Sorry if my soapbox leaves splinters on your floor, but I need to rant.

I can’t believe I have to explain this all again, but here goes : North Korea is not a threat to anyone in the USA or Canada.

Why? Because all it has is a piddling few nuclear devices that use all the uranium and/or plutonium that the South Korean government has been able to purchase and produce over the lifespan of its fifty year nuclear plan.

So say the worst possible scenario occurs and the Un One thinks that maybe that one solider with the natural good looks and charms was looking at him funny, and this time, having the man and all this family tortured to death just isn’t going to cut it. This time… the whole world has to pay.

So he launches all his devices while stroking a non-existant mustache and cackling evilly, or at least, what he thinks is an evil cackle but sounds more like a frog with the hiccups about to barf.

And all those devices are heading for major cities in the USA. Oh no, surely this must mean we are all doomed!

Well guess what? There would be ZERO DOOM, at ;least in the Western Hemisphere. In order to get to us, the devices would have to cross China (who is a nuclear power too, remember?”) and then cross the Pacific Ocean, which is, ya know…

KIND OF LARGE

and that would give the world plenty of time to intercept the missiles and cause them to splash harmlessly into the ocean where they can be picked up later.

Meanwhile, the entire world would have invaded North Korea and in record time Un would be Un-employed and his country would be absorbed into South Korea and become New Korea, or looked at another way, Korea Classic.

And why would Un the Great and Mighty bring that on himself?

Remember, it is never only a question of what the enemy can do. It’s always a question of what they would do.

I mean, you could punch your boss in the face tghe next time he talks to you like you’re in fifth grade. You have the capacity. You have the fists and the rage and the opportunity to put both of those things together for a moment of punchtastic glory.

But you wouldn’t. DO I need to explain why?

And for heaven’s sake, people, don’t make fools of yourselves talking like the world ending in a nuclear holocaust is a possibility. It ain’t. Korea isn’t the Soviet Union. A nuclear exchange between it and the rest of the world would not bring an end to all life as we know it.  Un just plain does not have enough nukes for that, and it’s not like we’re going to blow ourselves up just to make up the difference.

Now don’t get me wrong – he could do a lot of damange with the nukes he as, especially to countries way closer to him than us. If he decided to take out Beijing or Tokyo or Ulaanbaatar^[1], he might be able to do it. And not only could millions die in the initial striek, the environmental impact would be felt for hundreds of years. In fact, fallout would take even more lives than the initial blast.

But that’s not going to happen, because no matter who he attacked, the world would wipe out his regime before the ground has even stopped glowing and why would Un want to do that?

But people will go right on believing that we are on the brink of total annihilation, and you know why?

Because it’s fun.

It’s fun to imagine that we’re at risk of losing it all. It makes life more exciting and dramatic and the fun kind of scary, the kind you get in a horror movie.

And like in a horror movie, it’s safe to get scared about North Korea’s nuclear proigram because you know, deep down, that it’s all fake, there’s no real danger, and at the end, it will all go away and you will go on with your life.

It’s the attractive bullshit of popular delusions, and I am sick and god damned tired of it. So here I am, being the “no fun” guy who tells people that the Emperor, despite what you read on Twitter, actually IS wearing clothes, and any gimpses of his genitalia you thought you saw were only the products of your fevered imagination.

Nark my words. Were this article to be seen by a large number of people, I guarantee that I would receive dozens of angry letters in which people would be making superficially logical as to why I am wrong wrong WRONG, but the subtext would be clear, and it woudl read “”you’re no fun!”.

How dare I insist upon reality when we’re all having such a fun time being scared?

Because real world things are happening and our priorities are all fucked up because of the media pursuing what they think is the best story, instead of looking for the truth.

And social media only makes things far worse because now it’s not about rating, it’s abnout clicks, and everyone is competing to share the stuff that will get likes and shares and that kind of intellectual populism is going to favour the sensational falsehoods over the unglamorous truth  most of the time.

It’s all reality television now. Everything from the biggest news program all the way down to your auntie’s Facebook feed is just as trite, just as manipulalative, and just as “real” as Toddklers and Tiaras and Survivor : Atlantis.

Clearly, the public mind needs a better immune response to bullshit.

I have no idea what that would look like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(This was originally going to be a poem. But  FUCK poetry. I have way too much to say for that shit .)

Sometimes, my depression is like….an invisible straightjacket that restricts what I do in a way that makes no sense to those who cannot see it. I don’t believe I can escape it, so to save at least some of my sanity, I’ve  learned to ignore it too.

In fact, when I am performing socially, I can fool myself into forgetting that I am sick and believing that there is nothing really wrong with me, I have just been in a bad mood.

For my entire adult life.

And I am 44

It’s a nice place to visit, but I can’t exactly live there.  I wish I could become the person I pretend to be, and I am working on that.

But it will take a long time. I just have to remind myself that the person I pretend to be is me as well.

Sometimes, my depression is like…. a twisting, crushing, spaghetti-fying black hole at the center of my soul. A brutal inward tide that draws everything into its maw of annihilation and despair. It devours all, leaving me hollow and empty and sad. Attemptds to satisfy it work for a while. But the void in my soul is patient. It knows it will win in the end.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a terrified beast hunted by long, dark demons and driven into a state not unlike insanity where it wants to get away,  get away, get away before the bad thing happens!

This animal knows, in its heart, that it is going to die, because it’s only one little animals versus a galaxy of monster that all want to eat him, crunch crunch GOODBYE.

He also knows that before he dies, when he knows there is no way out, he is going to snap like a dry twig and murder every single fucking one of them he can before they eventually put him down.

He doesn’t want this to happen.

But the thought makes me feel a little better.

Sometimes, my depression is like….an endless dirfting through dimly lit subterranean canalls, where the only sound is the lapping of the waves against the hull of my gondola and the tiny bumping sounds from the gondola’s smooth passage through a canal barely wider than it is.

And behind it all is a slow, even, strong, masterful rowing.

And the real mystery is not why I am in this canal…

But why I like it so much.

Sometimes, my depression is like….being the outermost planet in a vast solar sytem, pathetically dependent on the tiny amount of energy it gets from that hot and wonderful star at the center of it all, and worried that nobody even notices or cares about it because it’s so far out.

And on that planet is a robot. And that robot’s job is to monitor signals from the inner planets, and report what it finds.

And it spends every day monitoring as hard as it can. It has to try so hard because it is barely picking up anything. And the signal he picks up are so faint that they barely make any sense and seem random and thoughtless to the robot.

So the robot has concluded that nobody is transmitting, that the signals he picks up are all in his mind, and that he would be better off shutting down and going offline.

But what this robot does not know is that it has a broken antenna. That therfe are, in fact, many stations broadcasting to it on every channel and at full power, and that are desperate to make some kind of contact with him.

It thinks that nobody cares.

But it’s just a broken antenna.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a chill fog that fills my mind and makes it so hard to think and plan and do complex things. An artificial lobotomization that renders a n otherwise highly intelligent person from being able to cope with even the most basic levels of life. The things healthy people don’t even think of as tasks, let alone understand wbhy someone would find it hard to do them.

So it leaves me drowning in plain view of everyone but nobody can throw me a line because they don’t even see what is killing me.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a deep rage that burn all it touches and most of what it touches is me. An impotent rage that takes out its frustrations on the one available target : ,me.

It’s a ravenous monster, and I have locked myself in with it in order to make absolutely sure that it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

So it eats me instead. And that only leads to more rage. So it’s like I am constantly punishing myself for the crimes I have committed against myself when punishing myself for the crimes…. and so forth and so on.

And the great thing about this self-torture is that it’s conflict free. You don’t have to challenge anyone to a fight over it. You can do it whenever you like, because your victim is always right at hand. And you know he deserves it too for being such a pathetic loser and sucking so bad at everything and basically being horrible….BECAUSE of the self-loathing and self-torture.

The punishments is part of the problem.

And sometimes, my depression is like….being a kid who is all alone in front of the school because everybody forgot to pick him up and now the shadows are getting longer and the people who live across the street from the school are starting to wonder what is going on and the people driving by wonder too, but not for very long, because they have to get on with their lives.

He doesn’t notice any of this, though, because as the minutes tick past he gets sadder and sadder till ihe feels like he will crumple in on himself at any moment, because that screaming void inside him just keeps getting bigger and bigger because it’s clear that he doesn’t matter and doesn’t count and nobody cares about him enough to do one single thing to help him.

And he deserves it all, because he’s terrible.

His harried aunt arrives just in time to see he has attempted suicide… again.

She rolls her eyes. Nobody nobody likes the kid. He’s such a drama queen.,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.