos too. So more like 65/week at current rates.

Is it unpatriotic of me to hope the Loonie plunges in value even further?

I am going to have to get my roomie Julian to walk me through declaring earned income when you are on full disability. I can make something like $1000/month without it being deducted from my cheque.

Actually, I just looked it up, and it seems like it’s an annual limit of $9600 now. That’s groovy. It works out to $800/month, but because it’s an annual limit, it can be applied flexibly. Which is good news for us freelancers of whatever strike.

I wonder if you can be a freelance messiah. Have miracles, will travel.

I’m about 1/3 into today’s script. It’s not due until 9 am tomorrow morning (time zones) but I still feel bad that I am not finished yet.

I have been trying to build a daily routine around the new realities of my existence. I can do anything – even write a million words – as long as I build it into my daily routine.

This afternoon, I experimented with doing the day’s script in thirds. So I wrote the first third, then played Skyrim until supper time.

It felt wrong. It still feels wrong. So I am not going to be doing that again. Tonight, once I am done blogging and take a brief rest, I will finish the dang thing.

The problem is that my afternoons have become very unproductive because the heat scrambles my brains and I can’t get things done. It would be nice if I could write the script in the afternoon then blog after supper and have the evening free for whatever.

I have another job pending. Someone who needs little pieces between 100 and 500 words written at a penny a word.

You literally could not pay a writer less on a per-world basis. But it will be good experience and what the hell, some extra coin too.

In conclusion, it’s beginning to look like I have a life now.

So far, so good!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

The game’s begun

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And God the director
Smelled a rat
Pulled another rabbit
From his hat
Sniffed the air, and said 
That’s that, I’m 
Going. 

Such an Anglican view of God. A god who finds your humanity embarrassing, who doesn’t approve, who hold you to an impossible standard and when you don’t meet it,. a God that simply leaves you behind because you were never good enough.

I’ve met parents like that. In general, I want to smack them.

Anyhow, the game’s begun for me because I am almost done the first draft of my first animation script. It needs one more news item to riff on and some more detailed description and it will be ready for final polish. I am not super pleased with the riffs I have written but I can tune them up in the polishing stage.

Riffing on news items relevant to Uber and Lyft drivers is not easy.

In fact, I am a little worried that my jokes are too snarky. I will have to talk with my boss Prasad about editorial tone and intended audience. Snark is my default mode but I am sure I can come up with other kinds of humour if I put my mind to it.

It’s just so much fun pointing out absurdities and hypocrisies. I am a natural satirist that way. It’s totally a defense mechanism. When I receive input that is inconsistent with what  I know about the world, logically unsound, morally unacceptable, `or otherwise something I refuse to accept, I turn it into satire and push it right back out.

Kinda of like having a mental gag reflex, I suppose.

This rejection of information is necessary because the default mode of the human mind is to take what people say to us and add it into our picture of the world. And that was fine when it was just Ogg telling Norp where he was attacked by a tiger.

But as civilization advanced, things became too complicated for that and we had to come up with a way of maintaining the integrity of our minds and our world-views. So we have to develop this ability to reject bad information – to spit out the poisoned food for thought.

It’s a vitally necessary reflex – otherwise we would be overwhelmed by contradictory information. But it is also the root of a lot of prejudice because it is this mental function that keeps existing beliefs from being changed by new evidence.

Still, it’s this reflex that is a;so the root of all comedy. Laughter is our response to logical inconsistencies and other absurdities. It’s a form of input rejection that we enjoy and actively seek out. I suppose one could make the argument that this provides us with an evolutionary benefit by making us seek out novelty and push the edges of our understand out a little further each time,.

But really, nobody knows why we laugh. We know what function it serves in the mind, but not what function it serves in evolution.

Needed a bit of a rest. Which is kind of the problem.

I have had a super sleepy day today. As in, I have spent more hours asleep than awake. It really cut into my productivity and gave me less time to work on things than I would have liked. And it’s so depressing to lose time like that.

Honestly, I am a little worried.

I can only assume I have been not getting enough decent quality sleep lately. It really feels like this is something that has been building up for a while and now has to run its course, whether I like it or not.

I do not.

It could be that this is parent of the healing process from my major depressive episode last Friday night. My mind needs all this sleep in order to pull me back together. That is how our bodies respond to infection – that’s why being sick makes you so tired – so why not the mind as well?

And I know getting uptight about the chronic sleepiness doesn’t help things. And in the past I could handle that. The sleepiness would have to persist for more than two days before I would start becoming anxious and irritated about it.

But I have stuff to do now. Jobs. Responsibilities. The chance to earn income for once. So I can’t be asleep most of the time.

I got like this at VFS too, come to think of it. I would have periods where I would go to class but I would be fighting sleep the whole time, and then when I got home I would sleep some more. It’s clearly a chronic issue.

And the obvious culprit is my sleep apnea. That would definitely cause me to have low quality sleep that eventually meant I had to pay off that ol’ sleep debt all at once.

And thus, I ended up super sleepy for days on end. And if I want to get healthy and stay healthy, I am going to have to deal with my fricking sleep apnea instead of ignoring it.

Which means I have to build myself up until I can overcome the big roadblock :

Admitting to Doctor Chao that I have been doing jack shit about my sleep apnea for years. He thinks I have been using CPAP this whole time. Nope. By any objective measure, I am a terrible patient.

Holy shit, I thought I had finishes this thing! That’s pretty bad, even for me. Just kind of wandering off while blogging.

At some point, I am going to have to learn exactly how many balls I can keep in the air at one time, and stick to that limit. I forget things because in order to pick up the new thing, I have to forget one of the things that are on my mind at that moment.

Subjectively speaking, it’s like things just disappear.

I am telling you, it’s going to get to the point where I have to have handlers in order to do the simplest things, like Stephen Hawking.

But my spine works fine.

It’s this brain of mine that gets confused.

I will talk to you nice people…. um…. later today, actually.

 

 

 

 

 

Another day older

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Wow. He is not nearly as butch looking as I thought he would be.

Anyhow, 44 isn’t much different than 43. Except that my 43rd birthday wasn’t, ya know, hell.

I was supposed to be at a Secret Informant meeting this afternoon, but I was too sick to go. By sick I mean depressed, of course. That’s my illness, both chronic and constant. I have still not fully recovered from last Friday night. Right now, I feel beat up inside. Bruised. And really goddamned tired in a way that goes beyond the physical I can tell I am on the mend but it’s taking longer than I thought I would.

I am struggling with feeling self-loathing guilt about not going to the meeting. Part of me feels like a total loser for having taken the loser choice instead of forcing myself out there where the odds were good that once I got moving, I would feel a whole lot better.

The other side of the internal argument says that I have to take care of myself and not push myself too far and end up totally collapsing. Part of managing illness is knowing when to push and when to accept your limitations – and forgive yourself for them.

It’s that last bit that’s hard for me.

I hope that some day, I figure out how to turn off this ruthless, relentless self-judgment. Accomplishment will help. I completed that insane assignment and the payment for it has been put through. The funds will be available in a week, if I’m lucky.

Because that’s how modern banking goes. Everything is instant except the things that mysteriously take days to happen. It will be three days for my method of payment (PayPal) to be approved. And then Upwork only does payouts once a week.  And only if there is more than $100 to pay.

The usual bullshit. I supposed that if it is a pay per transaction situation with Upwork, then doing fewer transactions overall would save them money. And also bandwidth.

But it is frustrating to us poor schlubs waiting for our money.

Oh well, it will show up in my Paypal account eventually. PayPal was not my first choice for the receipt of payments. My first choice was direct bank transfer – that way the money goes directly into my Vancity account, and it would be simple to transfer it onto my reloadable VISA from there and then use it wherever.

But I ran into one of those situations that drive us poor idiots stuck insisting the world make sense crazy, because in order to set up the direct transfer, I needed my account number, and there is literally no way for me to find out what my account number is. No way I could find, anyhow. I did every Google site search I could think of, and the closest thing I could find was a page that told me how to find my account number… on a check.

Who the fuck uses checks any more? Might as well be banking using marks scratched on clay tablets with reeds, or notes tied to carrier pigeons.

So that was super frustrating. I can see that PayPal is almost as good because it it set up to draw from my credit card anyhow, and most importantly tons of places accept PayPal as a form of payment for stuff now, so I can use it for online shopping no prob.

But, well, I am one stubborn dude who hates to stop anything before he finishes it, and so I will probably call the bank tomorrow and get my account number from them, and set the fucking thing up like I wanted it set up in the first place.

But hey, that’s the stubbornness that earned me that money in the first place. Only someone like me would have worked so fucking hard for a whole week for $100. It’s that semi-insane persistence that sustained me.

And the stubborn pride of never giving up no matter what the challenge is…. in other words, never letting a challenge defeat me. Fuck you, challenge. I am going to defeat you whatever the cost.

Again, not exactly one hundred percent sane, but potent when harnessed properly.

When I was feeling overwhelmed by the task next week, all I had to do was imagine failing my first ever freelance assignment and that would goad me back into action. I worked rally hard on that insane thing, but I got it done.

Just between you and me, and don’t tell the client, but it was not a very well thought out assignment. For me at least…. I am dying to know how the others hired (if there were any) fared on the job.

I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there was an easier and faster way to do it and it was only my very high standards that made it take me so long to rephrase four paragraphs. Maybe if I had truly accepted that I could trash most of the content from the original and done my rephrasings by taking like two facts from each paragraph and completely ignoring the rest.

But I care too much about information,. I can’t just casually destroy it like that. Even with permission. I made a few concessions to the idea, like only including three from any list of more than three items, but for the most part it all stayed.

And while that slowed things down and made way more work for me, I will say this : My reworked paragraphs were well written!

Oh, and the agreement for the job was to do it for USD $72, and I was paid USD $86 instead. So they threw in a tip, at least.

That means that, at the current exchange rate, I got paid CDN $116 for the job. Which is nice. Nowhere near minimum wage, but still. Nice.

Aaaand I have a completed job on Upwork so I am not a total nonentity any more. Plus I have the animation thing I am going to be doing 5 days a way.

So things are looking up for me. I just have to pull myself together and get on top of it.

And I am totally going to do that…. TOMORROW.

Today, I am going to freaking relax.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

My depression and me

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First  : status update. I feel a lot better than I did last night. But I am not yet well.

And this has brought up a curious subject, because I am now at a stage where I can consciously assess the amount of depression in mt bloodstream. I can feel its presence, I and sense the healing process. I know I am going to get better over time. I am not particularly worried about my future mental state despite how bad it got last night.

A previous version of me, the pre-Kwantlen me, would have simply done… nothing. Well, nothing except let it eat me up inside for decades. He might have gotten somewhat pissed off but he would have just sucked it up and gotten even more numb.

The suicidal impulses would have been there. I might even have done it.

But now, I feel it all. The road to recovery for my particular kind of depression is paved with blood, because in every way and every way, I must choose to be alive and in pain rather than numb and pain free.

It’s like I am chewing off my own leg to get free of a trap called depression.

The important thing is that I don’t feel like I own this leaven of depression. It is not a part of me. It’s just something that has happened to me, like a cold or the flu.

And like those ailments, I know it suck for a while butI will get over it eventually.

And unlike those ailments, there is even a good chance that I will emerge stronger and saner from the experience. I feel like my recovery has left the “waking up” phase and entered a “breaking and remaking” phase.

Life, by which I mean the metaconscious healing part of my brain, will continue to shatter me and reforge me, each time terrible at the time but necessary to precipitate the sorts of changes that need to happen. Each reforging purifies me because that’s what lets the poison out. I have to be rendered unto a molten state by the emotions and the pain because only then do I have the fluidity to filter out the impurities.

In other, less poetic words, it forces some catharsis on me.

And I am sure that could be changed. I think the forces that have kept me semi-sane (or at least non-delusional) have the end result of making my internal structure rather inflexible. So for me, recovery has to be a series of painful rebirths. My internal structure is too rigid for gradual growth at this point.

I’m currently about 2/3 of the way through legendary lemon “Jupiter Ascending”. It is supposed to be really awful but I am not seeing it. It’s cheesy and stupid in parts but as a connoisseur of terrible things, I can tell you that it’s really not that bad.

In fact, it’s more well thought out than a lot of movies that don’t get tagged as terrible.

Anyhow, the reason  I bring that up is that there is a scene where the main character, Jupiter, tells someone that (spoiler) her powerful new role as space royalty won’t change who she is as a person.

And I had to laugh a cynical old person laugh.

From my point of view, she could not be more wrong. And not just because we all know that wealth, power, and luxury all corrupt people and infantilizes them.

It’s because this change in her life means she is on the precipice of total change. The rise in station (so to speak) means that, spiritually, she is the goo inside a cocoon that is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but a stage in between. This makes her both extremely vulnerable (good thing she has a hot Space Stud to protect her) and capable of changing into whatever the hell she wants to be.

She can make her outside match her inside in a way that most of us can only dream of. Especially in the context of a giant space empire that has the ability to rewrite the human genome however it likes.

So she is in the sort of molten state I am talking about. Whatever she needs to be, she can be. I would love to have that kind of freedom, even if it would basically mean going beyond all realms of human meta-consciousness.

It’s a level of choice and options that might well drive a person insane. But I would still go for it if I could. I would not be able to resist.

I am dying to know if I could be able to remain a force for good despite the social programming in my primate brain telling me to become a ruthless reptile who doesn’t need to consider others at all now.

I honestly don’t know the answer. My best guess would be that I would turn into a character like Trevor Goodchild from Aeon Flux. He’s an excellent example of an ice cold INTJ who believes himself to be always working towards the public good, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that he is really just a megalomaniac totalitarian  like any other.

I suppose I might be less hypocritical than him because I am more self-aware and I know how easily that line of bullshit – the idea that you are always working towards what is good for people in the long run – can open the door for your worst instincts to reign supreme by letting you justify any level of inhuman barbarity by saying it will turn out to be the correct utilitarian choice eventually.

So I am well aware of that trap.

The other route to horribleness would be the decadent path, where I revert to the oral stage of development because I have decided that all that matters is my own pleasure and doing whatever the hell I want.

That leads, inevitably, to cruelty, because once physical pleasures no longer thrill you that much, the next step is to indulge in the pleasure of the exerting of power over others. The dominance thrill. And without any moral or spiritual ground for that, you get the Stanford Prison Experiment. You get Abu Graib.

You get the Holocaust.

Because that’s how decadence works. It always needs stronger and stronger doses of the pleasure sought in order to be satisfied. So everything inevitably escalates.

It has a tragic quality to it. Kind of like a kid who makes himself sick on the candy in a candy store because he is so excited by it all he ignores the warnings his body are trying to give him. Because it starts from a place of innocence – the simple urge to have a lot of fun – but goes downhill rapidly.

So anyhooo…. um… something something I feel separate from my depression now, something something that’s a good sign, something something dark side.

You’d think I would be friends with my depression now. After all, we’ve been together for so long and been through so much together.

But he knows I am going to kill him.

And then I can finally be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.