That sounds like an interesting topic.

Let’s see if I get back to it.

First, today’s vid, which is very vloggy :

I rather like that vid. It’s far less ambitious than my usual vids and yet I feel there is a warmth and charisma and vulnerable charm to it that I am going to try hard to remember for future vids.

Maybe I have been trying too damned hard and I should just relax and be myself.

Hmm, where have I heard that advice before? Oh, that’s right…. everywhere.

It would save me a lot of stress and toil if I just concentrated on making one little vlog type entry a day, TikTok style.

Oh right, TikTok! That’s the app I need to download and install on my phone. That would make vlog type vids much easier to make.

I might even do more than one a day. Shocking!

Heck, maybe instead of a YouTube star, I could be a TikTok star. Become known on that platform for my charming candor and wit and, presumably, somehow make money.

Okay, just verified that you CAN make money for TikTok views – if you have at least 1K followers. Which seems like a lot.

Then again I already have 535 followers. So maybe it’s not that crazy. Maybe people on TikTok are way freer with who they follow than YouTube folk.

So who knows. If I keep making enjoyable content, I might get there.

And it does seem to be my more personal and revealing work that gets comments. The songs and rants and such are probably a lil too “out there” for people to relate to.

Maybe I should worry less about entertaining and concentrate on connecting instead.

Pretty sure I can handle that.

Anyhow, back to the topic. (I did make it back! I did, I did!)

What exactly is our moral obligation to ourselves? What do we owe the person we see in the mirror? Is it a sin to treat yourself badly?

It’s a hard question to even contemplate because of the sort of mental feedback loop that such a self-referential topic creates.

Plus a lot of us do not wish to think along those lines because we correctly suspect that if we applied ethics to how we treat ourselves, we would not come out looking too good.

I know that in my own situation, I treat myself very poorly. I get almost no exercise, I stay seated in the same position for way too long, my sleep schedule is a total mess, and I can only shower once a week.

Well, actually, I could probably do it more but I lack the motivation.

WHICH PROVES MY POINT.

If I was my own zookeeper, I would have gotten fired for laziness and gross incompetence a long time ago. If I saw someone treat an animal the way I treat myself, I would be outraged.

But is how I treat myself legit morally wrong? I don’t see how it could be anything else. There is no room in ethics for a self-justifying personal exception. If it’s wrong to do it to anyone else, it’s wrong to do it to yourself too.

How to we atone for sins against ourselves? Through the only true cure for guilt out there – right action. Do better. Treat yourself right. Do what you know you should do.

But that sounds hard and like it might be a lot of work. Way easier to just keep abusing ourselves and not deal with any of our problems.

Why cope when you can avoid?

More after the break.

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The Council On High

What if there was some kind of cosmic council that judged your soul after death and all it cared about was how you had treated yourself.

How many people would do well on that exam? We abuse and misuse ourselves in so many ways, it’s hard to imagine scoring well.

Because remember, this is not a test of how well we lived, or how happy we were, or how good a person we were to others – it’s strictly about judging you for how you treated yourself exactly as if you were being judged on how you treated others.

Did you take good care of yourself? Were you a responsible owner of yourself? Did you keep yourself healthy and hearty and robust? Did you feed yourself the healthy, wholesome food you knew would lead to a happier and healthier you? Did you give yourself enough deep, restful sleep? Did you keep yourself well groomed and clean?

Were you kind to yourself? Patient? Forgiving? Did you parent yourself well? Did you give yourself structure and discipline tempered with mercy and compassion? Did you show yourself you cared? Were you gentle and warm towards yourself? Did you allow room for your being human and thus imperfect and flawed?

As you can see, no amount of wealth, status, success, or fame can improve your score on this test. You might be king of the world and still hate yourself, internally verbally abuse yourself all the time, and wreck your body pursuing short term pleasure.

I’m not saying one’s score on this test is particularly important or reflects on your value as a human being. This is just a thought experiment to see where this notion of one’s ethical obligation to oneself leads.

Many uncomfortable places, as it turns out. It’s possible that if, somehow, we were all to embrace this view of ourselves, our behaviour would radically change and we’d end up living much cleaner, happier, and more sensible lives.

Sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it?

And it would involve taking on a lot of adult responsibility. Which is a funny thought – actually taking responsibility for ourselves, in full, is a scary thought.

And yet, we’re the only ones who can do it. So you either live a life where you’re bouncing off the walls blindly and thoughtlessly all the time, or you take control and start steering towards what you want.

Easier to just keep bouncing, right?

Not better. Just easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s Tuesday, and that means Wound Care at the CHAC (Community Health Access Center) and then my exercise et al at the KADC (Kinsmen Adult Day Center).

Wound Care was routine. This nurse agreed with the others that the wound on my left foot is shrinking, albeit very slowly.

Must remember to move it around more so the blood circulates better.

Then it was off to Kinsmen. Here’s my notes from there.

A few words before exercises begin.

Would have written more, but this time they had a word search and a crossword for me to do and I got sucked in

Oh well. I had fun and even managed to be a little more social and conversational than last week this time.

______________________

Now I am in the bathroom after exercising. Proud of myself for asserting myself enough to tell the attendant that I needed to use the bathroom instead of just suffering in silence and risking an “accident”.

I suppose that the prospect of soiling myself in front of all these people might just have helped me with the assertiveness.

–‐‐———————————-

Third period, after lunch.

Really opened up socially and very happy about.  I  made a new friend, Judy. We bonded over both being Gen X. 

The music system has been playing a lot of the MOR music I strenuously avoided in the Seventies.  Even better, the lyrics on screen are clearly auto translated because some of them have been hilariously  wrong. 

The winner was  it transcribing “put your head next to mine, dear” as “put your head next to reindeer”

Well if you insist…

————————

Waiting for pickup. I am thinking this must be how kids waiting to be picked up by their parents after school feel.

---

I mean, I assume that’s how it must feel. It’s not like I know from experience. I was left to walk to and from school all alone no matter the weather.

Anyhow, I had way more fun this time. The ice has been broken. I feel more comfortable there now. I was able to be more of my true talkative self.

I can actually be quite charming and charismatic when I don’t have anxiety riding me like I’m some kind of uber for neuroses.

Oh right! And when I got home, I did a video!

That essentially my blueprint for political reform. That’s how I would remake the system if I could. Screw this token democracy, I want the real thing!

There would finally no bottleneck of moneyed interests to whom the politicians are far more beholden than to the people because the people can’t hurt them until the next election but their rich donors could hurt them right now.

Nope. No more politicians. No more capital city either. No more legislature, no more lobbying, no more oligarchy.

I prefer to call it “plutocracy” myself. Oligarchy is a less specific term. But the world is going with oligarchy and I don’t care nearly enough about it to object.

And think of all the insanely popular things like universal daycare and universal basic income and comprehensive environmental reform would finally get passed into law because there’s no more politicians and lobbyists thwarting the will of the people.

And yes, the people would probably make some truly horrible mistakes. They would validate terrible but exciting ideas while ignoring boring ideas that would actually work.

But mistakes are how people learn, and it will be how a people learn as well.

Besides, democracy has never been about being the best way to get the “right” answer. The idea is for it to be the will of the people and therefore for it to be a way for the body politic to make itself own choices and learn its own lessons.

Direct democracy would be a way for politics to finally move out of the house and grow up. People would have to face the fact that they are, in fact, in charge, and that we will suffer the consequences (and reap the benefits) of our choices.

No more politicians means no more people to blame or praise for everything. There will only be we the people in charge.

And we’ll have a lot of growing up to do.

Oh right. And we might keep a token legislature around for administrative purposes, like producing a head of state.

But like the British royal family, they would have no power and be purely ceremonial.

More after the break.

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A headless democracy

We might need a head of state and some form of powerless “ruling” class just to make the stupid programming in our lizard brains happy.

It could very well turn out that human beings need to have leaders to focus on or they become restless and chaotic. They need to have people to turn to when they don’t know what to do, even if following their lead is purely optional.

I saw at VFS what happens when there’s no real leadership at the top. People are not happy. They feel lost and unmotivated and hesitant and quite frankly depressed.

So the main job of the token legislature might just be to fill that role on a purely ceremonial level. They could even still generate bills and debate them on the record, with just the actual vote on the bills given over to the people.

There would have to be a way for the people to generate bills and put them to a vote without these bozos too, of course.

This token legislature might be a good middle step between our current phoney baloney democracy and true self-guided government.

Kinda like living in your parents’ basement before moving out on your own.

The transition to not having specific individuals to credit or blame for things would be rough enough. In my system, if you don’t like how a vote went, you have nobody to blame but your fellow citizens.

I won’t lie, that might cause unrest at first.

Ballot secrecy might become more important than ever.

But eventually, the people would understand that they are the ones in power and as tempted as they might be to blame everything on, say, whoever the most vocal and well known proponent of the side they don’t like is, ultimately they, as a population, decide.

And that’s exactly as it should be.

I mean, look at all the social progress that has come out of just bullshit fake democracy.

Now imagine the leaps and bounds we could take with the real thing!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Took another crack at riffing on the news but what came out wasn’t funny.

It was strident. Or put more generously, passionate.

See, this is one of the reasons I can’t have a fixed format. Even with the best of intentions, I do not end up with whatever I set out to make.

That’s why the product pretty much has to be me.

I’m the only thing it all has in common!

Anyhow, here it is :

Like I could easily do a whole short video essay on my thoughts about direct democracy (I’m for it) and about the psychology of conservatism (they’re dumb) and share my extraordinary insights with the world at large.

And maybe I will do that. And maybe not.

I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that I am, in fact, a flake. An airhead. Kind of of a space cadet.

While also being a startlingly intelligent and talented dude.

But all my character points are concentrated in just a few stats and that means things like “common sense” and “ability to focus on the here and now” are way below average.

To be honest, any truly decent society would have figured out what a genius I am when I was still a little kid and made sure to nurture and develop my mind and my abilities so that I could grow up and truly contribute to the society that raised me.

But alas, nobody even wanted to deal with me.

I might have been a little hard to handle, admittedly.

I mean, what do you do with a kid who’s way smarter than you? Like I have said before, so much of adult authority rests on their intellectual superiority. As a kid they are supposed to know and understand way more than you about life and the world and so you can go to them when you don’t understand things and they can nurture and guide you with their superior minds.

All that goes out the window when you’re way smarter than your teachers.

Ergo I was impossible to control. I could think rings about them. Luckily for them AND me, I didn’t require a lot of controlling. I was an agreeable and eager to please kid who for the most part followed the rules.

But at any moment I might derail the whole momentum of the lesson by asking the teacher a question they could not answer.

And I would do so from a place of total innocence, with absolutely no malice or mischief intended, and that meant their usual tools for handling unruly kids did not apply.

Teachers do not like kids who make them look or feel stupid.

But I was just being my irrepressibly bright self.

And I get the feeling that I am still kinda dangerous like that. I seem quite harmless and friendly, and I am, but I also might suddenly loom over a person like the intellectual giant that I am and not even know I am doing it.

And I am not sure there’s a lot I can do about that. I lack the fine social skills to know and understand how not to do that.

All I can do is rely on my being generally lovable and friendly and harmless enough to gloss over my well intentioned mental mayhem.

Thank God I’m cute.

It’s saved my ass so many times. It may not help me to be less of a spaz or a flake, but it at least makes my clumsiness endearing more often than not.

The youngest child always develops odd coping mechanisms.

More after the break.

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Oh right, the vid

You know, maybe it’s okay that I can’t stick to a topic and never seem to end up where I was trying to go.

I might not nail every subject but I sure cover a lot of ground.

Anyhow, today’s vid.

I’m not happy with it.

It’s not very funny. I just ended up soapboxing a bunch. Hence my little crack about being a commentator not a comedian.

I was trying to be a comedian…. at first…

I guess I just did not have anything particularly hilarious to say. So I will have to make a mental note to slow down and gather the stories before video making time and gather them based on whether I have anything funny to say about them.

Or at least something interesting and hopefully somewhat related.

I suppose I could think of myself as “a pundit who is sometimes funny” instead of trying to compete with Colbert and the Daily Show in the whole “news with jokes” category.

After all, they have swarms of very well paid talented writers and I am just one admittedly very gifted dude.

But meh. I wanna be funny AND insightful. Or at least to keep the funny and the profound in different videos with different intents.

Or maybe I will just keep making whatever I end up making and trust that one day it could find its audience. I dunno.

Maybe what really matters is putting my insight and wit and personality into whatever it is I end up doing and trust that this will coalesce into a personal brand of sorts where my fans are up for whatever it is I put out next.

Sounds sorta risk, kind of like I think I’m like Neil Young switching genres and style with every album but somehow retaining a certain number of diehard Neil fans.

So what the hell. One day I’m singing, another I’m riffing (or trying to), another I am writing a song, another I am delving deep into the musty caves of my moribund soul in search of priceless personal insights and catharsis, and so forth and so on.

It’s all sort of entertaining, I hope. My idea fan reaction would be, “I have no idea what he’ll do next but I know that I’ll like it, so… start the show!”.

If I could manage that, my very unpredictability would become an asset. What will he come up with next? Tune in and find out.

Can you tell I was raised by television?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The Prince of Lies is sad.

So sad that I wrote a song about it, ha ha.

Here it is :

Maybe I keep writing songs like these because some very deep level of 1970’s singer-songwriter programming emerges when I go to write lyrics.

And I mean, I feel like with every song, I skate a little closer to writing the next, “Puff The Magic Dragon”, or worse, “The Unicorn Song”.

God do I hate that song.

This time, I tried to do what I did with the previous song and kind of force it to be heavy metal, in this case, orchestral metal.

But those versions of the song turned out terrible, so, orchestral FOLK it is.

And I know this bizarre identity crisis where the heavy metal, punk, and industrial music is in conflict with the sad, sweet folks I keep writing, is pretty silly. I should just go with my muse and discover my true voice and all that good stuff.

But I can’t escape the fact that the kind of music I’m writing is not the kind of music I like. Like a lot of Gen X kids, I have a deep down aversion to folk music that kicks in whenever I hear softly strummed acoustic guitar and gentle singing.

Like with poetry, it’s not that none of it is good, it’s that the bad stuff hurts so much.

So if I didn’t know who made it and I heard one of my wimpy folk songs played on the radio, I would roll my eyes and mutter, “Oh, GREAT, this should be good. ” sarcastically.

But the thing is, I’m not in an angry heavy metal mood today, or lately. I am in a contemplative, introspective mood where I feel like I have stripped away some of my false self in favor of the real and much crankier me that lurks underneath.

That’s one of the things I have to grapple with : the real me might be way more of a prick than the person I’m accustomed to being.

So it’s anger yet again. Every time I try to imagine a more “authentic” version of myself, all I can see is an angry, sarcastic, short-tempered dude who goes around like Lou Grant, scowling at the world full of people who are so goddamn stupid.

And who knows. Maybe that version of me would be a temporary thing that exists only until I vent enough of my latent rage to cool back down and be normal.

But maybe not, and that’s a risk I am not prepared to take. It would inevitably lead to me hurting a lot of people very deeply with my acerbic wit and uncanny perceptions, and that’s too high a price to pay for my own personal growth.

I mean, I’m not some Boomer who thinks the most important thing in the world is their precious selves and that anyone, like say a wife and kids, who gets in the way of their own personal journey is just going to have to suck it up.

Which brings me back to my fantasies of just disappearing to somewhere where nobody knows me so I can start over from scratch and build a version of myself that is functional in the real world.

Wouldn’t that be something. Me, in the real world, with a job and a boyfriend.

That’s my big dream : bare functionality. The sort of thing most of the world takes for granted once they have been through their period of fire with their first job ever.

I’m still waiting on that. Working for my uncle Sonny at his shop was great. I think my winning personality made me a good fit for the job of cashier/clerk. I liked the customers and they liked me. It worked out pretty good.

So I know that I can do that kind of work, physical disability aside.

In fact if it weren’t for my bum legs I could do all kinds of jobs. I know damned well that I could be a really good employee somewhere.

It’s the getting of the job that confounds me.

And so I am here.

More after the break.

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Is that really it?

I dunno. Maybe not.

I don’t think I am afraid of actually doing a job, but I might be afraid of having a job.

In that it would mean to committing to eight hours a day of sustained effort with no chance of retreating to my nice soft bed when I start to feel overwhelmed.

At the very least, there would be one hell of a nasty adjustment period as I got used to the idea of being “on” and in public for such extended periods.

And that’s not even counting lunch and commutes.

I definitely would have to change my badger ways. No more crouching immobile in the dark like some kind of cave lizard. I’d have to go into and stay in the light.

So maybe there aren’t as many jobs I could do as I thought. Maybe all these years of hermitage have done a lot of damage to my ability to function at a human level at all.

Luckily, I am a writer, and bar for human functioning for us is quite low. If we manage to deposit some text where it is supposed to go now and then, and if we’re lucky make the occasional public appearance where we’re clothed and manage not to say something that gets us canceled, people are willing to let everything else slide.

Of course, that means I really should be pouring more effort to actually getting paid to do this shit. This is also a job I know I can do – I am a highly prolific writer who can write whatever needs to be written as long as it’s not technical.

And the best part is that I can do it without even putting on pants.

And that leads us back to UpWork and me trying to get past their god damned fussy identification process again.

Wish me luck on that.

I will talk to you nice people agan tomorrow.

I sang again.

I think I’m getting better at it, sorta.

Most importantly, I enjoyed singing.

So here it is :

I still haven’t found something that’s like Riffusion in that it generates the music but instead of generating the vocals it uses mine.

So basically, I sing it, and it provides the music.

This is partly inspired by the fact that every single Riffusion song I have made based upon my lyrics has had at least one line where the “vocalist” gets the phrasing wrong or a lyric wrong or sometimes just sort of breaks down completely for one second.

I do my best to make sure my lyrics have the same rhythm and meter throughout but somehow when Riffusion does its magic something effs up anyhow.

So partly I want to sing my own lyrics so I can get them right god damn it!

Plus there’s the fact that I can sing okay. Presumably if I wrote the song I could make sure there were no notes that I can’t reach very well, so it could even make me sound like a much better singer than I really am.

Or am I? Gordon Lightfoot is a legend and he can only sing three notes.

Of course, I’m a much better songwriter than him, partly because I’m younger and hipper and partly because I’m more versatile but mostly because he’s dead.

Died in 2023 at the age of 82.

Not a lot of people who were famous in the Seventies left, I would imagine, seeing as they would be a minimum of 20 years older than me.

The Boomers are all in God’s waiting room now.

Oh, and I made a joke.

Spur of the moment thing, just decided it was time for me to make my first YouTube short and see what happens.

It was a bit of a hassle to make, so I will have to think about how much I want to do it in the future. I think it turned out pretty good though.

Good thing I’m naturally hilarious.

Come to think of it, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do via TikTok on my phone. It’s designed for the quick making of short form content and so I wouldn’t have to mess with a video editor, I could just think of the joke, deliver it to the camera, and forget about it.

Well, and add the tags. God damn tagging. That’s actually the hardest part for me. My mind does not lend itself well to coming up with a bunch of words to describe the thing I just did. It’s always a strain on my brain.

And not the fun kind like with a crossword puzzle.

And then there’s this, which made me very grateful for Doctor Costin.

Because according to that guy, psychiatrists are just pill dispensers today. Why spend one more second with a patient than is absolutely necessary for billing purposes when you can totally get away with just listening for a keyword that matches a medication on WebMD and make them go away?

Apparently guys like Doctor Costin, a psychiatrist who is also a therapist, are rare.

Certainly what Doctor Josef is talking about in that video matches my experience with most of the doctors around here. They practice turnstile medicine where their sole goal is to make that thing click as fast as possible.

Did they properly diagnose and treat you? Who cares, if they were wrong it will just make you come in for more office visits.

I’d like the option to wait longer for an appointment with a better doctor, please.

More after the break.

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Feeling kinda ragged

But does that mean I’m not OK?

God, I don’t fuckng know.

For one thing, there’s hypochondria. I had it really bad at one point around thirty years ago and part of the process of clawing my way out of that stinking hole of madness and malnutrition was developing a policy of ignoring minor aches and pains and other pseudo-symptoms and instead waiting for something serious and scary distinctly bad to show up before running to my local MD.

And that’s a policy I hold to today because the alternative is to once more enter that realm of whirling insanity in whose shadow I spent three months of Hell when I was in my early 20’s.

I can’t let my mind seize upon minor things and blow them into major traumae by sheer neurosis again. It is the panic and the self-scrutiny which made me so sick and I am not going into that bedlam again, ever.

But I pay a price for that and that price is my possibly not “catching some early” when medical intervention might do me the most good.

And I’m not happy with that but the alternative is far worse than some theoretical and unknowable increase in risk for God knows what.

I feel various forms of cruddy all the time. I’m not a healthy man. I haven’t felt robust and healthy for a very long time. I’m always kinda tired and sore and headache-y and out of sorts. I couldn’t possibly afford to take all that shit seriously.

That way madness lies.

You’d think feeling kinda shitty all the time would give me the incentive I need to get up and move around more and try to live a healthier life, but alas, no.

I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s my normal. Every once in a while the clouds part and the sun shines down from God’s heaven and I actually feel good for a while, but for the most part I live in an eternal fen of meh.

I’m not sick, but I’m not well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Short answer : I dunno.

It started with a YouTube video essay I was listening to and they were talking some boilerplate stuff about giving up on the person you’re pretending to be in order to truly be yourself – typical authenticity jive, very individualist – when the narrator mentioned always pretending to be okay and suddenly it broke through to me that I am always pretending to be okay and that I had no idea if I really was.

In fact, shockingly, I might not be capable of that level of introspection. That might seem strange coming from a guy who has written millions of words in this very space about all his psychological issues, but that’s a product of analysis, not true introspection.

I don’t think I can truly look deeply into myself. And if I try, one thing becomes very clear : my deep inner self does NOT want to be looked at, and resents me for trying.

It feels like I have actually been hiding from myself for a very long time. That cranky inner self of mine is a wizard at spinning complex illusions that seem like the real me, or facets thereof, but the truth is that they are more like fictional expressions of myself.

So they are expressing something real, but they themselves are mere projections.

But that’s the only version of me I know how to be. I don’t have a “real me” that I have been holding back all these years, gritting my teeth at the part I am forced to play while my true inner being yearns to be free.

My inner being just wants me to leave him the fuck alone.

Seriously, he’s like an angry badger in there.

I guess I have been hiding within myself for a very long time. It makes a lot of sense now that I have thought of it. I knew that I had withdrawn into myself in layers and that the real me was inside those layers like a Russian nesting doll.

I never can remember the proper name for those.

But what’s new is the realization that those layers became my layers of illusion. It’s like this entire time, I have been a child in an adult sized mecha suit clumsily trying to pretend to be a real person.

Well I am a real person.

I’m just not an adult.

And the whole damn show is just a way for me to hide from the world while operating (minimally) within it. Being a mecha suit, it’s quite clumsy and not well suited to life in this adult real world, and so I have to remain isolated most of the time so that I can take the mecha suit off and relax.

Here in my room, alone, the child inside the suit can function, more or less. There’s nothing here to challenge my dyspraxia or my social anxiety. I can be basically a brain with a computer and exist in a kind of virtual mode where I don’t have to cope.

But here’s something that’s hard for me to confess – even the version of me I cherish the most, the version I am when I am relaxed with my friends, is not the REAL me.

It’s about as close as I can get at this point in my journey. And I love that version of me, more or less the same version I am when I am being Fruvous online, although of course I have a lot more freedom when I am being a fuzzy lil fox.

But I get the feeling that the “real” me would be a lot less warm and friendly and easy to get along with because the “real” me was raped when he was only four years old and has to live with that reality every single day.

No wonder I prefer to stay distracted and avoid being him as much as possible. He’s a much more cold and bitter and angry version of me that’s more like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting only without the good looks and sunny disposition than he is the warm and fuzzy fox you know and love.

So do I. I’d rather be him than me, every day of the week.

And now I know why.

More after the break.

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Piercing the membrane

I feel like I have entered a new level of painful but fruitful paring away of the dead flesh and impacted scar tissue of my mind to release the dormant life sleeping underneath.

I am excited by how much my mind is resisting the scalpel, so to speak. All of my best psychological insights and progress has come from going exactly where my mind does not want me to go so I look forward to really digging into the bad stuff and bringing it into the sunlight where it can heal.

I’m not sure how much of this leg of my journey I will be able to put into words. As articulate as I am, this may go below and beyond a level where words apply and into the realm of pure inchoate emotion.

We will see.

I know that I am well beyond caring if what I need to do to heal myself hurts. Fuck pain. Pain is temporary and ultimately meaningless, especially when weighed against the permanent gains of deep catharsis and the making of the subconscious conscious.

So bring on the pain and the resistance and the friction and the fear. All they will do is convince me that I am on the right track and make me all the more determined to push down on the handle of the knife all the harder.

Time to use my incisive mind as a healing tool.

Nurse, laser scalpel please.

And I don’t care if I am working where the sun don’t shine. I don’t have to be able to see or understanding what I am doing or where I am going or what it all “means”.

All I need to do is follow my feelings to the dead diseased flesh, and keep digging.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I didn’t say everything I meant to say in this video.

But that’s normal for us neurotic writer types.

We always have far more to say than we can say, and in a way, that is what keeps us communicating in the first place.

It may not ever get everything out at once, but it still helps a lot.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

Just tryin’ to work through my emotions and maybe even feel a little bit clearer and cleaner and lighter as a result.

I keep feeling a larger former of catharsis looming in the gloomy depths of my turbulent soul. It lurks there, like a shark seen only as a shadow beneath the waves, and I keep trying to turn to get a good look at it but it darts away.

Perhaps I need to clear out more of the smaller emotions first.

Or maybe deep down I am still too scared to “go there”. I’ve been doing what I can to lean in to my pain and stay with unpleasant emotions long enough to hear what they are trying to tell me and so forth and so on, but it’s all so slow.

I still long for some kind of massive transformational force that could shove my shallow reason and perverted superego aside in order to change me in all the ways I need to change in order to heal and make me into a brand new version of myself, without all that bullshit baggage from all these years of being inert.

Unfortunately, the thing most likely to do that for me would be some kind of massively horrible medical condition. The kind that drags me into a world of pain and horror and humiliation and disgusting bodily realities that makes my life as I am living it now seem like a golden paradise by comparison.

I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. But it might.

I can’t imagine what other sort of force could enter my life like that. Religion isn’t really an option and it’s not like I play the lottery or have any other way for good fortune to hand me an opportunity.

I am going to make another attempt at connecting with UpWork. Clearly my incredibly frustrating first attempt was unsuccessful so I am going to contact them to see if there is some more reliable way to clear the identity hurdle.

Because I still don’t know what “reduce angle” means.

I want to make UpWork work (up) because, like I said, I know and trust them. And the alternative would be to enter the absurd world of “work from home” scams and swindles where I have to figure out which might legit result in real actual spendable money and which are just human garbage victimizing the most vulnerable.

Because it’s not like the well to do of the upper middle class are falling for these scams. It’s disposable losers like me (but dumber) getting conned.

Number one rule : if they ask YOU for money, run. Close that tab and never look back. Because ask yourself, if they can get schmucks like you to give them money up front, what is their incentive to do anything to make YOU a success?

So clearly I am not exactly their ideal mark. I am cynical, suspicious, perceptive, and most importantly just really god damned smart.

I see through these people.

But I still don’t want to deal with all that bullshit.

But I need something meaningful and productive to do with my time and I can’t seem to provide that for myself so I need a job.

The money is not the most important thing. It’s having something worth something to do. My creative output is a great outlet but it doesn’t have enough of an audience for me to feel like doing it counts as productive.

I cherish every follower on BlueSky and subscriber on YouTube, but until I manage to gain a bit more traction, it can’t really scratch that productivity itch.

Surely someone out there needs my outrageous talents.

More after the break.

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The usual kind of job

I don’t really stand a chance in traditional employment, even the online kind.

Because my resume is pathetic and I have no qualifications for anything. All I have is a random smattering of university courses and my… let’s call it “certificate” from VFS.

So the traditional route to employment is absolutely not my friend. Who wants to hire some 52 year old loser with no employment history in this millennium and absolutely no job skills outside a fairly narrow field.

And even my VFS “certificate” is getting old and moldy and worthless. It’s from six years ago, and any sane employer would be thinking, “And nothing since then?”

That’s why a place like UpWork means so much to folks like me. I can write up a proposal where I really sell my abilities and submit that and things like resumes and certifications need never enter into it.

I know that there’s all kinds of things I can do. It’s convincing someone to take a chance on hiring me to do it that is the tricky bit.

I should also hook back up with the March of Dimes people through whom I was taking that network administrator course.

I crashed out on that. But whatever. That doesn’t mean I failed forever. Sure, mental illness ate my progress – typical – but they have other courses and plenty of different ways for people like me to enter the magical realm of actual employment.

Like a lot of things, it merely waits for the next time the breezes inside me are blowing in the right direction to fill my sails and propel me forward.

I wish that wasn’t such a dicey proposition. I wish that I could regularly be a go getter full of enthusiasm and ambition who takes on that big ol world every single day.

But instead, all I can do is pray for blue skies in winter.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was trying to think of something funny to do today as I am an incredibly talented comedy writer and yet absolutely none of that goes into my creative output these days.

Which is weird.

I guess it stems from the unformatted nature of my output. The only intent attached to this blog or my videos is to express my creative energies and I suppose it could be said that attempting comedy in that way would be too restrictive for me.

Which is sad.

But I am getting ready to reform my wastrel ways and learn to focus and commit and make stuff I actually expect people to like.

After all, I really do want to become a YouTube star. And that’s not likely to happen my accident. I know that I have the ingredients to make top notch content – wit, unique POV, unique personality, charisma, basic video editing skills, and so on – but whether I can pull that all together into something watchable depends on me and my ability to get my collective shit together.

And I am going to try, gol’dang it. I can’t recite a spell and have all my multitudinous facets suddenly fold into one solid focused reality, but I can keep nudging my self in that direction until my talents are actually noticed by people I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about my creative capacities lately and how casually I handle big creative ideas and create stuff that is quite original and high in content without even really thinking about.

That’s just what I do.

But none of that really matters if I am still working all by myself and doing things in my usual sloppy halfassed unfocused way.

So I suppose I am at a crossroads where I have to choose to either sacrifice my current state of insipid placidity for a life with a lot more striving in it or sink bank into fruitless oblivion and go back to just marking time till I die.

I’ve been building myself up slowly. But that might not be enough. At some point, some kind of quantum leap of faith may well be needed where I have to jump into something with both feet and no guarantee of success and just wing it.

Give becoming the baby bird that DOES fly when kicked out of the nest a try.

It’s never too late to launch, or so I keep telling myself.

I guess one of the biggest problems is that you can always just… not. Not strive, not stress, not overcome yourself, not try to do things you find hard, not step onto that path into the unknown, just plain not do anything and let routine carry me forward in time.

After all, I’ve done that for thirty fucking years. What’s another day or two?

Repeat until I finally fucking die.

It’s ultimately a lack of self-discipline. I have very little experience with voluntarily making life scarier and more difficult for myself in order to pursue a goal.

I’ve never been asked to do anything like that for school. School’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. Even in college, it was work I could do without raising a sweat.

So I never had to buckle down and focus in order to succeed at school. And having had only passing involvement with the world of employment, I have never had to learn any self-discipline for that either.

So I am brilliant AF but I am as weak and flabby on the inside as I am on the outside.

I can’t do this all alone. But I can’t do it with others either.

Somehow, I will succeed.

More after the break.

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My right foot

I keep forgetting to mention this – the wound on my right foot is officially gone.

Well, it closed, anyhow, and therefore does not require regular bandage changes any more. That leaves just the issue with my left foot left…. er, remaining… for the nurses at the Richmond CHAC to deal with.

And it appears to be getting smaller.

Woohoo, normal human healing!

That raises the prospect of one day not needing to go to the CHAC twice a week at all, and I have mixed feelings about that.

Right now, my Wound Care missions twice a week are the only thing that gets me out of the apartment on a regular basis except Denny’s.

So if that left foot wound healed up, I would only be leaving the house for Denny’s once a week, and that can’t be good for me.

I’d need to find something else to do outside the apartment besides my occasional non-CHAC related medical appointments because I already feel like I don’t get nearly enough fresh air and sunshine with how much I go out now.

I suppose I would still have the sweating with the oldies at the Kinsmen, come to think of it. So I would be going out twice a week.

Relatedly, I suppose since August is barreling towards us like a garrulous drunk I should do my traditional “talking about how I should get Julian to drop me off at the beach at Garry Point Park for a couple hours” bullshit.

And it’s true. I should. I totally should. It would do me a world and a half of good, both physically and mentally as well as spiritually. Everything points to GO on this plan.

But it’s never going to happen. It’s just another casualty on the long long list of my dead intentions, killed by my inability to act on my own to leave my tiny comfort zone.

So there it is, dead on the outside of the walls of this crummy old castle of mine. with me looking down on it with faint pity but mostly detached disinterest.

As if it’s a tragedy but not something that has anything to do with me.

All that matters to my ancient internal operating system is that the Citadel has remained secure, with no chance that any of those evil and insane impulses, emotions, and instincts that make me want to leave the castle can get through and make me act in a way it deems “irrational”.

After all, if you can’t leave, then all those impulses can do is make you suffer, right?

But if you CAN leave…. well…

…then you’d kind of have to, wouldn’t you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Amongst the day’s weirdnesses will be the fact that my vid of the day will be appearing in part two of today’s blogging because I haven’t made it yet.

I was out of the house at the time. I could theoretically have made a video via my cell but I am still too shy and self-conscious to do that in public.

And speaking of my cell, here’s the stuff I wrote on the road :

Today’s exercises were way more ambitious than the previous time I was here. They were done with us standing and holding the back of our chairs. And that was fine. But then the exercises  required letting go of the chairs and that’s where I met my doom because I cannot stand for very long. I held out for as long as I could but had no choice but to sit down before I fell down.  Then I  did the rest of the exercises sitting down while the  old people stood.

That was humbling. 

Oh well.  It was still exercise outside on a gorgeous sunny summer day, so it’s all good. 

And who knows, if I get enough exercise here , maybe I will be able to stand for longer.

Next up is  physio, and I am dreading that because once more, I didn’t do the exercises and I am very embarrassed about that.

So I might just do something extremely uncharacteristic  and just plain lie.

I dunno. My essentially honest nature might keep me from doing that. We’ll see.

After this then physio, wound care is going to seem like a spa vacation.

They need to invent a Xanax for crankiness.

Done at Physio.  I have done a lot of exercise today and I still have wound care to do.

But I feel fine. My muscles are all warmed up and the weather is gorgeous and I feel good. 

This fresh air and sunshine and exercise stuff really does work. Go figure.

Bit early for wound care so I type to you lovely people on my cell.

I installed Google Keep on my phone earlier so I can just one finger type away and when I get back home it will sync via our WiFi and then I will cut and paste all this text into my blog and voila, I am already somewhat done with blogging for thevday when I get home.

Now if only wasn’t so sleepy! I am clearly behind on my ZZZ and I could use a Diet Coke with full caffeine right about now.

My computer crashed while I was out so now I have to sit here while it reboots.

Oh well, at least I can still write.

Predictive text has come a long way since I had my tablet working. It is way more likely to suggest the word I want now. I think it must be taking in more of what I have written already.

It makes me wish I had it on my PC  to be honest. I would blog SO FAST!

me while not at home

Holy crap, I wrote almost 500 words out on the road. Yay for me. That means part 1 of today’s writing is almost done already.

For the record, I did totally lie to my physio. Told her I had been doing the exercises three times a weak.

Like hell I have.

 It’s so hard for me to modify my routine. Adding making a video a day to it was a major operation. And that’s something I more or less enjoy doing.

Adding exercise would be huge. Comparatively, going right back to doing my default thing of not doing that is way, way easier.

The easiest thing to do is always nothing. Therefore the path of least resistance is also to do nothing. And why it’s fatal to get addicted to doing whatever is easiest.

Anyway, odds are I will go right back to life as usual after today.

I am a terrible patient.

More after the break.

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OK, before I post this, know that it turns out things are not as bad as I thought.

Big surprise, I overreacted.

I am still very glad I got these emotions out.

OK, let the games begin.

I crunched the numbers and my life should be largely unchanged except that I will never order in again except maybe once a month.

So that’s a bummer.

But other than that, I will be fine. I’ve just gone from $50/week over expenses to $20/week, and that does suck, but I will be OK.

If I want that damn power supply, I’m gonna have to find work.

And I shudder to think of what the next five week month will be like.

But I am about to find out because the next month IS a five week month. I just checked. Doesn’t that just fucking figure?

The moment the idea of a five week month entered my head, I knew I had to go check to see if life was, indeed, that cruel.

And of course it was.

So for the next 5 weeks I will be getting by on $135 per week, which is doable but my budget will have zero wiggle room.

In fact, I will have to find $5/week in savings.

Maybe I will skip one McD’s a week. I will hate not having the fun everyone else is having – I hate feeling left out.

But desperate times etc.

So yeah, got to find me some kind of online work. I will contact UpWork and see if I can get their arcane identification process done that way.

I’d prefer to use them because I know them and trust them. I am positive I can get work through them with my surprisingly robust ability to believe in my talents when there’s money on the line.

Guess I just need the right inspiration.

And the real deep down gut level inspiration of just being REALLY FUCKING BORED.

I need something meaningful to do, not just spinning my wheels like usual.

I want to DO STUFF GOD DAMN IT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided to vent on something that has been bugging me for a while now.

I explain what I am talking about here :

Like I said in the vid, I don’t think the term is doing a great deal of harm. And I am sure there are millions of people in the world right now who have taken some comfort in the much more serious and attention demanding diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder rather than boring, vague terms like depression.

I mean, everyone gets depressed. But PTSD, only soldiers and massacre survivors and people like that have that!

Which is, in fact, my point. They have it. You don’t.

In other words, I am being my usual tightass self about language and logic. I know intellectually that these things don’t actually matter much, but they bug me.

We all have our little peeves, I suppose.

Today’s been decent. No fresh health complaints, which is nice. Had a good wholesome turkey dinner at Denny’s last night, which was nice.

Wednesday is Deposit Day, so I am at the end of my money. But it’s no big deal. I still have $36 left on my card and 8 bucks in cash. I’ll be fine.

There will be a petty awkwardness tomorrow night when I would usually be giving Julian $20 to cover the McD’s meal he will be fetch for me, to be eaten while he and I and Felicity and hopefully Joe will be hanging out on Zoom.

Call it a Covid Dine-In Experience.

Well I don’t have the cash this time. I guess I paid cash when I should have used the card for Denny’s last Sunday night. So I will have to get creative.

Luckily I have a plan B prepared for just such a contingency. What I will do is order something online from somewhere in the neighborhood (probably Pizza Hut) and get Julian to pick it up for me.

I say probably Pizza Hut because unlike nearly everywhere else besides Superstore that I order from, I actually know where it is.

It’s like two blocks away.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, my Big Day. Wound Care then exercise at the Kinsmen center.

So, also Xanax of course.

Though I wonder if there will come a point in the future where the place and the people and the activities will become so familiar to me that I don’t need the Xanax.

I mean, it’s not like I need a Xanax to go to Wound Care at the CHAC. Heck, I am so casual about that place now that sometimes I don’t even slow down to check in.

I just say, “Hey Megan!” as I rollate past her and she says “Hello!” and then marks me as present on the computer.

It’s a system that works.

In fact the original point of Doc Costin giving me the Xanax prescription was to allow me to get out there in the world and have some positive social interactions without my crippling social anxiety screaming like an enraged banshee in my ear.

So much of my life has been spent desperately trying to stay focused on the here and now despite the massive panic attack I was having without even knowing it.

As far as I knew, that’s just what life was like. You went around in a constant state of low level panic, occasionally spiking up to full on freaking out, until you finally get home and away from everyone else and can finally relax.

No wonder I have isolated myself so much and been so withdrawn. With a setup like that, it’s not a matter of choosing to be alone, it’s being driven to the solitary life by the baying hounds of mental illness.

In my heart of hearts, I’d rather be with people I love having a good time. I am happier when I am being social. When happy social times end, part of me is always sad to have to go back into my sorry assed coffin of a fucking life.

I need to hang on to that truth and let it change me.

Maybe it can set me free.

More after the break

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Curry at last

Well that’s my last ever order from Tandoori Oven.

Because the curry I ordered last Saturday night has bones in it. Big chunks of bone. Just like the previous time I ordered from them.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this could happen twice, but I am starting to think for them, bones in the lamb curry aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

Maybe there’s a culture out there where if their lamb curry doesn’t have bones in it, they assume it can’t be fresh.

Or maybe there’s people out there with the excellent dental hygiene to crunch the chunks of bone like they’re popcorn and these people would be telling me, “But the chunks of bone are the best part!”.

I tried to put in a complaint and get a refund but they don’t offer refunds more than 24 hours after the purchase.

Oh well. At least I got to vent about it.

But I am sure as fuck never ordering from Tandoori Oven again. Fuck those people. They are clearly operating on a set of rules with which I violently disagree.

At this point, I am mostly angry because those huge chunks of bone took up space where more lamb curry should have gone.

Here’s the evidence :

So in general. my entire experience with ordering in last Saturday night has been unpleasant, although only this extra calcium business is Tandoori Oven’s fault.

Oh well. Sometimes life just decides it wants to fuck with you and all you can do is do your best to roll with the punches and land on your feet with some dignity intact.

At least the bone free parts of my curry were pretty good.

I mean, it’s lamb curry. It’s hard to screw that up.

But somehow, they managed it. TWICE.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.