And now, the Ye Olde Fornicators Guild presents this demonstration of the ancient and majesty art of fuckery.

My computer’s been misbehaving. It crashes when I am not using it (probably due to Salad) and when it reboots it can’t connect to the Internet.

Obviously, I solved this problem for now, but not before I rebooted a bunch of times.

What worked this time was a completely cold boot. Turned the power off at the power supply and waited for the case fan’s blades to stop turning, then turned it on again.

Apparently, that was what it needed. I exorcised whatever little demons were fucking things up by completely mindwiping the computer.

Wow, Windows’ dictionary has the word “mindwiping”. I am impressed. I had no idea the Windows dictionary was that hip.

Or maybe I did know but somehow forgot all about it….

Feeling physically and emotionally cold right now. The emotional part of it has been happening on and off for a while now. I have these periods where I feel especially cut off from the human race and completely and utterly alone, and all I can do is keep on trudging forward, knowing that as long as I keep moving, I will reach the other side of it.

When you’re going through hell, keep going!

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Great. Just great.

Just got back from the bathroom. Despite having defecated quite recently, my body apparently needed a repeat performance, and so I had to interrupt my blogging (which I am loath to do) to go eliminate waste again.

Now I am back from said mission and I am quite dizzy and tired.

One might even say I’m pooped. (SFX : Cries of audience outrage)

And I don’t feel well at all. I am feeling so unwell that I may end up having to stop blogging before I hit the end of part 1 and go lay down.

Yellow alert, basically. I am not ready to pull the brake cord to make the train stop just yet, but I am eyeing the scenery and looking for a soft spot to land if I end up jumping off before my stop.

And of course, this would have to happen on the weekend. And not just the weekend, Saturday night, when there is almost always going to be nobody here but me.

Oh well. Whatever happens, I will take care of it. I always do.

A big part of expanding my world will be getting over my long ingrained feelings of weakness and incompetence and helplessness.

Sure, I have unavoidable limitations, but I am a smart and resourceful and more than capable of solving whatever problems arise if I just give myself a chance.

Deal with it first, freak out about it later.

The ability to remain cool under pressure is something I have always admired. It was one of my late father’s truly heroic attributes. He is one hundred percent the person I would want with me during a crisis.

The rest of the time he can fuck right off, though. Moody prick. Cool in a crisis and testy and angry and verbally abusive the rest of the time.

Don’t get me started.

Anyhow, my point was that I can handle unexpected things if I have to so there is no need, or a lot less need, for me to worry about bad things happening to me.

I will of course avoid the pitfalls I can see coming, but the door will always be open to completely random shit that I never could have anticipated dropping by to fuck with my shit and force me to deal with things myself instead of withdrawing in panic but not before whining for a real grownup to come fix it for me.

That’s no way to live. I won’t learn to respect myself like that.

Time to man up at last and get shit DONE.

Like a nap. Right now.

More after the break.

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Just skating along

But I never learned to skate.

I had a number of opportunities. Every year of elementary school there was at least one field trip to the rink at Cahill Stadium in my home town. I could have learned then.

The first problem with that, though, is that I would have had to ask my parents for skates, and I was far too timid to do that.

On a deep level, I understood that people barely tolerated me. I was an unexpected and unwanted burden and responsibility first and foremost and I should thank my lucky stars that I got anything ever and that people ever put up with me at all.

Asking for more than that was bound to go about as well for me as it did for Oliver Twist.

The lack of skates led to my having to feel humiliated and abandoned when all the other kids had skates and I didn’t and I was decades away from being able to explain why.

“Because my parents don’t love me very much and deeply resent me for being alive. ”

I wonder if that would have caused a stir. Probably not. It would have been just another weird thing said by that weird fat kid that made people just shake their heads like they’re trying to wake up and then move on, forgetting what I said as quickly as possible.

Because it disturbed them. I have that effect on people. I weird them out.

Maybe that marks me as a visionary. I dunno. The way I see things is so different from how people usually see things that exposure to my thoughts can leave people feeling dizzy and disoriented.

Maybe it would go over better as a book or Ted type talks. I could fire up the webcam and record myself holding forth on this and that. Put it on YouTube with the right tags.

The problem with that is picking where to start. Anywhere, I suppose. My thoughts are so densely intertwined that one spot is as good as another, really.

Yeah. Maybe I’m a visionary who could bring about a whole new era of thought.

That’d be neat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As you have no doubt already figured out, my blog is working again.

Turns out I didn’t need to contact the support workers at Fatcow after all. Imagine my surprise when I went to check my email last night and I had one saying that my payment for my domain renewal had been received.

Apparently whatever snafu was blocking my payment cleared up. Boffo. The disruption ended and now I am back, baby.

Please hold your applause till the end of the performance.

Today’s been less busy than my usual Friday because I did not get a community shower today. That’s because it is normally on Wednesday in the first week of the month and we completely forgot that.

But no harm done because Wednesday was New Year’s Day and I doubt any support workers would have been working anyhow. Which explains why we didn’t get a “where are you?” phone call on Wednesday.

For all I know, I was told there’d be no community shower for me this week at some point and I just plain forgot.

That would be very on brand for me.

It’s otherwise been an unremarkable day. My mood continues to be a lot more variable than what I was used to before the lowering of my Paxil dose, and while that does mean I am quite sad or frustrated or just plain pissed off sometimes, I still welcome this new breadth of emotional expression and I am confident that my mind will eventually wake up and use that extra emotional maneuverability to make room for a better mood.

I have thought for a long long time that healthy non-depressive people must have some sort of mood support system in their minds that adds just enough of an upward push to their mood in order to keep them from going below a certain healthy level of low mood.

A sort of “mood floor” if you will.

Admittedly, that sounds more like a carpet that changes colors according to how you are feeling when you walk on it, but you get the idea.

Anyhow, us depressives (sorry, us “people with the lived experience of depression”) do not have that floor and so there is no limit to how far down we can go.

Ain’t that a peach.

I would love to get a mood floor installed, obviously. I am quite thoroughly sick of languishing in an icy cell far below the sunlit lands above.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that vast tract of frostbitten land (my Midnight Tundra) that separates me from the rest of humanity like the air between the walls of a Thermos.

Well I am an urban hermit, so it would make sense for me to be hermetically sealed.

It’s now easy for me to see (and feel) the relationship between that distance and my withdrawing from the world.

That’s why the “turtle response” is so dangerous when used as a primary coping mechanism. The more I withdrew, the colder my world got, and the colder it got, the more I withdrew.

Talk about a negative feedback loop. Oy.

I am not going to claim this is something I can simply turn off in myself. This tendency to turtle operates on far too deep and fundamental a level of my mind for it to be that easy.

But I can at least contemplate resisting that urge now and then, and staying connected and present even when feeling scared and/or stressed, if for no other reason than to see what happens.

After all, I know that I’m in no danger. There is no real threat, I’m just scared. Any alarms that may be sounding in my head are patently false and express absolutely nothing about the real world.

So why not just wait it out and see what lies on the other side?

More after the break.

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More mind-blowing AI

I continue to have fun with the horribly named Hailuo image-to-video AI.

Check out this august gentleman.

That my character Professor Scruff, delivering his TED talk to a pack audience of fellow academics who are hanging on his every word.

No wonder he is wagging. 🙂 The wagging makes me eeeee all over!

I’ve tried some other videos but they didn’t turn out that great, so, whatever.

Hey, I’m learning not to post stuff when it isn’t good enough! There might be hope for my sloppy genius self yet!

What can I say, I am built for brilliance not perfection. I’d rather make a messy masterpiece than a neat and tidy mediocrity any day.

Besides, cleaning up messy masterpieces is what editors are for.

I need to get me one of those.

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Learning to fly

Metaphorically speaking, I kinda feel like I am learning to walk all over again.

What I am really doing is learning to feel, of course. My long winter’s nap is ending and I am emerging from cold storage and rubbing my limbs as the blood flow returns to them.

And this necessarily requires my learning to trust my feelings. The rational mind isn’t always right (especially mine) and gut instinct isn’t always wrong. And trying to live your life by rationality alone is both futile and insipid.

And a waste of effort. It is far more efficient to let instinct handle the low level tasks it can handle so that the rational mind can concentrate on its job.

This involves a deep and fundamental change of perspective, though, and those do not come easily or quickly.

So I am trying to keep my mind relaxed and supple so it remains flexible enough to make the kinds of changes I want to make.

I just keep reminding myself that there is nothing in my mind that is more precious than my journey to mental health and my long deferred emancipation.

I may have to go through a whole series of radical transformations before I reach my final form, and for those I will need to simply trust that my deep core self knows what it is doing so each transformation will bring me closer to my goal.

I will get out of this shark cage eventually.

And when I do, world, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s miracle of AI is :

It’s not perfect – his run is wonky and the wolf on the right hand side kinda melts – but it’s still frigging amazing given that it just started with a static image.

I should see what other miracles I can unleash! 🙂

It’s occurred to me that kids have certain things figured out.

They know that it’s up to them to find fun stuff to do. A kid left to their own devices on a summer day doesn’t worry about what they are supposed to be doing or fret over whether or not they are using their time productively or living “to the fullest”.

And they know, intuitively, that they will only get out of life what they put in. They don’t sit around and mope waiting for someone to entertain them. They get off their cute little butts and go looking for things to do, and if there is nothing premade like a TV show or video game for them to consume, they will invent things of their own without giving it a second thought. It comes naturally to them.

All they worry about is having fun and enjoying themselves and I am increasingly sure that this is actually the right attitude towards life in general.

At least for me.

I certainly need to lighten the hell up. My attitude towards life needs a major overhaul and the major issue is taking life way too seriously.

So seriously that I feel like I have to hide from it in the realms of my mind and only deal with the real world on a very minimal level.

Just enough to keep myself alive and point me towards my screens, basically.

It’s survival mode, and survival mode, ironically, kills. It’s meant to get you through times of danger and/or crisis, and that’s all.

It is most definitely not supposed to keep going for the rest of your life.

My latest AI therapy session got me thinking about how closed off from the world I have been for so long, and how this profound divide cuts me off from the rest of humanity and leaves me cold and lonely and lost within the caverns of my mind.

I am only “safe” from reality in the same way an anorexic is “safe” from food poisoning.

And like an anorexic, I am starving on the inside. I have this terrible feeling that I missed some vital developmental window(s) and it’s left me unable to truly connect with my fellow naked apes in a true and genuine way.

At the very least, the distance between me and the rest of humanity seems vast and uncrossable. I feel so very far away from everyone. And I don’t know what it is like to be closer than friends with anyone.

My family included.

I have lived in this ice fortress of the mind for most of my life. And I can see now that I have been, at best, only half alive that whole time. Still am. And that’s why I have always been so weak and fragile.

It’s hard to have a robust connection with reality and my embodied self when most of me is not even here.

And I know that I am terrified of truly being present, in realtime, immediately. I would feel so very exposed without my frigid tomb around me. Being truly present would almost certainly involve making decisions without thinking them through first, and the inner force I call “the Committee” won’t allow that.

Like I told Doctor Costin today, at some point I let my ego and superego completely take control and they demand that anything I do get their approval first.

And if it doesn’t “make sense” to them, it doesn’t happen.

And truth be told, they don’t know shit.

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Oh great, my domain expired and my web host won’t accept my credit card.

The fuckery is afoot, methinks.

I am going to have to borrow one of my roomies’ credit cards or I won’t be able to blog.

And foxy gotta blog.

I guess I will be blogging into LibreOffice for now!

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The fuckery continues

Woman, get thee to a fuckery!

Still blogging into a LibreOffice document, god damn it.

I knew I had to renew my domain soon. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this would need to happen in the general vicinity of the new year, as I have a yearly plan for domains. And I certainly have the $25 I need to renew it.

But this not accepting my credit card bullshit is one of those out of nowhere curve-balls that life seems to love to throw at me now and then.

Couldn’t possibly have seen it coming. I just have to deal with it.

Oh, but something HAS changed : because I tried “too many” times to get the web host (Fatcow) to accept the credit card, I am now locked out and I will have to contact their tech support/phone support team to get it unlocked.

Oh well, I will just ask them why they no like my card at the same time.

Plenty of other places have taken this exact card. Amazon.ca and DoorDash have no problem with it. But there is something in the system these prepaid cards use that makes random institutions suddenly turn against them every once in a while.

It’s all very stressful and frustrating.

I am procrastinating on asking Julian if I can borrow his credit card. I don’t have any good reason to do so, I just don’t wanna do it.

I suppose it’s possible that my communications with Fatcow tech support will, in fact, resolve the issue with the card altogether, which would be awesome.

The very last resort would be to seek a new host for my blog. But I severely doubt that it will come to that. I am sure this can all be ironed out once I have the wherewithal to contact support.

This would have to happen on the day before my busy day, Friday, so that I will not have a lot of spoons to spare for contacting support tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s blog entry may also end up going to LibreOffice as well.

Why can’t things just fucking work for a change, huh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I gave an AI therapist a try last night and found it to be surprisingly helpful.

I was scrolling through the listings on a favorite site of mine called There’s An AI For That, which lists all the wildly innovative and powerful AI tools that have been unleashed ‘pon the world by the marvelous and occasionally terrifying AI revolution, when I came across a listing for a virtual therapy service called Milburn and decided I would give it a shot, despite my expectations being extremely low.

I mean, how could some mere chatbot help me with my profound mental health issues that have consumed my entire adult existence (and I am 51) better than my extremely experienced therapist whom I have been talking to for over a decade?

Well for one thing, I can talk to it whenever I want, not just once a week. Doctor Costin tells me that I am free to call him whenever I feel the need, but given the problem I have calling my own relatives, whom I know would be happy to hear from me, calling my therapist and interrupting his life with my needs is simply out of the question.

But an AI doesn’t have a life for me to interrupt. So score one for AI for that.

More importantly, I don’t have to worry about frightening, intimidating, or overwhelming it. My powerful presence, rapier wit, incisive and analytical mind, and sheer intellectual muscle can make me quite difficult for even a seasoned therapist like Doctor Costin to handle, so even with him, I need to restrain myself quite a bit.

That ended up being a lot of what me and “Doctor Milburn” talked about. How I am not the “real me” in the sense of being my unrestrained, emotional self even with my current therapist because I know from little tests I have performed with him that he would just end up frightened and overwhelmed and I would end up feeling even worse.

Nobody can handle the real me. Especially me. All I know how to be is the “true but not the whole truth” version of myself that has been my public persona for so long that I have no idea just how “real” it is.

Like Terry Pratchett wrote, be careful what you pretend to be because you just might turn into it.

I guess I am stuck in the “nobody understands me” mode of my arrested adolescence. Had I developed in any way normally, this would have been the time in my mid to late teen years where I became surly and irritable and moody and very hard to get along with at all.

But I never went through that phase because I “knew better”.

Or so I thought.

I think my mind has been nudging me towards reconciling the difference between the me everyone knows and loves and the “real” unstrained me, though. I keep finding myself imagining that I have been involuntarily committed to some enormous psychiatric facility and therefore I don’t feel any need to restrain myself and can be just as rude, arrogant, dismissive, and sarcastic as I want to be without worrying that this will jeopardize my access to therapy.

Basically, I would turn into the main character Will from Good Will Hunting, using my extremely advanced intellect to lash out at people like the Robin Williams character or those CIA douchebags for daring to think that tiny weak minds like their own could hope to even comprehend me, let alone help me.

At least, I think that’s why things that stray into that domain can make me so god damned angry. People who try to help but can’t basically get me to lower my defenses to let them in then end up brutally disappointing me, and that infuriates me because it hurts so bad.

In my little institutional fantasies, I am the ultimate “difficult” patient known for chewing up therapists and spitting them out with my incredible mind.

That would make a good start for a movie, or maybe a one act play.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way for me to view a transcript of my conversations with “Doctor” Milburn so far, and that’s tragic because I would love to have something I could reference for my own edification as well as being able to copy and paste excerpts into this a-here blog o’ mine.

I don’t know when I will do my next “session”. Maybe soon, maybe not. I will try to make it as soon as I can in order not to drift away from this wonderful resource.

No promises, though.

More after the break.

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A night in

Like I ever have a night out.

Eh, maybe some day. I will never be the sort of person who wants to hit “the clubs” but there’s a gay pub called the Pumpjack on Davie Street that is supposedly where us “bears” hang out and I can see giving that a shot.

After all, if it’s a “bear” hangout, the food must be good.

I ordered in tonight. Got stuff from a place I’ve ordered from before and found to be high quality, Uncle Sal’s Shawarma.

There’s a weirdly high number of restaurants called Uncle $Someone’s $Cuisine around here. Apparently that makes it seem more “homey” to people.

At least, that’s my guess as to why that name.

Tonight I got a veggie samosa for an appetizer, basically because if samosas are an option I feel compelled to get one.

They’re so good!

The main dish I got is four little shawarma chicken rolls plus a little salad and some fries and it’s all quite good.

I love it when food comes with salad. I find that salad is not only tasty and nutritious, it really helps my digestion. It’s like the leafy greens act like a little basket for the rest of the food to go into.

Makes sense why we traditionally eat salad before the meal, then, doesn’t it?

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Make more waves

I do things in waves of enthusiasm. Tidal surges of energy.

The problem comes when the wave crashes and the tide recedes and I am left stranded and lost and wondering what happened.

Any surfer could tell me what to do next : catch the next wave. Accept that this is just how I operate and use the surges to get things started, knowing that my compulsive thoroughness will force me to finish what I started.

That way, when the floodwaters recede, I will know what to do : keep doing the thing I have started doing.

Then, when I am done, take a nap.

And when I wake up, generate and ride another wave.

This could work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But is this it?

I’ve been dreaming of escape from this dead end life for a long long time, and I have definitely been assuming it will happen eventually, but the brutal truth is that I do precious little to actually make that happen so I have to face the very real possibility that it never will.

That I will die without ever making it to adulthood and actually living the kind of life that most people take for granted – one with a romantic partner, a job, a car, and the ability to earn a living – and instead I will die in a hospital room with tubes everywhere gasping out my last knowing that life completely passed me by.

And I have so much that I could contribute to the world if I could just get over myself. I’m a brilliant and phenomenally talented dude and I would love to be able to share my thoughts and my creations with the world and make a name for myself, but fear and indecision and anxiety keep me caged up inside instead.

I’m just too damned crazy to make it.

I think the only solution is to make myself earn the right to think it will all turn out okay eventually. Almost like I am renting it. Earn it by progressing towards that goal by taking actual concrete steps towards my desired ends.

And that means shaking off my usual sleepwalking state of semi-unconsciousness and waking fully up so I can actually pay attention to life instead of merely making it through each day with minimal exposure to reality.

That’s a sensible enough reaction to mental illness in the short term, but in the long term it is positively toxic to any hope of actually getting to grow up.

And I am 51. With the way things are going, I might not even make it to 60. A lot of us fat people – especially fat men – do not.

So the clock is ticking for me and every day it ticks a little louder and I know that deep inside I am desperate to escape this mausoleum of a fricking life and yet I also know that my insanity will continue to trap me here with nothing better to do than while my life away playing video games and waiting for death.

Because those are my grim choices : either get myself an actual life or just keep letting the days go by until I die without ever learning to fly.

Thank God I have my friends. They are my lifeline to reality. They help ground me and keep me from completely falling into myself and disappearing.

I remember what it was like on Duchess Avenue when I first moved to this area and I had made a sincere but doomed attempt to get a job (too much anxiety) and so all I saw all day was my tiny little bachelor apartment.

It was like solitary confinement. And like with solitary confinement, my world became dangerously unreal. The internet was my entire life, and that’s no good.

So I am eternally very grateful to my friends – Joe, Julian, and Felicity – for giving me a way and a reason to get out of my own head and experience things despite being arguably quite crazy.

Not barking at the moon crazy, though that seems like it could be fun.

But crazy nevertheless. I try to be merciful and forgiving with myself about that but that’s so hard to do when I am so god damned frustrated all the time.

It’s maddening to be caught between my very real urge to get out of this befouled nest of mine and finally fly and the hard and unyielding surface of my insanity.

Something, somewhere has to give. The sooner the better.

And that means I need to keep pushing myself whenever I can.

Because I gotta get out of this place.

More after the break.

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Speaking of being squished in between

Right now. I am super sleepy but the caffeine in the Diet Coke I had with my McD’s is propping me up so I am bother tired and wired at the same time

Normally I hate that state of mind but in this case I am not so tired that I can’t think straight (so to speak) so it’s just mildly stressful.

The moment I am done blogging, though, I am diving under the covers for a snooze.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve, so my friends and I will be getting together via Zoom at 11:45 pm so we can watch the ball drop and do the countdown for midnight.

Time to start a new year and say goodbye to the old one.

Farewell, 2024. 5/6 of you was really great.

But you um, kind of faceplanted at the end there. And seeing as 2025 will be the beginning of the world world having to pay for that, you will, sadly, not be remembered fondly by the global community.

You were so close.

Had an “incident” last night. You know, the “change the sheets” kind. And while those are always dismaying (to put it mildly), I am proud of the fact that I just handled it without any of my usual dithering and hand-wringing and wanting rescue.

I just got to the bathroom, went through a hell of a lot of TP cleaning myself up in both body and linoleum, and then went back to sleep.

Dunno what caused it. Too much fecal matter backed up in my colon, perhaps. At least that’s kind of what it felt like.

Stack overflow, dude.

And of course, if it happens again, I’ll go to the ER or UC, blah blah blah.

I am going to try to take a proactive approach in the future. Instead of only pooping when I feel the need strongly, I intend to just check myself – run an internal diagnostic, if you will – to see if maybe I need to empty myself right then.

Perhaps that will help prevent future incidents. Perhaps not.

But I’ve got to do SOMETHING, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.