It’s that sad song by the Tragically Hip again.

Making that vid was fun, and it taught me an important lesson :

I am completely incapable of knowing whether my singing is any good.

The whole thing was a surprisingly emotional experience and it set off a war between my traditional destructive self-loathing thinly disguised as analysis and my stubborn refusal to let that side of me win.

It’s better than just hating myself but the back and forth between the two combatants makes it impossible for me to settle on an opinion.

There are things that sound good in my performance, and things that sound bad. I know I sang better than some people but not nearly as good as a lot of people. If I do another one of these, I will try to prepare my voice more, because just singing the song all the way through once was apparently not enough.

There was still a lot of rust in these ol’ pipes of mine. I can hear it clearly.

But that’s not what is important. What’s important is that I like singing and it felt good to express myself that way as well and it’s something other than me just talking.

Not that I am not a spellbinding orator, but I wanted to mix things up.

And in many ways it was a lot less work than my usual blah-blah. Less editing to do. Pretty easy to find an appropriate visual.

And the background video was not only royalty free, it was just plain free. I expected the site, pixabay, to want to charge me money for a royalty free vid.

Let that concept roll around in your brain for a bit.

But no, I was able to download it.

I wanted to put the lyrics in the vid too but I ran out of energy. Plus I know what a pain it can be to get the words on the screen and not looking like ass.

At least I have figured out how to center things in my video editor. For some reason the usual buttons just spaz the fuck out now. I click center and it draws a box across the top of the screen or hops to some arbitrary corner or whatever.

And in a previous era I used those buttons a lot to correct for my wonky vision.

But there’s another way. A convenient crosshair that appears to guide you to the center. So my on screen text should look less like an incorrectly loaded slideshow now.

I keep playing with the idea of doing my videos in multiple sessions in order to raise the quality to more than my roughly one hour of editing energy can handle.

But so far I am just too damned lazy and/or addicted to video games.

It’s already making the sick part of me feel panicky and infringed upon just to make a video every day. I am going to give myself time to get used to that before I push things any further in that direction.

But the seeds of progress have been planted. I have been askng myself whether gaming is necessarily the most fun I could be having for a given stretch of time.

Maybe I would be happier doing something creative, like messing around with all the neato AI toys out there, or writing something big and fictional.

Games are fun and they keep me busy but they’re not something I can really get excited about. I am too much of an old and jaded gamer for that.

Maybe I need to do new things more often. Wake myself up inside.

It’s not like I have anything better to do.

More after the break.

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Rust in the gears

I had a bad moment earlier. .

I was between activities and about to start playing games (what a shock) when I had this moment of intense physical frustration. Like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, or maybe out the window with a madman’s sanity-shredding shriek.

This happens now and then. That’s not the unusual part. Presumably the urge to get up and move around and express my physical energies builds up behind the dam that is my depression and sometimes that become impossible to ignore any more and overflows into my conscious mind for a moment or two of ARGH.

A moment that playing video games would do nothing to relieve.

No, the unusual part was that this time, I had the wit and the perspicacity to ask myself, “Well, then what WOULD make me happy?”.

I didn’t come up with an answer in those few moments, but it’s a great sign that I am beginning to think along those lines.

I have lived in silent despair for far too long. It was a major breakthrough when I realized that I wanted more out of life – a lot more – than my stable but smothering lifestyle could give me.

But it turned the lowered Paxil dose to make me feel like it was possible. As the numbness retreats, new life springs up in its place, and while the healing spring is sometimes painful to experience, it’s worth it all to finally wake up already.

The time of cold storage is over. I locked myself away to protect myself from a cruel and callous world a very long time ago. It’s the version of myself I was left with after my breakdown in my early 20’s ended and it’s the person I have been ever since.

But it’s… um… help me here, Jean-Luc..

Yeah. Exactly. Well said, mon ami.

And hopefully this spring will be MY spring. The spring where all my permafrost thaws out and all this black and stinking ice that I have mistakenly thought was part of me will melt away and the real me will emerge, like the Iceman from his cave, and step out into this wild and wonderful world he’s never truly known.

And I will be reunited with my long lost other half, and be whole again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Linked here as a reference of my reference.

Anyhow, on with the show.

I read a quote once that said something like, “after each work is finished, there is that little dissatisfaction that is the seed of the next one”, and that’s certain how I feel about these videos I have been making.

I’m not satisfied with what I have been putting out. I’m not declaring all my recent videos to be utter crap or anything, but I want something more out of them.

Maybe it’s time I mounted my soapbox and did a big rabble rousing speech about bringing the billionaires down.

Billions of us, hundreds of them, and so on.

That sounds like it might scratch this newly hatched itch. Get my passionate beliefs behind my oratory prowess and hope to really reach some people.

The political climate seems right for the rousing of the rabble, n’est-ce pas?

I could see myself becoming a Malcolm X type figure. I am certainly in a very, very “by any means necessary” mood right about now.

It’s going to happen. The oligarchs and plutocrats ARE going to get the hell out of the way of democracy and the will of the people. Consider that writ in stone, assholes.

How much damage you take and how bloody it gets is up to you.

Just remember the odds. Your private security forces and your high tech alarm systems and your helicopters aren’t going to do a god damned thing to save you if the people are out for your hide.

Because we’re the one with the tanks, bombs, and rocket launchers.

And the numbers, obviously.

Now where was I? Sorry, I got into firebrand mode there for a minute.

I really feel French when I get like that.

As indicated in today’s vid, did the therapy thing today. 2 pm on a Wednesday instead of the usual 1 pm on Thursday.

My therapist has travel plans this week. Whatever. I am fine with moving the appointment around if there’s a good reason.

It’s chaos and uncertainty that bother me. Moving an appointment is a matter of going from one certainty to another.

That said, if he did this all the time I would get annoyed pretty fast.

I told Doctor Costin about how I am trying to warm myself up inside and thaw myself out so that my emotions can flow and through that find their own level.

We also discussed my cerebral escapist tendencies and how desperately unbalanced they have left me.

I escaped being raped when I was 4 years old by retreating into the depths of my mind and in truth I have never fully emerged again.

Even when I was a schoolboy, I was dealing with reality as little as I could get away with. I would read books while walking to and from school (not recommended). I would spend my time at home watching TV or reading or playing video games. At school, I escaped the boredom of being way, way. WAY ahead of my class by escaping into the world of my mind and thinking about stuff.

I still pass the time that way in places like waiting rooms. It’s great because I don’t actually get bored until I have caught up with the backlog.

---

Where is my mind today? I totally forgot that I wasn’t done with this part yet. The mind fog rolls thick today I guess.

Now I am sitting here about to eat supper when the lunch half of the day’s blogging ain’t done yet. How embarrassing!

Oh well. Onward and upward!

More after the break.

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Absence of mind

I try to make light of my absentmindedness but the truth is that it can be very scary.

Because it erodes your whole confidence in reality. In the back of my mind lurks the constant paranoia that I am forgetting something important. On a subjective emotional level, I feel like everything in my umwelt could vanish at any moment. Just wink out of existence because my attention was focused elsewhere.

No wonder I feel like my focus is never where it’s supposed to be. Like I am always looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My gut says that is somehow related to my inability to multitask.

It must also be part of my general background of anxiety, as well as my tendency to rely on routine to keep my shit together.

I don’t have to wonder what I am supposed to be doing if I do the same things at roughly the same time every day.

I would benefit greatly from some kind of assistant whom I could trust to be, essentially, my extended memory. Someone who is good at keeping all my details in their head and at the ready so that I could feel secure in the knowledge that I’m not forgetting anything.

That would be such a load off my mind!

As is, I can only do what any of us can do : the best that I can. I try hard to keep the important things in mind and when I screw up anyhow, I say oops and make whatever apologies I need to and do my best to get over it with a minimum of excoriating self-loathing and recrimination and all that jazz.

I joked recently on a BlueSky thread that my absentmindedness is at least one third of the reason I’ve had to develop an endearing personality.

People are quicker to forgive you if you’re both sincere in your apology and cute.

I’ve always pitied those people who can never admit when they’re wrong. Like my late father. That seems like such a terribly limiting way to live.

I am no paragon or anything but I apologize right away, every time. I can’t imagine doing anything else. Not only is it the right thing to do, it gets it over with before it can hang around and fester.

And whatever it is, I do genuinely feel bad about it. It’s not performative.

I dunno, I just try hard to be a good person.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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This one ain’t much, but they can’t all be gems (PRODUCTIONS!).

Note : I am not in any sense or in any way, shape, or form, advocating for or encouraging anyone to shoot President Donald J. Trump in his big fat stupid forehead order to see him and all his evil disappear in a fine red mist for his crimes against you and those you love who supported him for so long.

I repeat : I am NOT saying anyone should do that, even though you’d be remembered as a hero by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

Don’t do it. It would be wrong.

But it’s perfectly fine to think about it as a way of dealing with the voices screaming in your head at the madness infecting the world today.

I find it to be very effective in relieving a certain kind of tension. The kind that comes from having a lot of primal animal rage and no place for it to do.

And of course, it doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s just thoughts in your head. Thoughts can’t hurt anyone, no matter how satisfyingly bloody and gruesome they are.

I mean, I don’t even own a gun.

Besides which, killing Trump would just make him a martyr. And just think of how disgusting it would be to have to pretend to miss him and say nice things about him in order to not speak ill of the dead.

Of course, it might be more like this :

But really, who’s to say?

It would be far better, morally and politically, if he is taken out politically. Like, for instance, if he is not just impeached, but impeached with almost every single Republican and Democrat voting to toss his ass out of there.

I say “almost” because you just know that, no matter how strongly the wind is blowing the other way, there would still be a few idiots so indoctrinated to Trump worship that they couldn’t possibly vote against him lest he strike them down for their impiety.

Conservatives are cowards, after all. That’s why they can’t ever stand up to real power, and why they can’t help kowtowing to the rich.

Though that might just be changing. Real populism is rearing its magnificent head and the billionaires better learn to play nice or it could be their head on a pike.

But even more than them, the Republicans in the House and Senate who have been selling the GOP base to the rich by feeding them a bunch of crap had better watch the fuck out, and that also includes Fox News.

I think Fox News is on this, though. They are at least intelligent enough parasites to know that they can’t afford to be too out of sync with their viewers so even that band of billionaire lackeys are expressing grave misgivings these days.

I actually have a tiny bit of room in my heart for pity for those idiot hosts who are stuck with trying to come up with ways to make the tariffs sound like a good thing.

They really seem like people struggling to find nice things to say about a recently deceased relative everyone hated.

“Well he was always very…. passionate in his opinions. “
“Yes… you always knew exactly what he thought about various groups of people….”

Of course, what I am really looking forward to is when they finally break. When the tension becomes too much and they snap and let loose with what they REALLY think.

At least one of them is going to do that soon. And the rest of them won’t openly agree but they won’t disagree either.

I know how Fox News and other dysfunctional families operate.

More after the break.

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The ghosts inside my haunted head

As far as I know, she wasn’t singing about me.

Anyhow, I think I have some clue as to where my “haunted” feeling comes from. It’s not a fully fleshed out and coherent notion yet, but here’s what I’ve got :

It definitely has something to do with my mind subconsciously processing emotions. The “ghosts” flickering around inside my skull like moths flapping around a lantern are emotions moving around as they try to get expressed despite the ferocious and tenacious lock down I have on my heart in the name of “control”.

Ha ha ha.

The “haunted” feeling is, therefore, the strange effect of my mind fighting itself to create a state of mind where those emotions can make it through. It feels spooky and unnatural to me because it’s so different from my usual artificial cold and calm reality.

It has a lot more in common with the vast dark and mysterious forest that exists outside of the bright cold light of my incredibly powerful mind with all its logic and analysis and deduction and insight and all the rest of its tricks.

The place that I have, traditionally, been too terrified to so much as look at let alone enter. The subconscious mind, Jung’s “shadow”, the inner realm below and beyond the febrile world of so-called “reason”, call it what you will.

It’s where all but the coldest, brightest, most clinical emotions live and it’s always where the real us truly lives and that means that we can’t go on pretending that it isn’t there or that it doesn’t count just because we can’t handle it.

So for a long time now I have been trying to open myself up to that world so I can learn to navigate it and maybe get some healing done when I am down there.

Certainly, my issues exist on a level far below anything my overweaning superego and its high intensity laser beams can reach.

It’s down there with my most warm, tender, intimate feelings, the ones that were there long before my bullying intellect took over, back when I experienced the world through my emotions instead of locking them away to keep myself “safe”.

I have to open up my haunted head and let the ghosts fly free.

And that means expressing them. The only cure for emotions is to feel them.

And I do that through this blog and you, my wonderful readers.

And who knows, maybe the video too, eventually. I haven’t spilled my guts in them yet but it honestly might do me some good.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my freaking legs.

And when I think about my legs, I think about how angry I am about the total lack of diagnosis as to what the fuck went wrong with them.

Their degradation has made my life so much more constrained and dependent and lacking in basic human dignity.

I mean, I’m a cripple now. That’s still new. And it sucks.

For instance, I can’t even have a bowl of soup because I have no way to transport said soup from the kitchen to my seat in front of Mister Computer where I spend the majority of my waking hours.

I really wish I had exercised more when it was still an option. A nice long walk in a part or even a little light jogging sounds so good to me now. Being tied to a walker has vastly reduced both my mobility and range, and more importantly, my independence.

I hate having to rely on other (mostly poor Julian) for basic things. Not only do I feel super guilty for being such a burden on people^[1], there’s the simple fact that doing things yourself is always faster and simpler and easier than doing things through others.

So even if I was a completely selfish oral retentive sociopathic seat moistener, I still would want to do most things myself.

And I’m not.

I want my legs back, damn it. I’m not going to tell you to be grateful for the functional legs you presumably have, because well yeah, but the number of misfortunes we do not have is functionally infinite, but I will say this :

Use it while you have it.

I want to be free to roam the world on my own, too. It is the bitterest of ironies that I am only getting my head together enough to socialize outside of Le Gang and maybe even talk to people I don’t even know way after the point at which my crumbling body will let me do that.

At least, to do it without help. But I’ve already covered that.

I long to be able to pay someone to push me around in a wheelchair and take care of my simple needs. I would feel so much better if I was empowered like that.

I have lived far too much of my life in a state of cringing gratitude instead of coming into my own and building pride in my ability to handle whatever comes along.

But I can’t get back all the life I’ve lost. All I can do is let it go and start living now. I might not have all the options I should, but I ain’t dead yet, and there’s fun to be had.

Slowly but steadily, I prise open the door to the vault around my heart, hoping to one day finally be born unto the real world so I can, at long last, be alive.

I don’t feel fully in possession of myself yet. Not by a long shot. I still have a lot of healing to do before I can exit my semi-sleeping stupor and truly awaken from the spell I have been under since I was raped when I was 4 years old.

Like Pinocchio, I hope to some day be a real little boy.

But until then, I will continue to be the strange and magical being that I became.

Shhh. The Prince is sleeping.

More after the break.

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About that pet thing

Let’s take another crack at this.

It comforts me greatly to think of myself as a pet (of sorts) or even a mascot to my group of friends because at least then I have a role and a use.

And that goes a long, long way towards shouting down that voice in my head that tells me I am a parasite and a blight on all that know me and a drain on society and everyone would be better off if….

Yeah, you know where that’s going.

I know that those thoughts are crazy. Lots of people love having me around. I may not have a job but I contribute in my own special way.

I spread my special sunshine as Fruvous on Tapestries. I leave tons of comments on YouTube, BlueSky, and (ahem) other places. I write on this lovely blog every day, and lately I also make a video every day.

I might not reach a lot of people (yet), but it would be wrong (and dangerous) to say that I don’t have any impact on the world or that I don’t produce anything.

The world would be a poorer and sadder place without me. People definitely would miss me if I was gone. And I could never do that to those whom I hold dear.

Suicide is such a brutal, selfish act.

Besides which, there’s still a lot of fun to be had. My life might not be all I want it to be but I still manage to have a somewhat good time.

And there’s always room for more. My life is far from over. And as long as I live, I am going to keep pressing forward toward the light, even though it blinds me and burns me and makes me afraid sometimes.

I know that this happens only because I’m not used to the light, having lived in the cold and the dark of my Midnight Tundra for so long.

And if I keep pushing forward then giving myself time to adjust, some day I will emerge from my cave into the world where the rest of humanity lives, and I will, at very very long last, get to go play with the other kids.

Maybe I was destined to be both special and strange. It certainly does seem like I had no chance of being normal – I was an eerie over-bright toddler.

So maybe I just walk a different path than most.

That would make sense.

And who knows where this road might lead me?

I just have to open myself up to inspiration.

Because when I am inspired, nothing can stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

How could I not talk about the most wonderful thing to happen in my long lifetime?

To add to that : impeachment is pretty much the only thing that can save the oligarchs.

If they make a big display of sacrificing Dumb Donnie and all his goons to the will of the people. said people might just forget who put them in power in the first place.

Or they might not. They might launch such an enormous investigation into that entire coterie of fucktards that every single link between them and the other billionaires is exposed and people will head straight for the puppet masters once they are done with the puppets and their hangers-on.

But it’s still their best bet. They need to push “the good ones” like Warren Buffet and Mark Cuban to the forefront and have them in some way leading the charge to hang Trump et all so that people have some kind of positive image of billionaires to counter all the crap that Trump and his ilk have done.

This WILL require at least a symbolic sacrifice of profits. Both in the form of allowing themselves to be taxed more (Buffet can lead that) and in accepting new worker protections and price controls and all the rest of the New Deal kind of things that FDR ushered in as a way to keep the angry mobs placated.

This could be the beginning of a new era of actual change.

People are seriously waking up to just how bullshit the era of supposed worship of “the market” has been.

The invisible hand job is over. They have seen how unregulated capitalism can lead to atrocious consequences that nobody in the public wants to see happen. They are not willing to accept that the rules of the game say their child must die. The

Capitalism is a game, and we the people are free to change the rules of said game in order to create better outcomes any time we like. The myth that The Market will somehow shrivel up and die if we so much as touch it was always a cocktail of bullshit and wishful thinking and moral cowardice, and people are catching on to the con.

That why the powers that be need to embrace guys like Oren Cass.

He’s going to help usher in a new era of post-capitalism conservatism that stops kowtowing to Mammon and remembers that Jesus said to take care of the poor.

It’s downright perverse that the socially conservative Christians, at least in the USA, somehow got infected with free market mania in the first place when the entire history of Christianity and especially the New Testament itself strongly indicates that Christianity is meant to restrain capitalism and the pursuit of wealth.

That’s why “prosperity gospel” is such a repulsive thing.

So I am glad to see people like Oren Cass pushing back on that BS.

It would be better for all concerned if the Republican elites in the House and Senate followed Ben Shapiro’s lead in denouncing Trump. These tariffs make for a perfect breaking point. You can plausibly say you were a Trump supporter until he announced the tariffs and thus dodge having to ever admit you were wrong.

And that’s vitally important in today’s world of honourless conservatism that has forgotten the lessons of character and integrity espoused in those old sitcoms they seem to love so much.

You know, things like not lying, fessing up when you messed up and taking the consequences, and trying to be a good person.

Where did all that go? Rush Limbaugh killed it, I guess. Or at least what he started.

I’d love to hear his private unguarded thoughts about this era he began.

Bet he wishes he’d been a bit more understanding.

More after the break.

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A little freaked out

I’ve also been feeling a little overwhelmed lately.

But I am pretty sure it’s temporary.

The cause is obvious to me – I have added a relatively major thing to my day, namely making a video, and that has supplanted some of the time I would more usually have to just hang loose, relax, play video games, and revert to my liquid form like Odo.

And my mind is not used to that yet. So there’s times when I feel like I am not getting enough free time, even though that’s still most of my day.

But I remember, way way back in 2011, when I first started blogging every day, and how difficult it was to adjust to that at first, but now I can’t imagine a day without getting to let my emotions out via blogging.

That’s how I know this vaguely hunted feeling that I am “always” busy will fade over time and the videos will become as routine as the blogging.

Speaking of video making, I continue to wonder whether the effort I put into editing the videos could be better spent elsewhere.

Because going through the raw footage to snip up ums and ahs and stutters takes quite a bit out of me. There’s a mental discipline to video editing and a fairly high level of concentration required and by the time I am done with that, I don’t have a single erg of energy left to do anything else.

I was actually going to add pictures and little text jokes to today’s video but by the time I finished editing that was absolutely no longer in the cards.

And all that just to make the video run a little more smoothly. I am pretty sure that my unedited speech is not so full of ums etc. as to be unwatchable and arguably that time would be better spent on something that added a lot more to the final product.

Like the pictures and jokes I mentioned.

I will continue to brood upon the subject. Maybe I will consider doing the record and edit in the early afternoon and then the polish and ornamentation in the evening. I dunno.

I know that I could probably make something really special if I could find the energy.

I know that technically, I don’t have to do a video a day. Not on paper anyhow.

But in reality, I kind of do.

It’s the only way I know how to do things. I have too much creative energy to express for me to really take my time with things.

Maybe that will change at some point, but for now, it’s what I got.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, as always, my vid :

Nothing amazing to report there. Tried to make a thing, followed a method that turned out to be deeply flawed, will try again tomorrow.

Unless I forget. Always a possibility with me.

Then there’s this gem that I got from BlueSky :

And I think that all that Christian hypocrisy is finally starting to catch up with them. Prominent members of the religious right in the USA are standing up and saying. “Hey didn’t Christ say something about being nice or whatever?”.

Yes he did. Y’all need some Jesus, that’s what you need.

Then there is this miracle of language :

They say the best art comes from the worst times and these times of ours are certainly bringing out the wit in people.

Everything about that reply is magic. The turn of phrase, the setup, the rhythm, the way it misleads with the first half to make the punchline all the sweeter… perfection.

That’s not just a snarky reply, that’s a verbal assassination. I only hope to be that good at being righteously bitchy some day.

Nitpick : might have slightly funnier as “by pigeons”. Just a thought.

But the ultimate comedy kill shot came in this form :

And that leads me to the reason why this is actually a great time to be alive : because all over the USA, literally millions of people have flocked to anti-Trump “Hands Off” protests, and it ain’t just Democrats.

Not by a long shot.

In fact, they are on track to have over 3.6 million total protestors today at over 1100 protests in ever single god damned state.

And you know that includes the red ones!

And to put that in perspective, 3.6 million Americans would equal almost 1 percent of the entire population of the good old USA.

I am damned proud of our southern neighbors today. The people of American came out in force today to tell Donald Trump exactly what they thought of what him and Musk have been doing to their federal government.

And here’s the thing : it’s only going to get much, much worse for him in the future.

Because the recession (depression?) caused by the tariffs hasn’t even started yet. Just wait until the prices go up at the same time that people are losing their jobs.

Right now, the protests, while massive, are peaceful. Cops all through the USA are bewildered by the size of the turnout yet they report no incidents.

Turns out you have have millions of people expressing their opinion in a peaceful and respectful way when those people aren’t a pack of degenerate losers.

And nobody even had to poop on anything! Amazing.

And here’s the thing : Americans are primed for a good old fashioned backbencher revolution. All these representatives from the House and Senate that get ignored by the top GOP brass are listening to their constituents and seeing the way the wind is most definitely blowing and while no one of them has the guts to take on Trump alone, when they look around and see everyone in the same pickle, it will give them the courage needed to gang up on him.

And that’s how impeachment happens.

And the top dogs of both political parties better watch the fuck out because if they try to obstruct the needed change like their rich owners tell them to do, they will get washed away by the tide of history and flushed right down the rain with the rest of the sewage.

Get right or get out, motherfuckers.

History is on the march.

More after the break.

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Pangs of anxiety

It’s time for me to admit it : I’ve been feeling somewhat anxious lately.

Not all the time, thank God, just little stabs of anxiety when I am between activities or occasionally when I am trying to relax.

Plus those spooky moods I get now and then. That “haunted” feeling. But that’s nothing new, I’ve gotten those now and then since I was a child.

Back then, they freaked me out. Poor little Fru had no idea what was going on.

Good thing I never believed in the supernatural or I might have thought I was quite literally haunted or somesuch.

I don’t rule out the existence of ghosts, however. But obviously I don’t think they are the souls of the dead roaming the earth.

I figure they are some interaction of pheromones and electromagnetic oddness.

There is a lot we still don’t know about how our nervous system works.

Anyhow, back to anxiety. By talking about these incidences here, I am forcing myself to face them and think about them.

Because I need to deal with this problem before it gets out of control.

Now I knew that a reduced Paxil dose meant a higher risk of anxiety. I am fine with that. There are things worse than feeling anxious.

Like being so numb that you can’t do anything with your life for decades.

That’s pretty bad.

So at least I am doing stuff now. Videos, Onion headlines. Who knows, I might end up writing for the Onion and making a nice living doing so.

Imagine me living in a nice rented house in a pleasant neighborhood. Wow.

I don’t think the anxiety is a problem yet. But I am definitely going to talk with my therapist Doctor Costin in our next session.

Better safe than suicidal.

The thing is, there’s no depression attached to the anxiety. It’s just there. I think I have evolved to the point where I have separated myself enough from my anxiety and depression that I can ignore them as the meaningless noise they are.

I’d rather be calm, relaxed, and happy, but whatever. I will just keep bouncing along regardless and over time I will learn to turn that anxiety into enthusiasm or even just plain effervescent cheerfulness.

So I am not worried about my feeling worried.

It will all work out fine in the end.

I have faith in that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

About the stock market this time.

Decided to really lean in to my heresy today and reveal the truth that I first recognized when arguing with my Economics teacher in high school.

The stock market is made of bullshit, lies, and gambling, and the whole world would be far better off if we kicked the speculators out of the world’s piggy banks and stopped better people’s god damned retirements on a spin of the fucking wheel.

Well, you’ve seen the video now, you know how I feel.

Lately I always end up thinking of things I wish I had said in the vid about ten minutes after I start editing the thing, and thus far I have not had the mental wherewithal and agility to stop editing to record an extra segment and slip it into the vid saying them.

I will get there, though. I fully plan to keep making vids and improving my technique and developing my “voice” and trying new things.

For instance, comedy. I haven’t tried anything funny yet. I am a hilarious dude and I can see people making full on skits all by themselves online so there is no reason I can’t do something along those lines.

But there’s no need to rush. I can continue on my iterative learning journey serene in the knowledge that things are unfolding as they should.

Well, I can try, anyhow. No promises.

Where those late ideas go now, obviously, is right here in this blog o’ mine. It’s easy to use this space to expand on whatever I blab on about in the day’s vid.

Like, for instance, the real nature of the scam of the stock market that I forgot to talk about in the vid.

Say you did give all your money to your friend so he can bet on the ponies. And when he comes back, he not only pays you your money back, he gives you an extra $500!

Wow, what a great guy! $500 is a lot of money! He must really know horse racing inside and out. You’ll definitely “invest” your money with him again.

But what your “friend” isn’t telling you is that he actually won $10,000 and so giving you $500 left $9500 for him and a ripe sucker (you) ready to be plucked again the next time he needs gambling money.

That’s how it works with these stockbrokers and investment firms. They take your money saying they can make it “grow” or even saying they will “make your money work for you” (what a load of manure) and if they happen to win at the racetrack that is te stock market, they give you a little of that money to make you think you made a smart choice and keep the rest.

Now can you see why all these sociopaths love gambling with other people’s money? They can’t lose! If the stocks go up, they keep most of the profits, and if they go down, you take all of the losses.

And because of the vast asymmetry of (apparent) knowledge, they know that if they blow all your money on a bad bet, they can just feed you some line of bullshit about market volatility or whatever and you’ll have no choice but to believe it.

The whole thing is a Ponzi scheme inside of a scam wrapped up in greed and delusion. Like I said in the vid, I would get rid of all the stock markets in the world if I could.

But I will have to settle for being one of the only people in all of existence who can see that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but he has a tiny dick.

I’ve always felt like my destiny was to be a soothsayer of some sort.

Now if I could only find a way to make it all funny.

More after the break.

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And now the news

I could do a Daily Show style satirical news roundup, I suppose.

Obviously it would be anything but an original idea, but that doesn’t worry me because I know that wouldn’t matter as long as the riffs on the news are funny.

And of course, they would be. This is me we’re talking about here. I would freaking rock a format like that.

I’d have to pick up a few skills, like how to grab the footage I’d be riffing off of from other channels’ video feeds. That shouldn’t be too hard though it could get annoying.

And to be honest, it would be pretty low effort content for me. I generate jokes while I am watching things like the news as just a natural byproduct of being alive.

I joke therefore I am.

But the idea doesn’t really inspire me, at least not yet. It could be that if I think about it for long enough I will find a way to make it into something more.

Until then, I will file it under “good idea strategically” and it will wait until I feel ready to give it a try.

Speaking of the news, I read some good news today. Apparently the tariffs are really pissing people off, including massive MAGA “thought” leader Ben Shapiro, who is now ripping into Trump big time.

And he’s got millions of followers and is, as they say, “about as right wing as it gets”, and is massively influential in right wing circles, so if he has turned against Trump, presumably most of his followers will do so as well.

And that means the palace revolt is officially underway. Trump and Musk’s rampage is going to cost them all their base, especially when the tariffs trigger a recession and the prices for everything goes up right when people are losing their jobs, and then you will see his former supporters really getting pissed off.

And then no force on Earth will save him from the wrath of his people. Congress will turn against him. The Supreme Court will turn against him.

Hell, some of the smarter (?) people in his own executive branch will turn against him. His entire edifice will crumble away beneath him.

At that point, he’d better hope that all that happens to him is that he goes to jail.

Better to go out like a criminal than to go out like Mussolini.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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.