..emerges this heavy duty blast from the past :

That good ol’ song popped into my head this morning despite my not having heard it or thought about it since it was on the radio, so I looked it up on YouTube and gave it a listen and whoa nelly did I get hit with a nostalgia tsunami!

Felt like I had been picked up by a giant hand and then slammed on to the ground like I was a coin someone was trying to flip the hard way ^[1]

And the crazy part is that I still remembered around 75 percent of the lyrics even though I hadn’t heard the thing since like 1980 or thereabouts.

And that even impressed me.

I mean, I know I got a crazy good memory for music, but still… wow.

Anyhow, the song is an all time comedy classic. It’s damned near perfect, in fact. Every verse is hilarious and it follows the “from bad to worse to even worse” escalation pattern to a god damned T.

Like, it’s already going great, then there’s the verse that starts, “So you see, Your Honor” and that takes it to a whole new level.

And talk about relatable. Unless you have been locked in a shed by Mormons your whole life, you have been to at least one grownup style party and you can totally picture the chain of the events depicted in the song.

The song is by a group of fellers from my neck of the woods, the Irish Rovers, who were local rock stars when I was I kid because of their mainstream success with that song, and unfortunately this maudlin hunk o’ crap :

What, did someone think the main thing wrong with Puff the Magic Dragon was that the ending wasn’t depressing enough and didn’t feature the merciless wrath of an angry and withholding God enough?

And as bad as it was for you to hear it, imagine what I went through as a kid. They played that goddamned song at us everywhere back then!

It was like, “You kids like this song, right? Well YOU WON’T ANY MORE!”

Man, what a bunch of uh…. what a bunch of…

Enough of that sad hippie crap. Let’s get back to good ol’ drunk comedy with another all time Canadian comedy classic :

Same brilliant escalation. same sense of humour, also centered on liquor.

Finally, there is this priceless observation :

You nailed it. person I assume is neither a dictionary nor Emmanuel Lewis.

We’re a strange and magical breed, us furries.

And I am proud to wag my fluffy foxy tail among them.

More after the break.

---

I’m not really here

And that is, unsurprisingly, the problem.

In my most recent trip though the world of INTJ related videos on YouTube, one of the things that really struck me is the observation that an INTJ’s greatest weakness tends to be our poor connection with the world of the senses.

And you know what? They’re right. I’ve even talked about it in this space. About how I live in this abstract world where everything is mediated by screens, which eliminate all sensory inputs except for sight and sound and even those are abstracted further by being reduced to 2D images on a monitor or tablet or TV.

The purpose of all this abstraction on a physical and emotional level is to insulate me from overstimulation and the anxiety it brings.

But why is my bar for overstimulation so damned low? Why do perfectly normal situations that most people handle just fine overload my sensorium? Why do normal things freak me out, man?

Answer : precisely because I cut myself off from sensory input. Faculties atrophy when they are not used and by living in my little bubble of sensory restriction I have turned myself into the sensory equivalent of the Boy in the Bubble.

And that is so wrong. Without the sensory world to ground and stabilize the mind. you can fall deep into your own crazy inner world without a way out.

That’s one of my biggest fears : that I will lose that last bit of connection to the real world and fall into the black hole at the center of my mind, where my inner demons live, and end up in my own personal hell.

It’s a far more plausible concept than it should be.

The road out is simple but by no means easy : I have to spend less time with screens and more time in the real world, the world I can see and touch and taste and smell and hear, the world that exists completely independent of my deeply flawed consciousness and that therefore cannot be corrupted or perverted by it.

The sun will come up tomorrow no matter how I feel. And there is a great comfort in that. My inner world is a tempest of turmoil precisely because it lacks connection to the world of the senses, and if I am to escape this dead end life of mine, I am going to need to step away from the comfortable world of my screens and spend some time looking around and reminding myself that I am real.

I am real. I am present. I am now. I am a real life flesh and blood naked beach ape with physical desires, emotional needs, spiritual ambitions, and heart that longs for something more than this so called life of mine.

But can I step away from the screens even just a little bit? TO try it out?

We will see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.