That’s what I ended up talking about today.

And the sad truth is that we might be headed for divorce.

And like a lot of people whose relationship is foundering, we are talking about it to our friends and getting their support and luckily, literally everyone is on our side.

I don’t know the details of Trump’s new “liberation day” tariffs yet. I assume they are horrible and are going to spell disaster for all of us, American or no.

But in the long ruin, he will have simply taught the world that they don’t need the USA. We can just trade with one another, and pretty soon, the USA won’t be able to trade with anybody, and they will learn just how interconnected we all are.

Sure, losing a market of 350 million plus consumers will hurt everyone. But despite what they seem to think, most of the world is NOT America and there are 7 and a half billion other consumers we can sell our stuff to.

And Trump won’t last forever. He’s a very old man. He could die at any moment. It’s not like we have any idea what is health is really like.

And of course there’s impeachment. At the rate he’s pissing off (and on) his own supporters and causing them to scream at their senators and congresspeople, that comes closer to being possible every damn minute.

And wouldn’t that be a lovely way for this fiasco to finally end? Trump impeached and arrested along with all his cronies, with even his biggest (former) supporters all cheering like their team just won the Superbowl?

Because that’s the thing. He’s doing evil shit that even his supporters can understand, and they don’t care that he technically told them he was going to do it before they voted for him because these people run on emotional reasoning, not logic, and he made them trust him – that’s his superpower – and then betrayed them and that is all they need to know in order to be out for blood.

All we liberals need to do is to resist the urge to scream, “I TOLD YOU SO” and instead be extremely sensitive and supportive (something we’re good at) and maybe, now and then, say, “Wow, are you gonna take that from him?”

Just a thought.

Had Therapy Thursday today. Talked to Doc Costin about how I have been feeling better lately and how I actually had a moment when I felt emotional healing begin.

He agreed with me that the sunshine is probably helping a lot. The evidence that it’s been SAD^[1] making me sad is piling up.

Which means I should take advantage of my solar powered mood state in order to make sure that I have my light therapy setup ready for when winter rolls around again.

I know I have a solar light setup around here somewhere….

It also helps that I have been doing videos. They are something exciting and new for me to pour my energies into and that helps me perk up and stay alive and away and engaged with reality.

Oh, and I started my Onion headline list today. I already have five of the needed 30. Getting together 30 of them will not be a big deal for me.

Working them until I can’t think of any ways to make them better will be the challenge. I don’t normally operate that way. I create things then shove them out the door to make room to create more things.

As I am sure you all know.

But I am sure I can do it. I just have to recalibrate my brain a bit.

More after the break.

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Foot long nachos

Yup. That’s a thing.

They have them at Subway. I ordered myself some Subway last night and DoorDash hit me with the “if you add X amount to your order you’ll save Y on delivery” thing and for once it was actually profitable.

Usually it’s like, “add $5 to your order to save $2 on your delivery fee!” (um, no), but this time, for once, it was the other way around.

So I looked around the Subway menu on Doordash and that’s when I saw Foot Long Nachos in the Snacks and Sides section.

And I was like, WTF could that possibly be? There was no description, no picture, just those three mysterious words : Foot Long Nachos.

So obviously I had to order it.

Turns out it’s just regular nachos in a foot long dish. Which was not surprising, though still a little disappointing.

I wanted foot long nacho chips dang it!

Unfortunately there was no option to skip them putting jalapenos on there. I don’t eat those. They loudly disagree with me.

I am guessing these nachos probably come pre-assembled and then are cooked from frozen in their sub toasting oven.

I can’t see them catching on. It’s kind of a dumb idea anyhow.

For my sub I decided to go buck wild and not get my usual Cold Cut Combo. Instead I got the Steak and Cheese, with Sweet Onion Teriyaki sauce.

Not as good a combo as I had hoped. Sadly, I once more couldn’t taste the teriyaki at all. It seems like this curse of mine is forever.

Oh well. I was in the mood to try something new, and I did.

At least the steak wasn’t chewy like the first time I had a steak sub from Subway. That experience put me off those for twenty years.

Seriously. It was like beef flavoured bubble gum.

Otherwise, I am feeling a little down compared to earlier. Fair enough. That’s part of life that I am just going to have to get used to.

I think I am just getting sleepy because the sun has gone down. I will take a wee little nap between now and midnight.

And that’s another day in my two-fisted smash’em up of a life over.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I had just played way too much Tyranny and my brain calories were all used up. But I knew I would have to record a video soon.

So I decided to lay down for 45 minutes then make the vid when I woke up. That would have taken me to 2:30 pm, with blogging at 4 pm.

Kind of tight, but my brain was fatigued.

And as I lay down, I tiredly thought, “Who knows? maybe while I’m laying down I will get a great idea for today’s vid.

The moment I laid down, I had the entire idea for this :

It just sprang full formed into my mind. I’d start a series of one minute thought provoking videos called A Minute To Think. Tight, dense, and full of food for, well, thought. And I would make them into YouTube shorts.

I didn’t quite make it with that one but what the hell, it’s a prototype.

Turns out that in order for your video to be a YouTube Short, it has to be a) one minute or less long and b) “vertical”, which I think means in a 9:16 aspect ratio.

So basically, it has to look like it was shot on a phone. That will take a bit of doing on a PC, but I am sure I can pull it off.

It might even be possible to record in that format and simplify the whole process. I hope so. Converting video formats can be a huge pain in the ass.

Though I dunno. Maybe AI can make that miraculously easy too. It already can separate out all the tracks in a piece of recorded music, which blows my mind.

At some point today, possibly the moment I finish blogging, I am going to start that list of Onion headlines, even if all I can put there is my dumb joke, “Area Man joins with Depth Girl to create Volume Child”.

Ha ha ha.

To come up with these headlines (and the Minute to Thinks) I am going to have to learn to process things a different way and I am looking forward to the challenge.

For the Thinks, I am going to have to learn to be succinct.

I don’t think I normally waste a lot of words but I am definitely not succinct, and so learning to get my thoughts out in under a minute will be tough.

I only got it down to 1 minute 7 seconds today, damn it. There was more I might have been able to trim but by then I was TRULY brain fried so I had to stop.

Oh well, like I just said, it’s a prototype. I will refine the process as I go. Including, and I am gritting my teeth as I type this, being willing to do the whole thing over with tighter phrasing if that’s what it takes.

I hate doing things over. Especially things like my videos. Part of my “brand” is total sincerity and you can’t be completely sincere twice.

But art requires compromises.

For the Onion headlines it’s going to be a matter of learning to process the news in a sharp and satirical way.

Big deal. I already do. Admittedly, I haven’t turned those into Onion style headlines much, but I am a completely natural satirist.

That’s just how I process the world. With irony.

It’s a defense mechanism against hypocrisy.

So I am not worried about coming up with the headlines. I can do the bitingly satirical ones and the quotidian observation ones too.

Area Man Suddenly Worried Taco Bell Not “Authentic”.

He was quoted as saying, “I’m starting to think this might not be what they eat in Mexico at all. I bet they look at this kind of thing and laugh!”.

Excerpt from the potato

And that was just off the top of my head.

Yeah… I could totally write for the Onion.

They just have to be smart enough to hire me.

More after the break.

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What is masculinity?

That’s a darn good question, Patrick.

To expand on what I said in the comments : you’ll notice that women don’t sit around debating what it takes to be a woman.

A woman is a woman is a woman. The only qualification is menstruation. I don’t think one woman would ever say to another, “stop being such a little boy!”.

Or accuse another (or themselves) of “not being a real woman”.

The closest they get, I figure, is, like men, wondering if they are a legit grownup.

I know I sure as hell ain’t.

Or they might wonder if they are a good woman, like a good feminist or housekeeper or office worker or whatnot.

But there is no sense that they can just plain not qualify for womanhood.

But like I said in my YouTube comment, I think we men need something like that. The standards of manhood might change over time but the need for them does not.

Of course, things are even more complicated for us gay men. For many decades, gay was synonymous with unmanliness. To be gay was the worst possible crime against masculinity and therefore literally any heterosexual man outranked you.

We’re getting over that now. Slowly and painfully, but we are. Gen X types like myself are still carrying a lot of that negative programming around, asleep but not gone.

In a way it’s easier for us gay nerds because nerds don’t exactly invest much in manliness for a whole number of reasons.

As such, I have always viewed the “manly” world as something interesting and certainly not without its merits but almost completely alien to me.

My Dad did try to instill some in me and my brother Dave. It worked a lot better with Dave. Of the two of us, he’s always been way, way, WAY better at being normal.

Of course, my dyspraxia kind of put manliness out of reach too.

It’s like I am the exact opposite of Nick Offerman.

That’s part of how I know I would be the “woman” in any marriage.

I’m warm, I’m nurturing, I’m a homebody, I’m rather emotional.

Now I just need someone to be my “man”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, this :

I’ve thought about it more, and yeah, I would move to the USA to write for The Onion.

How could I refuse? I would be jumping from the gutter all the way to the heights of modern comedy writing in one enormous Superman-like leap.

For that kind of opportunity, I’d move to Hell. Or worse, Trump’s America.

At least Chicago is a Great Lakes city, so sanity would be only a lake away.

Still, it’s a bracing thought. I would have to get my passport, which ain’t cheap, and have to deal with all the rigmarole involved with getting a work visa.

Becoming an American citizen is not an option. Dual citizenship, maybe.

As nice as it would be to be able to vote in their elections, and therefore have more of a right to have an opinion on their politics, I am not giving up being Canadian for anything.

I love my country. It’s a vital part of me. End of story.

Now I don’t know how far $70K USD/year goes in Chicago, but at the moment it’s worth a hair over $100K CDN, so I have to assume I’d be able to live a pretty nice life.

Not the heights of glamour and luxury, but those don’t appeal to me anyhow. I would just rent a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood with lots of trees in it (we humans love to live in the forest) and make a nice little nest for myself.

Sounds absolutely lovely to me. My own little slice of heaven.

But I probably should not be getting that far ahead of myself. For all I know, it’s a remote job, or can be.

In which case I would be living here off of $100K/year. And even here, that would get me a fairly nice life.

So this is a goal worth putting some damned effort into, is what I am saying.

As for the 30 Onion style headlines, it’s not like I have to write them all at once. The deadline is over a month away. Theoretically I could write one a day until then and still make the cut.

More probably I would write a few here and a few there and once I had the requisite number I would spend the rest of the time refining the fuck out of them until each one was as funny and sharp as I could make it.

Assuming I can pull myself together enough to start.

Heck, even if the gig is out of reach, it would still be a good comedy writing exercise, and who knows? Maybe I would launch my own rival satirical website.

Call it The Potato. Both because of my Prince Edward Island heritage and because “the Potato has many eyes. ”

You know. Like a news organization.

I suppose my prospects are not great. For all I know, they are not even taking applications from outside the USA, although if so, they should have said so.

But I would like to think the folks at The Onion are cooler than that. Why restrict your search for the funniest people around to just the USA?

For all they know, there’s a dynamite genius satirist living in Lower Angola who would be a major asset to their team.

Or. Ya know. Living in Richmond, BC. Ahem.

It’s certainly something to think about. I know that if I summon up the wherewithal (that ever elusive substance) to get my list of headlines started, I will probably finish it.

Then it would be a matter of coming up with a really funny cover sheet and a resume so hilarious that they don’t notice that there’s almost nothing on it.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am a hilariously funny comedy writer and bound to be better than like 90 percent of the other applicants, so I at least have a chance to get the gig.

Then I would go back to the VFS writing campus and SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACE.

More after the break.

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About not failing myself

The real trick with this Onion thing is holding on to it.

Because I know what will happen if I don’t do a specific intervention to prevent it. It will sit there in my mind, seemingly not going anywhere but in reality slipping slowly away as my fear and aversion not only keep me frozen in place and unable to move forward but very gradually pull it backwards in my mind in an attempt to (badly) solve the impasse until I have forgotten all about it until it’s way too late.

And then while my conscious mind is kicking itself for letting this golden opportunity slip away due to my inaction, a quieter but more deep and powerful part of my mind is going, “Phew, thank God that is over, we almost had to do something!”.

I can feel it starting to happen in my mind as I type these very words.

So I am going to need to prevent that by starting my list of headlines very soon. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Once I get that going, my need to complete what I start should take over and I will at least finish the list.

And at that point, throwing together a “resume” (hah) and a cover letter would be no big deal so why the heck not just do it and then forget about it.

I guess I can ask them whether they take Canadian applicants and/or remote workers in the cover letter.

If not, whatever, it was good to get activated like that regardless. I need to tap into my capacity for hope and optimism and ambition as often as I can because I am convinced that my ebullient nature is my ticket out of this hole I’ve been in.

It’s just a matter of overcoming the fear I have of using it.

Oh, because that would take me “out of control”.

Well fuck control. Control don’t work.

Time to try a little chaos.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I rather like how this turned out. And not just because I had to fight my technology just to get the damned thing done.

And I lost.

What you see there is the raw, unedited version of my little thought piece. I edited the heck out of that version like I usually do, and then Corel VideoStudio refused to output it properly so I was back to square one.

Oh well. The raw version is hardly unwatchable. I have been internally debating whether all the effort I put into editing out um and ahs and stutters and pauses is really worth it in terms of the final product.

I’m hardly inarticulate. I speak clearly and my little verbal imperfections generally flow with my speech patterns well enough.

Another thing to ponder as I explore the art of video.

I’ve done some more looking for a program to add the video clip and pictures for me so all I have to do is talk. That would be ever so handy.

No luck yet, though. I tried an app/site called Descript which has many amazingly powerful features, like editing a video by editing its script (!!), but it did not do what I am looking for, dammit.

I think I am going to have to break down and just go get the visual content myself. Maybe subscribe to one of those stock footage sites to make it a little easier.

If I start doing that, then I will be doing way less editing to my vids.

I’ve only got a finite amount of creative energy in me and if I have to come up with enough images and clips to cover a whole video, I won’t have much left.

In theory I could record the raw video then spend more than a day editing it and refining it and so on. I could try the whole “make it the best it can be until you literally can’t thing of any way it could be better” thing.

But uh, I don’t really operate that way. As with a lot of things, I travel perpendicular to that more logical and orderly approach.

I do everything wrong and yet somehow it works out. Just like Lister.

Maybe some of us just have to make things up as we go.

About the subject of the vid : I’ve been pondering it further and I think it has something to do with our modern idea of “earning” pleasure.

Looking at a sunset is free. In the capitalist brain, that means it has no economic value. It has a price of zero. So it can’t possibly be important or good.

But more than that, I think we fear things that violate what Nietzsche called our fundamental table of values. The idea of a world in which unlimited joy is available on demand is just too upsetting to us. We need some sort of structure to make sense of how you come to “deserve” things and a world in which you can get your happiness from looking at a picture of kittens at play violates the very concept of “earning”.

I think this is behind a lot of rules about sex, too. Sex can provide enormous pleasure, joy, and release for comparatively extremely little labour, and we fear that.

I mean, did we really deserve that orgasm?

On a spiritual level, I would really love to learn what we can achieve if such arbitrary limitations are removed. If we all suddenly remember that we made the rules up just to have rules and therefore we are free to change or abolish rules that no longer work.

Certainly, the immediate effect would no doubt be a period of unprecedented decadence as everyone indulged themselves to their heart’s content.

But we’d get over that, and then… well…

..we would get to see what we become when all our needs are met.

More after the break.

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Past the decadent

There is a reason why decadence leads directly to temperance.

Decadence is the pursuit of spiritual objectives by tangible means. For example, a feeling of emptiness or incompleteness is a spiritual matter.

Trying to fill that void with sex and drugs is decadence.

And that’s why addiction in all its forms is the plague of our era. Whether it’s substance use disorder (drug and/or alcohol addiction), being an adrenaline junkie, hoarding (aka acquisition addiction), serial relationships, video games, risky sex, or pretty much any other way to activate your pleasure center, damn near everyone has their addiction.

Certainly everybody with depression. We all self-medicate.

The true horror of decadence comes when the pleasure that has been fixated upon reaches the point of diminishing returns and yet the individual does not want to let go of it so they keep ramming their head against the wall trying to get enough of the thrill out of the pleasure as they need at least to feel normal.

This hurts. And yet, because of the nature of addiction, the addict has deep tunnel vision and can no longer see any source of joy other than the fixation.

So they are compelled to keep doing something that hurts like hell and that makes them angry at the world and that’s why decadence so often leads to sadism or masochism.

They have gone so deep down the decadence rabbit hole that only the extreme sensations of pain, giving or receiving, can penetrate the numbness.

Because that’s where decadence leads – numbness. The impossible cruel mechanism of addiction is that every time you use something to plug that hole, the hole gets bigger, so it takes even more next time.

Hence people going from being a free spirit hippie to being a Jehovah’s Witness or the like. Once they finally hit rock bottom and that releases them from the addiction enough that they can look for a way out, they find spirituality through extreme religion and that becomes the new addiction.

Oh well. At least Jesus doesn’t wreck your liver.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.