As God as my witness, I can’t decide if I like that song or not.

It’s got a great beat and energy to it, but it’s also musically boring and repetitive. I mean, the bass sax riff is cool and all, but you need more than that. Either that, or you need rhymes that hit the stage so hard they break, and while I (again) love the energy of the song, the rhymes are good but not great.

So I still don’t know. It’s a kickass example of new-skool old-style rap, but…. meh.

I guess I will download it and listen to it till I make up my mind.

Today has been pleasant. Went to bed at three in the morning, got up around 8:30 or so. Play Skyrim a bunch.

So far, the game isn’t exactly grabbing me by the short and curlies and pulling me in, but I am enjoying it. It’s a lot like Bethesda’s other flagship series, Fallout. A lot of the controls are exactly like Fallout 4, a game I played a whole heck of a lot. But without the neato keen targeting system that lets me play the game in a sort-of-turn-based way.

Oh well. So far the fights have not been too fast for me, or at least, not unusually so. And I am a mage (sort of) so I can do fun things like animate corpses and shoot fire out of my hand.

Or paw. There is exactly one clearly Furry race in Skyrim and that is the Khajjit (pronounce ka-JEET, to my surprise), and surprise surprise, that’s the race I am playing. There were lots of other interesting choices, like orc, or troll, or wood elf, or whatever. But the conclusion was totally foregone. I was going to play the fuzzy race.

So my guy, Rhakshasa Raja, looks kind of like this :

Pretty studly, huh? And yet strokeably soft, too. Mrwar.  My guy has black fur and earrings and such, but you get the idea.

I will figure out how to take a screenshot of my pretty kitty some time soon.

The game first made a strong impression on me with the following scene :

I’m going through a barrow mound ^[1]fighting draugr with this fellow warrior (let’s call him Chuckie) when I reach a locked gate. I look around for a key or a lever to pull or whatever. I end up going into this tiny room and whaddaya know, there’s a lever there. So I pull it.

But instead of opening the gate I needed opened, a gate slams shit behind me, trapping me in the little room. Chuckie laughs at me and asks me what I have gotten myself into this time (dick) and goes to find a way to let me out.

But he doesn’t get far before he is surrounded by these douchebags calling themselves the Silver Circle surround him and talk about how much they are going to enjoy killing him.

And at this point I am freaking the fuck out because I think that the game is going to make me watch helplessly as Chuckie get murdered right before my eyes so that he becomes my vengeance motive for the rest of the game.

Imagine my shock, then, when Chuckie turns into a fucking werewolf and takes them all out in two freaking seconds.

That’s when I knew that this game had more to offer than a good take on the same old fantasy bullshit I have done a million times.

Other than my virtual adventures as a spell-slinging cat person, today has been quiet and, to be honest, not very productive.

I still feel really tired. It’s the same thing that happened to me in school as the term wore on. Every day, I was a little more tired and found it a little harder to get out of bed and go do stuff and the harder it was to concentrate and remember things.

It’s got to be a sleep thing. I am not getting enough of the good sleep, the kind that refreshes me and leaves me feeling renewed.

Instead, some internal battery wears down over time and I do not, as of this moment. have any idea how to recharge it.

It just happens now and then. I assume. Based on the fact that I haven’t keeled over yet.

And if it’s a sleep thing, it has to be my sleep apnea, because duh. It’s only a major medical problem that I have been completely ignoring. And I can’t even claim I am too busy to go to the doc about it any more.

But I know what he will tell me. He will tell me about scary surgical options and other painful possibilities in order to try to convince me to give CPAP another chance.

And who knows, maybe they have come up with some fancy new advances in CPAP masks or machine or whatever and it might somehow work for me the third time.

But I doubt it. Claustrophobia is very hard to fight. Which is ironic because I think it might be the sleep apnea’s oxygen issues that gave me the claustrophobia in the first place.

I mean, where else would I get this paranoia about getting enough air? I haven’t ever had a classic claustrophobic trigger incident where I got trapped somewhere. I have never been deprived of oxygen in a serious way that I can remember.

And yet, it doesn’t take much to set me off and then I start to freak out and think I am not getting enough air and everything goes to hell.

And by writing about it, I have heavily triggered myself. Lovely. Long, slow, deep breaths, each breath a little longer than the last.

Anyhoo, if I want to find a way to fully recharge instead of winding down over time, the answer will presumably lie in some form of treatment for my sleep apnea.

I have no idea what form that will take.

But I do know one thing.

It will not be CPAP.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I really feel like I am running out of gas lately.

Every day, I am a little more tired. I find it harder and harder to concentrate and the urge to turn my back on the world gets stronger and my will feels weaker.  I feel very… grey.

And I honestly do not know why. Clearly I am spending more of something than I generate, and I am burning through my reserves at a frightful pace.

One thing I do know is that I am having more and more of the bad sleep. Whether that is a cause of my problems or merely a symptom of a larger issue is up for debate. I am not sure why the bad sleep is back but I sincerely wish it would go away again and leave me with at least a shred of the illusion that I can get rest from sleep.

Maybe I am become depressed, despite my best efforts to keep my fires burning. Maybe I need to learn to live with the fact that there are going to be these cycles of energy and listlessness in my life no matter what I do and the best course of action is to accept the truth and figure out ways to cope.

That’s a galling thought but that doesn’t mean that it does not represent an important truth in my life. And as long as I am living the life of a (mostly) unaffiliated freelancer, there is no reason why I can’t have the occasionally unscheduled off day where I concentrate on getting as much rest and recuperation as possible and lay off the intense job hunt for a day or two.

But I am so afraid of slipping back into numbness and depression that I don’t even want to think about it.  I know far too well how easy it is to let everything slide and give up on life and stop striving and then the next thing you know, years and years have gone by.

I am too fucking old and fat and sick to lose any more time like that.

But perhaps it is naive, childish, and self-destructive to imagine that I can sustain a wave of enthusiasm and energy forever. The mature goal is to learn how to stop for a rest without losing the will to start again. To search for a source of renewal instead of setting myself up for failure by trudging onward till I collapse.

Right now, it’s Friday. That means that as long as I make it through today and Saturday, I will make it to Sunday, which I have declared to be my day off, my Day of Rest.

That means that on Sundays, my only obligation is to blog. I can set aside the whole ferocious multi level job hunt business and concentrate instead on relaxing.

That helps, but it might not be enough. After all, Sunday is my big social day, which I will be socializing from 6 or 7 in the evening until three in the morning. And while I treasure and cherish my social time with my friends, it doesn’t really count as “rest”.

So I dunno. I could throw Saturday in as a day of rest, I suppose. I don’t want to do so, but I have to think in terms of long term sustainability. It would suck because Saturday is one of my most productive days right now. But I need time to rest.

Plus I don’t like the idea of a whole day left to my own devices. So it can’t be that I actually forbid productive labour that day. Then I really would get depressed. And bored. And resentful of myself, which is a thing that exists despite its absurdity.

So perhaps I should see a rest day as less of a full stop and more of a taking my foot off the gas. A lack of acceleration. I have been pushing myself pretty hard and that is the sort of thing that is never going to last.

Honestly, I wish I could rest up today. Despite my having had nine hours of sleep already, what I want most right now is to go right back to bed and maybe actually get some decent sleep for a change.

It’s worked before. It’s like I have to nap to recover from the bad sleep. Eventually, I will feel refreshed and ready to take on the day.

Dunno why the bad sleep is back. I don’t think my blood sugar is high. I doubt it’s my allergies, seeing as I take my antihistamine within a few hours of going to bed. It’s getting warmer and that might be a factor, I suppose, but it’s not really hot yet.

So I am not sure. The heat seems like the most likely thing at the moment Maybe not directly, though. Maybe the problem is that I have been sweating a lot more lately and that’s led to my pore getting clogged.

Seems as likely as anything else, anyhow.

I wish could sleep all day, but I can’t, because I have a Secret Informant (that show I am working on/for) meeting at 5:30 and the trip there is going to be around 45 minutes plus the time it takes to get to the station, so…. I am going to have to leave at 4:30, and before that, I need to shower and get into clean clothes, and… oy.

Where’s a pocket dimension out of time when you need one? Someplace I could go and take a nice long nap and then return the exact moment I left?

Well, okay, a little latter. Otherwise I would run into myself.

I will have to make do with a nap of about an hour and a half and hope that said nap will be enough to get me boosted up long enough to get through the meeting.

Andy says he has some very good news for us. I hope it’s funding and/or support. It would be nice to get paid, or if not that, at least to be able to afford some professionals so that we have some people around who know what they are doing.

I can write, produce, direct, create, advise, and inspire, but execution is best left to others. People with generalized competence instead of my concentrated genius.

And what do you know, I have those people  now.

It’s a dream come true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out LBJ was a total cunt too, at least in terms of foreign policy.

This comes, of course, from that series, The Untold History Of The United States, that I have been watching. It’s been rough going but I persist.

After all, they will eventually get to things which happened in my lifetime.

What I have learned today that I did not know (or at least, understand) is that the whole deal with the escalating war in Vietnam was that the USA thought that, as long as they kept escalating in force of arms and sheer inhumane brutality, the Vietnamese had to eventually reach a “breaking point” where they would lose the will to fight and surrender.

A clearer example of reptile-brain bullshit is hard to imagine. The idea that if you hit the other guy hard enough, he HAS to submit and be your bitch is a pure product of the most primitive brain of our brains polluting our rationality, subverting our sense of self-interest, and suppressing both our compassion and our common sense.

And of course, the very idea that if you brutalize people, they give up is absolutely ludicrous. All brutality does is inspire the enemy to greater resistance. Brutality has never, ever, ever stopped a resistance movement (or “insurgency” as we call them when it’s brown people). Every act of brutality inspires hundreds of civilians to join the resistance and justifies further brutality by those opposing the occupying government.

And what really gets me is that this fact should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a shred of self-awareness. I would love to go back in time to when these testosterone junkies were making these decisions and ask them a simple question :

“What would be America’s breaking point? How much brutal aggression would it take to make America capitulate? ”

They would, of course, huffily reply that there is nothing that can dominate the America spirit and that if the Russians invaded. they would fight to the last man, no matter what the odds, for the old Red White and Blue.

“And why do you think the Vietnamese are any different? What would you do if the Russians invaded and slaughtered a thousand women and children as a show of force? Give in , or fight even harder?”.

And yet, this androgenic folly is repeated over and over and over again, whether it’s the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the USA fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Nazis punishing whole villages for harboring the Resistance.

It doesn’t work. It never works. And it never will. The only real way to counteract a resistance movement is to treat the occupied people extremely well.

Then you get this :

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/0GSvRsC6-B0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

At the same time, the occupying force should do its best to disappear from public view. Leave as few reminders that the nation is not determining its own fate around as possible. Pull strings from the shadows. Do nothing to challenge their sense of national identity.

Leave them, essentially, with nothing to resist. Most people will be perfectly happy to go about their lives because most people have only a shadowy concept of what happens at the highest levels of power anyhow, so whether or not that is “their” government or another means very little to them, as long as their daily lives are unaffected.

This approach goes against everything our stupid reptile brains tell us – what, be nice to people we have conquered? That won’t make my dick hard! – but it would work.

And of course, the third part of the strategy is to get the hell out of there as soon as you can. Long term occupation is never a good idea. To me, the best idea is to tell the people exactly when you will withdraw and leave them to determine their own fate. Make it very clear that past this point, you will accept no responsibility for what happens afterwards. On that date, responsibility will officially be transferred to the occupied nation, and it will be up to them to make it work.

That doesn’t mean you don’t help them build a democratic government. It just means that you are being extremely clear about the fact that you will not be there forever and that the people will be on their own when you go.

By being so clear from the outset, you take the wind out of the sails of any sort of resistance movement and you force the people to realize that they will not be able to blame all their problems on you forever.

This will not be an easy transition for people who previously lived under the patriarchal tyranny of an authoritarian government. These people are not accustomed to self-determination. They are used to doing what they are told.

The same thing happens on a much smaller scale with authoritarian families. The autocratic parents deny their children any chance to learn to think and grow and learn on their own, and then act surprised when their kids can’t handle a world where they are expected to do all three.

So while the date of withdrawal is fixed, the time between invasion and that date should include the time it will take to teach the population about what it means to be free.

It might even take an entire generation. At least until we perfect the art of it.

But in order to get the result we all want, at least on paper – a happy democratic country free to choose its own fate – we will have to recognize that there is a demon in the minds of men (and women too, presumably) and that this demon lies to people in the language of power, domination, submission, victory, and “glory”.

And it is this exact demon of the mind which has lead to all the brutality and inhumanity in the world, whether it’s the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Rwandan massacre, or Abu Graib. The idea that if we are brutal and horrible enough, the enemy will HAVE to submit (even though we wouldn;t submit if we were them) and the accompanying pursuit of the cock-hardening feeling of dominance is the number one factor in all examples of man’s inhumanity to man.

To me, that is the clear face of evil.

And it is that demon we are to vanquish if we are evolve as a species.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been having one of my sleepy days.

I knew I was not exactly in for a fun time today when I woke up all sweaty and dizzy and incoherent this morning. This is something that (thankfully) doesn’t happen that much to me any more, but it’s still a really pisser when it does.

It’s hard to describe the mental state it leaves me in. I can only repeat that it makes me feel like I just ran a marathon underwater and only barely made it back onto dry land. I wake up feeling incredibly physically and mentally tired, which is kind of the exact opposite of what sleep is supposed to do for a fella.

I ended up not being able to drag my ass out of bed until 10:15 am even though I woke up at 9:45 am. And true, I am a slow waker, but it doesn’t usually take me half an hour to get out of bed. But it seriously took that long for me to gather together enough of my wits to actually conceive of and execute the thought “get out of bed now”.

Then I got myself some water so I could hydrate myself and sat in front of the computer. Originally, I had planned to try out the game I just got off Steam last night, Skyrim,when I got up this morning. But I was way way too mentally fried to take in a new game. So I played another game, Heroes of Might and Magic 5, for a while.

I decided to get Skyrim because the reviews for it are absolutely insane. It has a Metacritic score of 94 percent, making it the tenth best PC game of all time according to their rankings. Plus I asked a few furs I knew and they attested to the game’s unrelenting awesomeness. And it was on sale for $22.

So I figured I would give it a shot. And some time soon…. I will. It’s all downloaded and installed and ready to go. I just need the time and mental coherence to do it.

Anyhow, I played HOMM5 for a while, and managed to finally beat the level that I had been stuck on for a while, so yay that.

That took me to 11:30 am, and at that point I had to choose. I could either :

a) Stay up, go eat lunch, and risk being incredibly sleepy in therapy at 1 pm, or

b) Get an hour of sleep, miss lunch, and go to therapy refreshed

And as we all know by now, it is a bad idea for me to ever skip a meal and that goes quintuple for the first meal of day which often occurs eight or ten or even twelve hours before the previous meal at midnight-ish.

Clearly, then, option A was the sensible and logical thing to do.

But I chose B because the very thought of not getting more sleep made me feel a chill like someone just rubbed an icicle against my heart.

And for what it’s worth, it worked. I set my alarm and took a nap for an hour and felt so much better afterwards that I felt almost coherent going into therapy.

It was not a great session. As usual, the life update section of the therapy took over and left no room for the part where I talk about myself and my problems.

I am seriously considering just skipping the life update bit next time, which is next Thursday at 1 pm. It’s not that I mind talking about what’s going on in my life. To have someone listening attentively while I do that is actually pretty gratifying for a ghost in the shadows like myself.

But it’s not what helps. It’s not what makes me saner and strong and more whole. What helps is when we dig deep and unearth the deep unspoken pains and take out the bits of psychological shrapnel, one by one, that are keeping me from healing.

And I need people’s help to get there. I need someone asking and probing in order to shake the calcified emotions loose and bring them into my consciousness so I can deal with them and lessen my psychological burden.

That, for me, is what therapy is for. It’s what keeps me going back. And while I know that not every session will produce a major breakthrough, when it does like it did today, I end up feeling like it was a waste of time.

Admittedly, I had a lot to talk about life-wise, what with the big project I have become part of. ^[1] It’s a big life event and I am incredibly happy to be part of it. I feel so lucky that I got something like that barely a week after graduating. I hope we make our show and sell it to someone, even if it’s just a tourism board.

But Andy assures me that no matter what, it will get made. I find that highly reassuring. Even if it never goes anywhere, I will at least have something to show prospective employers that shows I can be a good team member and make things which are good.

And by God, it will be good or I will die trying.

I realized today that I think I am the only person who can anywhere close to working on the show full time. I think the others either work full time (like Andy) or are students.

That might mean that it will be up to me to keep pushing the thing forward. Fine. I can do that. I can be the sparkplug. I can be (as Terry Jones put it) the terrier nipping at people’s heels to keep them moving forward.

I think it might also end up being up to me to keep things focused, as part of that job. I can do that too. I have been pondering what we should be doing next, and I have some ideas.

I want to do an advanced technology test, where we take the equipment out and try some on location shooting so that we can figure out what we need and make as many of the dumb mistakes as we can BEFORE shooting.

I want to start develop our method for finding and enlisting our Secret Informants. They are going to be the heart of the show and we will need to pick our people with care.

I am going to start developing the pitch documents for the show. I would have done them already but I keep forgetting to set side time to do it.

I should be able to slap together a one-sheet at least. And a logline.

I hope my partners in this endeavour can handle the sheer voltage I plan on bringing to this project of ours.

This is no longer just some idea of Andy’s.

It’s my future, and I am going to make it happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I will get to the topic of that provocative title in a moment, but first, quickly :

Re : the subject of last Saturday’s column :

I made it. Finally. It took a lot of work and a lot of sweat, but I made it.

And I feel much better now. Less tense, more relaxed, more… functional.

I am hoping… hoping… that this means that I have pulled the cork out and things will work more smoothly and naturally and healthfully now.

But if not, at least I know it is still possible for me to get there if I really try.

That sounds a lot better than me than going months without release.

That’s the update. Now, on with the blog.

I have been watching a series called The Untold History Of The United States, and things are getting pretty rough.

It wasn’t all that depressing at first. Sure, America was not perfect, but it was still basically good and meant well, at least in the eyes of Oliver Stone, who created and narrated the series back in 2012.

But according to Stone, everything started going all to hell when FDR died and Truman took over. It was Truman who, on the advice of a hark named General Byrnes, started the Cold War with apparent glee.

There was a chilling sequence about how Truman’s entire demeanor changed when he was informed of the success of the nuclear bomb test at Almogordo. Before that fateful phone call, Truman had been a somewhat weak but reasonable and conciliatory President who professed to have no interest in flexing American military muscle in order to get its way on the world stage or to set things up so that the US called all the shots in the world.

Then he gets the phone call, and his whole attitude changed. Suddenly he was telling the world leaders he was meeting with to go to hell and that the USA would be calling the shots from now on because they had the most destructive weapon in the world.

Now how America is that? The minute they are more powerful than someone else, all sense of civilized restraint goes out the window and they can’t wait to act like demons and crow about how they don’t “have to” do all that listening to others and thinking about things any more. and now they were going to have some FUN.

A civilized nation, or at the least a civilized leader, would have taken the phone call, nodded, maybe smiled a little, and gone back to reasonable negotiations with the Allied powers knowing he had a somewhat stronger hand now.

But no. Americans are fundamentally uncivilized. They have never grown out of the phase where a child behaves not because it’s the right thing to do but because they “have to” or they will get into trouble.

So the minute they feel freed of “having to” behave, they go wild and loot and plunder and rape and destroy just like any barbarian horde.

And of course, things only got worse from there. Stone makes the point that despite what we have been taught, dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one hundred percent unnecessary. The Japanese had offered to surrender. All they wanted was to keep their Emperor, who was a religious figure somewhere between the Pope and God in terms of the level of reverence the people had for him. His role was mostly symbolic at the time anyhow. Letting them keep him would have cost the US nothing.

But no, the hawks were squawking for “absolute surrender” and nothing less. They, too, felt freed of the constraints of civilization and figured it was their God-given right to joyously fuck everything in sight with their big nuclear cocks and anyone who dared to suggest they restrain themselves in the slightest would have been declared a commie and a sissy and no fun at all, and violently ejected from their company.

At one point, someone asked Truman why he was determined to nuke a city in Japan, and he replied “Well what’s the use of building the thing if you’re not going to use it?”.

Ethically speaking, that’s like saying “Well what’s the use of buying the gun if you aren’t going to murder anyone?”

So to me, it’s clear that not one but two cities were nuked into oblivion (and history) purely so that Truman and his hounds of hell could wave their big nuclear dicks in the air adnd have a good old-fashioned jizz party.

And that’s when they started being total dicks to Russia, too, especially after the war ended. Even though arguably it was the Russians who stopped Hitler by being the first to be able to stop the Nazi advance in its tracks and then fighting them in a free for all brawl until the Germans were knocked out, and then ended the war by coming into the fight with Japan (which is what really destroyed Japan’s will to fight… the nukes didn’t figure into it), suddenly the Soviets, who had (as a nation) behaved honorably through the whole war, was vilified and shoved around by the newly empowered USA.

All because a lot of little boys in grown up clothes were having so much fun now that they didn’t “have to” listen to anyone else any more.

Basically, Truman was a very small weak man who fell prey to the manly types’ ability to manipulate someone like him via offering him the male approval he craved.

He would have done anything to keep those asshole’s approval and acceptance.

And the world – the entire world – would pay for that for fifty fucking years. America poured the fruits of the labour of billions into the pockets of a couple dozen defense contractors. It suffered through McCarthyism, a time where every single thing America thinks it believes was violently violated in a very public way.

But the rest of the world had it worse because this is when the CIA was formed and given unlimited license to do whatever it took to protect huge American business’ profits. And that very much included destroying their democracies and putting in brutal dictatorships instead just because those dictators were smart enough to say the magic words “I hate commies!” and thus could get away with whatever the fuck they wanted.

At least in this modern era, it would be very hard to get away with something like that. There are just too many people watching and the cover you would need for large scale horrors like that would have to be huge and absolutely airtight.

It’s not impossible and I am sure some evil shit is still being done by the CIA in the vulnerable areas of the world.

And right now, we are seeing how America reacts when a foreign government interferes with THEIR elections.

Doesn’t feel good, does it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.