So I learned from TikTok’s endless bounty that there have been a number of highly successful pilot programs testing out the viability of a 4 day work week.

These programs have been so successful, in fact, that the project is expanding to dozens of cities worldwide.

So it’s definitely an idea under consideration.

Some of its merits (besides the obvious) is that it would save businesses money in terms of office operating costs like heat and lights (just like during the pandemic), there would be less traffic during rush hour on the new “off” day, and people would have more time to recovery from their shorter work week.

The big obvious advantage is that everyone would have to sacrifice one day less just to put food on the table. Duh.

This could work a number of ways.

Simplest is the 40 hour model, where instead of five 8 hour shifts, you would work four 10 hour shifts per week.

Most people like that idea. Afew hours more at work in exchange for one more day off?

Sign me the fuck up.

On the other end of the spectrum is the 32 hour model where it really is like a long weekend every weekend because you would be working 8 hours a day 4 days a week.

Proponents of this plan say this can be done without a loss of productivity by streamlining workflow tp eliminate unproductive hours.

I have my doubts.

Then there’s the very sticky issue of how one implements this change. Ideally it would spring naturally from the progression of work and corporate culture over time.

One could see how an employer for whom one only has to work 4 days a week having a massive advantage in the labour market.

All government could do is offer tax incentives. Any form of forcing workplaces to comply would be disastrous.

It’s an interesting idea. In the past, we went from a 7 day work week to a 6 and then a 5.

We are long overdue to take the next step.

More after the break.

That was interesting

The section above this one was an experiment in writing something more “serious’ and editorial instead of my usual babbling brook of consciousness.

And I think it went okay. Would have been better in the old days when I could write for longer, but I think I did a reasonably good job of getting my point across.

But I didn’t really enjoy doing it, so I will not be doing it again any time soon.

Not for free, anyhow.

There just wasn’t enough opportunity for self-expression in it. And one thing I now know for sure about myself is that I have a powerful need for self-expression.

In fact, I am tempted to say it’s my raison d’etre.

And it always has been. I just didn’t know it.

All my trying to get and hold people’s attention, all my joking and opining and pontification and whatnot has all been my blind stumbling attempt to express the fire raging within me and my urge to shine, shine, shine.

It’s the main force fighting my shyness and insularity. Sure, I need my alone time like any good introvert, but I also have an unquenchable need for attention and affection and applause, and that’s not introverted at all.

So now I have a better idea what my true drives and motivations are. I need an audience, damn it, and somehow I am going to get one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow .

Let’s see… muscle aches? Yup.

Runny nose? Ya huu.

Headache? You betcha.

Sore throat? Quite.

Heavy fatigue? Zzzz… uh, wha?

Flop sweat making me feel vaguely glazed? You bet your honey dipped ass.

General half dead feeling of swampy malaise? Oh lord yes.

It’s official : that flu I had last week is back.

Yaaay. Did not miss it.

And like last time, it snuck up on me while I was taking an early afternoon nap. Felt reasonably okay when I lay down to sleep.

Woke up feeling like used shit.

Is this the same bug? Feels like it. Symptoms match. Kind of scary to imagine it lying dormant for a week then attacking again though.

Hopefully, the Gabapentin and naproxen I just took will kick the symptoms’ ass again \.

Because this shit is harsh, man.

At least now I know why I have been so dang tired for a while now.

In fact, I wish I could go back to bed right now. My head and my limbs both feel quite heavy and I long to surrender to gravity and get some more sleep.

But I have promises to keep
And 58 words to go before I sleep

So I guess I will have to muddle through
After all, I always do.

Can’t imagine I will order in tonight, like I had planned to do.

Now is not the time to be making the perilous journey from this computer to the apartment door and back.

Not when I feel like I feel right now.

More after the break.

My wander lust

See, the thing about my penis is that….nah, just kidding!

This is not going to be one of my discomforting screeds where I go into serious TMI mode and give a detailed account of just how “lonely” I am.

Though one of those may be coming soon.

I’m so lonely I could pole vault.

No, tonight I am going to talk about my deeply suppressed and rarely expressed desire to wander the world in search of the things I treasure the most : good conversation, se situations, and above all else, good vibrations.

Vibes are real, folks, at least to an empathic spoge like me, and I would go damned near anywhere for those happy, wholesome, hearty life-affirming vibrations.

Heck, I might even hang out with dull, repressed, tiny minded people I would normally assiduously avoid like a pleasant but annoying cousin at a family reunion.

If the vibe is good, I’m good.

I call them vibes because that gets the idea across in the vernacular, butbI don’t think they are some kind of mystical harmonies on the astral plane or any of that kind of New Age bullcrap suitable for those with minds so open you can hear the wind if yoi press your ear against theirs.

My best bet is that it’s pheromones . They affect us both powerfully and unconsciously and so it would make sense if one of their jobs was to help us dancing monkeys know what is going on emotionally around us.

All I know is I think a good long stay somewhere with excellent vibes would do me one hell of a lot of good.

Anyone got any recommendations?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some people wonder who they are.

Me, I wonder what I am.

Because I have never even heard of another person even remotely like me.

There have been people I somewhat identified with – like a pre-billionaire Elon Musk, for example – but nobody that I felt was the same kind of critter I am.

That’s a testament to just how alienated I am from the rest of humanity.

And part of that is no doubt due to my sky high IQ. I am simply not on the same mental plane as the rest of humanity., and I never have been.

And I am all too aware of the power differential this creates. With a mind like mine, I could easily overwhelm, bully, dominate, cheat, or even torment others and they would be powerless to resist me.

Luckily for both my soul and the fate of those I encounter, the very notion of doing anything like that fills me with sadness and nausea.

When you’re as empathetic as I am, to hurt others is to hurt yourself. I would feel the pain and fear of my victims very keenly, and I’m no masochist.

Still, the power imbalance leads to a lot of tension when I am interacting with normal people. There are always a lot of weird thoughts and unacceptable impulses going through my head and making it hard for me to concentrate on the conversation.

No wonder I’m so socially anxious.

In fact, part of me, namely my long neglected id, always wants to flip out and go on a rampage like some kind of intellectual King Kong.

Just leave me the hell alone! Grrrraaaaar!

More after the break.

Loss of balance

I have a weird and vexing financial problem.

Somehow, the last time I registered one of these Pay Power cards I use to shop online, the card got registered with the system – I’ve used it numerous times since then – but didn’t register with their website, leading to the absurd situation I find myself in now where I can spend the money but I can’t check my balance.

So I have no idea how much moolah I got left on there. None whatsoever . Could be $125. Could be $20. I have no way of knowing.

But I would still like to spend it. So all I can do is try to spend it and see if it comes back as insufficient funds.

If it doesn’t, great, Money successfully spent.

But if it does, all I can do is take note of the amount attempted and try spending less and less until it finally goes through.

Which is ridiculous and makes me seem like I am trying to get away with something.

And that rankles every bourgeoisie bone in my body. Me? A criminal? Preposterous!

Jokes aside, I do take a lot of pride in my honesty. Very Taurus of me. We tend to think people should be able to tell how honest and forthright we are just by looking at us.

Even though we tend to be somewhat paranoid and suspicious of others ourselves.

I suppose I could handle being suspected of something if it was coming from the same sort kf general paranoia as my own.

After all, I am spooky smart.

Just in time for Halloween!

Fruvous shouts, “Boo!” very intelligently.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

i know one thing – I am sure as fuck sick of always being hemmed in by fear.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Not a great session. My fault – I didn’t have a lot to say. Kinda drew a blank.

Did talk about my anxiety a bit. We decided what I keep calling my paranoia is more like what we now call hyper-vigilance.

After all, it’s not like I think someone is out to get me. Other than life itself.

Whatever you call it, it results in my not being able to sleep properly because even in my sleep, my mind is always racing around like a hyperactivity puppy trying to find the danger it can smell but not see.

So the fear that keeps me from entering the land of the living is not just a suit of leaden armor or the deathly dark cold of midnight tundra.

It’s also the howling unceasing winds of anxiety constant pushing me around. It’s the hyper-vigilance that makes it impossible to truly relax .

It’s that scared little animal inside me that refuses to ever accept that it is safe.

Because then I would let my guard down and that’s when they GET you.

To be honest, I am beginning to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off just letting them HAVE me already just to get it over with.

Not that there’s anyone there in the first place.

Well I am all out of brain calories. Time for a nap.

More after the break.

Brain calories restored

Well, in the process of being restored, anyhow.

Another thing I discussed with Doc Costin today was sleep. Mine has been pretty low quality ever since I left the hospital, and that was two months ago.

Doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. But calendars don’t lie.

Anyhow, sleep. The discussion helped me de-normalize the strung out yet also tense way I usually feel.

Because this feeling is not normal. I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s been there for a really long time, too. So long that I can’t remember when it started.

It could be decades ago for all I know.

This is clearly unacceptable. We biological life forms need our sleep and the broken, shallow sleep ain’t cutting it.

So I am going to try Zopiclone again. It worked quite well for me when I was in the hospital. I got some very good sleep there, ironically enough.

But when I tried the same cocktail of Zopiclone, naproxen, and acetaminophen when I got home, I got the usual “full speed into a brick wall” response where my brain tries to catch up on all those missed REMs all at once and in doing so burns out my brain and leaves me feeling like a blown fuse.

In other words, crappy. And it’s very hard to talk myself into doing something you know will have that effect, even if you know it’ll make you feel a lot better in the long run.

Hopefully taking only half a pill will ameliorate that effect.

Can’t do it tonight, got Wound Care in the AM and so I can’t afford to be all fucked up by overloaded sleep when I go.

That would suck.

But tomorrow night for sure. Then I will have all of Saturday to recover.

Life is so damned hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I can’t shake the feeling that I am the victim of karmic irony.

Because it seems like I sat around doing nothing but rot my brain with video games until the option to do anything else was taken away from me by illness.

Now I am unable to go for a walk or start using the primitive gym in this building or really to do much of anything at all by myself.

At least I am realistic and pragmatic enough not to tear my hair and gnash my teeth wailing, “O woe betide, I was just about to start walking and running and kayaking and cross country skiing and…”

Yeah bullSHIT you were.Even if I suddenly had my peak health from when I was 21 back, I would still spend my time the same way.

The only real difference would be that masturbation would be way better.

I miss being that horny.

But apart from that, little would change, because the real problem lies within this Byzantine labyrinth I call a mind.

I walked like someone clad in iron long before my legs went boom. Depression is just like that. Everything I do involve overcoming such a potent kind of inner resistance that I have frequently likened it to driving with the parking brake on.

That’s the invisible burden we depressives carry with them every second of every day of their sad little lives.

We can’t explain or justify it to those who neither see nor feel our burden. You might as well be trying to tell fish they’re wet, or what color is to those born blind.

Truth is that most people will never lack what we lack, thank Whoever. And it’s hard to imagine missing something you barely know you have in the first place.

I wish there was a pill that gave you depression for like 24 hours so that people who deal with us on a regular basis could know what its like.

Except for us, it never ends.

More after the break.

Good old pepperoni

Decided to order in tonight. Pondered what I wanted, Dithered for a while, which is standard operating procedure for your truly.

In certain situations, I can be very commanding and decisive. A natural leader, even.

But when things center on me, everything goes all wobbly.

Anyhow, after the pondering period, it suddenly came to me :i wanted PIZZA.

And not just any pizza. It had to be the one, the only, all time ur-pizza, pepperoni.

It’s the one pizza nearly everyone loves. And I still get the occasional hankering for it despite Pizza Slut having many tastier and more nuanced options like the Chicken Caesar and the Meat Lover’s.

Sometimes only the original classic will do.

I think I got hooked on pepperoni way back when we lived at 1 Road and Francis and had a Little Caesars in the mini-mall next door, with their $5 medium pepperoni pizzas.

It was nice living one door down from a Safeway, a KFC, and Little Caesar’s.

Anyhow, I just ate 2/3 of a 9″ pizza, and now I must lay down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling foggy and/or groggy at the moment.

Probably because of the unplanned nap I took earlier. Not an involuntary nap… I’m not narcoleptic. Just found myself unexpectedly sleepy and decided to just go with it.

Woke up at around 3:45 pm, stagger-rolled into the kitchen to grab some food, then strolled back to sit at Mister Computer and blog.

So things are a bit hazy as of yet.

I have a complicated relationship with my mental fog. On the conscious level, I hate it and wish my long delayed dawn would come and burn that shit away so I can THINK.

But on an emotional level, I need that shit. I use it as my main defense against a chaotic and overstimulating world. It keeps me nice and numb so that I have the distance I need from reality in order to feel safe.

Hence my being a lonely planet orbiting a far too distant star, barely surviving on the few rays of warmth and light that make it this far.

I would love to be a lot closer to the sun. But this is as close as I can bear.

So as of now, I am doomed to starve for warmth and light in my long and frigid orbit. It is a sad and lonely life out here beyond Pluto, and I long for more.

But how do I convince my deeper self that thawing is not the same as dying? I’m not a snowman. There’s a real flesh and blood human being under this insulating layer of snow, and it’s him that’s real, not the snow.

Maybe it all begins with letting go of the compulsion to be in rational control of myself all the god damned time.

There are other, more humane forms of self control. There must be. Most people do not lead a dark and dirty life like mine.

Maybe I can be alive for a change, and save the icy self control for emergencies.

More after the break.

This is a closed set

It figures that I didn’t realize that I really take outside input into my writing process well until I was already enrolled in VFS.

That’s how I am destined to learn things, it seems. By blundering into situations with the best of intentions and finding out what a bad idea it all was afterwards.

Some of us are doomed to only learn in retrospect.

The signs were there, though. They always are. Like all those books on writing I’ve bought and couldn’t even stand to read.

Like I have said before, my writing is intensely personal. It flows directly from the depths of my soul, and as such, any attempt on my part to put someone else’s thought in there is met with the psychological equivalent of a strong immune response.

The foreign intrusion must be repelled!

This is only a problem because my usual way of learning is to swallow the information and absorb it until it’s a part of me.

This is what led to my academic success, but it has its drawbacks.

Such as making trying to learn about writing from others feel like someone is poking around in my internal organs and making rude comments.

Guess I just have to keep learning by doing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I might be losing my eyesight .

Every day, it gets harder and harder to read text om either of my screens.

Every day, the bigger and bigger text has to be for for me to have any chance of being able to read it.

Text I could read just fine a month ago is a grey blur to me now. I can barely read the comments on TikTok any more. I can’t read the clock on my computer screen at all any more. Even text on our big screen TV is hard to read.

And my diabetes is largely uncontrolled. So diabetic loss of vision is a real possibility.

And that freaks me the fudge out.

I’ve actually known about this for over a week. It’s just taken me this long to calm down enough to talk about it.

Of course, none of this would be a problem if my goddamned glasses worked.

Patent readers know that my current glasses make me farsighted. Things have to be around three feet away for me to be able to see them clearly.

So when I talk about my eyesight getting worse, I mean my unaided eyesight. And that’s what I use the most, which might be part of the problem.

I can’t wear them while looking at screens, as the screens are too close. And looking at either my computer or my tablet is what I do all goddamned day.

So clearly I need to get my elephantine buttocks to the optometrist to get a new prescription so I can order glasses that work for how my eyes are now.

And this time, with no interference from my eye surgeon Doctor Vaezi.

More after the break.

So far so good

My drugs continue to hold back the pain from whatever bug I have.

I know the bug is still there because some symptoms remain. My throat and ears and Eustachian tubes are still sore, for instance.And I still feel weak.

Even more so than usual! Sigh.

So I know that all I have do ne is suppress the worst of my symptoms.

The pain is gone but the malady lingers on.

That’s kind of a joke.

Anyhow, I remain concerned about this bug. As you know, before the drugs kicked in, I was in a whole lot of pain.

So this clearly is no mere case of the sniffles. It causes body wide inflammation of muscle tissues and that is not usually a symptom when I get the flu.

Could be covid, I suppose. Symptoms match. Based on that, I think I had better give Wound Care a pass.

They’re gonna ask if I have Covid symptoms and I ain’t gonna lie. So I might as well stay home where I can only infect Julian.

Sorry about that, Julian.

So I will have to miss my wound Care appointment. Annoyingly, I can’t call them beforehand because my appointment isi n the first slot of the day, 8:45 am.

Oh well. I will stumble through somehow. I always do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From the srudio that brought you My Left Foot comes…

OK, not really.

It’s just that my right knee is the latest part of my dying body to go wonky on me and I am so very very sick of this shit.

My knee feels rather stiff and sore and worst of all… loose. My guests is that there is something inflaming the are underneath the kneecap and that’s both causing the stiff sore feeling and pushing up on the kneecap from below.

This brings up the terrifying possibility of the kneecap

I threw up in my mouth a littlr just from typing thar.

So please, Whoever, keep my kneecap in place until whatever this is goes away.

Leave me the ability to walk at least as well as I do now.

Right now, though, my most pressing problem is that I just woke up from a nap feeling absolutely and utterly terrible.

Everything aches. Every joint is stiff. Every muscle burns.

I think I am coming down with a disease I just made up called omnititis, or inflammation of the everything.

THIS JUST IN! Joe thinks he may have the flu.

Um, yeah, me too, now that you mention it.

Well ain’t this just fine and fucking dandy. On top of all the rest of the crap I’ve got to deal with, now I’ve caught some kinda bug.

Looks like we’re not going to Denny’s tonight after all.

Son of a bitch.

I sure hope Naproxen can at least turn down the burning.

More after the break.

For which I thank God

Well, the good news is that I feel much better now. In fact, I feel so much better that I ended up going to Denny’s after all, though sadly without Joe.

We have the same bug, methinks, but Ihave some he doesn’t : drugs.

Yes, I owe my miraculous “recovery” to my beloved Three Musketeers of Gabapentin, Naproxen, and acetaminophen. Took a little while for them to kick in but when thry did, all those body aches and muscle pains were gone, Daddy, gone.

So right now, I’m living on pills, for which I thank God.

I mean, I am always living on pills. Loads of them. And they all help keep me alive, and thank Whoever for that.

But they have never saved me from terrible pain like a superhero like my little cocktail did, except perhaps in the long term.

I can still feel the aches et al but as sensations both faint and remote.

Sure am glad I ain’t feeling all of THAT.

Gabapentin is definitely the best pain relief I’ve ever had from a pill because it takes the pain away without making me dopey or sleepy or Doc.

It just turns the volume down on the pain.

Eventually, the meds will run out and I will have to re-up and take more.

But until then, bab5, I’m flyin’.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of a generic title, but I have to start somewhere and today I was drawing a blank as to what the heck to write.

So at this point, I have jumped out of the plane on the assumption that I will figure out how to knit myself a parachute on the way down.

Geronimo, and all that.

You know, I’ve been following the development of vat-grown meat for a long time as it is a technology I long to see come to fruition for three main reasons :

1. Environmental. This is the big one. Raising and slaughtering animals is a horribly inefficient way to get meat protein and blows through enormous quantities of precious resources while also creating tons of pollution. If there’s a technology that can replace that ecological horror with some clean and efficient, I’m all for it.
2. Moral/Humanitarian. Eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals for their meat would also be better for the animals, given the hellish conditions under which they are raised. This is a much weaker argument, however, because the animals could be raised more humanely. As to it being inherently cruel to kill them, that’s debatable. Animals kill and eat one another all the time, after al.
3. Let’s call it… Scientific. The third reason I want a vat grown meat revolution is objectively terrible. It’s that I am dying to see how the vegan/vegetarian community reacts to it. Without the environment or the animals to use as moral justification for their beliefs, all they would have left is, “we think meat is icky”, and that’s no fun to shout outside a slaughterhouse.

Finally, I will leave this for you to ponder : if we did stop eating animals, the populations of those animals would plummet to almost nothing as we’d no longer have any reason to raise them by the millions. So is the species really better off?

More after the break.

On feeling grown up

It’s very hard for us hardcore failure to launch types.

You all know my (lack of a) life story. No jobs, no relationships, no involvement in practically anything. Just day after day after day of hiding from the world by living inside my computer most of the time.

The locations changed but the tragedy remained the same.

So there is very little I can do to feel grown up. Hell, ever since my legs went weak there’s very little I can do to feel like a competent recluse.

I’m a cripple now. And an invalid. Finally, my psychological inability to look after myself is backed up by a physical inability to look after myself.

I guess the ship of being self-reliant finally sailed off without me for good.

Bon voyage, I guess. I barely knew ye.

And that is a brutally hard cross to bear for a North American male of my generation. I may never get to be a grownup at all. My whole life could begin and end as a colossal waste of ever so much potential.

My only way out is to get back into freelancing. Climb over the massive pile of aversive fear that has accumulated at the entrance to that realm and get some fucking work.

I would still be a crippled invalid.

But I’d be an employed one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, how’s my health?

The prostate infection remains gone. No pain on peeing and my urine remains a healthy honey yellow color.

It’s gone from looking like cranberry juice to looking like weak lemonade.

It’s still pee, though. Trust me. I checked.

The whole thing has gone quite smoothly, Way moreso than the 1st time.

The fact that I have been through it all before made all the difference. The first time, I was understandably freaking out because in my books, urinating blood is a pretty serious symptom and I was imagining all kinds of horrible things that might be wrong.

This time, I knew the score. Knew it was probably just the same ol’ thing. And it was.

So mostly it just cost me some very painful peeing and a boring four+ hours at RGH.

At least I managed to not set foot in the place for two entire months!

In other good news, when I was doing Wound Care last Tuesday, the nurse discovered that the wound on my butt has closed and thus no longer needs a dressing.

So I am back to having only the dressings on each foot to worry about.

Sadly, this does not mean my butt has gone back to normal. The wound is still there and still hurts. I can feel its presence as I sit here and type.

But progress is being made.

I must confess, part of me will miss having strangers touch my butt.

Especially the male ones. Sigh.

I’m so lonely.

More after the break.

On ordering in

Man, it can be a pain.

Wanted the Pot Roast Dinner from Denny’s. Nope, they’re closed.

Fair enough. It’s after 9 pm. They probably close a 9:30 pm and stop taking orders at 9.

OK, I want a Whopper with Cheese meal from Burger King. Nope, THEY are closed.

Since when do fast food places close this early?!?

Luckily, Subway had my back. Got a Turkey sub wending its way to me as I type.

Tonight, I eat freshLY.

The Tik Tok Man feel

I am increasingly addicted to TikTok.

When I am scrolling through my For You feed, I feel a strange sense of being connected to something greater than myself.

And I sure as heck never got that from Facebook.

TikTok seems to know how to perform a social media miracle by serving me random videos that I almost always like.

And there’s such variety! From silly people goofing around to adorable pet videos to earnest news reports about all the crazy shit happening in the world (sigh) to pithy science tidbits to funny little skits and so much more.

And there is something magical about a never end basket of wonder and delights like TikTok. All the serendipity has a cumulative effect of making me feel more connected to my fellow human beings and that gives me a warm, glowing feeling.

And while I have only dipped my toe into recording myself, I am quite an active commenter and that scratches an itch too.

Right now, various aspects of my personality are tussling over which of them I will choose to express in TikTok clip form.

Will I be the wacky funny guy? The snarky sharp-witted verbal sharpshooter? The warm, peaceful, all-loving junior messiah? Or the ranting pundit screaming at people that they need to rise up and kick ass?

Right now, that last one is winning. Every horrible news story about the coming environmental apocalypse pushes me further in that direction.

Eventually I will have to make my feelings known.

And they are increasingly harsh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.