Yup. Another dang karaoke vid.

In retrospect, this was inevitable.

Eh. I don’t know why I do these karaoke vids. I am always deeply dissatisfied with the results, to the point where I feel a little ashamed for even doing one, let alone posting it where the whole world will see it.

I have a song cooking in Riffusion but this time I wrote the lyrics then set them aside so that I can look at them again with fresh eyes and tinker with them as needed.

At least I can dodge a little shame that way.

I keep telling myself, “of course it’s not perfect, it’s karaoke!” but it doesn’t help much.

The problem is that I can’t edit audio nearly as well as I edit video, so I don’t know how to take my vocal track and spruce it up with Autotune and taking the best of multiple takes and so forth and so on.

I mean, cutting and pasting is easy but I have no idea how to splice music of all things together so that it doesn’t sound like multiple takes stitched together.

I could try looking it up, I suppose.

Or maybe there’s some kind of magical AI vocal cleanup tool now that does it all for you.

That would be nice. I am very comfortable editing video but I only do pretty basic stuff. Cut, paste, add titles, maybe some music. Easy.

Anything more technical is beyond me.

I almost sort of have technical skills, which is frustrating. I have been saying for decades that I am a nerd in all ways that aren’t job skills.

Nobody is lining up to pay me for my ability to remember obscure songs or my scattered knowledge of science or my socially awkward introversion.

But I somehow missed getting all the technical skills that are supposed to be our compensation. I am not a programmer or a sysadmin or an engineer. I don’t have an intuitive grasp of system design or higher math. I don’t think in code.

I also don’t have Asperger’s, which is something I suppose.

And, of course, I’m incredibly talented, creatively gifted, and sparklingly charismatic.

I just need help turning those into, ya know, money.

I keep coming back to the idea of needing someone to hold my hand through my journey into relevance. My problems are both emotional and practical but the practical ones I could solve myself given time if I only had that strong, sure hand to hold to help me calm down and focus and deal with the chaos in my head.

I’m such a fragile, sensitive thing. A hothouse flower through and through.

Now where’s the hot guy with a house?

What I really need is Robin Williams from The Birdcage. A smart, competent, organized, driven person to manage and handle a super talented bundle of nerves like me.

It would be amazing to be able to just relax and concentrate on being me, instead of having to do everything myself.

Obviously what I need is an agent. And I have a list of 38 Canadian agents open in a tab, just waiting for me to apply for one. ^[1]

But so far I am still too damn timid to try. When I try to imagine myself applying to be a client of one of them, this crippling voice inside me asks, “And just what do you have to offer them to convince them to take you on?”.

Nothing, I meekly reply. I have no publications of note. The fact that I’ve written millions of words on this blog since 2011 is impressive but it doesn’t prove to an agent that someone else thinks my work is worth something.

And that’s what they are looking for. They are far too busy to figure out if you work is any good by themselves so they rely on other gatekeepers to approve you for them.

Which means getting myself published.

Which means writing things worth publishing.

And a whole new set of gatekeepers. Sigh.

I need an agent to get me an agent.

More after the break.

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On managing me

I’m pretty sure being my agent would be a fairly easy gig… at first, at least.

I’m not that complicated. Give me a task and I do it, and odds are, if it’s a writing task, I will do it both faster and better than you thought possible.

That’s the payoff for all these years of building up my writing muscles on this blog.

And I am not fussy. If I can do it and it pays, I will do it. In fact, I can see myself telling a prospective agent, “Give me all the really crappy tasks nobody else will do. I will clear them off your plate lickety split. ”

And I will. I would relish the challenge. I don’t care what it is. As long as it pays, even if it pays way too little, I will do it.

And obviously, that would be my way of tempting the agent into taking me on as a client. Just think of all the stuff you’ll finally get done!

And I know I probably wouldn’t be calling my agent in the middle of the night to talk me through my latest nervous breakdown nor would I throw a hissy fit if my intricate and fussy demands aren’t met.

Well, probably not. There’s only so much of people screwing up simple things when they were told exactly what to do one man can take.

But I can roll with the punches.

Plus writers often work alone, and that reduces the chances of drama.

But I suspect that once I was famous some ugly sides of my personality would come clawing their way to the surface of my mind and I would have to contend with that.

As does anyone who “makes it”, I would imagine.

Society does not prepare us for large differences in status between us and those around us. We grow up roughly equal to others.

Fame and/or money can fuck that up completely. There is a lot of primal primate programming that we have no idea is lying latent in our brains until it rears its ugly head when we get power or status.

Will Smith has been saying that he wishes everyone could get everything they always wanted so they can see how it doesn’t really solve anything.

I’d like the same thing, but as a test to see if someone can be trusted with power.

Real character is what you do when nobody can stop you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Maybe I should have called the video that.

It sounds clickable.

Anyhow, so I bitched about people being stupid about automation.

If your job necessarily involves interacting with physical objects, which is most jobs, trust me, you’re not getting automated any time soon.

In fact the whole idea that automation is coming for all our jobs is deeply bourgeoisie. When people say that, they’re not thinking about jobs like carpenter or nurse or managing a Stuckey’s.

No, they are thinking of nice soft middle class jobs. Info work. Creative work. Middle management “work”. The sort of things real people do, ya know?

Only people in that socioeconomic strata could even begin to imagine that automation is somehow going to take “all the jobs”.

Plus, the fact that business A doesn’t need you in order to generate profits any more doesn’t mean business B can’t exploit you.

So to speak.

Human resources are far too valuable to go to waste. It’s still possible that if you’re a middle class person, your job will go to AI and your highly specialized skillset will become obsolete and, well, you’re not exactly going to be able to switch to waiting tables or flipping burgers.

The social descent alone could kill you. We human beings tend to view loss of status as something only slightly better than death and so some people would rather starve while still technically being a lawyer than live as a fry cook.

Plus those jobs tend to be a lot more physically demanding, which is a problem if you are not used to physical work any more.

If you’re middle aged and fat, is what I am saying.

Anyhow, point is, automation and AI aren’t going to eliminate most jobs.

Just the ones people who went to college tend to want.

Switching subjects, I have been pondering what it means to take this whole YouTube thing more seriously.

It’s not an easy equation to solve. Of course, I could emulate the successful YouTube channels that I am subscribed to, and do things like exhort people to like and subscribe and join my Patreon and all that crap.

Oh gee, is my Gen X disdain for doing things like that shining through?

Another possibility would be merch but I don’t exactly have like a logo and a mascot and a (ick) “brand” yet.

I suppose I could take something I’ve said that I think is particularly pithy and slap it on mugs and T-shirts but that seems a tad premature.

Like I keep saying, I know that the product is essentially me. I am the one constant amidst all the random things I talk about. My personality, my charisma, my POV, my wit, and so on are basically what I have to offer the world.

And they’re pretty amazing.

But it’s pretty hard to imagine building a brand around myself. I don’t even have a catchy name to call myself and I doubt I ever will because I instinctively resist attempts to reduce me down to something easy to understand.

That’s not necessarily permanent though. I might figure myself out enough eventually.

My first thought was to name the channel, “Hey, it’s that guy!”. Then I would become known as That Guy.

I could then get all cute and steal something from Friends and call every episode of my show, “That Guy talks about… ” or “That Guy goes on and on about… ” or the like.

Eh. Maybe. That could work but I’m not in love with the idea.

Then again, that still sounds better than trying to market myself as some radical truth spitting iconoclast who tells it like it is.

I mean, I do, but… I don’t know if I want to make that my identity.

I would hate to get boxed in as some kind of angry firebrand and end up having to make up new things to be mad about all the time.

I dunno. Maybe I am just unable to imagine promoting myself at all.

In fact, it highlights one of the conflicts in my nature, where I know that I am pretty fucking amazing, and yet, I am still kind of meek as well.

Too meek to imagine saying,. “Hey world! I’m amazing! Gimmie money!”

I am cringing internally just thinking about it.

And that’s essentially what telling people to go to your Patreon amounts to.

I got some issues to work out.

More after the break.

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You could be a big star

And I want that. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.

Or maybe not.

I would definitely be the sort of celebrity who would make occasional appearance here and there and be all warm and charismatic and cool with my fans, then disappear into the limo and vanish for a while.

That’s the problem with being where I am on the whole introvert/extrovert thing. I am definitely not a pure introvert – I love attention too much for that. And I definitely have magnetism and appeal beyond the usual bounds of introversion.

But I am still fundamentally an introvert and being “on” like that is very draining for me so I would need to rest before I could shine, shine, shine again.

That’s subject to change, though. Could be that with the right social therapy, I would come out of my shell further and find that I can, in fact, derive energy from social interaction and not have to go back into my shell nearly as often.

But I will always need an avenue of retreat, I think.

Of course, this is all just theory. I will be lucky if I even become known let alone famous. I want to be a YouTube star and make a living doing videos, but like I demonstrated in the first half of this blog entry, that’s going to be hard for me to pull off.

So I will just keep plugging along doing what I do and trying to figure out a way to promote myself that I can live with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s vid is a note to Vladimir Putin asking him to not use nukes.

It’s something I am quite worried about.

I have this horrible vision of the old Vladillac himself, drunk and angry and in defiant denial of his own incompetence. staggering up to the nuclear button determined to give this harsh and unfair world a giant middle finger before the overdose of sleeping pills he just took kicks in.

Yes, I know it’s not that simple to launch nukes.

This is a nightmare, not a frigging simulation.

And to say a Ukraine that glows green at night would be the last thing the world needs right now is an understatement the size of all of time and space.

Although I dunno. Maybe nuclear winter would cancel out global warming.

Not worth it, obviously, but one takes one’s silver linings where one finds them.

Anyhow, I meant it when I said that if Vlad the Bad pushes the button the rest of the world would invade Russian looking for regime change.

He’d be lucky to live long enough to see the Hague.

And I hope he still knows this. But like with his bitch Dumb Donnie, I worry that the corrosive effects of autocracy coupled with advancing senility will create a perfect storm for the doing of truly terrible things.

Things they know they probably won’t live long enough to be punished for anyhow so they might as well do whatever brings them the most pleasure.

Dumb Donnie, at least, can still be stopped. The Supreme Court has said no to him many times now. The lower courts hate his fucking guts. Right now the only thing that is keeping him in power is the gutlessness of the Republicans in Congress.

And their majorities in both the House and the Senate are might slim, so it would not take very many of them to defect to the right side of history for things to change quite radically and maybe even permit impeachment.

But we don’t need impeachment to stop him. If the House and the Senate turn against him, and the courts already hate him, there is nothing to stop Congress from passing laws specifically to cut him off at the knees.

They control the purse strings, after all. They could defund the White House if they felt like it. Or pass laws officially stripping him of his powers as Commander In Chief.

It’s weird that the Americans feel the need to pretend their head of state is also the head of their military anyway.

No other country does that.

But as for the Vladiator, I am pretty sure the only way he’ll leave power is in a body bag. He has so much invested in not ever admitting he did anything wrong in attacking Ukraine that I can’t see any other way this can end.

Although I dunno. Maybe there could be a way to plausibly claim that, say, due to bad health he had to regretfully retire to a dacha on the Black Sea shore.

And he was never seen again except for the occasional “proof of life” video posted of him leading the life of a happy retiree.

Which are fake, obviously.

More seriously, I do not like the way things are headed. What are we in the rest of the world gonna do if he obliterates Ukraine with conventional weapons?

I worry that he’s still smart enough to know that if he is going to do that, he needs to do it all at once so that by the time the world knows about it, it’s over and the “we have to stop this madman now” argument loses its punch.

And if he really doesn’t give a shit any more, God help us all.

More after the break.

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The other side

Had my therapy session with Doc Costin today, Wednesday, for the usual reason : he is traveling someone with his wife.

Probably to Calgary, where a bunch of his kids live.

Ended up tangled up talking about meds at the beginning of the session, which normally wouldn’t have bothered me much but after my frustrations with my phone call with Doc Kwok yesterday, it made me a little tense.

I was tempted to snark, “When do we get to the part where a doctor gets distracted and doesn’t let me get to the point?”

Ha ha ha.

But Doc Costin doesn’t deserve that. He’s a great guy.

So I did, eventually, get to relate my tale of woe about the Doc Kwok situation and he had some suggestions. The main takeaway was that I should talk with my main Wound Care nurse about it next Friday, which can’t hurt.

But he also thinks I should take my leaking love-tap to Urgent Care on the off chances that they will have a better attention span.

If I do it, I won’t be going to the UC on 3 Road. That one still fills up for the whole day by 10 am, apparently, and I doubt I could get their soon enough, and even if I could, I really dislike feeling like I am fighting through a crowd to do something.

So we’d be going to the one on Shellbridge Road. Hopefully the fact that it’s in a weird off the beaten track location means it’s not super slammed all the time.

If it’s slammed too, then clearly we need a third one. Dammit.

My leaky gasket is definitely not worth taking to the ER. So far it’s a pretty minor issue, so unless it gets drastically worse, no ER for me.

And I will dutifully go to the lab to get the bloodwork Doc Kwok wanted so that she will at least have one less excuse to not address my issue.

I am getting to the point where I wonder if I am going to have to go into these appointments already pissed off.

“OK, Doctor Idiot, here’s what we will be talking about. Try not to get distracted by someone jangling keys in the next room. ”

Probably not a good idea to say that.

But it sure would be funny!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a phone appointment with my doctor’s office today.

Here’s how that went down.

But first, I have to get this out of the way.

As patient readers know, this appointment was not with my usual GP, it was with his locum, because he’s apparent too important to see patients any more.

Well it turns out his locum’s name is Doctor Kwok.

And I think I deserve some kind of medal for not making fun of that name. The temptation is so strong. The jokes would be so easy, and plentiful.

But I won’t do it because that would be culturally insensitive of me and I refuse to go there no matter how fun it would be.

Still, a pat on the back for that wouldn’t go to waste.

Alright, now that I have unburdened myself, I can concentrate on the actual subject matter of the vid.

I’m rapidly reaching the stage where I just plain stop giving doctors the benefit of the doubt and start treating them all like dim children who have to be handled firmly in order to keep them from wandering into traffic.

No… no Brandon, put the toy car down, it doesn’t want to go play with the other cars, now pay attention to Mommy.

There has to be some way to keep them on topic. Maybe I need to draw amusing animals on my forehead with Sharpie so I can pretend they’re making eye contact.

OK, OK, I’ll stop.

Wait, no, one more : I know, I’ll show up with the topic and a few main points I want to cover printed out onto poster board so they won’t forget.

No, remember, Mister President, remember what were talking about? Tell me what it says on the big piece of paper. No, I mean under where it says, “Donnie is the best boy in the world”, sir.

OK, now I’m done.

The doctor wants me to go in and get my a1c done. I have a standing order so I don’t have to get a lab req from her or anything.

I will do it after Wound Care on Friday.

But basically I am humoring her. What I really wanted was some sense of her being interested in my beginning to wet myself and maybe even a solution or at least some kind of tests towards that goal.

But no. Exactly like Doctor Chao, she seized upon my less-than-perfect a1c level and used that as an excuse to tell me to fuck off and come back when I’ve done whatever.

Every second she spends talking to me is a moment she COULD be talking to another patient and telling THEM to fuck off,

The important thing is to get the money. After that, you’re a liability.

That’s why they seize upon one obvious thing and focus on that because what they are looking for is not a diagnosis but a reason to make you leave.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

This is the same medical system, after all, that has been perfectly fine with not knowing what went wrong with my legs for coming up on three years.

They tried a few things, it wasn’t those, so they got bored and gave up.

Guess I must have made the whole thing up. Or whatever. They don’t care.

God forbid they should actually diagnose me. Ick, diagnoses are such a commitment, and curing people means they stop generating office visits.

Where’s the fun (money) in that?

I would accept a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness. I have no problem with that. I have a history of psychosomatics and knowing the problem is psychogenic would be a huge step forward towards fixing it.

I don’t consider that probable, but it’s definitely possible.

But no, that would involve telling me something I might not want to hear, and that way too much work for a doctor.

After all, that might make you want to stay longer!

More after the break.

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An important video

This video is too long and too serious for our usual Zoom meetings so I am going to put it here in order to share it.

Pearl here learned something important and is brave enough to share it.

In the comments, I said this :

But women will do things to one another out of jealousy, resentment, and so on that would be absolutely unthinkable to a man. Things like starting rumours, using someone’s deepest insecurities against them, emotionally bullying people, and pretty much any other venomous, toxic, nightmarish thing you can think of in their conflicts with one another.

Me, on youtube, in the comments for this vid

And that’s the lesson poor Pearl learned the hard way. Like I said in the comments, women do not fight fair. Men have an internal set of rules that limits what we will do out of aggression and that is backed by the instinctive knowledge that if we go too far, other men will turn on us and kick our ass.

Women don’t have that. So they act out of pure rage and malice and with a coldhearted ruthlessness that makes guerilla warfare look like a polite game of checkers.

Like I said, I can’t empathize with that. Those male rules are in my brain too. Even fairly awful, violent men will follow them and disapprove of any man who breaks them.

I am probably less scared of women than the average straight dude because the power of the pussy means nothing to me and I have the verbal and emotional skills to defend myself against their dirty tricks.

And that’s one of the reasons I consider it part of my mission on this planet to defend straight dudes from the women who will abuse them, counting on both the rule against violence against women and the man’s inability to articulate what they are doing to hurt him to shield them from consequences.

Well not when I’m around, toots.

Women don’t scare me.

And I will tackle anyone at any time if they are being unjust.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was kind of surprised at how much effort went into this one.

Mmmaybe I should start picking the thumbnails myself.

Then again, if it gets the clicks… clicks for dicks, you might say…

But yeah, I was a little surprised when I finished making the thing and it was past 3:30 pm, meaning that it took me over an hour and a half to make a two minute slideshow.

And I was tired, too.

Wow, imagine if I actually took these things seriously and tried to focus down and make the absolute best videos I can make and really push hard on putting them anywhere they might get noticed and dedicated my life to getting big on YouTube.

Wow, what a great way to become crippled by anxiety and self-doubt.

I mean, I am not saying it’s out of the question. But I have never operated like that before. I have zero experience with buckling down.

I’ve never had to.

I think the only way to get me to work hard like that is if I go in the opposite direction and keep on not taking it seriously at all but treating it all like a big game, including promoting myself et al, and having the most fun I can that way.

That sounds way more sustainable. If I go for the hard driving approach, I know exactly what will happen ; the moment my initial impetus fades, I will crash and lose all motivation, drive, and focus in favor of doing what I always do.

Namely withdrawing into myself and letting the world outside my turtle shell fall apart.

That’s how so many bright and noble ambitions of mine have met their untimely demise. I just can’t sustain the momentum. It’s like I’m a rocket with only one burn.

So if that one burn doesn’t get me into orbit, I crash back down to Earth.

And odds are I won’t try again for a very long time.

I think to keep on pushing like that takes some kind of burning passion driving you to be ambitious and bold, as well as a deep well of personal energy.

I’m not like that. I’m a more relaxed, lackadaisical kind of guy. I need to do things joyfully and freely and with a sense of fun and excitement.

Or at least I think I do. I have yet to test this radical new theory of what works for me. It’s going to require a serious rerouting of most of my personality and the breaking of some very ancient habits of thought, and that’s rather tough.

As usual, I can see my destination – a freer and happier and more engaged me – but I don’t know how to get there.

Just got to keep feeling my way around, I guess. As always, I have to “learn to fly” – take my mind the places it needs to go to get the things it needs in order to thrive without it having to be logical or justified or “make sense”.

That requires a true leap of faith, a leap away from the known into a discontinuous world defined not by “logic” or “sense” but by my own mind and my own needs.

I keep telling myself that I don’t need reality’s permission to feel good. That I can imagine and invent whatever I need via my powerfully creative mind without worrying about connecting it to the real world in any logical sense.

I think that’s what healthy people can do. They don’t realize it, but they can.

Deep in the bowels of their minds (so to speak) they have a program running that deploys when mood dips low in order to keep their mood afloat.

Mine sinks to the bottom because I don’t have that lifeboat.

Or maybe I do, and there’s just too much heavy baggage in mine.

More after the break.

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These old bones

I’ve been feeling rather creaky lately.

You know, rusty. Stiff. It really feels like entropy is working overtime to make sure that if any part of me remains still, it seizes up in that position and when I go to move it again I have resistance to overcome like I’m the Tin Man after a rainstorm.

So where’s my little girl with the oil can? Because I need some serious lubricating.

This is a fairly alarming symptom. Good thing I have a phone appointment with the doctor tomorrow so I can talk about it with them.

It won’t be my usual GP, Doctor Chao. He’s away, apparently. It will be his locum, whose name I was told and then instantly forgot.

Good thing they’re the one calling me.

In fact the whole thing was their idea. They called me to make the appointment, which is normally an uh-oh, but I know why they are calling this time.

When I was with the physiotherapist, I told her that I was starting to leak a little. My urinary sphincter doesn’t quite close all the way, it seems, and so a little tiny bit of pee leaks out when I get up and move and things slosh about.

A distressing sign when you’re a man my age.

The physio wrote that down in her file and I imagine that’s what led to the phone call from my GP’s office.

I hope it’s nothing serious. Something that can be fixed with medication or maybe some minor bit of outpatient surgery.

The nightmare, of course, is ending up needing to be in adult diapers. I honestly do not think I could handle that. I might never leave the apartment again if it means I have to worry about crinkling in public and revealing my shame.

So hopefully it’s just the usual older man enlarged prostate BS, and who knows, maybe they have a shot for that now.

Or, sigh, yet another medication for me to take.

At least we’re catching it early!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A little note from Canada to our good friends in the European Union.

You’ll no doubt notice that the video is rather short today. It is, in face, only two minutes and change long. I somehow managed to be succinct.

And I am not sure how I feel about that.

I mean, I got my point across clearly and amusingly. I can’t think of anything more than needed to be said. It is a thing which is sufficient unto itself.

And yet, the whole thing was too easy. Not only did I get my whole point out in just two minutes, there was even a lot less excision to do than is normal.

In other words, there was not that many ums, ahs, y’knows, and weird pauses while my brain loads the next set of words than usual.

I’ve noticed that my speech is becoming more fluent when I am making these things lately but this was a quantum jump, not an incremental one.

Could I be leveling up as a presenter and commentator?

That would certainly put a new complexion on things. If making these videos becomes a lot less work, then that would leave me a lot more energy in my budget to do more with the videos than I have been doing.

Like increasing production values, though I am quite cautious about that. I don’t want to load my vids down with a lot of cheap looking and pointless adornment, nor do I want to make it look all slick and professional and therefore less sincere.

So it’s kind of hard to imagine where those production values would go. I could add a (very brief) title sequence and outro, I suppose, though I have no frigging clue what I would put in one.

Like, most of my videos are just me talking. A highlight reel of that would be pretty boring with music playing over it.

Maybe I would have to go through my recent videos and find little snippets where I thought I was particularly insightful and/or hilarious and/or charming.

I think my fragile psyche could handle doing that.

As for the outro, just credits, I suppose, though it might be fun to sneak in some of the joke credits I have come up with over the years.

Like “Best Boy : Arfy the Wonder Dog”, that kind of thing.

Or I could go with the other idea I had today while I was feeling guilty for my video being too short (and easy), which was just to come up with more stuff.

If I started doing a desk jokes type show – you know, headline then punchline, like on Colbert or the Daily Show – then obviously I would need a heck of a lot more than just one joke a day for it.

But I’m more about the commentary. I suppose I could have it be that there’s the first segment where I do desk jokes then the second segment where I get more into depth upon an issue of the day in a more editorial way.

And then, a zany undercranked chase sequence while Yakity Sax plays!

This is sounding increasingly like a TV show, and that’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, TV is still a thing. People still watch TV shows, even if it’s via streaming and not via cable so much any more.

TV survived the switch from antenna to cable, it will survive the switch from cable to streaming just as well.

People will always want to watch TV even when it’s being beamed directly into our skulls via remote telepathy.

And I will still want to be the person who makes it.

So this could all work out, actually.

Which would be nice.

More after the break.

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Rough and raw

That’s how I feel lately, on an emotional level. Like the substance of my soul is tender and sensitive from its long, long slumber and so the world feels jagged and spiky to me even though the life force propelling it has never been stronger.

It’s an adjustment.

Right now, I am still learning how to focus these newly awakened vital energies into healthy outlets so that they don’t end up turning into anxiety.

That means I have to be open to being motivated and that, in turn, means I have to try to overcome the negative thought patterns of depression that make me think that I have to minimize effort at all cost.

Because that’s the depression talking, making me protect it at my own expense by making me think it’s a part of me.

But it’s not. It’s just a disease. An accident. It’s only a part of me in the sense that a tumour would be part of me, and like a tumour, it can be excised and absolutely nothing of importance will be lost.

And a great deal will be gained once that fucking thing is gone.

But it’s still hooked up to a lot of important parts of me, so I can’t just hack it out of there with a rusty butter knife. It has to be removed with surgical precision and that takes time and care and patience.

Hence my metaphor of defusing a bomb. That one’s pretty old.

It’s been taking longer than I thought.

But now that my Paxil dose is going down, the process has sped up considerably. I feel like my mind can clean the toxins out of its bloodstream (like dialysis) much more efficiently than before and that lets my mind’s immune system attack that fucking tumour and make it wither away.

But it all rests on my being able to be the more vital and active and engaged person I have wanted to be for so long, and that means unlearning bad habits of the mind.

I’m working on it.

See, this is where the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy types have it wrong. They thing that you can change the thought patterns and everything else will follow.

Which would be laughable if it wasn’t so sickening. And destructive. It’s like thinking you can lose weight by drawing on your scale with a Sharpie.

Thoughts follow emotions. Emotions don’t follow thoughts. No matter what we think and no matter what we do and no matter what elaborate bullshit our rational minds cook up, emotions are always in control and we can only hope to use rational tools in order to pursue our purely emotional aims.

And I say this as someone with a long history of being extremely cerebral.

So take it from one who knows.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Possibly part one of oh so very many.

Like I say in the vid, I could go on and on.

I was surprised at just how cathartic making that video was. It did me a remarkable amount of good to get all that off my chest.

So much so that for that reason alone, I am probably going to revisit the subject. I clearly have a lot of deep seated issues regarding the Boomers and being the brilliant communicator that I am, I might just be able to explain them in a way that my fellow Gen X people will enjoy and maybe even find cathartic themselves.

Who knows, maybe I can become the voice of my people!

What, it could happen!

There’s money to be had in being the most eloquent complainer. I think.

I posted my vid to r/GenX on Reddit. I’ve been hanging out there lately. Feels good to communicate with people who speak my language, so to speak.

Perhaps I have felt generationally displaced for a long time without knowing it.

Thank God I have my Gen X friends to talk to and share my brutally cynical and darkly satirical POV with. As the vid of the day shows, I have a lot of observations about the world that I am guessing subsequent generations would find quite toxic.

Although who knows. Maybe with the right packaging, I could be a sort of dark guru to Gen Z kids, telling them what is really going on and shedding some (black) light on the things in their lives that don’t make any sense.

They do make sense, kids. It’s just a really harsh kind of sense. Buckle up.

Today’s been alright. I am fairly certain that I can afford to order in tonight, although I haven’t crunched the numbers yet so I can’t be sure.

They’re not very crunchy numbers. Could do it on pen and paper if I wanted. But I will crunch them all the same so I know what I can get away with.

Haven’t run out of cans of pop yet. So the consequences of my deciding to not get a fridge buddy this week hasn’t had consequences yet.

It could be that there won’t be any. I might have had enough cans “in the pipeline” to see me through the week. Ya never know.

Without actually going to the kitchen and counting them, anyway.

But whatever. This entire experiment was predicated on the idea that if I went without the cans for a week it wouldn’t bother me all that much.

And I really miss ordering in. It’s the thing that most makes me feel like I am a real, competent, grown up type person who can participate in society.

Poverty isolates you from that. When you can’t do the fun things everyone else does because you can’t afford it, it really gives you that “Tiny Tim looking at the toy carousel through the toy shop window” feeling of being shut out of normal society. .

Poverty can make a ghost out of anyone.

So hopefully tonight’s ordering in will make me feel better, assuming that it doesn’t end up outside the door to the building or some other such catastrophe.

Worst case scenario, I can nuke a pot pie, but losing that money would break my fragile heart. I have way too much invested in this little treat.

Both financially and emotionally.

But oh well. I can’t control whether my DoorDash dude is a fucking idiot or whether some unpredictable and suspiciously improbable series of events will somehow fuck me over and it will be all my fault, technically.

But I have to try. I need a little sunshine in my life right now.

I’ve been in Siberia for far too long.

More after the break.

---

It made it!

I ordered Donair Dude and it arrived without issue.

Halle fuckin’ lujah.

I crunched the numbers, and they were crunchier than I thought they would be because I apparently slipped a mental gasket and forgot what calculation I should be doing and it took me some time to re-sync with my higher brain functions.

No, take beginning of the month income, divide it by five for the five weeks (grr) of this month, that gets you your per week budget, then multiply that by four to cover the four weeks remaining, now you have how much you should have come this Wednesday.

The difference between that and how much you have right now is your spendable.

Take out the remaining expenses of this week – $30 for Denny’s tomorrow, $20 for McD’s on Tuesday – and whatever remains of the spendable can go to ordering in.

And that covered my Donair Dude pretty much exactly. Woohoo!

Ya know, now that I have written it all out, I can see how that would seem like an impenetrable wall of number talk to someone less mathy than I.

I swear, it seems a lot less complicated in my head.

But I get it. Not everyone has the circuits in their brain to deal with complex quantitative reasoning. The fact that they can, in theory, do all the basic arithmetical calculations needed for the spiel I went into just now does not confer the ability to treat quantity like a baker treats dough.

Luckily, there’s people like me around who understand that kind of thing and unlike many corrupt products of the modern financial industry, I’m actually on your side.

I should have become an accountant. Or a lawyer. Or both.

Or at the very least a lawyer who does his own accounting.

Oh, I suppose I could still go to law school. Do pre-law at some decent undergrad institute (so not Kwantlen) then law school (in Halifax, so I would be close to home) then study to pass the bar and finally become a halfassed lawyer right before I died.

Might not be a bad way to go out, though, if I can get the right kind of cushy scholarships so that I can live a comfortable student life.

At least I’d be doing something with myself!

Of course, that assumes the Onion doesn’t snatch me up.

In that case, fuck law, I’m too funny for that shit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve got to stop half-assing these things.

I wrote another song.

It turned out pretty decent.

YouTube won’t let me embed it, so here it is.

Dunno why YouTube won’t let you embed certain videos. Seems to be random. Bugs me because embedding is so much more elegant than a dumb hyperlink.

What is this, the 90’s? Am I going to be using Telnet to connect to a remote Unix shell so I can use gopher next?

Anyhow, the song is not horrible. In fact it’s kind of impressive. That Johnny Cash voice really makes the whole thing work.

But I know I can do better. I just have to slow down long enough to really work on the lyrics until they sparkle.

Oh right, and I should explain : the final line of the song was supposed to be “queen and life) but somehow ol Johnny turned it into “queen life” and while I consider that to be a life goal of mine that’s not what I frigging wrote.

And I didn’t notice until it was too late to fix it.

Leave it for future generations to puzzle over, I guess.

Damn performers not sticking to my perfect script! 😛

I am stuck in that most painful of places in my artistic life when I know that my output is not good enough by my own standards and that I can do much better, but I am not yet able to make the improvements needed for complicated psychological reasons.

The only thing to do in such a situation is to keep on pushing until the blockage clears.

I’m not going there.

I suppose if I was a true artiste I might try to loosen my creative juices with some liquor, but I can’t afford that and I know very well that my escapist tendencies and mental illness make me a prime target for all forms of addiction so I ain’t going there.

My drug of choice is video games, and while that addiction can be quite crippling, it at least doesn’t shred my liver.

Not in any direct sense, anyhow.

Did my banking after Wound Care today. Which means I had to face the depressing truth of the coming five week month.

Good god that sucks.

But I will make it somehow. Sacrifices will be made. I already decided not to get a fridge buddy of cans of soda this week in order to hopefully make enough room in the budget for me to order in on Saturday night.

Probably either Subway or Donair Dude, as they are the cheapest of my usuals.

Other than financial stress and its general bummerness, today’s had a bunch of little nuisance things go wrong, none of which are a big deal on their own but the cumulative fact has been to make me feel rather put-upon by the universe.

Like, Julian said not to order my groceries until he was on the way back from his errands because Joe was coming with him and therefore there would be nobody to take my order in for me until they came back.

So imagine my surprise when it turns out Joe has been home this whole time. He decided not to go with Julian after all.

Meaning I could have ordered my groceries whenever.

Also meaning that I did not have my groceries when I made my lunch just now, leading to it being a rather bare meal.

Because I am out of trail mix and we’re out of oranges, so that’s two thirds of my lunch gone just like that.

And I wanted to transfer the last of last month’s credit card to my Amazon account, but it turns out the minimum load for that is $25 and how much did I have on my card?

$24.47! Son of a bitch.

So little things like that. It went on my Steam account instead. Which is fine and all but I wanted to put it towards that far off distant year when I finally buy that fucking power supply I need so badly.

Oh well. Life goes on. I will limp along like I usually do.

Like I talk about in the song, actually.

I need to give that idea more attention than it got today.

More after the break.

---

Some random thoughts

As opposed to my usual slightly less random thoughts.

I wonder if I make big sad foxy eyes at enough of my friends on Tapestries, someone will donate a 750 watt or better power supply to me.

I gave an online calculator my machine’s specs and that’s the level of power supply it said I needed. Between 700 and 800 watts.

Whatever. I just want my computer to stop crashing when it uses the GPU.

Of course, as I learned from getting my GPU, it would be far better if the donation came from inside Canada.

It was insane enough getting my GPU from the US before Trump came to power. I can only imagine what I would have to pay in import fees now.

It would probably be easier to just make one myself out of parts, for fuck’s sake.

It’s really more a matter of frustration now. I’ve needed the PSU for a long time and I thought I was finally going to get it this month then boom, five week month struck.

TWO IN A FUCKING ROW. Unbelievable.

My mood is increasingly rough and raw. I feel like energy is accumulating inside me and making me increasingly restless and frustrated and agitated in preparation for me (hopefully) evolving to my next level of existence.

I will know I have made it when I can do fun stuff like job hunt, explore new places via Discord or whatever, and in general try and do new things and look for new adventures without feeling like I need a Xanax first.

I know that there’s a cheerful, resilient, outgoing, enthusiastic person hidden underneath all the rubbish and detritus that has accumulated in this rusty dusty crusty old soul of mine.

If I process enough of that garbage, that much lighter and happier person will bob up like a liberated balloon and I will finally be the person I was meant to be.

I wish I could just set fire to all my bullshit and burn it like a tire fire until it is all gone.

But instead, all I can do is shovel.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I’ve made an important breakthrough in the field of theoretical hikikimori research, otherwise known as loserology.

It’s not a cure for failure to launch but I think its an important step towards one.

As seen in today’s vid.

Saying us failure to launch (heretofore called “FTL”) types have failed to grow up is hardly revolutionary in and of itself.

I mean duh.

But the connection I’ve made to childhood fear of abandonment is, as far as I know, brand new and original to yours truly.

Excuse me while I bask in my own genius.

Gee that feels nice.

Seriously though, I’ve wrestled with where this pervasive feeling of not being able to make it in the real world comes one for quite a while and so making the connection with the very important instinct of children to stick close to their parents was a huge relief.

But it begs the question of what the hell went wrong? How does a normal, successfully launched person acquire the confidence to leave the nest and how did that process fail to happen for us?

I have a brutally cynical theory and it has to do with how we are a very intelligent population of social misfires.

Basically, the difference with us is we’re smart enough to think about things the healthier masses simply do without question by following their herd instinct.

Our herd instinct either does not work or we ignore it in favour of concentrating on our abstract reasoning skills and the world inside our heads.

Don’t get me wrong : the ability to tune out the outside world and hone in on your inner voice is vital to high intelligence.

But like all good things, it can go way too far and become a serious problem.

So the idea is that regular, normal, healthy folk just do what everyone else is doing and it never even occurs to them to wonder why, let alone contemplate not doing it.

In doing so, they maintain life momentum and have the support and safety that comes from having the rest of the herd around them.

Yes, even in our hyper individualistic society, people still take a great deal of comfort from knowing they are “normal” and therefore “safe”.

Normal people are also far better at listening to their instincts than us FTL folk. Again, we listen to our intellects, and that means we tend to view any kind of mental input that is not logically connected to anything as noise and tune it out.

You know, pesky little things like emotions and instincts and empathy and people.

So while the rest of the kiddies were blithely developing normally into healthy, functioning adults, we were on the sidelines questioning everything and unwittingly robbing ourselves of forward momentum.

But lots of intelligent nerdy people go on to have perfectly normal, healthy, respectable lives, so that can’t be the only answer.

Something more must have happened to us to destroy our ability to advance to that level of emotional maturity and I can’t think of what it might be.

Probably not one single thing, but a number of different things that all can disrupt the same vital psychological subsystem for which we do not yet have a name.

This phenomenon may include more than us extreme cases that are unemployed and always online and so on.

I know a lot of highly intelligent people who got a university degree in something brilliant but impractical and then took one look at the prospect of competing with all the other people with the same degree for the incredibly small number of jobs in that field, and decided it was not worth even trying, and gave up, and ended up working the same sort of jobs people without degrees get.

Only with debt.

In a way, they failed to launch too.

This warrants further investigation.

More after the break.

---

Did we make it?

There definitely seems to be a certain subset of the population that assume that if there’s competition, we lose.

Like there is zero chance we can win over others on any level.

Now where does THAT come from? How did we end up assigning ourselves to the omega camp, the permanent losers club?

Social dominance games have to play a role in there somewhere. You grow up being the last picked on teams and being treated like the lowest of the low by your classmates and getting bullied on the schoolyard and it sure seems like that’s the role society has in store for you.

And childhood, especially early childhood, is where we get our fundamental social programming. These are our basic lessons in how to exist around others.

And I didn’t even go to kindergarten. Le sigh.

So I guess the answer to how we assigned ourselves to the loser group is that we didn’t, we just found ourselves there and adapted.

It’s probably not quite that black and white, but close enough.

And maybe we didn’t develop our social skills more because we were too busy listening to that intuitively intelligent voice inside. Maybe that’s why there is this seeming incompatibility between high IQ and social skills.

Maybe when that goes too far, you get Asperger’s. Or full on autism.

Anyhow. To attempt to drag us back to the point by our ankles.

The feeling that we come last in everything leads a lot of us to seek cooperative environments, or at least our own specialized nerdy environments where we at least stand some chance of not being at the very bottom.

Like I said, not all of us end up in the full on FTL group like me. My circumstances , with my parents taking me out of university and back into my childhood bedroom, were especially cruel and regressive.

But enough of us end up here that you really have to wonder why.

And if there is something we can do to get the fuck out of here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

With better lyrics this time!

Warning, some people (I assume) may find this very creepy.

It’s certainly better written than my Trump thing, which now embarrasses me.

Which means my artistic talent is evolving rapid, because the Dumb Donnie song was just a couple of days ago.

Presumably, I will find my little goth ditty embarrassing soon as well, but for now, I am more or less pleased with it.

One thing that bugs me, though, is that I can’t change the lyrics after Riffusion has rendered the song once. I can go into the lyrics and edit them but when I render the song again, the lyrics don’t change.

Guess I better start trying to get it right the first time, at least with the lyrics, which are my main contribution other than describing the vibe I want.

So next time I do this, which will probably be in a couple of days, I will have to keep working on the lyrics until I am sure they are good enough.

Not something I have a lot of experience doing. But I think I am finally ready to get past the “cheerfully pushing out first drafts” stage of my artistic growth and into actually trying to do my art properly.

I give it about a fifty fifty chance of working. I have a lot of emotional instability and wobbly self-esteem to overcome before I can truly become a real creator.

I just have to keep telling myself that my work is already amazing but being able to bear down and make it as good as I possibly can will take it from amazing to super mega incredible or possibly even legendary.

Maybe even good enough for someone to give me money for it!

Then I can REALLY show the world what I can do.

Still, I have my doubts. I may just end up hating myself and thinking I have no real talent at all except a proclivity for self-delusion.

I mean, I hope not, but it’s a real possibility.

I feel like so far my artistic output has been really sloppy and halfassed. I’ve gotten away with it because I am frankly so talented that my halfassed work is better than most people’s three and a half assed best, but that doesn’t make it good enough.

At some point, the diamond in the rough has to start refining themselves.

I could start trying to get an agent. Might be hard without the imprimatur of some gatekeeper or another saying my work is worth something, but I could at least link some of my videos and stories.

Assuming any of them are good enough.

Told ya I was unstable.

Honestly, an agent would be so good for me. It’s exactly what a loosely woven creative weirdo like me needs : someone with focus and drive and competence and a vested interest in selling my work because he or she gets a cut.

And social skills. Mostly of the networking variety – knowing people, having lots of contacts in the business, knowing who to talk to about what and where, and that kind of thing. I don’t have any of that.

I can be pretty charming in person, but I have been a total outsider for most of my life and that kind of makes networking tricky.

I don’t know the kind of people who know people who know people and so on.

Agents do that kind of thing for a living. Their entire real job is dealing with the real world for us dreamy creative types so we can concentrate on making good stuff.

It’s very symbiotic.

Imagine having someone actively looking for work for me!

I can only dream.

And look around, natch.

More after the break.

---

Don’t be a baby

I can no longer dodge the realization that I have certain infantile characteristics.

Thought not for lack of trying.

Passivity is the main one. Some deep and deadly part of me is convinced that if I am a good baby and wait patiently long enough, someone will come do everything for me.

Not an easy thing for a man, even one as non-macho as me, to admit.

That’s joined at the hip with the learned helplessness. The passivity is reinforced by the deep down sense that my only form of agency in the world is to attract some sympathetic person to help me.

And that’s a terrible life strategy for many, many reasons.

For one thing, nobody offers a lot of sympathy to giant bearded fat dudes. My friends do, thank God, but the world at large doesn’t exactly look at me and see helplessness.

But mainly the problem is that it requires you to remain helpless and weak and infantile or you start to feel the only agency you know slipping away and you’re faced with the ultimate horror of having to face life all alone.

To your infantile program, that reads as being abandoned, and that is every child’s worst fear. Children know, instinctively, that without caretakers they are doomed.

Hence the feeling, even in a 52 year old toddler like myself, that I can’t possibly make it on my own. And a lifelong history of hiding behind others and making them deal with reality for me instead of learning to do things by myself.

And I have been in this state of suspended infancy for 30 years.

Only now do I feel like I am finally reaching the stage where I conclude that Mommy and Daddy aren’t coming and therefore that it’s time for me to get the hell out of this high chair and toddle off to look for them.

Or forage for myself. That’s the more likely outcome.

After all, Mommy’s on the other coast and Daddy is dead. I can’t imagine there’s anyone who’d want to look after me and if they did they are probably even more broken than I am and not at all to be trusted.

So I guess it’s time for me to just wander off. I used to be quite good at that. I would wander around the neighborhood, wander away from my parents, wander around the library at school. I was a great wanderer at one point.

Then bullying came along and I was scared of everything.

Time for me to start wandering again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.