I decided to try covering something from the news.

Specifically, the upcoming postal fucking strike.

I give my opinion.

I know I repeat myself in that piece, and I wanted to eliminate that, but by the time I got that far in the editing process, I had too few brain calories left to figure it out.

Oh well. It’s not a capital crime, or CRIME.

Overall I am quite pleased with my first foray into news commentary. It was quite easy to download that news story and clip out the bits I wanted and build my commentary around what I had.

So I know I can do that. And that’s neato keen.

I got a phone call from my mother today, which was awesome. We chatted about this n’ that, including the postal strike.

Which was ironic because I was in the middle of making today’s video when she called and yet the topic came up naturally in the conversation.

I guess it’s on people’s mind.

Apparently, my mother did send a package for my birthday, it just hasn’t arrived yet. Phew. When nothing had arrived, I started to worry about her.

Had something happened, and nobody bothered to tell me?

What can I say, I am a worrier by nature. So is she. We’re a lot alike.

So I was extra glad to hear from her. Obviously, she meant to phone yesterday, on my birthday, but shit happens, ya know?

My words, not hers.

She told me that she has pictures of me that she keeps around, and that made me extremely happy because I tend to assume people forget I exist if I am not around to remind them and that I do not matter to people.

I know a lot of that is the mental illness talking. I am still working on healing the wounds that cause such feelings and attempting to correct my unrealistically negative and overly simplistic internal narrative towards that end.

I remember how I felt when I was a kid. And I remember why. And I remember going through a lot of really harsh shit back then.

But it wasn’t all bad. I was happy sometimes. I enjoyed myself. I had things I liked to do and was happy to do them. It wasn’t all isolation and depression.

It was a very lonely life a lot of the time, and it’s true that I had nobody that I felt I could turn to or talk to, and no kid should grow up that alone.

But there was happiness too.

I didn’t make it to wound care this morning. I’ve definitely got some kind of bug. This time I am sure because I still felt crappy even after I hydrated and ate.

I think I’m fighting it off, though. Which is good.

All in all, it’s been a pleasant day so far. Tonight I will do the McD’s and Zoom thing with my friends. I’m looking forward to that,

And tomorrow is Deposit Day, meaning the long haul grind of this five week month will finally be over and things can become a little rosier for a good long time.

Well, a couple of months, at least. I hope.

Oh god. Life sucks. The world hates me. I just checked and next month is ANOTHER five week month.

I sincerely thought there couldn’t be two in a row. That life could not be that cruel.

I was wrong. It totally can be, and it is.

I’m going to need a lot of time to process this cruel blow.

Well at least this time, I will know from the start that it’s a five week month so I won’t spend like normal on the first week then have to catch up.

If I can even call it “normal” any more.

Why must life be so cruel? Seriously, what the fuck is WITH this?

I hate it when my paranoid, suspicious nature is validated.

More after the break.

---

It’s really happening

The first time, I asked Co-Pilot. This time, I counted manually on the calendar.

Got the same result. Another five fucking week fucking month. Fuck.

Is this the universe’s way of pressuring me into getting a job or at least some work? Because people with jobs don’t go through this shit.

I had such dreams. I was going to finally get that new power supply. Or sign up for Descript for a month. Or who knows what else.

Now, I will be back to just scraping by for ANOTHER month.

And it makes me want to fucking scream.

I spent all of the previous month just counting the days until things went back to normal, convinced (without checking) that there can never be two five-week months in a row.

I mean, surely whatever calendar anomaly caused them was so rare as to make the odds of it happening twice in a row prohibitive.

Not prohibitive enough, apparently.

After doing my banking tomorrow I will have to sit down and crunch the numbers to see just how much the next month will suck.

Like I said above, it should be not quite as bad because this time, my money can be spread evenly over all five weeks.

So who knows. Maybe I’ll get that PSU yet. Between the $30 on my card and the ~$60 left on my Amazon account, I’d need to come up with around $40.

That might be possible.

Oh wait, I just checked, there’s only $30 left on my Amazon account.

There’s a recurring charge of $11.99 that wiped out part of it. I assume that must be what I am paying for Prime these days.

In which case that’s way too much. I should cancel it. I can’t afford that and with how little I order from Amazon.ca it doesn’t make sense financially either.

Man life has it out for me lately.

Oh well, hardship builds character, he said resentfully.

Maybe I can afford the Descript thing instead. Le sigh.

Whatever money Mom put in her package for me is sure gonna come in handy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, on my birthday, I made a thing!

And it’s even kind of good!

Here it be :

Kind of astounding what AI can do, isn’t it? In many ways, that impresses me more than mere image generation.

Because this is music and music is magic and me being able to make an entire song just be typing in the lyrics and a general description of the sound I wanted and having it come out that good, that credible, is power at its most profound.

And those fools let it fall into the wrong hands…. MINE! Muahahaha, etc.

The song’s far from perfect. I really should work on those lyrics more, some of them are rather awkwardly worded and I shouldn’t have been quite so gruesome when describing Dumb Donnie’s fate in El Salvador.

Still, not bad for something that started out as just something to write to test out what Riffusion could do.

I’ve also uploaded it to TikTok like I normally do with my videos, as well as posted a link to it to my BlueSky, where it might just catch on.

Well a fellow can dream, can’t he? In my fantasy, the song goes mega viral and catapults me into overnight fame and practically forces the Onion to hire me.

I even get interviewed on As It Happens!

Also, I’m a billionaire with an anthro stallion boyfriend and a spaceship.

What the hell, if you’re gonna fantasize, go big!

All in all, it’s an unusual thing to get up to on one’s birthday but I am enjoying it. If I had more energy, I would have searched for a bunch of images to put on the screen to accompany the music.

Would have been more entertaining that just putting the lyrics on screen, which was tedious and exacting work.

Oh well. Live and learn.

I’m framing this whole thing in my mind as my having made a gift for myself. After all, I did make something which pleases me on my birthday so I think it counts.

And it’s so rare that I can successfully create something substantial. Though I suppose I shouldn’t denigrate my other videos.

That just leads to me having to renigrate them later!

Aw crap, I am getting the strong urge to nap. Well not till I have done my words. Hopefully the sleepiness will pass and I will be able to get things done before I zonk out for a while.

I’m glad I put some effort into playing around with Riffusion. That is exactly the direction I need and want to go in my life : letting myself really invest myself into the things I do, and looking for things to do that can take that kind of investment.

Creative things, for the most part. I have enough creative energy to run a large factory. The kind that works with molten steel.

Not to make anything with it. Just because they can. For kicks.

I’ve tried out my brand new Brita water bottle. It works great but it’s kind of a pain in the ass to use because the only way to fill it is to pour water directly into the built in straw and that’s tricky to do with any precision so I end up wet.

And that’s no fun.

So what I need is a funnel. A simple little funnel to stick in the neck of the bottle so it can act like a wider mouth for the thing.

Once I got that going, filling it up will be much easier and I will use it a LOT.

If only it fit under the tap in my ensuite.

OK, that’s enough for now. Time for a well earned nap.

---

A long way up

I’ve been having trouble getting out of bed again.

The same ol’ story. In between waking up and getting up, there has to be this period where I sit on the edge of the bed while I try to gather the motive force to get out of bed and face the world.

Dunno what has brought that ol’ beast back to life. I guess I’ve been feeling a little lethargic in general. Obviously, I am not going to declare myself to be ill when it is probably just a lack of food and/or hydration.

So, yellow alert only. If that.

But it’s still troubling to be having trouble getting out of bed again. I am definitely going to be keeping an eye on the situation.

Oh well, at least I have gotten lots of birthday well-wishes on Tapestries, which makes me feel good, both for the goodwill itself and the pride I feel in myself for actually taking the initiative in letting people know it’s my birthday to get that goodwill.

All in all, very positive.

Oh, and I had a chat about what power supply to get with my good friend, nimbat, and mistress of all things hardware, Windchaser.

So I know which one I’m going to get : this one here.

Of course, I’ll need to have the money first. That little detail. Looks like birthday money is not coming along any time soon, so I would have to make up the around $65 difference between my remaining Amazon gift card balance and the price of the thing from my current cashflow.

Dunno if I want it that bad. I might prefer to wait a month before subjecting myself to another month with less spending cash.

Or I could get a membership with Descript instead. That’s around $50 and that would allow me to see if they can do what I want with my recorded audio.

If they can, then $50/month is a small price to pay for being able to just record my usual talking head video then hand it to Descript to add the images and videos.

That sounds so good.

So it’s kind of a fork in the road of destiny : I could pay for something that enhances my enjoyment of video games, or I could pay for something that might get me ahead.

Right now I am leaning towards the PSU because my satirical news idea requires a fairly specific set of images and clips and I dunno if a generic, transcript-based service would be able to keep up with that.

But who knows. Maybe it can. In which case, sweet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today is my birthday. Almost.

I explain it all here :

Still trying to work up the ambition to try my news thing, Bullshit and Lies.

Some day soon, I hope. Could be big.

So yeah, tomorrow is my 52nd birthday. Whoop de frigging do. I always want to get excited about it and make a big deal of it but I never do.

If I had my way, I’d have a big birthday party with lots of people I know and love and we’d hang out and chat and have snack and there’d be cake and entertainment – basically the whole traditional deal but, ya know, for grownups.

So, no silly hats. Or clowns – definitely no goddamn clowns. And the cake would be sugar free, which probably means I’d have baked it myself.

It’ll taste good but it probably won’t be pretty unless someone else iced it.

As for the entertainment, it would probably be just some dude with a guitar who can sing. A full band would be cool but probably way too loud and not only do I, in general, not like loud things, to me the most important part of this party would be the conversation, so music at a quiet, background level only.

Although I suppose, if the band really put on a good show, I would permit the conversation to stop while we all watched them do their thing.

But then back to the talking! Hey, it’s my party, and I love conversation.

Hmm. Maybe it could be a 70’s type party, complete with conversation pits, fondue, pitchers of cocktails, and rampant bisexuality.

Well it’s hard to throw a good orgy with it.

Do people still throw cocktail parties? They were everywhere when I was a kid. It was fashionable to roll your eyes at them and talk about how dreadful they were, especially when you were at one for some reason, but as a kid they always seemed awesome.

People hanging around being sophisticated and trying to sound like intellectuals while sipping tasty cocktails and hooking up with one another.

Sounds like a lot of fun to me, especially if you have some people truly worth talking to in the mix so things don’t become too vapid.

Turning 52 is no big deal. Turning fifty was, of course, a very big deal, and not one I’d care to repeat, to be honest. And turning 51 was a bit of a deal because it really swept away the last dregs of any denial I still felt about being in my fifties.

And speaking of which, I feel like your fifties are an odd time. You’re definitely not middle aged any more (odds are, you ain’t making it to 100) so you are definitely not young and yet you’re not really old yet either.

Not in the senior citizen sense of the word.

It’s like your fifties are a DMZ between young and old. As if you’re practicing for really being old. More or less just getting used to the idea.

It’s the age where you start thinking of yourself as old and kind of trying out the idea in conversation like a teenager learning to swear.

And you start ending sentences with, “:..because I’m old. ”

Maybe that’s a Gen X thing. I dunno. Maybe we feel the need to recontextualize ourselves in order to be properly understood.

I certainly feel old. But that might have more to do with having an unhealthily sedentary lifestyle with very little movement.

My diet is healthy but my lifestyle ain’t.

I’ve finally started doing the exercises my physiotherapist gave me last Monday, otherwise known as almost a week ago.

Well, I did most of them. Rather depressingly, I was too tired by the other exercises to do the “draw letters of the alphabet in the air with your foot” one.

Presumably that’s to strengthen the muscles the other exercises don’t reach, as well as to reinforce precision of movement.

I predict my finding it very annoying.

More after the break.

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High on life

And by life, I mean sugar.

Been to Denny’s, had a nice meal, including a lovely gooey chocolate dessert, and got my gift from Joe and Julian, which is a lovely fat little Thermos brand thermos, and of course I got my best gift, which was a lovely conversation.

So if I had to sum up this outing in a word, that word would be : potrezebie.

But a close second would be : lovely.

Unfortunately, Felicity couldn’t make it to my little birthday bash because her gout flared up and the poor dear could barely walk let alone get to Denny’s and back.

So grr at Felicity’s gout. You were missed, dear. It was not the same without you.

After Denny’s, we picked her up some stuff from McD’s, and picked up my gift from her, which is a Brita water bottle with the Brita filter built in so I can have lovely clean Brita water whenever I like.

I plan to make it my new drinking vessel. Not only should this make meeting my hydration needs tastier, I honestly think Brita water does a better job of washing the impurities out of my body than regular tap water.

Possibly because it takes the impurities out of the tap water, thus keeping it from adding to the problem. Or maybe it’s just the placebo effect, I dunno.

I think it was rather clever of the Brita people to think of this product as there’s millions of young people carrying their metal water bottles around with them everywhere these days, so why not one-up the other water bottles by making one with your very well known water filter built in?

It certainly made me want one!

I’m a little worried that I have not received a letter from my mother yet. Usually I would get one well before my birthday but nope, nothing yet.

I’m not worried about whatever card she got me or what money she put in it.

I just want to know that she’s OK.

Maybe I should email my brother.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is remarkably simple.

Some people seem to get that instinctively. These people tend to be “hyper”. They automatically turn their bodily energies into the urge to actually do things and this makes them high energy type people who, ideally, get a lot done.

They might still be anxious in the moments where they have to slow down, but at least they are being productive towards their own ends.

Contrast that with dysthymic depressives like myself whose entire motivational structure is clogged with the ice cold sludge of depression and thus that motivation cannot lead to action and instead leads to frustration, anxiety, resentment, and yes, more depressive.

It’s like having a seized engine. Stomp on that accelerator all you want, you still are not going to get anywhere and the strain of the engine trying to move the car will hurt like hell and make you feel crazy so you will stop even thinking about trying.

Thus, the depression conditions you to live a very limited life. A life limited by what your seized engine will allow. And because you don’t know what the problem is, you can’t explain why you can’t do things that, from the outside, it seems like you are perfectly capable of doing and that definitely would help you if you did them.

But you can’t and you don’t know why.

The solution, of course, is to get all that gunk out of your engine and un-seize it. And that is more or less what therapy is for, whether it’s the traditional kind or journaling or shouting harshly at trees.

Don’t worry, they’re old, they can take it.

But it takes more than getting the gunk about. You have to break the conditioning that seized engine forced upon you. You’ll have to convince your sluggish mind that it is okay to press gently on the accelerator again.

This will not be easy. That kind of deep conditioning operates on a level far below the reach of our usual conscious mind. You can’t just order yourself to forget all about that set of rules and be ready for new ones.

To be honest, I don’t know how one breaks that kind of conditioning. I have not developed this line of thought far enough for that yet.

The classic Skinner-box answer would be that you have to condition a different, healthier response via positive feedback. In this case, that would mean revving the engine and getting a positive, reinforcing response instead of pain or fear.

Simple enough in theory but I am not quite sure how one arranges that when this is mostly happening in your head.

Got to find new, rewarding, life-affirming experiences, I guess.

And become less dependent on always doing the same damned things. The last line of defense my depression has against any kind of newness or progress is that cold, exposed feeling I get when I contemplate going outside the usual even for a little while.

Like the world outside my narrow little existence is some kind of cold and brutal ice planet that makes Antarctica look like Club Med.

But it’s easy to grow to feel that way when you never go out there or even look out the window. It’s a way to make yourself feel better about “choosing” to stay in.

Instead of just putting on a fucking jacket.

For all you know, it’s nothing but warm sun on green meadows under a brilliant blue sky out there now.

And even if it isn’t, you’ve got your coat and your scarf and your toque and you know that, with those weapons, you will quickly get used to the cold once you’re out there.

And you’re getting cabin fever from being stuck inside for so long anyhow.

So get the fuck out there!

Aaaany minute now.

More after the break.

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The work of life

Life is work.

To be a live human being on this planet is always going to require doing things that are not inherently fun and thus take effort – in other words, work.

The only people who come close to getting out of that are the very rich and the very sick and even they have to invest a little effort into their lives now and then.

Even if someone brings you your meals in bed, you’re still the one that has to eat them.

And this is why treating effort as the enemy can be so deadly. And addictive. There’s nothing wrong with trying to live your life with a minimum of tedium and drudgery… as long as you still live your life.

But if this healthy desire for efficiency turns toxic, it can turn into a pathological avoidance of anything except for the things with the absolutely highest effort to reward ratios that exist.

Those are the things that become addictions. Junk food, liquor, drugs, video games, even risky sex or for that matter, knitting.

All it takes is for it to stimulate the reward center of the brain.

And thus you have the dysthymic life : doing as little as you possibly can while fixating on one or two very high reward activities and making them the center of your life.

Like me with video games.

Breaking the hypnotic trance of dysthymia is not easy. Trust me on that one. Finding the living spark within you that doesn’t want to live life like you’re in a coma will take a fair bit of digging and letting it ignite the rest of you be a gradual and painful process of slowly bringing yourself back to life.

Right now I am trying to rouse myself enough to make a quantum leap to my next energy state so I can become more active in my engagement with life and less of a passive barnacle clinging to the underside of life’s vessel and spinning my wheels while pretending I’m getting somewhere.

There’s a hell of a lot a world waiting out there for me and I am eager to go out and get my own slice of it.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am surprisingly charismatic when I am having a chat with the camera.

Oh yeah, today I talk about sleep.

Definitely time to shear my beard and trim my hair so I am ready for the summer.

But yeah. There’s a kind of warm glow to me when I am relaxed and chatting with the camera in my usual casual, unscripted way.

Script? I don’t need no stinking scripts!

The evidence shows that I really could be a YouTube star if I could just pull myself together enough to create truly fun, funny, insightful content that looks professional and has enough rewarding content to keep people coming back.

And I can totally do that. Even if it means I have to actually jot some things down first.

In like, a bare bones outline of sorts. Just enough to remind me what I planned to do. Like I used to do for my standup.

Just needed a word or two to remind me of my jokes.

This brings us back to the idea of doing my own little satirical news program. I know it’s within my technical capabilities – all I need is to refresh my memory as to how to work with overlays and I can add the images and clips to make it a newscast.

Hmm. I’ve had the idea to introduce myself by saying, “Hi, my name is Michael Bertrand and I have no idea what I’m doing. ” for a long time.

Could be a fun, slightly provocative way to start my little show. You have to admit, that would make you want to watch the video to see what the heck happens next.

I will keep it in mind.

What would I call my little show? I’d be tempted to call it “Definitely Not The News” but that sounds too derivative. Maybe be utterly ironic and call it, “Bullshit and Lies”.

Has a nice ring to it. And again, you’d probably be intrigued. What kind of lunatics would call their show that?

Answer : my kind.

And imagine how hilarious it would be if the young people decided that their most honest and reliable news sources was a show called “Bullshit and Lies”.

Might help in case the powers that be try to sue me for libel or whatnot.

What? The show is CALLED “Bullshit and Lies”. And now you want to say people believe what I say despite that?

You, sir, are severely undermedicated.

And I know I would do it with my usual wacky, unpredictable, self-referential, context-aware Monty Python ish style. So it would be a newscast style show but I am more than capable of weaving whatever other kind of crazy content I want into that simple format.

So if I decided to make a go of this idea, I guess making a video for the day would involve trolling some halfways decent news sources for stuff I can riff off of so I can slay politics with my snarky opinions.

That sounds like so much fun.

And just think of the trouble I could get myself into with my barbs!

And of course, that would just be the “monologue” style portion of the show. From there I could do a lot of other stuff once I get the monologue stuff down.

Like fake movie trailers, fake ads, fake PSAs, and pretty much any other type of parody media you can think of. For instance.

Yeah, I could have a heck of a lot of fun using comedy to throw my truth bombs out there where they can blast away the REAL bullshit and lies.

There is so much toxic ideology and garbage thinking that needs to die out there.

And I am just the assassin for the job.

More after the break.

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Building myself up

I think the big problem with my attempts to build my ego and my confidence up is that I don’t really have a solid foundational sense of self to build on.

So it kind of feels like I’m trying to cross the Grand Canyon with a house of cards.

I think some solidity is accreting over time, so there’s that. I dunno how stable it is, but I think it’s there to stay even if it still is in the process of settling in and therefore parts of it are still moving around some.

Still, I would be much better off with a layer of bedrock solid self knowledge under me. Right now my lack of anchoring in the real world makes my sense of reality fluctuate far too much as the sands of my mental (and chemical) state shift around.

Unfortunately, if I am to develop that solid self, I am going to have to make like a Boomer and go on a voyage of self-discovery and (shudder) FIND myself.

Gack. Just typing that made my eyes roll like marbles.

But, like a lot of sappy, wimpy shit from my childhood, there’s a lot of truth to it. I feel like I am trying to finally finish going through my 20’s in my 50’s, and that means that backpacking through Peru is not exactly an option for me.

In fact, disability and lack of money means that I can’t really go anywhere. It would be tricky for me to even go to a convention if it was in Richmond, for fuck’s sake.

Which leaves going on a voyage of self-discovery online, which immediately sounds pathetic and lame to me.

I mean, it’s possible. I can dimly imagine the sort of steps I’d take. But it’s not exactrly the sort of thing that fills me with anticipation and wonder.

Still, I could try exploring Discord again, looking for new people and “places” and avenues to express and develop myself around people who don’t already know me and therefore I can reinvent myself a little.

Same fox, but with way less baggage! It’s Fruvous Lite!

And that would mean being willing to just try shit on impulse. Self-discovery is not the sort of thing that can be planned and executed logically, it comes from trying things thart seem like a good idea at the time and seeing if they work for you.

That flies in the face of my usual cautious, thoughtful nature, but that thing has grown out of control like a cancer and needs to be pruned back anyhow.

Caution means doing things carefully, and with forethought.

Cowardice means not doing anything at all.

I need to start making the other choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To be honest, I could have spent all afternoon doing it. It was an exercise of will to stop myself because I was having so much fun.

Here’s the result :

I love getting to be funny with people.

Anyhoo, like the last time, this compilation of clips was the result of me prowling around my backup of my HD from a very long time ago, back when the Earth was bright and new and the wine flowed like water and Donald Trump was just some guy.

And I look fresh and new too. Partly because back then we lived next to a mini-mall with a barbershop in it and thus my hair was actually kempt for once.

But also because I was younger and cuter and more energetic.

And I had no idea that by eating like a fucking idiot despite my diabetes I was wrecking the future for myself.

Or rather, intellectually I knew that I shouldn’t be eating like that but because it didn’t feel like it was hurting me at that time, I ignored it.

Even when I got blood sugar result that stated I might as well have cold maple syrup in my veins and my legs were being devoured by cellulitis and I was still like, oh well, shit happens, thanks for changing the bandages on my ENORMOUS WOUNDS that I KEEP PICKING AT, nice nurse ladies.

I am so ashamed of how I was back then. And what a nightmare that must have been for my poor roommates.

I’m so sorry, guys. Knowing me can be real gross and weird sometimes, I know. Especially with my warm sunny personality telling such a different story then my often shockingly terrible life circumstances.

What can I say? I’m broken.

Anyhow, another thing our little clip trip above reminded me of was that I am a genuinely cute, funny, charming, wacky guy.

There’s nobody out there quite like me. I’m a bright and shiny original and I have a surprisingly large amount of screen presence for someone so shy and I could totally make a YouTube star of myself by personality alone.

All that AND a genius level IQ AND creative talent out the wazoo?

It’s really too much. But then again… so am I!

I still need to be reminded of all that a lot because while my self esteem is stronger than it’s ever been right now, there’s still a lot of darkness and negativity inside me and these little daily ego trips of mine are my attempt to erase that shit, drive it out, send it off to oblivion where it belongs.

Because I am freaking amazing.

And I am still making the transition out of the darkness and into the light. I’m getting over being afraid to even be alive, seeing as I was never supposed to be, and I still need encouragement to live out loud, take up space, draw attention to myself, demand my fair share of things, and be ready to fight for my right to be.

Against who? My inner demons, mostly.

If there was an actual person outside of me attacking me it would be a lot more fun.

Like I was telling Doctor Costin during Therapy Thursday today, I have gone largely unopposed in life. Nobody ever told me I wouldn’t amount to anything or told me I wasn’t talented or otherwise forced me to fight back against them.

I mean, how far could I go with nobody to spite?

Only now do I feel ambition growing within me and with it the desire to prove myself to the world and show everybody just how freaking awesome I am.

And get myself some god damned money! And respect!

Especially for myself.

More after the break.

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To finally level up

Like I told Doc Costin on the phone today, getting a job would let me finally become an adult. A real, honest to goodness grownup.

And that would truly be like evolving into a higher life form for me. The good it would do my self-worth and confidence is inestimable. I honestly think that if I secured solid employment, this whole nasty thirty years of nullity would disappear behind me like fog and I would at very, very long last finally begin my life, and I would be happy.

Or at least a more respectable form of sad.

So why don’t you devote every waking hour to making that happen?

Because it’s not that simple. Not for me, anyhow.

Something being highly desirable does not automatically come with the motivation to make it happen. As it stands, I am still living my life the bad old way, spending my time hiding from the world in video games, blogging, making videos, et al.

But even that has improved. At least when I spend hours on BlueSky, I am, in fact, in communication with other human beings, albeit through the safe medium of text.

I write tons of comments there, as well as on YouTube. So even on that level I am not entirely cloaked any more.

And sometimes people even comment on my YouTube videos these days.

And those people can actually see me!

Maybe in the long term, I could even do the ultimate activity for shut-ins : live streaming! Me and an audience, together at last, in realtime.

I am a little worried about overwhelm on that one, though. I hope people would understand if a creaky old Gen X fart like me can’t keep up with the comments.

But I could see having a lot of fun hanging out, answering questions, talking about whatever is in my mind, and just soaking up the attention in general.

What can I say… I may be a fox but I’m still a ham.

And deep inside I am still that little kid trying to get people to pay attention to him. Fewer things could bring me more joy than making an audience laugh and feel good.

As long as they then fuck off, because baby, I’m gonna crash.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Today, I managed to squeeze an entire minute of French out of my ancient brain!

Most of which was just me staring blankly at the camera while trying to cudgel another bit of French out of my long suffering grey matter.

It was very hard for me to do. But also very fun. And that is definitely worth noting.,

I could learn a lot from these things where I jump in with both feet and get in way over my head doing something that’s way harder than I thought it would be.

Why be so scared of that? I didn’t get overwhelmed. I didn’t end up helpless. I didn’t get devoured by the task and end up with some angry person yelling at me for it.

I got it done. Like I always do. And I had fun doing it.

And the difficulty was a big part of that fun. It was like fighting a tough monster in a video game. One that is within your capabilities but only if you really stretch yourself and give it your all.

I need more of that in my life.

It exercises a part of me that doesn’t get much release in my life. I am not sure exactly what to call it so I will fall back on “grit”. It’s that quality which responds to challenge by rising to it instead of just trying to escape it.

And I need challenge in my life. I need things which let me stretch my mental muscles and really grit my teeth and put my shoulder to the wheel and PUSH.

I have lacked challenge for my entire life. School was way too easy for me. I barely even tried and didn’t take it seriously at all.

How could I? It was all so simple!

And one of the many things that keeps me so addicted to video games is that they provide that sense of challenge. There’s evil to fight and goals to achieve and a story to participate in and that gives me the semblance of actually getting things done.

Except, of course, that none of it fucking matters.

It keeps me busy and entertained but it doesn’t really make me happy. It just distracts me from how sad I am and how unsuitable and unsatisfying a life I lead.

And it’s not enough. Not any more. So far I still have the electric teat in my mouth way too much but I am weaning myself off that slowly and learning to find the fun in things that my actually go somewhere.

Like, say, job hunting. Or participating in writing contests. Or sending spec scripts out to various gatekeepers. Or whatever else I can find that might use my many talents.

Obviously I would be a lot happier if I had stuff to do. Fun stuff that challenges me to work hard and be productive because they will result in money.

Or at least get me some freaking comments. Something. Anything. Scream at me if you want to, I just need validation dammit.

Video games can’t give you that. No matter how well (or poorly) I do in a game, it’s still just mental masturbation. There’s still nobody to see it but me. I’m still not getting anything out of it except superficial relief.

What a waste of a life!

But I’m workin’ on it. Right now I am still hiding in the world of video games from the big bad world out there but I am determined to make more of myself than that.

And that means leaving my cramped and clammy comfort zone and spending time online away from the video games and the YouTube and the BlueSky and doing stuff that might actually lead to something good.

Or at least to something new.

God, do I need new things in my life.

More after the break.

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Coin of the realm

So I am sitting on a dragon’s hoard of wealth. My only problem is one of, shall we say, basic currency conversation.

How do I spin intelligence and talent into gold?

On the face of it, it seems eminently possible. Lots of people are out there in various creative and thought-work fields making money with their gifts. On paper, at least, there’s nothing keeping me from joining them.

In practice, well, there’s hurdles.

Being 52 with no job experience is one of them. That’s how I know that traditional employment is not for me. No hiring manager will take a chance on someone like me.

Not when there’s a plethora of normal human beings to choose from.

I mean face it, a life like mine is tres bizarre. Most people at least spend their twenties looking for work and taking whatever they can get.

Not me. I lived off the kindness of my friends, stayed hidden from the world, made no waves, and lived comfortably (but toxically) under the radar for 30 fucking years.

The only upgrade I ever got was when I went on welfare way back in 1999. Then, at least, I became the province’s problem, not my friends’.

But anyhow, fuck traditional employment. I’m too cool for that shit anyway.

And the Internet has plenty of ways to get around that requirement anyhow. No, my real problem is, of course, my health.

Both mental and physical, but it’s mostly the mental health problems holding me back. One might even call them spiritual health issues.

I am sick in spirit. But I am getting better.

At this point in my life, I feel like I am fumbling around in the dark looking for the little string to pull to make the light turn on.

There’s still a lot of radioactive darkness in me and that needs to be cleaned out before my soul can truly fly up to where it belongs.

For now, I am still filled with basic animal fear of that big world out there and the idea of going out into the hubbub of the real, workaday world scares the life out of me.

But I am working hard and getting stronger.

And soon, whether it’s on sheer chutzpah or a massive ego trip, I will emerge.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In today’s vid, I go on a bit about Dumb Donnie’s new toy plane.

I really want the whole world to start calling him Dumb Donnie. I want it to become so pervasive that he can’t help hearing about it. Nothing in this world would enrage him more than everybody calling him stupid.

Because he is stupid. Very, very stupid. He is senile and demented and had regressed into his early childhood and reminding him of this fact would drive him insane.

Nothing would bother a Gemini like him more than being called stupid.

In fact, in my ideal fantasy world, I’d get together a bunch of tough guy mobster actors with New Jersey accents to sit around and say, “What’s Dumb Donnie up to today?” and then laugh at news about Trump and what a fuckin’ idiot he is.

We need to destroy people’s ability to respect him. He doesn’t care if you don’t like him, but he will care if people start looking down on him with pity and contempt and start calling him a loser and a wimp.

That would get under his very thin skin real good. 🙂

And that could have bad consequences, granted, but as long as his staffers don’t let him nuke the New York Times or send ICE after Stephen Colbert, it will work out for the best because it will goad him into making big mistakes.

The kind that the courts have no trouble handling. Blatant and unambiguous crimes, for instance, that everybody sees.

And most importantly, the kind that shock and offend his base.

It’s happening with the plane right now. Prominent right wing “thought leaders” are saying things like, “I would take a bullet for Trump but… this plane thing… ”

I must admit, I am curious about the plane itself. It sounds rad, in a “right before the Empire fell” kind of way.

Maybe once Trump and his ilk are expunged from the White House, we can repurpose it to bring in refugees and immigrants from all over the world.

That would be apropos, don’t you think?

Anyhow, back to the point. He is systematically alienating his supporters. They are running out of the necessary mental elasticity required to keep excusing the inexcusable and accepting the unacceptable.

His strategy of saturation bombing the media with shocking stories about him might just be backfiring in a really spectacular way. He’s pissing in the pool way faster than his self appointed filter fish can handle. He’s going to end up killing them.

And without right wing media, his empire will fall apart rapidly. He’s entirely dependent on them to spin his actions in just the right way, and without that, his base would see him for what he really is.

It’s happening already. His popularity just keeps going down. I am waiting for it to get below 33 percent so we can say that less than a third of the people support him.

But right now, he doesn’t have a reason to care. Until people in power (Republicans) are willing to stand up to him, his approval could be at zero and he wouldn’t care.

It’s possible Congress will turn against him. It would only take a relatively small number of Republican defectors (or abstainers) for impeachment to pass. And like I said in the vid, that could make some ambitious Republicans in the House and the Senate into instant massive international heroes no matter how much Trump screams and cries and threatens to “primary” them.

Fuck him. He’s a toothless tiger. He is way overdue to be overtaken by a younger, smarter, more agile rival.

Go for it, ambitious Repubs!

More after the break.

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What’s up with that rage?

I have realized that I told you about my recent rage explosion in response to someone’s stupid fucking advice but I forgot to go into what the fuck is up with that.

It seems kind of important.

This is far from the first time I’ve had a major meltdown like that, and they’ve all been in response to someone’s well-meaning advice or something like that.

Like when I joined that online depression community and saw all the people giving generic encouragement to one another and this roaring demon I did not recognize came screaming out of me and wanted to grab these people by the throat and scream into their faces and like, what the hell, man?

It’s clearly disproportionate to the trigger. I would never say these people deserved the bile-storm I unleashed just because they accidentally set it off.

But clearly when their words enter my mind space and attempt to address my issues, their utter failure to do so really hits me where it hurts.

It’s like I tried to open up to receive help and got febrile inanity instead, and all my hidden rage and bitterness came pouring out of the opening.

I am definitely angry at a world that can’t help me. A world that can’t handle me. Even mental health professionals like Doctor Costin can’t handle the real, uncensored, uninhibited me. Even with him, I have to restrain myself enormously.

And I guess that’s kind of my story. I’ve spent my life feeling like a giant among pygmies and having to force myself into spaces far too small for me just to be able to get along in a world very much not made for me.

And its hard for me to imagine that changing. Were I to unbottle myself, I might feel a better but I would cope a lot worse. The best scenario I can foresee is that I go off someplace remote where I can be batshit crazy without hurting anybody.

Because how does one truly deal with being exponentially more intelligent, more creative, more powerful, and just plain more than everyone else?

It seems impossible. I can’t conceive of a self that could contain that kind of knowledge. There are no blueprints and no role models for someone like that.

Even mega-intelligent supervillain types are still basically just magicians and offer no insight as to any healthy way to deal with having a mind like mine.

So some of that shitstorm of rage and bitterness definitely comes from that.

And the world just failing me in general. A family that didn’t want me around, teachers that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep me from being bullied, classmates who hurt me for what seemed like no reason at the time. school administrators who were as flabbergasted and useless as everyone else.

There’s never been anyone who was there for me when I needed them. And that just made me withdraw from the world even harder.

What else can I do? When an animal cannot escape their pain they despair.

And I’ve known little else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here we are again : Fru feels sick.

And as usual, I don’t really know how seriously to take it. So all I can do is monitor the situation and wait and see what happens.

Man my life is weird sometimes.

Did my first physiotherapy appointment earlier today. It went fine. A nice lady named Ekta asked me some standard questions about my health and then we did the usual “do this, then do this with me pushing in the opposite direction” testing.

She also gave me the standard seated exercises to do. “Marching” in the air, up on my toes for five seconds then up on my heel for five seconds. and the always faintly amusing “hold you foot up and try to draw letters of the alphabet with your toe”.

I got those exercises from my case worker before but I kind of ignored them out of my usual mixture of timidity and laziness.

This time, it’s from a real deal physiotherapist so I know that there’s no chance that doing them can hurt me, and so it’s just a matter of summoning the necessary wherewithal to forge a new habit.

Luckily they are the sort of thing I can do while sitting here at Mister Computer, so that at least minimizes the disruption to my life.

I hope to turn them into a nervous habit. A productive way to fidget. Ekta says I should repeat each of them ten times and no more often than once every two or three hours, so I can’t fidget them too often, but if I play my cards right, I can turn these little exercises into a treat that I look forward to every day.

Work doesn’t always have to be work. It can be a lot like play. Spoonful of sugar style.

Mary Poppins knows a thing or two.

Certainly all forms of exercise can, with a little mental reframing, be seen as fun as long as nobody is actually forcing you to do them. And they can also be seen as a form of relaxation because they get the tension out of your muscles.

And in general dissipate excess nervous energy.

Being a depressed sluggard only makes things worse for yourself. This is, of course, the exact thing that irritating perky people are always telling us but it takes a fair bit of work on yourself before you can accept that kind of truth.

You have to fight your way through depression’s lies.

I had another rage and bitterness explosion recently. I was watching some therapist talking about the neurology of depression on YouTube and it was all very good stuff but then we came to the “advice” on how to exit the negative brain state of depression and it was all the usual chirpy bullshit about journaling and affirmations and that one word that always sets me off like a Roman candle : gratitude.

So I went off on this poor lady in the comments. Just spewed all my Gen X depressive venom into my comment telling her how her advice was worse than useless and was like a slap in the face to someone like me and how it made me want to puke.

Hey, at least I stopped myself from saying I wanted to throw up in her face.

To be honest, she was no worse than a million other idiots telling me the way out of my depression is to do things my depression keeps me from doing.

Which of course only makes me feel worse. It’s like a very elaborate way to tell me I’m fucked. Oh, so sorry, did we give you a moment of hope? Well FUCK THAT.

And yes, I know that’s the depression talking, for the most part, But what always blows me away about these experiences is how they bring out this H-bomb of bitterness and rage in me that most of the time I have no idea is there.

I assume that these experiences are ultimate quite cathartic for me.

But I would be better off venting my bile in a less antisocial fashion.

But what the hell. I got to be me.

More after the break.

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The cutest damn thing

Apparently I left a comment on this video a year ago.

I do not remember it at all.

Which is going to seem especially odd once you’ve seen it.

How could I have forgotten something so incredibly wonderful?

The look on the little deer boy’s face as he holds up the cookie for Santa is so heartwarming it could melt a dozen Grinches.

The whole thing makes me want to hug it. It’s just so very me.

Who’s the best boy ever? YOU ARE!

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The predictable update

I feel better now.

Not entirely better but I feel a lot better than I did earlier today. Turns out that this time, the magic elixir wasn’t water but food.

Eating makes you feel better. How very,,, counterintuitive.

I still feel vaguely ill but I don’t feel like my life force is ebbing away any more, and that’s kind of a plus. I probably just need more hydration and food.

I really wish my body has a diagnostics panel so I could tell, at a glance, what my various levels of important things are and thus be able to fix my ills efficiently.

“Oh, I see. My hydration level is in the red and my blood sugar’s trending downward. Time for a glass of refreshing orange juice. ”

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Instead, I have to make my best guess as to why I am feeling crappy.

The solution would be to develop a solid health routine. If you have a routine that supplies all your bodily essentials at a rate commensurate with their rate of use then you will probably stay hale and hearty all the live long day.

Or at the very least you don’t go thinking you have the plague when you just need to EAT. To pick a random example.

Mental note, hydrate AND eat before hitting the panic button.

Or well… I took a Xanax before going to physio, so… lack of panic button.

You get the idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Even though right now, we’re in Taurus.

But you get the idea.

If not, here’s a handy vid to guide you!

There are plenty of compilations of right wing media meltdowns over good ol’ Leo out there, but I won’t post one here because I’m too lazy to go find one.

But also because that seems a little too ill-spirited. Don’t get me wrong, I am a-tingle with joy at the panic and despair displayed by the forces of evil at this news, but I guess I am too Canadian to enjoy it too directly.

Turns out I have a schadenfreude limit. Who knew?

But that brings up an interesting subject, namely just how idealistic and “pure” am I? I have been doing a lot of defending Trump voters from baseless left wing bigotry lately, so obviously I am fairly far down the messiah path in my insistence in living by my ideals no matter the social reality I find myself in.

I will live by my beliefs no matter what. I will do so pragmatically and realistically because that’s my nature and because that’s how you get things done in the real world, but I still hold to very high ideals of compassion, understanding, and empathy.

And yet, I feel no guilt at all when I revel in the suffering of those I deem politically execrable. in general, I have never felt any need to pretend to be above that kind of thing, much to the occasional shock of my Aquarius mother.

I’ve always been a good deal more cynical and hot-tempered than her.

Than a lot of people, really. When I get into full on impassioned rant mode, most of my fellow Canadians, even those who agreed with every word I say and those who know me and love me and know that I’m a harmless floof most of the time, will want to take a few steps back from me.

Well, I am pretty big, after all. I just hide it by being a sweetie most of the time.

But lately I have been pondering my impassioned nature and how it has always made me stick out somewhat from my fellow Canadians and I have concluded that it must be my French blood.

I’m half Acadian, after all, and while I was raised Anglo, more or less, I do still have a Gallic streak in my genome and maybe that contributes to my being somewhat more emotive than is usual for Anglo culture.

Or maybe that’s too essentialist and it’s really just that I am kind of insane. I dunno.

But my hidden passionate nature makes me wonder about that French blood and whether it explains why so many top Canadian politicians are from Quebec because their culture allows for the kind of passion and drive that makes for great oratory, even if it just gets you dirty looks at the bar from people trying to watch the game.

Maybe you need to have a fire inside you that lights you up when you speak about what you believe in order to be charismatic in the political sense.

I keep telling myself that I should try to make that kind of video. Me in full on inspiration mode, expressing my beliefs with all my passion and articulacy and maybe actually making some kind of impression on the world.

So far, I’ve been too much of a wimp to do it. I know that such a move would not only mean entering a state of physical activation that I might hurt myself, or worse, say something really regrettable, but it could also mean crossing a line into a world of engagement that the sick part of me still fears.

I am still scared to leave my grotty grotto in case the big bad world out there snatches me up and I can never go run and hide again.

It’s a character flaw flaw that runs very deep, this need to be able to escape at a moment’s notice at all times.

I could call it cowardice but it’s more than that. There is a reason why I am so scared to be stuck in the real world and until I figure out what that is, I am going to keep refusing to stray very far from my tiny little comfort zone.

And I want out.

More after the break.

The raw life

I feel pretty ragged and raw a lot lately.

Like my soul has frostbite. That would track giving how much I have been talking about thawing out for a long time.

It’s not frostbite. It’s freezer burn.

Either way, it’s something that is always there lately. And it’s a major contributor to why I feel scared and desperate sometimes.

Life hurts. That sucks.

But I really don’t mind that much. To drag out an oft used metaphor, it’s like when your hand or foot is waking up after having fallen asleep.

Yeah it’s gonna hurt. Possibly a lot. But you don’t mind because you know that the pain means you’re on the way to feeling a lot better and most importantly you’re going to get your frigging hand or foot back.

There are definitely times when feeling pain beats feeling nothing, and I feel like I am in one of those times right now.

I definitely feel like I am on my way to something really big. Some kind of explosive liberation that will blast away all the ice and snow and dirt and filth and rust and decay that have accumulated inside me over the years and leave me open, exposed, and free, and ready to actually be a part of the world for once.

I just need to overcome the rest of that old fear of the outside world and convince myself that going out to play with the other kids can turn out really great, actually, and that everything I need to heal myself and feel whole again is out there waiting for me, and that there’s no predators waiting to destroy me the moment I let my guard down.

Yeah that means that I have been hiding for no good reason for a very long time. And there is nothing I can do the change that. The past has passed.

But I can do everything possible to stop doing it.

The past has passed but the future is not yet written.

And I am going to change the fucking script.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.