Well, maybe not ALL…

Nothing particularly revolutionary about that vid, and yet I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it’s because I was being very candid and open and I think that imparted a certain amount of warmth to what I was saying.

I will have to remember that for future vids.

The camera picks up honesty remarkably well, at least for me.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Talked about how relatively unemotional my family was and is. We all ended up being highly intelligent and deeply neurotic, and I think that came from the top, from our mother.

My mother, being a teacher, did an excellent job of encouraging and nourishing our young minds but not a lot to help us mature emotionally.

The truth is, we were never all that close. Especially not me, the uninvited one. I was telling Doctor Costin about how when my babysitter Betty would take me to her house when I was a wee thing, I got to see a family that was radically different than mine.

I’ve talked before how I had to figure out that despite all the yelling and swearing and verbal roughness, they were not, in fact, angry with one another.

That’s just how they communicated. Loud, blunt, open, and direct. So very, very different than my cold and constipated home.

But what I was talking about today is how Betty’s family was constantly doing things for one another. Their milieu might have been rough but their hearts were warm and they were always doing things for one another and in general they seemed to face the world as a group or a team and my home was just not like that.

We always just kind of did out own thing. I can’t even imagine asking one of my siblings for help unless the stakes were pretty dire. I don’t think any of us would dream of imposing on one another like that.

And that’s pretty messed up, to be honest.

We could chatter all day but displays of emotion were not a thing. For one thing, we didn’t want to upset our mother.

Not upsetting her is like a prime commandment for all of us kids. We shield her instinctively because her being upset upsets us severely.

We feel what she feels, I guess.

And so we became kind but aloof intellectuals, just like her. None moreso than me.

In fact, of all four of us Bertrand kids, I’m the most like her.

We also talked about how I have never been emotionally close to anyone. At least not after elementary started and Betty went away.

That’s when the emotional coldness really set in, causing me to continue to withdraw from the world deeper and deeper into myself.

I keep imagining myself as going around the world in a human-sized mecha suit in which I clumsily pretend to be human and present but all the world sees is a hologram of me and the real me is miles and miles away.

Like my mother, it’s not as if I am cold in any obvious way. I come across as a warm, genuine, and kinda wacky dude just like her.

And if the situation calls for it, I can being a very sensitive and insightful listener who makes people feel heard and understood.

And it seems like I am getting very close to those people. And I am. But then again, I am not. I am getting close like a therapist would, not like a friend.

The truth is that I don’t really know how to open up to people. I intellectualized everything even when I am talking to my therapist.

I want to change that. I want to be more emotionally open and present and real. I want to truly connect with others for the first time in my life and that means abandoning my posture of the curious intellectual and risking being “out of control” and, heaven forbid, doing things for purely emotional reasons.

I need to let go of that chokehold my ego has on my id so that I can just relax and do the best I can with being myself.

I think that’s how normal people do things.

It’s worth a try.

More after the break.

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Relax and let go

Let’s poke this particular knot : the moment of error.

That’s the moment where you realize that you’ve fucked up big time. Everyone has been there. It’s a very bad feeling.

But it’s what happens immediately after that I’m interested in tonight.

The self-repudiation. What form does it take?

For me, it usually takes the form of excoriating myself for not thinking. I’m such an idiot, if only I had given it two seconds thought, why didn’t I do that, argh.

Which is understandable, and even healthy when done in a balanced way.

But taken to the sort of scourging extremes a mind like mine takes it and it becomes the birthplace of “the committee” that insists that absolutely no action can be taken without its express approval to make sure you’re not doing something “stupid”.

And it does not approve much.

In fact, in my case at least, “the committee” has metastasized into a thick wall inside me that lets almost nothing through and so I remain “safely” constrained.

But hey, at least I’m not doing anything stupid, right?

I’m not doing anything.

And all out of a hyper-neurotic fear of making a mistake. But what’s the big deal about mistakes? You learn from them and move on.

I act like the whole universe is booby-trapped and only by inaction and staying within my tiny comfort zone can I avoid catastrophe.

But it’s just mistakes. They’re part of life. And eminently survivable.

Total inaction on anything that isn’t a “sure thing” is far too high a price to pay.

I think I need to think about this some more now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here’s today’s vid.

I feel a little bad about saying that it’s not a trick, because it totally is a trick. I’m trying to trick Republicans into remember their real values, the things they have always held to be true and that they have always thought they believed in.

It’s my shock treatment for severe cases of Fox News poisoning. Part of how the Trump cult works is that it keeps its adherents too busy performing mental gymnastics as they desperately dodge the truth of Trump’s horribleness for them to remember what they truly believe or apply any actual tests of truth to what Trump says and does.

So I want to wake them up to their real, core beliefs. These people are not monsters. For the most part, they are good people whose one moral weakness is that they are followers by nature and do not have it in them to reject their shepherd outright.

Until the shepherd rapes their wooly little butts personally, or those of their family. Then suddenly they are all shocked and offended and surprised because suddenly, politics is real and not just something on the TV or Reddit and what they espouse and believe has actual, real consequences to them, personally, and not just “other people”.

I honestly believe that this phenomenon explains why it has to hurt them personally before they see it as a problem. Until then, politics aren’t real. They’re just a place where you can dump all your negative emotions and express all the rage and frustration that you can’t express at the real source of your problems, like your boss, and you don’t have to restrain yourself or worry about the consequences because it’s not really real anyhow so you might as well let loose.

I came to the conclusion in my late teens that people, for the most part, believe what they need to believe. This is especially true in the arena of politics because its abstract nature makes it a perfect place to imagine things are however you need them to be.

The only place more effective for that is religion. And unfortunately, one of the the ways in which the USA lags behind the rest of the world is that they still allow politics and religion to merge and mix.

The rest of the world shut that shit down ages ago. Just try to claim you’re God’s chosen one here in Canada.

People will blast you with disapproval from all angles because that is not merely blasphemous, it’s indiscreet. You are baring in public that which should be private.

And in a reserved culture like ours, that’s just plain NOT DONE.

Anyhow. My point is that we need to reach out to the Trumpers of the world and see them as the tragically flawed but otherwise good people they are and do the one thing we can do to lead them out of the terrible trap they are in :

Become a superior shepherd.

Be willing to, gently but firmly, lead them away from the vileness in which they find themselves enmeshed and into the pure green pastures where they can thrive.

To do so will require being very understanding of who they are and how they think because what works for them might well seem patronizing or even insulting to liberal intellectual types like ourselves.

Like direct emotional appeals. We can’t be afraid to go directly for the gut. Accept that these people cannot be reached via logic and evidence because their beliefs were not the product of reason, they were formed to meet a need.

Find that need, and fill it better than the current coterie of fucktards.

It shouldn’t be all that hard.

More after the break.

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Last of the month

Hit the end of the government cheque month today, the 19th of March, which is exactly two months before my 52nd birthday.

That doesn’t mean anything, I just thought it was neat

Checked my VISA card and found I had $50 left on it. After hemming and hawing and agonizing over what I “should” do with it, I said fuck it and ordered in.

So I looked over some options on DoorDash. But most of them seemed way too expensive for my budget.

Or, in the case of one place, the burger had brie on it. Plus it was expensive.

I’m not paying you $25 for a burger and fries no matter how “bistro” it is.

So I gave up and went to our old friends at Donair Dude. I am currently in cholesterol heaven as I eat lamb donair meat on a bed of fries.

That plus a big veggie samosa was $30. Still not cheap compared to when Julian is nice enough to get me McD’s, but it makes me happy.

I love lamb so damn much.

That leaves $20 on the card, which I will just put onto my Steam account, raising the current balance there to around $60.

I am getting to the point where I am going to take the plunge and actually buy a new game. I don’t know why I am so hesitant – if I don’t like it I can just return it.

I just have a nervous and fretful temperament, I guess. I suppose that’s yet another thing I need to learn to accept about myself.

Science says that temperament is permanent. You come out of the womb a nervous baby, you’re gonna be basically nervous for your entire life.

It doesn’t have to make you miserable, though. Not if you stop trying to fight it.

I feel like for my whole life, I have been trying, unprompted, to force myself to be the person I want to be or feel I am supposed to be, and it’s taken this long in my life t figure out how self-destructive and futile that is

One of the most important determinations in any person’s life is, as the cliché goes, who you really are. And that includes figuring out what parts of your personality are permanent and thus something you’re just going to have to deal with.

I’m a shy, nervous, silly, and not very sensible or practical dude.

But I am also incredibly intelligent, with enormous creative energy and talent, and unique and powerful insights into how things, and people, work.

And I am starting to think that all of that comes from the exact same place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess I might as well get this out of the way first.

Is it just me, or does it like I killed and mounted Eeyore?

Anyhow, as you can see (and hear) from the above, I don’t have a lot on my mind right now, or at least, nothing currently outputting to my conscious mind.

I’m pretty sure that my subconscious mind would still be processing stuff even if I was a coma. That’s just the way I am.

In that case, I hope it would all take the form of an exciting metaphorical adventure.

Some sort of quest to wake the giant, or something.

Finished my playthrough of Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive (aka final – Ed.) Edition. Ascended to the titular Divinity, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds because it’s not like you get to actually do anything with your new powers.

I guess godhood would be rather hard to program into a game. Even vaguely defined “divinity” would probably end up being either boring or just maddeningly vague.

I guess I was wrong about the title having nothing to do with the content of the game. The subject of Divinity is actually central to the whole plot of the game.

But the Original Sin bit is still a load of crap.

Now, I am at a crossroads. I could :

1. Do another playthrough. As usual, I have already started one. That’s how I deal with the post-completion depression that often comes with finishing a game. As depicted in this song. I could just keep going with that playthrough, maybe after looking through the rather enormous collection of mods for the game for something to make a second playthrough more fun and exciting.
2. Play through Baldur’s Gate 3. That would complete the “trilogy” of games by Larian Studios. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one hell of a game, even though it has nothing to do with the previous two games, and there would be a sort of logic to completely the triptych. But that game, being modern, has a tendency to make my computer crash. And…
3. Buy a new game. There’s the Spring Sale underway on Steam and I could get a number of games for rather good prices. Of course, being recent, they might crash my computer too, sight. I really need to get that new power supply. And then ask Spuug to install it for me. Should be way less complex to install than the GPU.

So that’s where I am right now relative to my one and only hobby, gaming. Right now I am leaning towards getting a new game and taking my chances with crashing.

If I do get something new, it will probably be the blazing hot “new” release Elden Ring, a 3D ARPG from last year that was all the rage during those bright and shining pre-Trump days, or Palworld, which is a Pokémon clone with guns.

I’ve enjoyed that kind of monster collecting game before, but the real appeal to me is that this particular game has a lot of very spicy mods for it that will let you interact with your monsters in a more intimate way.

Gotta fuck’m all, after all.

But I know that adult mods tend to only be amusing/arousing for a little while before they become old hat, so I am not sure they are enough of a reason to buy a game.

So I will probably end up getting Elden Ring.

Or, ya know, being paralyzed be indecision until the sale is over and I can’t afford anything recent again.

That’s always an option.

More after the break.

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Through a glass darkly

Got my new glasses in the mail today.

They don’t work any better than my previous pair, at least not yet.

I am going to try to keep them on as much as possible in case my eyes just need to adjust to them.

But needless to say, this development has depressed me.

I was so looking forward to nice, normal glasses I could wear all the time instead of my current pair which make me farsighted and thus are useless to try to wear when I am reading or using my computer, and that’s most of my day.

So far, I think I’m habituating to the new glasses, but only time will tell. It might turn out to just be hopeful thinking.

If the glasses are, indeed, unsuitable, I will be faces with the thorny issue of why.

Did I accidentally give the glasses company my old prescription? I don’t know. It’s possible. But the new glasses seem to have a different effect on my vision than the previous pair, so I don’t think so.

Are the new pair defective? Possible. But I don’t know how I would figure that out. So for now I will have to assume that they are functioning as intended.

Is it the worst option, namely that my eyes are just plain too fucked up for glasses now? I really, really hope not.

If I go blind, I will kill myself. There’s no way I could handle that.

Luckily I have a needle in the eye appointment next week so I can just ask Doctor McKay about it. See what he thinks.

It could be that it’s hard to correct my vision while this swelling issue that is the reason for the needles remains unresolved.

So I am still holding out hope that if Doctor McKay and I can get the swelling to go down and stay down, my vision will improve dramatically.

Especially in my left eye, which is the more fucked up eye.

It will be tricky, keeping the new glasses on for extended periods. I can feel eyestrain building up in my eyes and my forehead from all the straining to see I am having to do just to see what I am typing.

And I have the WordPress screen font turned up pretty large.

We will see how things go. I will keep the new glasses on for as long as I can stand it, anyhow, and maybe my eye muscles will adjust.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye on the situation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welp, he’s my video for today :

I’m thinking I was maybe a bit too harsh.

I mean, I believe everything I said in that video. Conservatism is the political ideology is stupidity. Its media’s real purpose is to hide the actual complex and nuanced realities of life from people so that they do not have to face the harsh truth that they are actually just plain not smart enough to understand the world, let alone have opinions about it.

All of that is true but not useful, as Felicity would say.

And it represents only part of what I want for the world. As I have discussed before, part of me is a fire-breathing truth-spitting iconoclastic ideologue looking to shake the walls of Heaven with my words, and part of me just wants everybody to come together in peace, harmony, and understanding of our mutual shared humanity.

What can I say, I’m a complicated man. I contain multitudes.

I suppose that, just for public sanity’s sake, I may have to choose which side to go with one of these days. I can’t be like Don Rickles, acerbic and insulting one moment then an overflowing pot of human warmth the next.

At least, I don’t think I can do that.

But for now, I am just stretching my capabilities and learning what I can do with this whole YouTube thing. I mean, that’s just my third video of this new era. I haven’t even started to find my real voice yet.

And who knows, maybe tomorrow I will be full of loving kindness.

Like I said. Complicated. Like I am part Martin Luther and part Jesus Christ.

I do have an intent behind the video above. I want to activate shame and outrage in my conservative targets because I want them to get mad enough that they have to prove to me that they aren’t stupid by actually thinking of counterarguments.

And that’s the long game I am playing. If we can get them truly thinking about their opinions and testing them against reality, the side of the angels wins in the long run. Even if all they are doing is looking for ammunition to fire back at me.

So am I just trolling? Well no. I’m not just trying to piss people off so I can laugh at them. I am trying to challenge them in order to make them mad enough that they are willing to do whatever it takes to defeat me – even think for themselves.

But in the interests of full disclosure, there’s part of me that just wants to have people to debate with because that’s my idea of fun.

More fun that just burning my brain cells with video games, that’s for sure.

And I want to contribute to the public discourse. That’s one of the main reasons I want to become a pundit.

The other reasons are more selfish. What can I say, I’m only human.

I want nice stuff too!

But I also think I have a very unique and distinctive point of view that could move the public discourse along by prodding people to think about what they believe and why.

In that, I would be playing the role of the trickster. That’s the trickster’s karmic role, to wake people up and get them thinking, whether that’s with delightful comedy or searing diatribes or insightful political commentary.

And I can do all of those!

And I’m willing to cautiously believe that this YouTube thing might be an actual purpose and a role for me in life.

Certainly if I attract an audience, whether they’re for me or against me, I would feel like I am doing something with my life for once.

There’s got to be some righteous purpose for all the stuff going on in my head.

Or at least a way to make a living.

More after the break.

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The first step is change

When I was a “too smart for his own good” bored out of my mind in class because thw work wasn’t even in the same galaxy as being challenging for me, I would look around at my fellow students studiously beavering away at the classwork and wonder what it is that made me different from them.

I eventually came to the conclusion that part of the difference was self-image.

They didn’t think of themselves as the kind of people who get good grades, nor did they want to become that kind of person, so they struggled. Often they came from families where academic achievement was either passively or actively punished because it made the child not “fit in” with their family and/or one ot both of the parents was very sensitive about their lack of book smarts and would undermine the child out of their own jealousy or hurt feelings.

My “advantage”, therefore, was that I came from a very intellectual family where curiosity and learning were very much encouraged by my mother the teacher and there were lots of books lying around that I could read and feed my mind.

But even moreso, I was way too socially clueless for me to know I wasn’t “supposed” to be so overwhelmingly bright and by the time I figured that out, I was far, far too stubbornly prideful to pretend to be dumber than I am for any reason.

Pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to pull that off anyhow.

The conclusion I draw from this is thus : if you are going to set out to learn something, the very first thing you have to do is make peace with the fact that you are going to become the sort of person that knows that thing.

For example, don’t take a cooking class unless you’re certain that you are ready to become someone who knows how to cook.

If the knowledge conflicts with your self-image, stay home, because no matter how hard you try to put the knowledge into your mind, your identity will spit it right back out again.

Me, I’m socially inept enough to be a total polyglot nerd. There is literally nothing I could learn that would conflict with my self-image and/or my social role.

There would be things it would surprise me to learn, like sewing, but I’m not against it.

SO before you set out to learn something, ask yourself what you assume about the sort of person who knows that kind of thing, and if you want to belong to that group.

I think it could clear away a lot of roadblocks for you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kentucky Fried Chicken now has onion rings!

And they are quite good, too. I got them instead of fries with my KFC order last night. They are just the right amount of crunchy, which I quite like, and of course have lots of delicious onion flavour as well.

And they’re not even greasy! Truly a culinary marvel.

Anyhow, here’s a thing I made today.

Bluesky is a-Twitter (LOL) with calls for Chuck to resign and let some liberals who actually believe in things take over.

And that’s made two things connect in my mind : calling people like that chucklefuck Chuck a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) and how I have been saying that we are in an era where the next generation rises up and kills the old dinosaurs like Chuck in order to really address the important issues of the day.

I was originally talking about the brewing outrage in Republican circles that might one day lead to Trump’s impeachment and arrest, but it applies equally to the current situation in Democratic circles plus it’s a pun.

So consider this current situation to be the asteroid that wipes out the DINO-saurs and makes actual fucking change not just possible but vitally necessary.

The barbarians have breached the gates and seized the capital and it’s going to take real guts and true passion to save the Library of Alexandria from these assholes.

Oh wait, this just in, Elon defunded all libraries.

Civilization sure was nice while it lasted.

I’m still mulling over exactly what I am going to do with my newly regained powers of video. The truth is that there is absolutely no reason to get particularly fancy with the videos. YouTube’s culture not only doesn’t call for slick video production, I am pretty sure people don’t even trust it.

And that goes double for TikTok. I must admit, I miss TikTok. My experience of it was quite positive, even when I got in trouble for daring to suggest that we, as a culture, have gone too far in the hunt for predatory pedophiles.

Heck, I didn’t even suggest it. I just asked if maybe it was true.

But it kicked off a whole lot of people completely freaking out on me and I replied to every single nasty comment and I absolutely LOVED it.

I need to get into that kind of trouble more often. Come at me, bro. I’m feisty AF and I love verbal combat above nearly any other activity.

But I can see how the role of YouTube provocateur might lead me down a dark path because the more controversial I am, the more views I get and hence the more $$$.

So I would have to watch out for that.

I know it’s possible to use TikTok on a Windows machine. You just have to use an AndroidOS emulator, which would help me in other ways too.

Like with those damned websites that require a cell phone to sign up.

In general, I should work on setting up various forms of crossposting. I’ve been doing this blog for an audience of maybe five people tops for a long time and it would not be that big of a hassle to look for some WordPress plugins that could crosspost this stuff I write to like, Instagram and Tumblr and Wattpad and the like.

I dunno. Where DO people post their long form text content these days?

I could even, in theory, use one of those voice AI programs to turn my text into audio and then turn that audio into video for YouTube.

I dunno though. It might be weird to have people I don’t know reading this thing of mine.

I might start actually worrying about how people are going to react to what I type instead of just basically writing whatever pops into my head when I sit down to write.

Oh well. Time for me to FINALLY take a shower with my new cast cover!

If this works out, I’ll buy one for the other foot!

More after the break.

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Apres le deluge

Well the cast cover worked out great.

It’s basically just a long plastic sleeve with a big gasket (think “rubber ring”) at the top. Your leg goes through the ring into the plastic sleeve and the gasket seals around your knee and keeps the shower water out.

So yay, that part of the problem is solved and I can shower comfortably again!

Trying to make do with plastic shopping bags and tape was never gonna work out for me. I don’t know what competence magic Albert did when he fastened the bags around my feet, but it’s definitely beyond my meager capabilities.

You know, technically, dyspraxia is a learning disability, and that means I am both a wild out of control genius and learning disabled.

Something for me to think about in the future.

Anyhow, I was able to take a nice hot shower without the bandage on my left foot getting wet at all, and that makes me very happy.

Makes me feel that important bit more human, you know?

Watched a movie called Wild Robot with Julian last night. Holy crap, the feels. The plot is a mess structurally. The initial plotline ends and then the movie just keeps going.

For like, another hour.

But that’s forgivable because the movie has a very big heart and evokes very big feelings, especially in a big softhearted furry like me.

Plus one of the main characters is a fox named Fink.

And he starts off cynical and manipulative but through the magic of helping the robot Roz raise the little gosling Brightbill he learns warm values.

And there’s this scene near the end where Roz is going to go away from her new forest friends so the people hunting for her don’t put her friends in danger and Fink has this breakdown where he tells Roz that she can’t go because he needs her because she’s his only friend and he’s never had a friend before.

And that just wrecked me emotionally.

I’m tearing up just thinking about it right now. Because I am that fox. That scene plugged directly into my sad and lonely childhood and I felt everything that Fink was feeling and I cried.

Not as much as I should have. Stupid male emotional constipation, was I really that worried that Julian would think I’m a wimp?

But I cried, especially when I tried to tell Julian during the credits about what was making me so sad and I couldn’t get two words out before the emotion overtook me and I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t make more words come out.

And I am very glad all that happened. I need to cry. I need to let my emotions out in a way that’s way less cerebral than writing about them. I need to express myself.

Maybe one day I will get to the point where it doesn’t take a movie with a fox in it to push me to tears. The only other scene in an animated feature I can compare it to is that sequence in Zootopia where Nick talks about his trying to become a “boy scout”.

That’s basically what happened to me too, Nick. Thought I was starting to fit in then a bully chased me off.

Maybe I should watch the Fantastic Mister Fox again.

Catharsis is healing, after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You might want to skip this one, Julian. I’m not looking to put you or Felicity in the middle of anything but I just have to get all this off my chest.

I feel like Joe has completely given up on me.

And not just me, us. He never participates in any, and I mean ANY, of the usual ways we used to get together as a group.

No Zoom calls Tuesday and Friday after midnight. No Denny’s on Sunday night. No getting together with Julian and I to watch Colbert at midnight. No nothing.

He’s technically been back home for months now and to my surprise my life has barely changed at all. The only difference is that every now and then, seemingly entirely by accident, I see him for like half a second.

You know, just enough to confirm that he IS around and therefore he definitely IS avoiding me as opposed to when he was sick and living with his family and therefore had a pretty good reason for not being in my life.

Now, all he does is make vague noises about insomnia and being tired to Julian and it’s a magic “get out of all socialization” card and permission for him to just plain not bother with us any more.

And that really, really hurts.

To say it breaks my heart is a vast understatement. It crushes it. I always thought he enjoyed spending time with me and Julian and Felicity but apparently it was an onerous task he was dying to escape this whole time.

And I know what’s happening.

Warning, I’m about to be creepy in that special way of mine.

I know that when it comes time to decide whether or not to participate in one of our activities, he is choosing the immediate warm comfortable relief of saying no and enjoying the euphoric rush that we introverts apparently get when we dodge socializing.

Hence people talking about feeling positively giddy when plans fall through.

Not me. As patient readers know, I don’t take disappointment well, and Joe has been disappointing me over and over again for months now. I really love spending time wth him and I thought he liked spending time with me, but apparently he didn’t like it enough for it to be preferable to staying in his room.

And I know that he has not been thinking about the cumulative effect of every single time he fails to show up for me. Every time the possibility comes up, it’s just so much easier to say no and heave an internal sigh of great relief at all the social wear and tear and effort you just avoided.

And I am sure he doesn’t feel like he’s rejecting me/us every time, but that is definitely how it feels to me.

I mean, there’s a part of me that resists being social too. I’m an introvert as well. Being social drains me. It takes effort for me to overcome that.

But I do it because I love my friends and I love spending time with them so unless I am definitely sick, I am going to be there with and for them.

To me, all this is intuitively obvious. We express how we feel and what we care about through our priorities. When you de-prioritize people, they notice, and it hurts.

And knowing that spending time with me is not all that important to him feels like being stabbed in the heart with an icicle.

This has been building up in me for weeks and I feel better now that I let it out.

Thanks for reading it!

More after the break.

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I made a thing!

This time, with the camera a decent distance from my face because I’m not recording myself with a tablet and therefore myopically needing to be close to the screen in order to see what I am doing.

Now I have a great big monitor for that, yay!

And I had fun doing some basic video editing. I’ve got all the linkages in the process working so I can record stuff whenever I like.

I’m not ready to commit to X minutes for Y days yet, but I’m getting there.

Next time I’ll comb my hair first.

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My life on the Z list

I suppose I should start reading up on how to be a YouTube star.

I know I won’t enjoy it. I never enjoy reading those kinds of instructional things. I am not great at following instructions and everything I do is about self-expression so I also don’t like being told how to express myself.

Plus I lack self-discipline, I suppose.

But I will make myself read up on the basics of YouTube self-promotion so that I can get that much right at least.

I know that a big, big part of promoting your content these days is crafting the perfect title and thumbnail. And that’s kind of a drag.

But it doesn’t matter how good your video is if nobody clicks on it.

I can probably manage the title, that’s just words and I am good with words. And it might be fun coming up with clickbait-y (but honest!!) titles.

I’m willing to zazz up my content to give it maximum appeal but I am not going to use those titles that actually have almost nothing to do with the content.

God, those piss me off.

But my opinions have a tendency to be kind of provocative at times, and well, I am not above maximizing that effect in my titles.

I don’t wanna do the thumbnails though. That’s graphic design. Ick.

I hope that out there, someone has a template for Photoshop or the like where I can just type in the words and it handles the “typesetting”.

All in all, it should be interesting to finally launch myself into the much richer medium of video content instead of just doing text all the time.

Words are great but they’re limited, you know? Even mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mood is better today.

Yesterday it was pretty dark. Not for particular reason I can think of, just that part of my long mood cycle I guess.

I suppose that’s another thing I need to get used to about myself : I’m moody. And my moods don’t necessarily proceed logically from anything in my life.

And that’s frustrating.

My overly logical and controlling mind wants everything to proceed logical via a known and controllable cause and effect and has a very hard time accepting that some thing happen “just cause”.

I mean, they have a cause on the fundamental scientific level. Everything does. Presumably a Clarke level alien could track my brain chemicals and activity and show me exactly why my mood shifts like it does.

But I sure as heck don’t know.

It does feel like a cycle, though. A process. Some deep part of me is on a long loop kind of like a conveyor belt in a factory, and the factory is smelting and refining me as I pass through it, and even though the belt is very long, I am still keenly away both that I am going to end up back at the beginning again and that I am not really getting anywhere.

I still feel like a passenger in life. A spectator. A tagalong. Life is something that happens to other people, not me. I’m just this strange and unique creature who is always on the outside looking in and who has no idea what it’s like to actually be apart of things.

But perhaps there is strength to be found in my strange life in suspended animation. I certainly have an extremely unique point of view and some very deep insights into how things work and how they SHOULD and COULD work.

And I am passionately interested in what is going on in the world, and I feel like I could make a valuable contribution to the public discourse if I could only get over myself.

I’m working on it.

At least I think I am. I dunno. Maybe this life of mine really is a conveyor belt and the unhealthy part of my mind has gotten very good at creating the illusion of progress while keeping me “safe” by making sure I don’t get anywhere or change anything.

I’m definitely of two minds about nearly everything.

There’s the healthy, sane, expansive, confident, upbeat side of me that can’t wait to go out into the world and find fun things to do and cool people to meet.

That’s the side of me that really just wants to go play with the other kids.

But the other part of me is still that traumatized little monkey who was raised in isolation and then introduced to the other monkeys and instantly freaked the fuck out.

My isolated life has made me ill suited to go play with the other kids. The sheer volume and density of the fear involved is staggering. I had to learn, at way too young an age, that my only safety lay in nobody noticing me because I stayed hidden away.

And the only place I was truly safe was alone, at home, in my bedroom. That was the only place I could let my guard down and relax the hypervigilance and feel, well, as safe as I am capable of feeling, anyway.

Even in here, the permanently panicking little animal inside me never truly relaxes. That’s the part of me that has been hiding deep in the darkest recesses of my mind and calling the shots from in there with the cold yet crazed calculation of a mighty villain.

He’s just trying to be safe.

But I don’t know what it would take for him to realize he IS safe. Has been for a very long time. The things he fears so much are just ghosts of the distant past.

But he’s afraid to relax and let go.

Because that’s when they GET you.

And that would be the worst thing possible.

More after the break.

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Everything is fine

That’s what I am telling myself and sending it as deep as it can go.

Everything is OK now. I can relax. That scared little animal inside me can finally calm down, lay down, and have a nice long rest.

We’ve made it home safely. In fact, we’ve been home for a very long time.

And we have nothing to fear in the big wide world but our fears themselves. We are perfectly capable of handling whatever life throws at us.

And even if we get overwhelmed and freak out again, so what? Hang in there and wait for a little while and it will go away.

Anxiety is not destiny, for fuck’s sake. It’s just the result of a malformed adrenal response being triggered by innocuous things and if I just hang in there rather than fleeing I will see how meaningless it is.

And there’s always Xanax.

At this point, I feel like what remains of my skinsuit of fear is really just a kind of chemical residue remaining in my system entirely shorn of any cognitive justification.

So much for the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. According to it, if I change my thinking I will change how I feel!

Yeah right. Fuck off, CBT.

Ahem. Anyhow, knowing that all this fear holding me back is basically biochemical bullshit does help me push through it.

Sure, the alarms will go off, but I don’t have to listen to them. I know they are meaningless and represent nothing but a broken warning system.

I feel like I am building up the strength and will to make a big leap into something new. Like making my way onto YouTube again.

I look at my YouTube account and see over 300 videos there and I realize that I am perfectly capable of creating content daily.

Only now it would be much more well produced and way, way funnier.

I could really rock the YouTube world but I have to get started and established first. Make a “workflow” that makes creating videos as seamless and friction free as I can.

Any minute now. I swear to God. It’s coming.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thang today.

Talked about a lot of different stuff, as usual. As patient readers have no doubt figured out, I am not one to stick to a particular topic for long.

That’s just not how my mind works. Following the connections between things is so much more interesting to me.

I get bored staying in one place, intellectually speaking.

One of the things that came up was my being a somewhat high strung individual who could really use someone with a strong, steady, patient hand I can hold in order to keep myself grounded when my anxiety starts to spin up.

He’d have to be one heck of a guy. A real solid citizen type, with a powerful manly vibe and the forbearance to deal with me when I’m irrational.

But mostly I deal with myself, or not at all.

That’s another thing that came up : how incredibly emotionally isolated my life has been. I have never had anyone I could truly open up to, which is why I can only do it in the form of this blog. So I have no experiece of being emotionally intimate with anyone.

Not even with my friends, whom I love dearly. I am closer to Joe, Julian, and Felicity than I have ever been with anybody in my life and it’s still not very close.

Not that anyone is doing anything wrong. I am honestly a hard guy to get close to. It’s way easier for other people to open up to me than vice versa.

Like I said to Doc Costin today, that’s what would make me a good therapist but not necessarily a good person to get close to.

I honestly have no idea what will happen if anyone gets closer to me than my usual cheerful and sensitive and inobvious arms-length distance. I certainly want that to happen but I might freak out in a lot of different ways because someone is violating boundaries I didn’t even know were there.

These are the sorts of things normal people figure out in their teens.

I feel like such a freak.

We also discussed my feeling of weakness of character, which like a typical therapist he had to argue with me over.

I wasn’t saying I was permanently weak, Doc, I was saying I feel weak. Currently. I am busily chipping away at the emotional numbness and layer of icy fear that keeps me that way but for now I feel a distinct lack of character in myself.

Hence my general lack of action or determination. I am incapable of making a decision and then following through on it, especially if it takes sustained effort.

The best I can do is occasionally generate a wave of enthusiasm and ride that wave at least until my completion compulsion takes over and forces me to finish.

But the moment that wave crashes, it’s over, and God knows when I will have the wherewithal to generate another one again.

The sort of decisive will that would let me explore the world and expand my life, even only as far as to look for new ways to have fun, is alien to me. I can imagine what it would be like to have it but so far I have been unable to find it in myself.

So I remain hemmed in by fear and going absolutely nowhere. Filled to the brim with talent and genius but with far too weak an id to make use of it.

I live in a vault of riches I can’t bring myself to spend.

And that sucks.

More after the break.

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Tater tots and taco bites

That’s what’s for supper tonight.

The tater tots (or “tasti-taters”, because there’s no way the people at Ore/Ida can copyright the word “tater”) are something I’ve been getting for around a month now. I confess that I am possibly a little too fond of them as I seem to make a little more each time I prepare them,

But ever since I learned that it only takes 3.5 minutes in the microwave to prepare them, I have been hooked.

Hopefully, my Jardiance can handle the extra carbs.

The taco bites are from those neato people at Michelina’s.

Who happen to have one of my favorite ads ever.

The taco bites are meh but I think that’s because I overcooked them. Next time I will nuke them for 2 minutes flat, not 2 and a half.

The result was that the outer shell is a lot darker brown that the ones on the package and the taco meat and cheese filling is all shriveled up on one side of the inside of the shell and hence kind of dry and unsatisfying.

So I will definitely be trying them again in the future.

Maybe not for a while, though, because I have so many other Michelina’s single serving entrees to try.

They really seem to have nailed the formula, because the entrees are around $2.50 each and even I can afford that.

In fact, for around $10/week, I could have my four “home made” dinners a week covered. The other three days supper is either McD’s (Tuesday and Friday) or Denny’s (Sunday). Take out the one night a week I tend to order in, and now it’s $7.50.

Then I would only have to worry about a side dish, and even then not with all of them. A lot of them are meaty pasta dishes, and those do not call for any more carbs.

So yeah. I think I will be eating chez Michelina for a while. I was reluctant to go full Michelina’s at first because change but now I can see that it’s no big deal.

I do have chicken burgers to use up though, so maybe I will only get two Michelina’s a a week for now.

Thus concludes this fascinating analysis of the feeding habits of the urban Fruvous.

That’s the only kind. 😛

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a dark and brooding mood right now. Dunno why.

Probably just my ever-fluctuating brain chemicals. Or maybe I am coming down with some kind of bug, who knows.

But right now I have a mild headache, my joints are aching, I’m a little dizzy because I just sat down, and overall I am just feeling crummy.

I really should invest in some genetic Tylenol for situations like this. A mild analgesic seems like the perfect thing for my current condition.

And, like I’ve said, I should go back on antihistamines. That would probably help with a whole variety of symptoms given the nature of a histamine response.

Oh well. I’ll taken a Naproxen, that should help, at least with the joint pain.

Today’s not been much so far. Spent a lot of it asleep or just drowsing in bed letting my thoughts do whatever they need to do.

I guess I’ve been feeling bummed out all day, now that I think about it. I must have hit another iceberg of emotion that needs thawing as part of my healing process and that is going to burden my emotional regulation circuits for a while.

And they’re not that robust to begin with.

There are times when the sheer scope of my therapeutic task makes it seem insurmountable. My development has been so damaged and deficient that it’s occurred to me that a normal life might just be out of reach for me.

Certainly the sun has set on any chance I had at traditional employment.

But I’ve known traditional employment was probably not for me for a long time. There’s no way I could survive submitting resumes and doing job interviews, even if it was all online. Not when I know that, objectively, they’d be crazy to hire me.

I mean, I know I would be an amazing employee, but from their point of view, I’m a 51 year old mental patient with no job history to speak of.

Why take a chance on that?

So I would need some kind service like the March of Dimes to open doors for me, I think. They have special relationships with certain kind and understanding employers willing to take a risk on someone like me.

Eh, but fuck it. I’d rather get back into freelancing.

Which would be a pain in the ass because not only do I have to jump through a lot of annoying hoops to return to active status on UpWork, I would also have to have a smartphone which I currently do not.

I know, I know, it’s time I get with the millennium. And it doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition, I could just get a pay as you go phone and it would be a lot cheaper than a monthly plan because I would hardly ever use it.

Don’t know that I want to have the temptation to play games in bed again, though. I would have to put it somewhere where it’s not easy to get to when I want to lay down for a little while.

Being me is complicated sometimes.

I would honestly be better off with a flip phone. Except that would be useless for the main thing I want a cell phone for, which is to be able to do things requiring a smartphone, like using various business’ apps.

Or signing back in to UpWork for fuck’s sake.

There must be other freelancing sites out there, maybe even one that makes allowances for phoneless freaks like myself.

I’ve slept so much better since my tablet died. I don’t want to go back to bouncing between playing games on my PC and playing games on my tablet.

And a lot of those tablet games were just manipulative time sinks anyhow.

Maybe I need a smartphone, but a really shitty one that can support a web browser and some really basic apps and that’s it.

Or maybe I just need to develop more self-discipline.

Nah. Technology is easier.

More after the break.

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To just be

I need to become sufficient unto myself.

This cancerous continuous crisis mode has to go. It causes so much internal stress and avoidance. I would be a much happier and healthier man if I could just… relax.

Which would mean overcoming my old enemy, the anti-action bias.

I’m still in the grips of the depressive delusion that I have an incredibly limited supply of energy and therefore must invest it very, very carefully or tragedy will ensue.

And I am all for the prudent deployment of limited resources, but it too can metastasize into something toxic and compulsive where what started off as cautious investment instead become emotional constipation and reflexive self-denial, or worse.

I’m not preserving my energies, I am letting them rot on the vine. They are going to waste. It’s a use it or lose it situation and I am definitely losing it.

But it’s worse than that because not using it has more consequences that mere wastage. It leads to all kinds of frustration, anxiety, and neurosis from all those energies having nowhere to go but inward.

In order to just be, I must just do.

And deep down I know this. I’ve been saying that I need to do more in order to be happy in this space for decades now. But nothing ever changes.

That characteristic compulsion to hoard my energies (as if that’s even possible) still makes me very lazy.

Perhaps the real issue is reward. The anhedonia of depression makes you think that nothing you do except for the very high reward activities to which you are addicted can possibly be worth doing in terms of how rewarding you will find it.

Needing to expend a certain amount of your energies in order to be happy does not compute in such a stark equation, where everything is about trying to get the most reward from every tiny erg of expended effort.

From that benighted perspective, spending any energy without a HUGE return in reward is like pouring money down the drain.

I’d be better off if I took a page from the book of higher energy types and looked at my energies as a curse that I have to work hard to dispel before I can have any peace.

Or, if that’s too harsh, just see them as opportunities to have more fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got another needle in the eye today.

My eye doctor, Doctor McKay, is trying a new drug on my eyes. Something called something like “Aleal”. He wants to see if it works better than the previous drug at reducing the swelling in my eyes.

As far as I can tell, the vision in my left eye is still way shittier than the vision in my right eye. But we shall see.

I didn’t even know I had this appointment today until around noon, when Julian told me of his plans to take me there today.

Thus I learned of it not only by surprise but by implication. I had to actually say, “so what you’re saying is I have another appointment today. ” to get the info.

I’d appreciate more warning next time, Julian. You can’t assume that just because you know about it, I know it too.

You know me, I’m clueless. And I know that my appointments are written down on the calendar so I don’t bother remembering them myself.

Please warn me in the future. And that means actually telling me that I have an appointment soon. I shouldn’t have to deduce it.

Anyhow, it of course hurt like fuck. In fact, it hurt more than it ever had before, I think because Doctor McKay didn’t quite nail the “straight in and out” insertion that I know from my insulin days is the best, least painful way to do an injection.

So in addition to the usual pain spike there was a bit of burning after and the needle was actually in my freaking eyeball for like an extra second.

Whatever. The pain is brief, if intense, so I can handle it. I can feel the spot where the needle went in but there’s no pain, just a slight strand of cold, presumably from where the freezing agent got into the injection site.

Oh sure, NOW the stuff fucking works.

Wait, I remember what I wanted to talk about : paranoia.

It started with this YouTube short. ^[1]

It features an intergenerational conversation where a Millennial or Gen Z is quizzing a Gen X type like myself about how our parents just let us go play in the neighborhood with no supervision and had no idea where we were and what we were doing until we came home around sunset.

In the skit, the Gen X’er says, “I don’t know, I guess we were just tougher and more street smart or things weren’t as bad back then whatever. ”

No, my Gen X bro, the only thing that changed is that parents became way, way more paranoid. And that started with us.

We raised our Millennial kids to believe that the world was awash in desperate perverts just looking for a chance to abduct and murder them.

And then we complained about how kids don’t play outside any more.

And it’s all bullshit. Random child abduction is an incredibly rare crime. Your kid is way more likely to get in a car crash or contract a disease than to ever be at risk for being snatched by some dude in a van.

It’s the same kind of ubiquitous paranoia that leads to women feeling unsafe on the streets and imagining the worst when some guy just happens to walk behind them.

It’s all incredibly unhealthy, on both a personal and a societal level, and it leads to so much baseless pain, fear, and suffering, and yet I know there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s nearly impossible to fight something everyone believes, even if it’s delusional. It’s a truth that is far too hard to face for most people, so it’s just weirdos like me who can see the truth beyond the social illusion and realize it’s all bullshit.

I mean, imagine being a parent faced with the truth that you have been denying your child all kinds of freedom and healthy growth for no good reason.

And the same goes for women. Imagine knowing that you’ve suffered fear and anxiety based on threats that do not exist.

And that knowledge flies in the face of what everybody else believes.

So this pervasive and perverse paranoia probably ain’t going anywhere.

I mean, the real, safe world is so much less exciting.

More after the break.

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More about paranoia

The paranoia of which I speak is much more than a mere sociological anomaly.

Actual, real world policy decisions are based on this communal myth of a far more dangerous and exciting world.

It all revolves around making people feel better about their normal, boring, ordinary lives without them having to do anything.

If the world is filled with criminals after your stuff, it makes every single completely ordinary moment spent safe at home becomes a triumph over the forces of evil who would gladly slit your throat in the night.

Not to mention how this belief implicitly enhances the value of your possessions. This is very important because it forestalls those uncomfortable and confusing feelings where you can’t remember why you spent so much money on these things in the first place.

Turns out getting them was a lot more fun than having them.

It’s like how shitting on unemployed people makes people feel like they are somehow noble and rugged and self-reliant just for having a job exactly like 90 percent plus of the rest of the population.

And all without having to do or change or sacrifice anything at all.

Turns out there’s a lot of money to be made in making people feel special for being just like everybody else.

It’s like we are all part of this cult of paranoia that uses this sense of pervasive threat to conceal the thudding dullness of our ordinary lives.

If people truly opened their eyes and looked outside their lives to the much larger world outside their front doors, they might become discontent with their servitude and start to question the very valuations upon which modern life is based.

Like… if acquiring stuff has no meaning and adds no lasting value to our lives, what then? What do we do with all that money that demands to be spent? Spending money is seen as the primary way of acquiring happiness and so if we can’t make ourselves happy via consumerist means, what else is there?

Spirituality, of course. But modern society does a very poor choice of leading us there.

What we all truly need is a path to meaning and getting in touch with our true values.

But who’s going to sell us that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] I know, normally I would embed the video, but some videos just do not let you do that for some reason. Pisses me off. [[1]