Apparently, a town called Wallingford has a very funny sign.

And I really enjoy what a good job someone or other is doing coming up with excellent one-liners that fit in that number of characters.

Over near our beloved Denny’s, there’s an Accent Inn which had a few good ones but whoever did their sign must have quit because there hasn’t been a new one in months.

Anyhow, I thought I would share a few of my faves from the Wallingford sign here.

Just call me your comedy curator. And this way you don’t have to listen to the music from the video, which starts out bad and then keeps getting worse.

“They’re not going to make yardsticks any longer.”

A gem of brevity and wordplay. This seems like the sort of joke a high school English teacher would love. She’d put it on the blackboard before class and then wait to see if any of her students are smart enough to get it.

They’re not going to make them any shorter, either.

“Dear naps : I’m sorry I was a jerk to you as a kid. ”

This one is in a more observational vein.

I don’t remember ever being told to nap by my babysitter Betty. It’s not something I can imagine her doing. She was way too cool for that.

I do remember napping, though. Toddlers can’t stay awake all day, after all. So I would take a nap in the afternoon.

But if I was sleeping while Sesame Street was on, call a doctor.

“I’m still hot. It just comes in flashes now. ”

One for the older ladies.

I love one older lady I saw on TV who calls them “power surges”.

Ya know, I would not be entirely surprised if, despite my definitely being male and thus incapable of menopause, I started having hot flashes one day.

I have a lot of feminine traits. I’m very maternal. Loving, caring, doting. I would make an amazingly good parent to some lucky kid(s).

I’ve even got tits.

Pretty sure they don’t “work”, though.

“All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand. ”

Very funny, but it could be better. For one thing, you need to say “telekinesis” instead as it’s the more well known term.

And there’s a logic issue, because you can’t raise someone’s hand just from believing telekinesis is real. You need to actually have it.

So it would be better as, “If anyone in the audience is telekinetic, raise my hand. ”

Eh. Still needs work.

“I’m friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y. ”

LOL, very clever. Better with the addition of a single word :

“I’m ONLY friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y. ”

But they had to use a version that would fit on the sign.

“Dogs can’t operate MRI scanners but cats can.”

That one includes both animals AND science, two of my favorite things!

I’m pretty sure I was born a furry. Even as a tiny child, I loved animals. I would light up any time an animal was on the TV screen. I loved meeting dogs, even though I was a little bit scared of them.

And of course I was surrounded by cats and I loved them all. When I was feeling lonely, there was always a nice warm kittycat nearby for pets n’ purrs.

I miss have fuzzy critters in my life. We can’t have any because Joe’s allergic.

“Ever stop to think and forget to start again?”

Boy have I ever. Being the thoughtful, dreamy type, I couldn’t possibly count the number of times I have accidentally got lost in thought when I really should be doing something important, like looking both ways before crossing the street.

That’s enough of this for now.

More after the break.

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No more jokes

Eh, I’m tired of that now, and the quality really drops off at that point anyhow.

Grappling with the cold

God no, I’m even sicker of talking about that.

Need to buy heater, Amazon password, desk heater? etc.

My video game issue

Got stuck in my video game, Divinity : Original Sin Enhanced Edition, for a while.

I won’t bother with the details. Just know that I made it to somewhere near the end of the game (I think) when suddenly I needed a whole bunch of things things called Blood Stones or Star Stones.

This was a bummer because I had no idea the damned things were that important.

So I looked up where you find them all and I went through every single location and what the hell, turns out I had already found them all.

Well fuck, I thought, now what?

I had to face the possibility that a game bug was going to completely stop me from progressing in the game, which would be a serious bitch given that I have already played the damned thing for 156 hours.

Luckily, I decided to look up how to get past that one thing again, and it said that I could also use Inert Stones, which are what Blood/Star Stones become when used up.

Oh! Those I got.

But not enough of them. And I know I sold some at one point, which I would not have done had I known how god damned important they were.

So I went around to all the vendors I could think of and bought back the ones I could find, but that only got me to 10 and I need at least 12.

So my last hope is that a character I haven’t used for a while has a few.

I hope I didn’t sell them to some random character I met. I would hate to have to go check the inventory of every damned character in the game.

The whole thing has been emotionally draining. I will quite honestly be glad to finish the god damned thing, or at least find out there’s another big map to explore.

And that’s what has been stressing me out lately. The End.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve gotten my refund for last night’s curried lamb fiasco.

Not a full refund, sadly, because I did end up eating the garlic naan I ordered (and it was quite good) and I am obviously not going to get my tip back.

I mean, can you imagine?

And my driver did their job perfectly well. They played no part in the culinary nightmare that was my burned and bone fragment filled Indian food experience.

So I just got the actual ~$16 for the curry back.

Nevertheless, I am going to order in again tonight so I can get something legal to feed to human beings. It will cost more than the refund, obviously, and that means it will eat more into my money on my card, but oh well.

I feel a spiritual need to compensate for having a lamb curry try to kill me.

Obviously, I won’t ever be ordering from Tandoori Oven again. I mean Jesus fucking CHRIST. Actual fucking BONES.

Clearly I’m still not over it.

Well can you blame me?

I have, of course, also given Tandoori Oven a one star review on DoorDash, along with the curt and accurate assessment, “My lamb curry was burned and had bone fragments in it. ” If they don’t like that, tough.

I mean, how the hell does that even happen? The curry getting burned, I understand. Someone clearly did not stir it enough. The need for stirring things like curries, stews, chili, and so forth so they don’t burn on the bottom is just one of the little annoyances of the world of cooking.

But BONE FRAGMENTS? It seriously looked like someone threw the entire lamb in there. I am pretty sure I could have fitted those fragments together and gotten at least half of a rack of lamb out of it.

And they had straight, clean edges, so they had clearly been machine cut. By some truly horrifying piece of slaughterhouse equipment, no doubt.

Coming this Halloween… see what happens when…MARY HAS A LITTLE LAMB! (SFX: chainsaw starting up)

Hmmm. Could the problem have occurred at the slaughterhouse meat packing plant? Not entirely. Even if they fucked up, someone at Tandoori Oven should have noticed the odd clicking sounds the bone fragments made as they bumped into each other.

I guess that kind of thing can happen when nobody is stirring the stuff.

In my heart of hearts, I think I deserve more than a refund. I think I should be compensated for my emotional distress. And there is the question of punitive damages as well. Surely someone at Tandoori Kitchen needs to be punished over this.

Because I was raised by television, that immediately makes me think of some ne’er do well last son of the family that owns the place getting screamed at by his long suffering and thoroughly exasperated father.

“All I asked you to do is stir the curry! Just stir! How can you fuck up stirring? Oh, and did I forget to tell you to make sure there are no HUGE PIECES OF BONE in there before you serve it to a customer? Must have slipped my mind!”

And all the while the poor guy is in the traditional “getting yelled at by your parents” posture. Head lowered, staring at the floor, shrinking back a little.

I bet that’s one of those things that’s universal. You could do a supercut of parents from all over the world and from all walks of life lecturing their kids and it would look exactly the same whether you’re in Jersey or Timbuktu.

I guess I am done now. Hopefully getting a nice meal tonight will help me to put an end to this whole sordid affair.

But seriously. BIG PIECES OF BONE.

Un fucking believable.

More after the break.

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The other reason I feel grumpy

I’m really fucking cold right now, but that’s nothing new. Really got to pull the trigger on getting that space heater.

Or thermal tape. Or a lot of sweaters.

This can’t be good for me, living in an icebox. It’s especially bad once the sun goes down, like right now, naturally enough.

I’m not a well man and these chills and things must be stressing my system.

The root cause of the continuing problem is my chronic indecision, though. I could have had a space heater a week or more ago but I keep dithering about it.

Last time I was on Amazon.ca, I noticed that they had cute little desk model space heaters, and that might work for me.

My father had one of those for his office, and it worked extremely well.

Any one I get would not be nearly as fancy, but I like the idea of having the heat source be close enough that I could just point it at myself like a desk fan.

Kind of a desk fan in reverse, really. At least in terms of function.

I could even put it where my desk fan in right now. Obviously I’m not going to need the damn thing for a while so I could just stick in the closet and put its warmer cousin there.

My main worry would be frying or overheating some of my expensive computer stuff, of course. Heat and computers do not mix well.

So I might have to rearrange things in my room a bit to make sure the heat points at me and not the computer or the monitor.

Heck, that CPAP machine of mine has been sitting there on my bedside table gathering dust for more than a decade, I could stick IT in the closet instead and the desk heater could then be pointed directly at me.

Wheels within wheels.

Oh that’s right, I tried to pull the trigger on the space heater but it wanted my Amazon.ca password and I didn’t remember it so I went to look it up in my Google Keep.

And it’s not there god damn it!

I am positive I put it in with all my other passwords. And now it’s gone. So I am going to have to go through the whole “lost your password?” thing even though I am not the one who lost it!

Google Keep, my butt!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy…. Wednesday.

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

Apparently at some point Doc Costin told me that my appointment had been moved from one o’clock this Friday to noon today.

I have no recollection of this but given my occasionally spotty active memory I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It was originally moved to Friday from the usual Thursday because he has a medical appointment on Thursday.

Anyhow, I had just finished up in the bathroom when the phone rang and it was Therapy with Doctor Costin time.

Oh well, it’s not like I was doing anything important.

I’m actually quite proud of how good I have gotten at just dropping whatever I am doing to do therapy when things like this happen.

Pretty good for someone who dislikes surprises as much as I do.

We talked about this n’ that, as usual. The Great Betrayal when my parents took my brother Dave and I out of university came up. Apparently he had forgotten that I had already told him how I went along with the whole thing willingly because I was just that eager to please my parents.

My mother even said, “We’re only going to do this if you agree to it” or something along those lines. I could have just said no and kept my life intact and on course.

But nope. For my whole life, a big part of my role in the family was to be okay with everything. To go where I’m told and stay where I’m put. To be a total doormat who always did whatever was asked and was always ready to sacrifice his own best interests so someone else could get their needs met.

Honestly, most of the time I didn’t even know what my needs were.

That led to me telling Doctor Costin all about how I never stood up for myself as a child at all. I certainly never advocated for myself. I was too busy trying to survive on the tiny little scraps of attention I got from my family.

I already always felt like I was barely being tolerated and that if I became even slightly more of a hassle to look after, they’d just give up and abandon me.

But that was never going to happen. Because they’d already abandoned me.

My fault for being a surprise, I guess.

No wonder my self esteem has historically been so terrible.

I also spoke with Doc Costin about my growing confidence and ability to actually appreciate my own extraordinary gifts and let that be reflected in my self-worth.

Which led to my mentioning how I have known I was extraordinarily gifted since I was three years old, or at least since my first days in school, and how for some reason it never made me feel any better about myself.

Partly that’s because I took it for granted. Like I have said before, it’s hard to value something that comes so easily to you.

But mostly it’s because I never got any positive reinforcement from it. Nobody ever told me, “Hey wow, you are amazing, you’re going to go far!”.

Well, except for Mrs. Moase who ran the corner store.

But other than her, nobody, Not my family, not my teachers, not the school administrators, nobody. There I was, an incredible jewel of a student, and nobody encouraged me at all.

If anything, it just annoyed my teachers and left me bored as hell and completely unchallenged in class.

Heck, I didn’t even get a nod at VFS and I was by far the best writer there.

Maybe I am just too god damned shy and humble.

If I had to do VFS all over again, I would go in there with a massively cocky attitude and see how that works out for me.

I mean, what the fuck. Why the hell not?

It pays to advertise.

More after the break.

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I am bewildered

So tonight, I ordered some lamb curry from a place called Tandoori Oven.

When it arrived, it was not what I expected.

For one thing it was burned. Definitely burned. I mean, check this out :

The too-dark color was the first thing I noticed when I unwrapped it. But I thought maybe that’s just what the curry from this place looks like.

But then I noticed an odd and out of place aroma. Then I tasted the curry and that confirmed what my nose had told me.

It smelled – and taste – like burned cinnamon rolls.

Not what I was looking for. I was definitely going to complain via DoorDash but it was still edible so I wasn’t that pissed off yet.

So I go to dig in and see something white and vaguely tubular sticking out of my curry.

I take it out and ITS A PIECE OF FUCKING BONE.

And then I found two more.

I mean, check this shit out.

I mean, can you fucking believe it? I’ve had ordered get fucked up before but this is a whole new order of magnitude worse.

It’s beyond “damn it, they fucked up my order” and well into “I did not think this kind of thing could happen here” with a hearty dash of, “how DOES this happen here?”

So you better bet I complained via DoorDash. And I complained under the “Food health/safety” category because duh, and even jumped through the hoop of taking the pictures they now demand with my webcam as proof.

Why do they now require pictures with complaints? Fuckheads, presumably. People abusing the system making life harder on everybody.

So yeah, this definitely sets a new low water mark. Imagine if I had not seen that glimpse of tubular whiteness before chowing down.

At minimum I would have chipped a tooth.

At maximum that one bone would have choked me to death.

So, not good.

Oh, and the kicker : I found two more chunks of bone.

Oh well, at least the garlic naan is good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And today is one of them.

Started feeling really dragged out and tired last night, Uh oh, I thought. Then I started getting the chills, triggered by, but not entirely due to, the cold. At one point, the chills dug so deep into my poor body that I was not just shivering, I was shaking like Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond.

This did not bode well.

Sure enough, I woke up this morning feeling utterly wretched. So I had to cancel Wound Care. I will change my one remaining bandage myself.

That’s right, I haven’t shared that yet. A week ago, the nurse took a look at the wound on my right foot and decided it was sufficiently closed that I didn’t need a bandage on it any more, so I have only had one bandage to deal with for a week now.

Hooray! Now to get the other, more severe one on my left foot to heal.

Which probably means keeping my ortho shoes on way, way more. The point of the shoes is to offload my weight off my wounds so they can heal, and that means that technically I should be wearing those things any time I walk, even if I am just walking to the god damn toilet.

Because, you see, according to Nikki, the reason these wounds could not heal is because every time I walked, the pressure ripped them open.

Yikes. That’s bad.

And yet, having those big clodhoppers on is a pain because of the way they have collapsed on me. They are not comfortable to wear any more and I am still waiting to hear back from Nikki about that problem.

I get the feeling she doesn’t check her email much. Grr. I don’t want to have to call the office, Phone calls are much rougher on my social anxiety than email.

Then again, I am getting really fuckin’ sick of being chained up and hemmed in by fear. It’s no way to live, and I want to live god damn it, not just survive.

Yay, here come the chills again. But I type valiantly on nevertheless.

I can crawl back into bed and bury myself under the blanket when I am done,.

Haven’t ordered a space heater yet. I will probably end up with the fancy one. It’s more expensive than the Amazon Basics one but it’s highly rated and has both a built in fan and a sort of spout to aim the hot air where you want it to go.

Plus it looks nice.

Right now, being me is kind of a slog. I feel tired and cold. Making the words come out feels like hauling bricks and it’s hard to stay focused on the task. My mind does not want to sit still and write.

Writing is, after all, a strange job. Some strange person sits there perfectly still except for their fingers and types away and/or sits there staring into the middle distance looking to all the world like they’re in a daze or stupor before typing some more.

The real work of it all is 90 percent internal, which is why, I suppose, writers tend to be deeply introverted people.

Who else would be willing to do that? Extroverts need too much stimulation.

When I am writing fiction (which I should do more), I sometimes imagine my mind as being a chaotic and bustling factory floor with robot arms moving things around, sparks flying as things are welded to other things, conveyor belts bringing parts, and so on.

It’s an imagine that I find quiet soothing because it gives me the feeling that all the sturm und drang in my head has some kind of purpose.

Of course, if I just decided it was time I wrote a book already, that stuff would have a purpose and it could keep me occupied for quite a while.

But what book would I write?

Whatever would be the most fun to write, I suppose.

I will think about it.

More after the break.

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This makes me so happy

I need more music videos to feature cartoon bunnies rocking the fuck out.

Wee freaking ha!

If I did write entirely for the fun of it, my shit would get REAL wacky.

Like, Douglas Adams wacky.

The image in my mind is a cartoon minecart rocketing through tunnels barely staying on the tracks as it takes turns on two wheels and me inside it cackling like a lunatic.

Me cackling like a lunatic seems to be on my mind lately. I guess because the world is getting so damned crazy that my inner lunacy is rising in order to compensate.

It’s like air pressure in that way. Inside pressure has to match outside lunacy.

Recently in a YouTube comment, I let something slip that I never thought I would ever say to anyone.

But I admitted that I go from my usual “love the world” mood-scape to my long suppressed “cackling demonic trickster dancing with joy as he watches the world burn” side with distressing regularity lately.

I’m pretty sure that side of me could never actually take over unless something TRULY horrible happened to me but I still don’t like seeing or feeling it.

I can so easily imagine this figure looking down on a burning city and screaming, “That’s it! Go for it, you dumb motherfuckers! Die in droves! Shit in your own nests! Vote for the ‘we will definitely slit your throat’ party! DO IIIIIIT! ”

Hopefully by writing that down I will ease some of the pressure in my head.

I mean, that’s how evil tricksters like the Joker happen. They are, in the worst possible way, smart people reacting to a stupid world by going insane to the point of complete misanthropy and thus evil.

And the problem of being smarter than most and therefore completely capable of seeing how stupid and misguided so many people are is one that all of us smart types have to deal with on a day to day basis.

For me, the solution is to ground everything in the purely emotional foundation of my deep and determined humanism. I care about people. even if they sometimes seem like children to me, and being smarter than the herd simply makes me a potential shepherd.

And don’t talk shit to me about how they “should” follow you because you’re so god damned special and smart.

Fuck that. That’s the moral nihilism of the spoiled and weak.

You do whatever it takes to lead them the right way. Or at least to do your best to do so.

I mean, do you really care, or don’t you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why was I such an eerie child?

Patient readers know the drill. Preternaturally intelligent. Learned to read when I was 3 years old. Talked like a tiny adult. Was a strangely calm and self-possessed kid. Had zero fear of or inherent respect for adults.

Yet for all that, I was a terribly lonely child, starved for any kind of positive attention, all alone in my chilly little mind palace.

Honestly, that hasn’t changed nearly as much as it should have. I have very good friends who love me. I socialize with them regularly. And I love them to bits.

But I am still trapped in my palace of ice, nevertheless.

Lowering my Paxil dose gradually over time should help with that. I’m still trying to process the fact that a great deal of the emotional coldness and numbness I have been complaining about (a lot) over the last 20+ years was probably the Paxil, and I just didn’t even have a frame of reference from which I could understand the problem.

How was I to know what was depression and what was Paxil?

Arguably, Doctor Costin should have known. That is, technically, his area of both expertise and responsibility. He theoretically could have figured out it was time to cut back on the Paxil a long time ago.

But I bear no umbrage. I know that I can very intense and overwhelming to deal with. I have both great emotive power and a massive intellect that can make even people with doctorates struggle to keep up with me.

Sorry, Doc, but if I have to slow down to normal person speed for you, there is no way therapy is going to work.

Which is a problem in and of itself, and it’s why this song hits me so hard :

Obviously that’s a metaphorically exaggerated version of my situation. My mind might be accelerated but the rest of me ain’t.

But I get it, Barry. I really do. I’ve spent my whole life slowing way down just so I stand some kind of chance of connection with others. If I took the inhibitor off my engine and tried to go full speed ahead to see just how fast I can go, my last connection to the rest of the human race would snap and I would lose my fucking mind for good.

And that thought terrifies me.

Not to mention that I can’t even imagine what going full tilt would even mean for me. How would that even work? I’m neither a scholar nor a researcher so it’s not like I would be inclined to gorge my bloated mind on all the latest information.

I don’t gorge. I graze.

I suppose I could write at a frenzied speed. See just how productive an author I can be if I just surrender myself to my muse and my craft.

I know I could produce my usual rough first (and last) drafts that way. But then I would have to slow down to do the proofreading, editing, and so forth.

And that’d be a drag, man. I need an editor.

A pretty demanding one.

Often the people who most crave being controlled by others are the ones who can’t/won’t control themselves.

And I know I don’t have the self-discipline to make myself produce the very best writing of which I am capable.

I’ve gotten away with submitting rough drafts for far too long.

Then again, maybe that just means I’m so dazzlingly brilliant that everything I write is perfect the first time and I don’t need to slow down and edit and do multiple drafts.

Yeah right. Even at my most delusional I wouldn’t believe that. No matter how talented I think I am, I know that what I write can always stand a lot of improvement.

Including these blog entries. But that ain’t gonna happen.

The whole point of this blog is to allow me to express myself freely and second-guessing every word I type out of fear of my own eventually judgment is definitely a one way ticket to crazytown.

Oh yeah. And, um. something about being a weird kid.

I’m, pretty sure that’s where I started.

More after the break.

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It’s getting closer

Me buying a space heater, that is.

And none too soon given that it’s actually been below freezing all day today.

That’s no big deal for most of Canada, but here on the Wet Coast, below freezing with snow on the ground is like Arctic Armageddon.

So on the shopping front, I have at least narrowed it down to three or four potential space heaters, from a $45 el cheapo Amazon Basics model to this fancy thing. 

The fancy one is in consideration because it was recommended by two different “consumer reports” type sites and what the heck, it’s just $20 more.

What I want to avoid is the humiliating feeling that you get when you’re sitting there with something with subpar performances thinking, “I paid too little for this. ”

Of course, I don’t want to pay too much either, but at this point I am willing to err in the “too much” direction and rely on Amazon’s return policy to protect me.

Then again, I’ve heard they just keep making returns harder to do… probably because people were abusing the fuck out of the system to just get stuff for free for a week or two then return it.

This is how “restocking fees” happen, people.

Fuckheads. The enemies of all systems. The reason we can’t have nice things.

Anyhow, that is but a glimpse of why it takes me so long to make a decision. I’m trying to take the pressure off myself by telling myself it’s no big deal if I get the “wrong” thing as long as it does the job of keeping my enormous buns warm.

Especially my hands, specifically my right hand. The circulation in it must be terrible because it gets cold so very easily.

My fault, I fear, for using the mouse without a mousepad or wrist support at all for years.

Nothing I can do about it now but get a space heater… and some gloves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I listened to this record dozens of times in elementary school.

I have, I must admit, a very minor kind of dysphoria.

I’ve always felt like I was a thin, supple, gymnastics type person stuck in the body of an extremely overweight ogre.

I’ve always wanted to do things this body is simply not designed to do. Like dance, or climb like a ninja, or vault over objects when I am feeling especially exuberant.

That’s why I love video games where I can do that stuff. Games like the Assassin’s Creed franchise, or the Shadow of Mordor games.

In those games, at least, I can move like I want to be able to move. Like some strange part of me thinks I should be able to move.

As in, I will get vivid flashes of the desire to move that way, all athletic and toned and acrobatic, that I of course can’t do anything with but wait for them to pass.

But I can see what that part of me wants to do so clearly in my mind.

Basically, I wish I could parkour. That shit has fascinated me every since it was still called “free running” and I saw a piece on it on some news show.

I want so badly to be able to move like that. To just flow up walls and over rooftops and along fences and such, almost like a cat.

But I can’t do that kind of thing. And it’s not just because I’m old and crippled and fat. I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I was 25 and my ideal weight and I had kept on working out at the UPEI rec center instead of letting my social anxiety make me stop.

I could have used some Paxil back then,

Anyhow, my point is, even I was the picture of physical health, I still couldn’t parkour. This fleshly frame of mine is capable of many powerful things. It can carry a lot, it can do a lot of work, it can endure much, it can protect the quarterback.

But it’s not built for agility and there is nothing I could do short of a total brain transplant to change that.

Take that as a hint, science. Get on it!

And it strikes me that this very minor kind of dysphoria must be fairly common, at least amongst us deep and thoughtful types.

The average person, thankfully, just becomes whatever they are to become holus-bolus without ever thinking about what body they wish they’d gotten.

It takes some serious brainpower to make yourself miserable like that.

Where was I? Oh right, minor dysphoria being common.

I mean, we know that there can be a mismatch between body and brain. That’s medical fact. It’s almost like the brain and the body come from separate dice rolls and it’s sheer luck when they happen to match.

Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s bad.

That’s why I am so very supportive of not just trans people but anyone who feels like the inside does not match the outside and I want them to do whatever they need to do in order to feel right.

Even if it’s something other people find “cringe”. Like the “fat bearded dude in a Sailor Moon outfit” trope.

I’m not going to judge. If that makes you feel good, go for it, and let the weaklings cringe. You’re living for you, NOT them.

And I am saying this as someone who needs to pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox from outer space on a regular basis in order to feel sane.

Make the outside match the inside.

It doesn’t work the other way around, though many have tried.

More after the break.

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From the inside out

For me, everything always starts from the middle.

By that, I mean that for me, inspiration and motivation and even belief have to come from somewhere deep inside me.

Maybe that’s a testament to just how much of an introverted intellectual I am. I dunno.

And I know that this reliance on the deepest and most mysterious, most intuitive part of my mind might sound a tad odd coming from a science loving rational materialist like me, but to me there’s no conflict because my reason and my intuition have always worked together seamlessly.

They’re like the left and right hands of my mind. Sure, one of them is probably stronger and/or more agile than the other, but I’d still be lost without either of them.

Ever had to deal with a temporary loss of the use of your non-dominant (submissive?) hand? Because that will teach you how much you need it right quick.

So even my most rigorously analytical thought processes use that awe-inspiring supercomputer that is my deep intuitive mind to do all the heavy lifting.

And even my most enigmatic creative thoughts, the ones that seem to have an enormously dense burst of information compressed into a nanosecond, still needs my conscious, rational mind to decompress, unpack, and organize them.

To me it’s all the same in the end. And I could not tell you where one begins and the other ends. Nor do I care.

The question that could really bake your noodle is whether or not I’m smart because of this close relationship between my brain hemispheres, or if my hemispheres get along so well because I am so darn smart.

Both. Neither. A quantum superposition of all possible states. Who cares?

I definitely don’t want to get caught up in yet another senseless dichotomy.

I have never responded well to being told I have to choose a side.

Fuck your goddamned sides. I don’t care whether Team Red or Team Blue wins. I’m not some junior jingoist eager to get picking a side over with as quickly and as thoughtlessly as possible so I can get to fighting (the fun part) all the faster.

Leave me out of your petty dominance games.

Or if I have to participate, let me be the ref.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what it feels like I’m doing when I try to come up with something to write about on this here blog o’ mine – waving a cartoonishly large butterfly net around trying to snag just one of the many thoughts darting about in my head so I can harness it and thereby slow it down enough to put it to work.

Just imagine me putting a tiny harness on a protesting butterfly. Aww.

That’s the thing about my thoughts : they don’t want to be slowed down. My mind, when untethered to a real world task, works incredibly fast. That’s why sometimes it’s so hard to slow my thinking down enough to pick something and go with it.

No time to talk, I’m too busy being BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE! Yeeha!

Tricky as it be to trap one of my lively, slippery thoughts, I continue to do so every day because I can be a lot more sane if I let some of those thoughts and emotions and ideas and all the other mental entities in my brain out.

That was the whole point of this blog to begin with : to express at least some of all the crazy noise in my head so that I can concentrate.

I keep telling myself I should honestly be writing a lot more. As in spending a 9 to 5 type jobs’ worth of hours writing every day so I can see what life is like when I am getting so much more of the craziness in my head out every day.

I remember that way, way back in 2011 when I was writing my first million words and therefore was writing around 2700+ words a day, there were times when I actually felt completely calm and relaxed and okay.

Almost human, in fact.

So if I could stretch myself to that level again, or even go beyond, I might just find that this capacious noggin of mine has become a much quieter neighborhood.

My God, is that how normal people without massive megavolt minds feel all the time? No wonder they have a much easier and less complicated life than mine.

I’ve always had way, way more brain power than I knew what to do with. Perhaps if I had been born with a level of ambition commensurate with my intellect, I would have naturally plowed all that excess mental energy into achievement.

But I ain’t like that. My sister Catherine is, and I’ve seen what it gets her (hint : far) and I have also seen the toll it took on her, especially when she was young, and knew that her path was not the path for me.

Not that I am completely without ambition. I’m a dreamer and I dream high. My highest ambition would be to follow in the footsteps of my (qualified) hero Walt Disney and create a media empire whose name becomes synonymous with quality.

Disney, meet Bertrand.

But doing that via sheer hard work and determination and grit, all while being whipped by a desperate fear of failure, is never going to be for me.

I could stand to go in that direction, though. I guess it’s a matter of letting myself become motivated. I know that there’s a vast ocean of ambition within me somewhere, so it’s just a matter of tapping into it and giving it rein to drive me wherever it needs to go, or even just fuck around, just as long as I get my energies out.

I am still discovering aspects of the true toll being so stopped up inside for so long. I am already starting to feel like the previous versions of me were nothing but ghosts and illusions and that the real, substantial, embodied me is still being born.

And boy, is this birth canal long.

More after the break.

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Afraid of myself

I guess, in my own way, I have allowed myself to be constrained by others.

Namely, I have been the Giant with the Head Hung Low, not just out of humility but out of not wanting to get any further from the rest of humanity than I already am.

When you’re surviving on the tiny bit of warmth that makes it through the door that your fears make you hide behind, the last thing you want to do is retreat.

No, you want to stay all snug up against that door nice and tight so you can soak up all the distant heat you can.

Kinda explains my entire life, really.

Traditional Western individualistic values would say that I should stand up, straighten up, stop worrying about spooking the pygmies at my feet, and stride forward with great purpose and intent so I can finally embrace my destiny.

Or at least get laid.

And I am not saying that would be a bad way to go. But I have a lot of emotional baggage still weighing me down that keeps such noble virility out of reach for now and instead all I can do is keep opening up in my “slow like sunrise” way and hope for that ever looming tipping point to arrive already.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inertia lately. I feel like I need to shake off all this excess inertia I have accumulated over these many years of lethargy and forget all about whatever excuses for inaction that still remain so I can cut loose from the past.

But I’m scared.

I’m always scared.

So, no sudden moves, I guess. As appealing as some big dramatic awakening seems on a cathartic level, the truth is that I have to move slowly or I risk freaking myself out and ending up scurrying back into my hole and slamming the lid shut so hard that I won’t come back out until Spring.

Sometimes dealing with my volatile and fragile state makes me feel like I am juggling nitro glycerin all damned day.

I wish I was stronger. Tougher. Manlier.

But I am what I am, no more and no less.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always enjoyed grocery shopping.

There’s something cheerful about it. Perhaps my primitive Northern European instincts are saying, “Ah yes, a successful hunt. Now we are sure to survive the winter. ”

Or maybe I’m just greedy and like acquiring food. I dunno.

I tell you one thing : if I could afford it and had any place to put one, I would get a deep freeze so I can stock up on many tasty microwavable things and have those as a resource I can rely on.

I could totally imagine myself becoming a food hoarder that way, though. This pleasure I feel at the acquisition of foodstuffs could be quite addictive if I was free to get whatever I want whenever I want.

I could end up like one of those people that practically has an entire supermarket’s worth of food in their basement.

Today’s been mellow. Did Wound Care in the morning. My nurse was a tad brusque for my tastes, but not everyone can be ray of sunshine and she did a very good job.

She even dealt with these weird black patches on my left foot. They showed up recently. They were almost totally black (maybe a little dark blue as well) and I had one on the outside edge of my big toe and another between my second and third toe.

It looked quite bad, and I was worried that I had suffered from some kind of stroke in my foot and that had caused serious bruising.

But the patches didn’t hurt, which was a good sign. More or less.

Turned out that the black patches most likely came from a time when I stubbed my toe without feeling it, it bled a little, and that caused lint from my black socks to stick to the blood and thence to me.

There only seems to have been one casualty, name one toenail. The toenail for my second toe on that foot is just plain gone, man. No trace of it remains.

It will grow back. But still, it’s very weird to know that I can get injured badly enough to lose a toenail and bleed a bit and not feel it at all because there’s so little feeling left in my feet due to the diabetes and peripheral neuropathy.

I know big words!

I am going to have to do my best to be super careful with my feet, seeing as the body’s natural warning system, namely pain, is not working properly.

Being numb isn’t fun.

Speaking of my feet, my orthotic shoes have already flattened once more. So I have emailed Nikki, the nice British lady who is my orthotics person, with the news, and I am proud of that because my instinct would be to just let it slide.

But the one thing guaranteed to make me assertive is pain.

It also makes me cranky..

I told her about my theory that it’s my weak ankles that are causing the problem. I’m no expert, so that’s just my partially educated guess, though.

She’s the professional…. orthoticist?

Well Windows seems to think that’s a word. Which is a good sign,

For all I know, I just have a weird way of standing and walking that defies containment by mere shoes.

I know that I’ve been pondering getting out my ratty, worn out, beat up shoes and wearing those. I’d miss the arch support but they don’t twist my ankle out of joint.

And that’s a plus.

I imagine Julian and I will be making another pilgrimage to the G. F. Strong building at VGH soon. I hope this is a solvable problem.

More after the break.

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Bits and pieces

Just some random internet stuff.

Like this absolute gem of perfection :

I’m in awe of how well executed the premise is in this strip. And of course, as a gay furry, I could not love that ending more.

Saving the poor innocent dragon from an evil princess! Just imagine the heinous things she was probably making the poor thing do.

I know who I would rather have.

The knight. Duh.

Oh, and I love that I live in a world where something like this exists.

Here’s a pic for those who don’t like following links :

That, my dear friends, is a very frilly, very lacy, very classy plush vagina.

It would make a perfect gift for the sophisticated uptown lesbian on your shop, or it could be used as a talisman to ward off evil gay vampires.

And because this is an Etsy product, it is handmade, one of a kind, and you have your choice of colors for both the base AND the lace.

I’d kinda wanna do white lace over a black base but that would be so obvious.

Oh, and don’t you just love that photograph?

It’s so summery! Makes me imagine a very special ladies only garden party.

But I’m a hopeless romantic like that.

And I thought this was quite cute and informative :

I really need more aspects of music theory illustrated by disheveled cartoon cats.

Maybe then I could learn this shit.

I’ve thought of looking for some kind of free (or cheap) music theory teaching app or site. But I would need to get over my aversion to learning keys first.

They still make no sense to me. Why not put everything in C?

But I hate that when something doesn’t make sense to me, my brain grinds to a halt until I can figure it out.

I know damned well that some things won’t make sense at first and you have to learn more before you will understand said things, but I guess my brain is petulant and spoiled and just expects there to be people around to explain things to it.

It’s not like I think I am incapable of learning keys. I could learn them without too much problem. Sure, they are rote memorization, which I detest, but I really want to actually understand music on a lexical and not just an intuitive level.

I want to know what the fuck I am doing, basically. And what else I can do.

I mean, people like David Bennet (my crush) know how to make things more harmonically rich, or catchier, or how to match melody to bassline, and all these other magical formulae that I can’t believe are things that are known and understood.

My music making would be so much more structured and less haphazard if I only some some clue of WTF I am doing.

I will learn it somehow. Someday. This I swear.

I just have to get the fuck over myself first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.