Got a call about, of all things, those compression stockings I ordered way, way back when my leg first got infected.

Like I even give a shit any more.

But answering the call did force me to get out of bed, and that woke me up enough to realize that I was super hungry and so here I am, eating lunch and blogging when I would rather still be asleep.

Because I am, as usual, super sleepy at this time. And that makes the words not want to come out and play.

It’s hard to have something to say when you are barely conscious.

And man, am I getting tired of this bullshit.

Every goddamned day I am slogging through turgid swamps of sleepiness while I eat my lunch and try to put some goddamned words on the page.

It’s very stressful. I would much rather sleep until I was done but either hunger or the need to pee always wakes me up and then I got to eat and blog.

I am getting so sick of this that I am pondering separating the eating and the blogging. Eat lunch while watching stuff via YouTube, then go back to sleep and do part one of my blogging when I wake up again.

A radical step, by my standards, but potentially worth it if it saves me from this god damned bullshit every god damned day.

Well that’s all i got in me right now. I am done eating and I am going back to bed,.

See you on the flipflop.

---

Not feeling well

Let’s make it official : this was not your average “sleepy day”.

In fact, I am pretty sure my body must be fighting off an infection because I have been wiped out all day. As in, it’s a little before 7:30 pm and only now do I feel awake.

I spent almost the entire afternoon in fitful, tortured slumber, broken up only by trips to the bathroom and abortive attempts to play video games which ended with a whimper when I realized I just had too little brain available for them.

That’s not normal. Even when I stay up till like 9 am or 10 am, I am usually caught up on sleep by the late afternoon. And I went to bed at 8:30 am this morning.

There’s one rogue variable though : the fact that it is finally summer and in summer I tend to have tortured and unpleasant sleep in the afternoons.

It’s the heat, I assume. I am prone to heat stroke and heat sickness, and if you combine heat stroke with my sleep apnea, you get a dream vacation in upper Hell.

Honestly, I would rather have an infection. Because an infection will pass after a week or so, whereas summer ain’t going to be over till like, September.

Still, I can take steps. The first would be to avoid napping in the afternoon.

That would be fairly tall order. As patient readers know, I use naps asa form of mood regulation. Napping resets my background anxiety level, and if I try skipping it, I grow more and more anxious and the effort of staying awake starts really stressing me out.

And I know this is an abuse of sleep, in a sense. All the sleep hygiene guides tell me that I would be better off sleeping in one eight hour block like a normal human being instead of splitting it into two naps and a single 4 hour ish block.

But I don’t really feel like I have a choice. My mind is too disturbed and restless for me to be able to stay asleep for eight hours.

Hell, to even get that four hour block, I have to take Mirtazapine.

Dunno how the hell I would get eight hours. But I get the feeling it would involve an IV drip and someone to turn me now and then so I don’t get bedsores.

And possibly a blackjack to the base of the skull.

What can I say, the weather is always unsettled in this head of mine. True rest is an alien concept to me.

I mean, I think I remember sleeping reasonably well as a child. It still took me a really long time to get to sleep, but I think I woke up feeling okay-ish.

Don’t quote me on that, though.

---

RIP Uncle Sonny

Well shit. Just got a Facebook message from my brother that my Uncle Sonny died in his sleep last night.

Fuck. 🙁 I guess it’s not a total surprise, as he’s had heart problems since the 80’s and it was kind of amazing he lived as long as he did.

But it’s still a shock, and I miss him already. He was my first real boss. Before I went to work for him, I had only had my paper route, which I did pretty much entirely alone, and my summers pedaling my Dickie Dee ice cream cart around, which was also a jbo I did pretty much entirely on my own.

I mean, I had bosses, but I only saw the one for my paper route when I turned in the money for the papers and I only saw my Dickie Dee boss at the beginning and end of every working day.

And I know it was as a favour to my mother that Uncle Sonny hired me. And I know that there were times I gave him reason to wish he hadn’t.

I was much younger and more clueless and less responsible than I am now, and there were times I acted more like a teenager than a young man in his 20s.

But he put up with me, probably because I was very good with the customers. I am that rare person who actually enjoys customer service.

To me, it’s people coming to me looking for things I can give them, even if it’s just ringing up their purchases.

I have such a low opinion of my own competence that simply being able to do that competently over and over again makes me very happy.

Back then, I didn’t think my Uncle Sonny liked me very much. But now I can see that he was just somewhat cranky by nature.

Anyhow, RIP Uncle Sonny, and my condolence to my cousins Dale, Nola, and Blaine.

Hang in there, Mom.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

YouTubers, that is.

I’ve been watching (well, listening) to a lot of videos that summarize the rise, fall, and other misadventures of various YouTube stars lately.

Why? Well, partly because they are just interesting stories, but mostly because I hope to become a YouTube star myself and so you better believe I am taking notes.

Granted, they are mental notes. But those are the only kind I use anyhow.

In school, I took notes in class mostly to keep from being bored.

The strongest theme that has emerged from all these videos is these people not responding well to criticism.

They get super defensive and lash out, and end up starting beefs with other creators, and then comes the drama llama to poop all over everything. The creator ends up losing a lot of subscribers and everything goes to hell.

This is not particularly surprising. You take some youngish person and give them sudden wealth and fame and you get angst and drama. These people, like most of us, have never dealt with all the weird shit that comes crawling out of the dark dank swamp of our social instincts when our social status suddenly skyrockets, so it is not a surprise that they get confused and angry and so on.

After all, when you think about it, it’s no wonder these people don’t know how to deal with criticism because most of us don’t ever face serious criticism.

At least, not in the larger social sense.

So I consider myself forewarned. If I ever get anywhere on YouTube, I will have to make sure to not get hot under the collar about shit people say about me.

It’s got me thinking about what kind of persona I want to project as well. While being a paradigm shattering shit disturbing iconoclastic firebrand has great appeal to me, I am increasingly pondering an alternative I call “Mister Reasonable”.

I know that I have the ability to keep cool and calm and controlled where others might get drawn into petty arguments, personal attacks, and the usual interpersonal crap.

I could see myself acting as a cool, detached, but compassionate voice of reason in public debate whose manner and outlook inspires people to see past their anger and focus on the simple, human things that really matter.

So basically a toned down version of Secular Messiah Fru.

I know I can do that. But I don’t know if I wanna. Once more, I am faced with the issue of trying to pick one of my facets to represent the whole and it’s really frigging hard.

I keep coming back to the idea of having different personae, each with their own channel and their own area of expression. That would solve the many facets issue,but there is a reason I have always resisted any identity splitting like that, and it’s the deep fear that my sanity would shatter from the strain.

I am not saying I would develop full blown Dissociative Identity Disorder), but I can see each persona developing in parallel and my ending up very confused.

So I doubt I will go that route.

Don’t know how else to solve the problem though….

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,

More after the break.

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Inside a mind

Another genre of video I have been consuming lately is the output of a channel called Inside a Mind. Here’s their telling of the infamous BBC show “Ghostwatch”.

It’s a fascinating story and I heartily suggest you watch the video, but in case you are too TL;DR for that, here’s the gist :

Way back in the 90s, the BBC put on a drama called Ghostwatch on Halloween. But this was not your average spookfest. Instead, it was done exactly like it was real news coverage of actual paranormal events, complete with an actual well respected newscaster as the anchor and real celebrities as themselves doing the presenting.

Including fan favorite Craig Charles,aka Lister from Red Dwarf.

And while they told people it was fiction at the beginning and end, and did other things along those lines, they did such a good job making it seem real that it didn’t matter. A lot of people were scared far beyond any reasonable limit, including one mentally disturbed boy who committed suicide and left behind a note saying something like “Ghosts are real, so I think I will go be a ghost now. “

For more on what an amazing job they did making it seem both real and hella fucking scary, watch the clip.

So clearly, the BBC fucked up big time. But I can’t censure them too harshly because this is exactly the sort of thing I would want to do if I could.

Well, and I hadn’t watched the clip and learned what a terrible idea it would be.

I enjoyed that video so much that I decided to check out other videos on the channel, and that’s how I came across this :

It’s the story of this YouTube account that posted videos telling a marvelously disturbing story of Daisy Brown and her father’s creation called Alan.

Now, to me, it was clearly fake. I mean, one look at Alan and you know he’s a puppet. But it was told in a very “real” way that had a lot of people wondering if it was fiction or maybe even…. nonfiction?

Well, not everyone has a keen analytic mind like mine.

Anyhow, what kept me enthralled with the story was how it was told indirectly but very compellingly. In fact, the fact that people had to dig around a little to find it all because it was not being presented as a narrative only made it seem more real.

Ethically, I have some reservations about fucking with people’s minds like this.

But artistically I could not possibly love it more. I am enraptured by the potential of this kind of storytelling and have enormous respect for the people who put it together because if there is one thing I respect, it’s a really top quality public illusion.

The kind that takes a lot of effort and thoughtfulness and attention to detail.

I love it so much that I actually thought about whether I wanted to try something like that myself. But I don’t think I do.

Or if I did, it would be from an entirely different angle from horror.

Possibly something that convinces people of its reality precisely because nothing implausible happens in it.

Something about a rising global movement? I dunno.

But regardless of whether I get involved, I am taking great inspiration from it.

Art is so goddamned awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s just…. could.

It’s so damned complicated being me.

At any point, I could make a video. I have ideas. Part of me is itching to make another and take a lot more time and care with it this time. I know I can only do so much skulduggery trying to figure out my voice and attitude before I can’t make any progress without actually doing the damned thing.

But it is so hard to do things when the rabid dogs of self-hatred are tearing at my guts. When “could” turns into “should”, that “should” becomes yet another way for my overpowered superego to punish me.

So to escape said punishment, I flee into my distractions, and nothing gets done, and I feel even worse about myself, so I bury myself even further, and sooner or later I am going to lose sight of the surface entirely and finally go completely crazy.

That prospect is not without a certain appeal. Might be nice to just give up trying to deal with life entirely and just go wherever the tempests of insanity want me to go.

But ultimately, that would leave me trapped in my own mind, and that would be hell.

So instead I am stuck painstakingly picking through my own guts trying to fix myself with the same brain that is broken in the first place.

At this point, I would welcome any sort of higher power to whom I can surrender my broken and unworthy self in order to be reborn and made whole again.

But if I want to find one of those, I would pretty much have to invent it myself. Other people’s imaginary patriarchs are not going to cut it for me. They bear the grubby handprints of people’s petty agendas and lust for power all too clearly for me.

Plus, ya know, I know they are not real. But that seems less and less important to me as I get older. Fuck reality.

Clearly, reality is not enough to keep a human psyche stable. We need some form of escape from the constraints of realism in order to provide permission for the mind to generate whatever emotional inputs it needs in order to be healthy.

So I need to dream myself up one of those, I suppose. I dunno. It all seems so risky and crazy and weird when I try to imagine it applying it to myself.

I have been dedicated to the truth and nothing but the truth for so long. Quite arrogantly, I have looked down my nose at the people and their cherished delusions.

Surely, a highly intelligent person with a keen and powerful mind like me had no need for such obvious bullshit. Right?

But genius or dolt, we all need the same things. Love. Acceptance. Peace. Safety. Connection. Status. Community.

Home. Can’t forget home.

But how can you believe in magic when you already know how the trick is done?

That’s why it has to come from withing, I suppose.

Because reality just plain does not have what I need.

Reality isn’t enough.

There has to be more.

Even if I have to invent it for myself.

More after the break.

---

I did an oops

Screwed up last night. Twice, in fact. When Joe asked me if I needed to go to Sav-On before we hung out with Felicity near McDonald’s, I should have said yes.

I was all out of my usual supplies, having undershopped a tad, and needed to get more.

But by saying no, I insured that I would be getting said supplies at 7-11,not Sav-On, and 7-11 does not stock the kind of carb-free snacks I like.

Then, to compound the error, I forgot myself entirely once we actually got there and got the same sorts of carb-laden snacks I used to eat all the time.

Double oops. Hard to believe I have only been lo carb for a month. Now the sort of things I used to consume on the regular seem sort of gross to me.

I mean, they still taste good. But they don’t feel right. If that makes sense.

And I would love to be able to say that I refuse to eat them and will, in fact,give them away ASAP, but no. I will end up eating them, at least until I get fresh supplies tomorrow evening at Sav-on.

But from that point on, it’s back to the new regime, with the almonds and the peanuts and the wasabi peas and such.

Maybe then I will give it all away.

Or maybe not. Whatever.

---

It’s all carbs!

I think I may have mentioned this already. If so, sorry. I will be brief.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the snack aisle at 7-11 and I suddenly realized that the entire aisle was carbs.

Whether it was candy or chips or crackers or chocolate or donuts or whatever, the main thing everything had in common was loads and loads of low-density carbs.

And that really got me thinking. Why do we snack on carbs? Human beings enjoy a wide variety of foods. It’s what makes us omnivores. We happily munch fruit and meat and cheese and all the rest, and yet when we snack, it’s carbs

The quick, glib,and insufficient explanation would be that carbs stimulate the reward center of the brain, ergo, they are addictive.

But a steak stimulates the reward center too, so there has to be more to it than that.

Perhaps our nutritional programming prioritizes the acquisition of calories over all else. In the wild, that makes sense. Carbs are the fuel of life, after all, and if you run out of fuel, it doesn’t matter how healthy the rest of you is, you are dead.

But I don’t think that’s quite it either. Certainly, corporations have played their part through the largely innocent pursuit of creating the tastiest foods they can.

And the subsidization of wheat, corn, and rice is definitely a silent partner in this.

But I think there is something specifically about carbs qua carbs that produces a sort of high that makes carbs, specifically, quite addictive.

To the point where people get the symptoms of low blood sugar when their actual blood sugar is normal, it has just fallen rapidly from the crazy high of a carb rush.

So what do they do? Eat more carbs. And the cycle continues.

Regardless of the cause, I look forward to getting off that goddamned treadmill when I go back to my usual snacks tomorrow.

Now I need to learn to cut the carbs when I eat out, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just woke up and I am all sleepy and cranky and out of sorts.

More sorts on back order.

Not feeling the words right now. might end up having to stop early again. Wondering if I would be better off waiting until I’ve had some more sleep.

I mean, nothing says I have to eat while I blog. I am eating lunch right now, and I could just watch something on YouTube while I do so.

And man are the words not coming easy right now. It’s hard for me to even stay focused on the screen, let alone put words on it.

Yeah, that sounds good. (Much) more after the break.

---

That felt wrong. OK, not going to do that again.

What’s more,. while I am not as sleepy as before, I feel worse. I think the sleep I just got was very apnic and I am now running pretty low on oxygen.

Time to do my breathing exercises so I can get the used air out of the bottom of my lungs so good clean unused air can replace it.

And just think, that’s only one of the ways in which my life is a horror show!

There’s also the sores all over my legs! Big gross wounds covered by scabs which itch and therefore tempt me to remove them.

Sounds like a pretty serious problem, doesn’t it? Generally speaking, gaping wounds are a big frigging deal. But not according to the ER doc.

His diagnosis was basically “um,they will probably go away when you get your blood sugar under control,or whatever. Bye!”

Doctors never take me seriously and are always eager to get away from me.

I think it’s because I am fat.

Thebn there’s whatever the hell is happening on my scalp. It’s gone way beyond dandruff now. In fact, I am downright nostalgic for mere severe dandruff.

Instead, the whole front two thirds of my scalp oozes some kind of clear fluid, occasionally mixed with blood, all the time. Said ooze dries into an crusty layer that I have to remove periodically because a) my scalp kind of needs to breathe, and b) it itches just like the scabs do.

I am tempted to cut my hair super short so I can see if my high strength dandruff shampoo to cure the issue.

But it’s already a visible and disgusting problem. Shaving down would make it more so. So if I was to go that route, I would need some kind of hat to wear in public.

And of course, I can’t bring the issue to my doctor any more than I can bring my leg wounds to him because he’snot seeing people in person due to Covid.

How the hell he can diagnose anything over the phone when he can’t even see it is beyond me. Maybe he does Zoom calls now?

For that matter, couldn’t he just wear a mask and surgical gloves? It really depresses me that in person medicine is just not an option for me right now.

So there’s wounds on my legs and my scalp oozes. Of course, I still smother in my sleep as well, and I get weird pains all over my body but especially my feet as my nervous system is slowly self destructing.

Thank goodness medical science has reassured me that none of that is a big deal.

Otherwise I would be really worried!

More after the break.

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Funnyman or Firebrand?

So now that I have settled on which facet of the glittering gemstone that is my scintillating personality I want to put on YouTube – the political pundit side – I am left with an even harder question :

Am I going to try to make it funny?

I mean, I got the mad comedy skills. I do funny. And there is no doubt that making my political and social commentary funny would make the product far more appealing than just straight up polemics.

Just look at how popular Colbert and the Daily Show are. I could produce that kind of product no problem. Get the news, pop it into the video editor, add my snarky comments, and there you go.

I think I would call it Riff the News, “the show that really riffs the news a new one”,and if that caught on, I would expand it to “riffing” other things.

Movies, video games, nature documentaries, porn, whatever.

But the problem is, the sort of politic diatribes I have in mind are not funny. I want to excoriate the evil and madness and stupidity I see in the world with the power of my words and my voice, and it’s hard to imagine that also being funny.

Like, I am pretty sure my hero Martin Luther didn’t get a lot of laughs.

But I am not saying it’s impossible. In fact, I am pretty sure there is an acceptable middle path out there somewhere, it’s just going to take a lot of imagination work for me to find it.

No prob. The prize is more than worth the skull sweat.

The obvious median between humor and political commentary is satire. And that’s probably the basic direction I am aiming for.

But I am not sure that what I want to say can even be seen as satire. Or if I do manage to make it satire, it would be the kind that isn’t actually funny.

Like, “A Modest Proposal” is definitely satire, but not many people would find it funny.

So I dunno. I will have to find the exact right point on the funny versus firebrand spectrum for me. And I am sure it will take some trial and error to find it.

Because as much as I would like to think that my magnificent mind can figure things out so well that it’s perfect right from the start, the truth is that in the real world things always require some fiddling and fine tuning before you get them right.

And I hate fiddling around with fine details.

But I very much want things to be done right.

So I guess I will have to get used to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was therapy day, which is why I am only beginning to blog now, a bit before 7:30 pm, when I would normally be starting on part 2.

Therapy takes a lot out of me, which is why I don’t end up blogging right after therapy. But I should try to do it anyhow as it is best to express all the emotions that therapy stirs up while they are still fresh and I haven’t had time to “process” them yet.

It wasn’t the greatest of sessions, largely because I was pretty sleepy. Not as bad as that one session a couple of months ago when I was barely conscious, but still not all that great overall.

We talked about my vast reservoir of shame that I do not know what to do with. But as I was talking about it, I realized that detaching enough from it to view it as a discrete entity within my psyche was a very good sign and the first step towards getting rid of it.

I can now, metaphorically speaking, start working on the antidote. If I think of it as this massive pool that has to be dealt with linearly, the task seems impossibly huge and I lose all hope.

But if I think of it as a toxic substance that just needs the right reagent to neutralize it, the task seems far more doable.

Remember, folks, this blog is your one stop shopping destination for the nerdiest metaphors on the entire internet.

I know, intellectually, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I know that my family was wrong to treat me as an afterthought at best and a burdensome pest at worst, and that I deserved to be treated as an equal to my siblings and given all the love, attention, reinforcement, guidance, and support I needed to grow up healthy and strong.

Which brings up the other thing I have a vast reservoir of : anger.

That’s harder for me to deal with than the shame because anger is so much more volatile and unpredictable and quite frankly, it scares me.

It scares me because when I try to get in touch with it, it fills me with crazy thoughts that make me feel like at any second, I could devolve into some kind of demented homeless soothsayer screaming at people to wake the fuck up as they passed my cardboard hut.

And that’s one of my more positive scenarios. At least in that one, the worst I would be doing is hurting people’s ears.

Clearly, I need to keep working on making videos because those could be a socially positive outlet for my anger, as well as for my sharp perceptions and wit and all the other good things I have to contribute.

But I don’t want to be the angry ranting guy. That’s too restrictive. I would hate to be in a position where I felt like I had to think of or find something to be angry about.

That would be a terrible way to live. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Plus that’s not the sort of audience I want either. I have seen the sort of people who want to listen to the angry guy and it is not, primarily, thoughtful and intelligent people looking for a new perspective.

It’s people who want to watch the angry person commit verbal violence on somebody, and in that sense it stops being discourse and starts being a bloodsport.

I do not want to be another Morton Downey Junior, regardless of politics.

What I want is to be a powerful force for change. I want to be the person who articulates what others cannot and by doing so speaks truth to power with great precision and impact, like artillery fire.

i want to expose the lies and hypocrisy under which evil thrives and let the pure clean light of the truth disinfect the body politic, and give people the cognitive antibodies they need in order to resist the madness and by opposing end it.

I want to be a source of hope and strength for people because when they listen to me, I make the world make sense to them and make them feel like the problems of the world are understandable and solvable and that the only thing that stands in the way or a mch better world is a small handful of old rich white men and their puppets and that if we want to, we can simply push them out of the way.

There are billions of us and hundreds of them. It would be very, very easy.

Because this is our world, not theirs. The government belongs to us, not the other way around, and we can change the rules of the game any time we want because it is our game and we are free to make it benefit us and not them.

The public is only as powerless as it believes itself to be. As we are seeing all over the world today, when the people are roused to anger, nothing can stop them.

And that’s the message I want to deliver to people. Individually we are weak, but together we are unstoppable.

Together, we can make the world a safer, saner, more compassionate, more intelligent, and above all a better place to live.

it’s been done before. That’s how we got here. How we arrived at this era that, despite how it looks, is still the best time there has ever been to be a human on Planet Earth.

And we can do it again. We can make the world of today look positively Dickensian compared to the bright and shining future we will build together.

And all we have to do is to stop believing in our own powerlessness and push the small number of corrupt old men out of the way and take our government back.

And make it do what we want it to do, for our own benefit.

It really is that simple.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Had a lot of trouble getting to sleep this morning. Had one of my attacks of being sleepy until I lay down and then suddenly I am wide awake and extremely tense.

So I lay there a while, hoping I could relax myself via stretching and other motions, but eventually I had to give up and get up and do stuff.

So I got up and did some of my pushouts, and that helped. Pacing to and fro probably would have helped even more but I was too depressed.

I’d have to feel better in order to do the things that would make me feel better. Fun.

After exercising, I fucked around on the computer a while and eventually got tired enough to go to bed and sleep for real this time.

Time elapsed since first attempt :around 80 minutes.

Time I spent asleep : around three hours.

Clearly that’s not enough.

Yay, another sleepy day.

---

Not happy with how my video turned out. But that’s as far as I can take it for now. When I can, I will try adding some bells and whistles, but right now, it is done.

I would probably be better off making peace with the fact that I will never be the sort of person who hangs on to something he has made until he has made it as good as it can possibly be before putting it out into the world.

That’s just not possible for me. I am too emotionally unstable. If I don’t push it out into the world the moment it is done, my belief in it will collapse and it will never see the light of day and probably will get deleted.

It really limits me as an artist, but it’s the best I can do. I can never be the kind of person who says “Not till it’s ready!”.

Instead, I say “The next one will be better”.

And iit will be. I do make better first drafts over time. But still.

I want to do so much better. And I suppose I will, eventually.

But boy do I wish I could do things the way others do.

---

Maybe what I really need to do is rework how I see my day.

Accept that odds are, I am not going to get anything useful done in the afternoon, at least for the rest of the summer.

Imagine my day as basically starting at 5 pm. By then, I will probably have caught up on sleep and be ready to actually tackle things.

I have resisted this idea for a long time out of some misguided desire to be more “normal” and because for some reason, I find the idea depressing.

But what the hell. I am a creature of the night. Might as well get used to it.

Maybe even try being productive when I am up at night in the wee hours of the morning. Those can be my most active hours sometimes.

Oh, but then I would lose precious video game playing hours!

Maybe what I really need to do is convince myself that being productive is just as safe and fun as playing video games.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

More after the break.

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Leveraging my assets

One of the things I like about my recent “call to libertarians” video is that it allowed me to use more of my assets than just my writing skill.

Yes,I know…. with writing this amazing, how could there possibly be more?

But there is! The video also makes use of my skills as an orator. I have talkedabout that skill here before when I told the stories about how I held an impromptu D&D game and a room full of medical students absolutely spellbound with my charm and wit and likability, and of course, my charisma.

It’s not a standard kind of charisma, but it can be quite effective.

Plus I also have what I will call force of presence. When I am “on”, I come across very strongly both in person and on camera.

This would be a problem without my also being charming and lovable. But I am, and I think that gives me the true charisma that can make people happy just by being around me, basking in my glow.

And that’s like, you know, important.

On the other side of the coin, the video features my potential as a firebrand. I can totally imagine myself being a galvanizing and polarizing figure for my flaming hot speeches that hit people right in the feels and make them good and angry about the world.

Some people would love me for that, some would hate me. Like my hero Martin Luther,. I could end up opening divisions that would last for hundreds of years and really turn the whole world upside down.

I don’t want to do that. I always want peace, enlightenment, and harmony.

But those might not be mine to give. My job, as it were, might be to be the one who starts the fire that burns down all the old dead trees in the forest and makes room for the new trees to find root.

But like another hero of mine, Paul Atreides from Dune, I want to avoid all that if I can. I don’t want millions of people screaming my name as they wage a bloody jihad.

And yet, there is so much hypocrisy and corruption and evil and sheer fucking stupidity and regal galloping buck-naked lunacy in the world today that I can’t see any way to deal with it surgically and precisely.

It feels like the only option I have is to scream back at the void as loud and hard as I can. It’s like an ideological gag reflex that makes me want to violently regurgitate all the poisonous bullshit I have had to swallow right into the face of this terrifying age and force it to deal with its own mess for a change.

And I bet I would feel so much better afterwards.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Had a lot of trouble getting to sleep this morning. Had one of my attacks of being sleepy until I lay down and then suddenly I am wide awake and extremely tense.

So I lay there a while, hoping I could relax myself via stretching and other motions, but eventually I had to give up and get up and do stuff.

So I got up and did some of my pushouts, and that helped. Pacing to and fro probably would have helped even more but I was too depressed.

I’d have to feel better in order to do the things that would make me feel better. Fun.

After exercising, I fucked around on the computer a while and eventually got tired enough to go to bed and sleep for real this time.

Time elapsed since first attempt :around 80 minutes.

Time I spent asleep : around three hours.

Clearly that’s not enough.

Yay, another sleepy day.

---

Not happy with how my video turned out. But that’s as far as I can take it for now. When I can, I will try adding some bells and whistles, but right now, it is done.

I would probably be better off making peace with the fact that I will never be the sort of person who hangs on to something he has made until he has made it as good as it can possibly be before putting it out into the world.

That’s just not possible for me. I am too emotionally unstable. If I don’t push it out into the world the moment it is done, my belief in it will collapse and it will never see the light of day and probably will get deleted.

It really limits me as an artist, but it’s the best I can do. I can never be the kind of person who says “Not till it’s ready!”.

Instead, I say “The next one will be better”.

And iit will be. I do make better first drafts over time. But still.

I want to do so much better. And I suppose I will, eventually.

But boy do I wish I could do things the way others do.

---

Maybe what I really need to do is re

Today I feel like I am fighting my own shadow somewhere deep in the dark and fevered forests of my mind.

Makes me feel a little feisty, a little paranoid. But sort of cheerful too.

Gonna finally finish my frigging video. The thing has been hanging over my head for too long and it’s not like doing the final edit and adding a few bells and whistles is going to be some enormous effort or anything.

Besides, I have ideas for other videos and I can’t do those till I finish this one!

Chaos still reigns in cities all over the world. But it’s a peaceful, non-violent chaos. No overturned cars, no fires, no looting. The demonstrators are policing that themselves. Anyone tries to start that shit, they get surrounded by demonstrators and held down then handed over to the cops.

And that makes me smile.

I keep thinking about what a unique event this all is. Because there is no way these demonstrations would be anywhere near this big and this fervent and this long lasting if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

Covid ensured that billions of people worldwide had plenty of time to come out and protest because they didn’t have to go to work. It also ensured that people were feeling somewhat stir crazy and thus were in the kind of defiant mood that breeds dissent.

Of course, the people in these demonstrations are not social distancing, and that has me worried. Some are wearing masks, some are not.

So if there is a second wave of Covid, we can’t just blame it on the yahoos who want to re-open everything too early.

But one crisis at a time. Covid is so last month. I mean sure, most of us are still social distancing most of the time, but by now that just seems normal.

The levels of nostalgia are piling up so fast, it’s making me dizzy. For three and a half years, we were nostalgic for the pre-Trump years. Then Covid made us nostalgic for the days when all we were dealing with was Trump. Now we’re kind of nostalgic for the time when all we were dealing with was Covid.

Can’t wait to see what the next crisis, the one that makes us long for the days when all we had to deal with was worldwide protests.

I wonder what it will be. Alien invasion? Lawn gnome uprising? Cats 2?

But I am not really worried about the future. The demonstrators will win. Reforms will happen. People are pissed off and the governments of the world know that this is not going to go away on its own.

And what do you know, people all over the world are united in a common cause on an unprecedented level. We have a global consensus now, even moreso than we did on Covid, and the people of the world are realizing that they can make change happen.

These are truly historic times. I feel like the world is finally waking up.

And it is NOT a morning person.

More after the break.

---

OK, first, the video version 2.

The next version will have some clip-art and/or video clips and/or music if I can think of anything that is on message and isn’t so corny that it makes the whole thing seem sarcastic and thereby undercut the message.

I mean, what music do American Libertarians like? Rush?

Now that’s me delivering the message. But I would prefer it to be delivered by someone else. The man whose voice I was unconsciously echoing in my performance.

The voice of Jesse “Formerly Known As The Body” Ventura.

He would bethe perfect person to deliver the message. He has great “mic skills” as we say in wrestling, he’s very popular in libertarian circles, his natural cadence and rhythm is perfect for the message, and not only is he from Minnesota, he was their frigging governor, so you know he’s got cred with right wing-ish people in Minneapolis.

So if you are out there, Mister Ventura, it would mean the world to me if you would record a version of this message in your own voice and style.

Who knows, together we might just be able to bring right and left together in the common cause of defending American liberty.

Surely that’s something we can all agree on, right?

---

The infinite cringe

Let’s talk about shame.

I have lived my entire life crushed by shame. From the very beginning, I felt shame just for being around, taking up space and breathing the air.

Like I have said many times before, all my life,I have felt like an unwanted guest who has overstayed his welcome but cannot leave.

Without saying anything, my family made it clear I was not wanted. I was an unplanned child and too shy and timid to even insist upon my own right to exist, let alone demand my equal share of anything.

So nobody ever dealt me in. Nobody was willing to sacrifice any of what they had in order to give me my due, so I hung around the edges just happy that they let me stay and grateful for whatever tiny scraps were given to me when they remembered me.

Then bullying came along and destroyed whatever was left of my self-esteem, and made me ashamed of being fat, of being smart, and of being around.

I wasn’t welcome anywhere. Nobody was ever happy to see me. I always felt like they were just barely tolerating me, and any second they could abandon me forever.

No wonder I spent so much time in my room.

And to this day, this shame haunts me. There is still a big part of me that feels like I don’t even deserve to be alive, let alone have needs.

I feel like I have spent my entire life in mute apology for my very existence.

Hence the infinite cringe. I have been inwardly cringing away from reality and trying to make myself as small as possible so I can get as close to not existing as I can.

And I don’t know what to do with all this shame. I know that the only real cure for shame is right action, but what is right action when the sin is being alive?

just continuing to be alive is not enough. I need a massive dose of whatever the opposite of shame would be.

Pride, I guess? But pride in what?

I have no answer for that question.

But I am going to keep looking.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, and I made a comic :

I dread the future.

Or maybe I just dread time.

But for as long as I can remember – certainly for all of my adult life – the passage of time has always made me feel guilty and ashamed and scared.

Let’s make sense of that with an example.

Say I am doing computer stuff and happen to glance at the date. With a start, I realize that it’s already half way through the month.

This happens to everyone.

But what doesn’t is the sharp stab of guilt and shame and fear.I feel as a result. It only takes half a heartbeat and yet I go through an entire cycle of “oh crap, even more time has passed without me getting anywhere in life and now I am an even older loser oh god oh god I better bury myself in my distractions to flee this pain”.

Turns out hating yourself is like anything else you do a lot – you get better at it over time.

I mean, sure it’s horrible to feel that way, but you have to admire the efficiency.

Now obviously, that’s a terrible way to go through life – afraid of the future. And not even any specific future – just the fact that time keeps passing and I keep getting older and more pathetic without making anything of myself is more than enough.

So naturally, I respond to this by fleeing back into my distractions, thus ensuring that I keep falling forward through time without making anything of myself.

With depression, it’s always our coping mechanisms which kill us, one way or another. If we were healthy, we would use these mechanisms a reasonable amount as part of full, balanced emotional diet.

But the void inside us takes far, far more than a reasonable amount of anything to fill, and so we fixate on one high yield activity or another.

Only activities with extremely high effort to reward ratios stand a chance of overcoming the chilling anhedonia of depression that makes it so hard to enjoy anything.

So we end up lost in our overused coping mechanisms, whether it’s crossword puzzles, video games, or heroin. Whatever it is, it is our refuge, because it’s the only way we can feel anything close to normal.

Viewed that way, it’s no wonder that I am not all that productive. To go outside my comfort zone is to venture naked out into that cold dark night in a way that people who have never had depression could scarcely comprehend.

It makes me wonder if there is some more reasonable way to go about recovery. Some way of insulating us poor shivering wrecks against that killer frost so that we can better explore the world without feeling like our souls are starving to death.

I suppose that’s what antidepressants are for. And they help a lot, but they are not enough to make me a functional adult citizen. Not even close.

And therapy helps too. As does this blogging. Thank you for reading it.

But it only goes so far. In order to truly get better, I would have to find some way of not feeling so very, very alone.

I have been alone and abandoned in the cold dark night for so very, very long.

All I really want is to finally be able to come home.

More after the break.

---

Just finished attending my first fannish Zoom meeting, and man, was it great.

I attended in voice only because at the last second, I became incredibly paranoid that people would be offended by seeing and hearing me eat.

And I had to eat. The meeting was scheduled for between 6 pm and 9 pm, and there was no way I could wait until 9 pm to eat.

As it turned out, it was a total nonissue, but I guess my social anxiety felt the need to make its presence felt before the meeting, so that is how it happened.

Whatever. The next time I will be there live and in color, and my social anxiety will just have to deal with it.

I had loads of fun. I guess I didn’t realize how badly I missed true fannish conversation until I got my first dose in a long time and it was sooooo good.

Same thing happens if I go without Diet Coke for a while. My active withdrawal symptoms are minor – a bit of sleepiness, tiny little headache – but that first taste after a drought tastes soooo damned good.

And I got to see and hear people I had only read via the BCSFAzine letter columns before, like Steve Fahnestalk and Lloyd Penney.

And I got to see people I know but haven’t seen in a really long time, like Steve Forty and Stew Smythe, who has been very ill and so I was SUPER glad to see him.

And in general,. it was just wonderful to enjoy the company of like-minded people. Not to knock the other members of Le Gang – Joe, Julian, and Felicity. They are fascinating and intelligent people and I feel blessed to have them as friends.

But we talk all the time. So it’s refreshing to have a broader discussion with more participants now and then.

Plus, it’s nice to be around people who haven’t heard all my jokes. (*laugh track*)

Gameswise, I finished Assassin’s Creed : Unity, and based on how much I loved that game, I started looking at other entries in the series.

And there are a lot of other Assassin’s Creed games.

So I looked the series up on Metacritic, and the one with the highest score on PC was Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood. This was good news because that’s also the one Maelkoth said was his fave.

So that will likely be the next game I play once I completethe Franciade DLC in AC:U.

Right now, I can get it for around $20, which is fine, I can spare that these days.

Oh, and get this : Assassin’s Creed : Unity, the one I am almost done playing and absolutely loved, only has a Metascore of 70 percent.

Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood, the one I am probably going to get next, has a Metascore of 89 percent.

So if I love Unity, I will absolutely adore Brotherhood. Statistically speaking.

I can’t wait to find out if theory and practice align.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Video later. Stay tuned.

A lot of the time, people will reject a line of reasoning simply because they do not like the conclusion it leads to.

This is perfectly human of us. We’re not fact gathering robots, we’re people, and we have emotional needs which sometimes take priority.

But it’s not intellectually honest.

Not liking the conclusion has no bearing on whether the reasoning (or its conclusion) is valid or not. Something is either true or it isn’t. Emotions don’t change that.

This phenomenon really shows itself when, in the course of debate, someone says “That can’t be true!”.

All they are really saying is, “I don’t want it to be true!”.

The truly intellectually honest person follows the evidence wherever it goes and accepts whatever conclusion it supports.

But like I said, we are human, and need to protect ourselves emotionally, and so we reject emotionally damaging conclusions even when they are obviously true.

Even the most intellectually honest of us are guilty of reacting to a bad conclusion by subjecting the reasoning that led to it very, very closely, looking for any flaws that would justify rejecting the conclusion.

I certainly have done it.

Suddenly, we are incredibly fussy about logic.

And that’s bad enough, but of course, if we like the conclusion, the situation is reversed. We will overlook glaring logical inconsistencies and errors in thinking if the line of reasoning leads us to somewhere we want to be.

Suddenly, we’re not fussy at all.

---

Dealing with the raging sleepies yet again. This is growing quite tiresome.

The only cure I can think of is to just keep sleeping until I am frigging done. No matter how long it takes. Just stay in bed until I wake up feeling rested.

But that could take a very long time and I got things to do.

Plus it would fuck up my schedule. I am awake and blogging now because this is the (approximate) time when I eat lunch. That’s part of my daily routine.

And I am not good at routine. By default, I improvise. Sticking to a rigid routine sounds downright stultifying to me and there’s not a lot I can do about that.

So I tend to cling to whatever regularity I can actually maintain.

Because despite my dislike of schedules and routine, I also crave stability and predictability. Somehow, the universe is perfectly happy for these things of both be true in me at the same time,.

It seems like I have a lot of needs that my own nature precludes me from fulfilling.

And that kinda sucks.

Oh. And I beat the main mission of Assassin’s Creed : Unity this morning.

Awesome game. Exactly the sort of “open world full of quests” game I love. Plus I love being able to climb and jump and otherwise get around my environment like that.

It gives me such a feeling of freedom and power.

Plus I loved that the game was so very, very French.

More after the break.

---

OK, first off, here’s the video. Sort of.

That’s the first rough edit of it, anyhow. I was all set to break it down to just the bits that were needed, one hundred percent content, but shortly after I started editing the video I got this splitting frigging headache right smack dab in the center of my forehead and it was all I could do to finish the rough cut before the pain forced me to stop.

Ergo, what you see above is not my best work, which is why it is an unlisted video. Hopefully, I will produce a finished version, with text screens and music and a much finer grain editing job, tomorrow afternoon.

I really, really hope that my headache was a one off thing. Given the location, it was most likely some form of eye strain headache, and that is not good.

If I get a headache every time I edit video, then I might have to re-evaluate my plans. Making videos is what I was planning to do with my life for now, and that means editing them all by myself.

I highly doubt I could convince someone to edit them for me. And even if I did, I doubt I would trust them to do it right.

Luckily, there’s plenty of ways to get around eye strain issues. I could change the color settings on the UI of Video Studio, I could experiment with editing video under different lighting conditions, I could see about getting clip-on anti-glare glasses, and so on.

So it’s solvable.

By the way, do you like my video? I know it’s very rough, but you get the idea, right? I want to prick the conscience of American libertarians into actually living up to their stated ideals and sticking up for the freedoms they supposedly cherish.

And if they don’t want to do it, I would really, really like to know the reasons why.

After all, the jackbooted thugs of the federal government are as we speak violating the God-given rights of sovereign individuals. This is the exact scenario they have been warning us about all these years.

What possible reason could they have for failing to spring into action?

That’s why I made sure to speak in the strong, emotional, supercharged way that goes from one powerful symbol to another that they respond so well to.

I wanted them to have absolutely nothing to object to in what I said except for the fact that I mentioned Donald Trump.

That way, they have to either agree with me, or admit that it was never about freedom, liberty, justice, or the American Way. They were always statist thugs willing to abandon every American ideal ever conceived in order for their fascist wet dreams to come true where they can finally retreat from the adult world they never could handle and hide away in a society that by every possible measure is worse…. but it sure is easy to understand, and that’s what makes it all worth it.

And the fact that they get to hoot and holler like monkeys while their fellow Americans get brutalized is the most fun part for them.

Finally, they get to stop pretending to be civilized and get to be the dark-hearted heahen savages they have always been.

Enjoy it while it lasts, you goddamned apes.

Society will be coming for you soon enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.