Not you the reader, of course. Just life in general.

I don’t think I will make it to FRED tonight. I woke up with lungs that feel super heavy and scratchy inside accompanied by a strung-out, drained feeling that makes it super hard to concentrate and slight, faint tingling and heat in patches all over my body.

Sounds pretty bad. So I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Don’t want to end up with pneumonia again. Dunno how I survived it, psychologically speaking, the first time.

By burying myself deep in crossword puzzles and games on my tablet, I guess. Using those “ignore everything in favour of media consumption” skills I have been honing for all these years.

Yay me. See, I know how to cope!

The problem with not going to FRED is that I will still need to do my usual Sunday night shopping for the week, So now I have to ask Joe to come pick me up after FRED and take me to Pricemart or wherever to get my groceries.

And I hate having to pose. But I have little choice.

My word, do I feel like crap. I feel like my dealing with reality right now is like waiting for the merry go round to come around to the brass ring over and over again, only in this case the brass ring is reality and I can only deal with reality when I am in range.

I hope that makes sense. It seems like it does, but I am kind of out of it, so maybe not.

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Right now, the inner narrative of my life goes like this :

I was born in 1973. I was a pretty happy kid up to the rape. I was precociously bright, cute, outgoing (but with a touch of shyness), charming as heck, and quite often the center of attention and maybe even a tad spoiled.

Then I got raped by a stranger at the age of four and it crippled me psychologically.

Fast forward to the first day of school. I go alone. School is scary. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. And I don’t know anyone because I didn’t get to go to kindergarten.

On the other hand, I already knew how to read at a 4th grade level and I knew math up to but not including the times tables for multiplication.

So I had both an advantage and a disadvantage. I was mentally advanced – far, far ahead of my peers – but socially retarded.

Aaaand that was the pattern for the rest of my life, really.

Still, it wasn’t too bad at first. I got along with my fellow students. I was even somewhat popular, probably due to all my goofy charm and natural wit.

But that made me a target for, ironically, another bright freckle faced redheaded kid, and he turned the tables on me and got everyone calling me fat and generally looking down on me, and so down to the bottom I went.

Not having gone to kindergarten, I lacked the social skills to defend myself.

So school sucked. Bullied, outcast, ostracized, and degraded. At the same time, the actual school part of things was insanely easy for me and I was bored most of the time,

I also didn’t have the social skills to think to show some humility. The schoolwork was laughably easy to me and it showed.

During this time, I occasionally had a group of friends but I was always mistreated and bullied by them as well. I was a wimpy whiny kid and not that fun to have around.

Eventually, I graduated with honors from high school. And then, after one last summer goofing off, I went to university.

There I acquired a good group of friends. Nerds like me, with whom I felt comfortable and relaxed and included. We hung out and played cards at The Pit, a cafeteia, and called ourselves the Pit Crew.

Those were the happiest days of my life. My classes were cool, I had a social life, I hung out with my friends a lot, and things were generally groovy.

We all know how that ended. My parents defunded my education, I was forced to move back home to live with them because their severance packages meant that I did not qualify for a student loan because they could afford to continue to pay for my education.

They just chose not to.

And the worst part is that I cheerfully agreed to all of it. It was all done with my permission. All my life, I had been expected to make life as easy for my parents as possible and so I was still the kid who was eager to please and okay with everything and whose motto was “Sure thing, Mom and Dad.”

How clever of them to take advantage of that.

This withdrawal of funding killed me inside. I went downhill fast. Ended up a dehyrdrated, malnourished, paranoid, hyprochorndriac lunatic with vivid hallucinations (mostly tactile and auditory) who spent all day on the couch in front of the TV while life continued as normal around him. My IBS was out of control, I couldn’t keep food in, even drinking water made me feel sick, and I was wracked with pain.

Eventually, I hit my frustration point and started bringing myself out of that terrible state bit by bit, fighting it with a savage determination.

That got me to a stable state, and that is where I have been ever since. For more than 20 years, I have managed to get by via compulsively playing videos and hanging out online all day. I have done it in Portland, Silicon Valley, the GVRD, and of course, back home in Summerside, and to be honest, it’s pretty much the same everywhere.

At times, I have fought back against my mental illness. Other times it was all I could do to survive. The mental health system here has let me down in many ways over the last 20 years and I only started to actually get better when I happened to ask for individual therapy when there happened to be a therapist open to new patients and therefore I got hooked up with Doctor Costin.

It’s been a long road since then. It took me to Kwantlen and then VFS but it could not save me from my own inner demons when they took advantage of me and coninced me to quit a great job and then not get a new one right away.

And then Skyrim came along, and their victory was complete.

And I still have not really recovered from Skyrim. That hole was mighty deep and I am still not as functional as I was when I fell in for over a year.

And that’s where I am right now. Making it through the day the best I can, clinging to this sad little perch of mine, life not going anywhere, just a long painful slide to the grave.

That’s the story so far. Can’t say it is particularly exciting or moving. But it’s life.

I hope it has a happy ending.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Can’t think of anything to blog about at the moment. Not even something silly and fluffy.

Hmmm. Maybe I will post some of my old vids.

Never mind, apparently there is no way for me to go to the list of my own files, the ones I have uploaded to YouTube, any more. I am completely lost. Why do I keep finding things where the most basic functions are the hardest to find?

These people don’t know crap about interface design.

I can, however, access my playlists, and I have one where I list some of my favorite funny videos of all time.

So let’s try sharing some of THOSE, assuming any of them are still there.

I am feeling so old-guy cranky right now.

Definitely one of my all time fave Internet videos. The music is meh – fun but generic, like most ska, but the animation if superb and does a very good job of tellling its little story of interspecies “love” using only visuals, with a bit of help from the music.

I say “love” because, watching the thing now, I can see it has not aged as well as I might have thought. The message in a modern context is “relentlessly and even violently stalk the one you love with Terminator-like singlemindedness and eventually they will surrender and love you. ”

And there is so much wrong with that.

She gets away with it only because she’s a cute little bunny girl. That’s why it doesn’t necessarily trip the This Is Bad alarm right away. She is cute and harmless looking and that means she can relentlessly hound poor Cat Dude in a way that would obviously be wrong if you changed anything about her.

Like, if you flipped the genders and it was a male bunny relentlessly pursuing a lady cat, The bunny boy would come across as cross between Pepe LePew and Hannibal Lector. The ending would be absolutely horrifying. And nothing about it would be “cute”.

Or change species. If it was a lady cat pursuing a male bunny with all the subtlety of a mid-frenzy pirahna, we would all assume, not unreasonably, that she wants to eat the poor bunny boy.

Or at least do a lot of things to him whether he wants them or not.

The past becomes a foreign country when you are Woke, doesn’t it? The innocent things of our younger days suddenly seem creepy as hell.

Oh well,. Moving on.

Here is the first Bowser and Blue song I ever heard :

I still love the song and find it highly amusing, although of course, to people who did not grow up in the 80’s,it would be nigh on incomprehensible.

Imagine coming across this when you had never even heard the word “Rambo” before and think of Sylvester Stallone as “that guy from the Expendables movies, maybe”. \

At one point, I had an entire slew of their tracks that I had taped off the radio. And it was great stuff, and very hip at the time. It has a song making fun of Aussie mania, for instance. It was sharp stuff, and some of it was quite daring.

There was a song with the nuanced and sensitive title “Captain Hindgrinder” which was a very long series of nautical/homosexuality innuendos, with lines like “Grab hold of this here tiller, boy, heave ho and up she rises!” and “Have you ever been to sea, Billy Boy, Billy Boy/ have you felt the waves a-crashin’ at your door?” and ending with the Captain saying “We’ll make a seaman of you yet, Billy boy. ”

Look, I never said it was highbrow, I just said it was funny. And kinda hot.

But that was way back in the 80’s, when Bowser and Blue were a hip young comedy duo playing chic clubs in Montreal.

Check out the crap those assholes put out now.

Now it’s the kind of comedy that might give Joe Clark a small chuckle and that your parents embarrass you by being WAY too into it.

What else have we got here?

This one is not exactly funny, but a lot of fun anyhow :

To be honest, I had totally forgotten this little gem. I saw something called “Nursery Rhyme” on the list and I wondered what the hell is that?

Turns out to be a very cute and clever little confection, with great performances of some very cunningly arranged rhymes. They manage to deliver the lines in a more or less naturalistic style despite the fact that they were delivering rhyming couplets, and that takes a good deal of skill.

Plus I love how the cast of characters keeps expanding. Gives me a good “amateur production so we want as many people as possible to get a credit” feeling.

And I know I already said this, but it’s just so damned clever!

Plus Tom is pretty hot, in a douche-y kind of way.

I just posted it to my Facebook with this introduction :

A clever confection of humor and verse
About a poor girl whose day gets worse and worse
But never you worry, it all ends quite happily
With melodious couplets that go off quite snappily
And I know that some people mind find it a bit twee
But others will enjoy it – people like me
So enjoy this small tale where things get worse and worse
(Not safe if you hate people speaking in verse.

What can I say, the rhyming’s contagious.
It makes me do things completely outrag-

No. I can stop,. I am stopping now. This is me, stopping.

Phew. That was a close one.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the videos as much as I enjoyed sharing them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.