This vid is weird even for me, and I am very proud of that.

I decided that today I would try to write open ended “mystic” poetry where I tried to express something inside of me without worrying about whether it was easy for anybody to understand or not.

And just for fun, I would then slap than into Riffusion and see what came out.

And as poetry, I think it came out okay for a first try. I will no doubt try again in the future. Maintaining the proper frame of mind was difficult but rewarding.

It was actually kinda fun.

Anyhow, here’s what ultimate resulting from all this mishigas :

I’m proud of myself for being able to at least partially give up worrying about whether I would be understood in order to draw directly from that deep mysterious part of me which I have always feared before because of the powerful emotions it stirred in me that I did not understand and that did not make sense.

So my overly rational self feared it but also, in a sense, obeyed it simply because the emotions involved were so strong.

Luckily, the emotions only ever made me want to go look at the moon or put me in a weird spooky mood, as opposed to telling me to kill.

But I am a lot less scared of that part of me than I used to be. I still wonder, in passing, if I would have been better off with some kind of religious indoctrination so I would at least have some sort of framework for understanding things like that, but eh, that probably would have come with more baggage than it was worth.

And it’s good to know, at this stage of my auto-resurrection, that there truly is a realm beyond my ego and superego that operates without any need for logical contiguity or linear narrative at all and that if I learn to use it properly, it might just become a source for the counterbalancing force for all that “reason” that has been inanely dominating my mind all by itself for far too long.

That was one hell of a sentence.

I certainly need some way of reminding myself, as often as is feasible, that there is this whole world of emotion and connection and intuition and understanding outside of the bright cold light of my powers of reason and that this other realm is not only real but vitally necessary for my mental health.

It is, in a very deep spiritual sense, the realm of the unknown. Not only in the usual vernacular sense but in the sense of being beyond knowledge and understanding. It is a realm where things fit together emotionally, not logically, and that can be very scary for a brainiac like me but like I keep saying, not everybody has an intellect but everyone has emotions and all those people out there who do not have my sort of logical faculties must be getting through life somehow and this realm must be it.

As impossible as it seems to one such as me, their intuition and “gut feelings”, with only weak input from their reasoning faculties, must be enough for survival.

They muddle through life, from my point of view, and it works out fine for them. They grow up, gets jobs, have families, become known in their community, and in all senses function as a normal healthy human being for their whole lives.

All based on educated intuition.

Boggles the mind.

But I am desperate to learn more about it.

More after the break.

---

The rest of the story

First, a coda to last night’s tale of woe :

So as patient readers know, last night I ordered in and that was dumb because I had forgotten that the buzzer I use to let people into the building was broken.

So last night, when my phone rang, I told the driver I was letting him in, and I press six, and he immediately messaged me (through DoorDash) that it hadn’t worked, so I told him to try again but if it still didn’t work to just leave the food outside the building.

Phone rang again, I pressed the button again, then hung up, depressed.

Well either it worked the second time or someone let him into the building as they came in or out (naughty, not supposed to do that) because when Joe and Julian came home, my food was NOT outside the building but outside our apartment door.

So I could have had my delicious Indian meal last night, exactly as planned, if I had only known the damned food was right where I could get at it.

Admittedly the hike to and from the apartment door is a bit of a strain for me but I have done it plenty of times without a problem.

So that was the perfect capper to this comedy of dumbassery. The food was there but this fact had not been conveyed to be so I didn’t know.

True, when I didn’t get a message from my driver the second time, I could have deduced that this time he had gotten in, but hindsight etc.

Oh well. No big deal. No harm done to anything but my poor nerves, and they will recover with time.

Some day we’ll look back on this and laugh.

And laugh and laugh and laugh in increasingly high a pitch until the nice young men in the clean white coats come to cart us away.

More importantly, I think I am increasingly making peace with the fact that I am high strung, emotional, reactive kind of dude who does things like get all bent out of shape because of a food delivery mishap and that it’s totally fine to be that way.

It’s certainly a hell of a lot better than creating a state of eerie inner calm by brutally quashing all strong emotions in order to make living a worthless life more comfortable.

Yeah fuck that. I will pay for the highs with the lows if that is what it takes to get myself out of these fucking flatlands so I can go somewhere where the wind doesn’t blow through me all the time and there is a reason way this day is not like every other.

I want my life to have real content to it.

I want to feel things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was a day for gloating like a well fed demon over the burning husk of Dumb Donnie’s stupid White House.

Seriously, I imagine myself rubbing my hands together and capering with glee like some kind of overweight crippled Rumpelstiltskin.

Let the games begin!

It’s odd that at times I am downright saintly in my desire for everyone to get along and understand one another’s humanity and all that good stuff. and yet at the same time I have never had any problem with openly enjoying the misfortunes of evil people.

What can I say. I’m complicated.

And a lot of the facets of my personality don’t really fit together or at least not easily. Hence my difficulty in creating a unified sense of self.

I suppose that most people create said sense of self by unconsciously eliminating sides of themselves that don’t fit whatever narrative emerges during their tumultuous teen years and all that trying on of various identities.

I never went through that because emotionally speaking I was never a teenager. On an emotional level, I am in Grade 7 at best.

Like I have said so many times before, I missed out on a simply ridiculous number of developmental stages, from not having an imaginary friend to not having friends for the first five years of school to never dating in high school or developing an extended group of friends or going to parties to anything else a normal teen (or child) did.

I mean, I didn’t even play with toys. Not stimulating enough.

And the reason I keep coming back to the sheer weirdness of my childhood is that I am trying to wrap my head around how despite all that I did not, in fact, become a serial killer, or the like.

Apparently a lot of the developmental stages we think are vitally necessary to a child’s development are actually kind of optional.

Not that I would recommend skipping any of them to anybody ever. I have no idea how the fuck I got away with it so don’t go thinking you can, too.

I suppose one could see it as a testament to my mental strength and integrity. They kept me nailed together enough to get through 12 years of school and some college despite my bizarre suspended life.

I certainly have no illusions about “catching up”. That’s not how things work. I might be able to cover some of that ground later in my life but that’s not going to erase 30 years of wasted adult life or retroactively give me a better childhood.

I can’t ever get any of that back. There is a bright, happy, well adjusted, and very successful version of me that never got to be, and it is fitting that I mourn that poor fellow so I can let him go and move on.

He’s gone and nothing can ever change that.

Maybe I should hold a funeral or something like that.

I’m never going to “catch up”, but maybe I can make my own unique bespoke version of a happy, well-adjusted future for myself where I work for a living and have nice stuff.

Because sometimes it just feels like…

But more than the money I want the dignity of work. I want the self-esteem that comes from knowing you are a contributing member of society and not just a drain on it. I want to have enough money to not feel like a burden on others because instead of them having to look after me, I can pay people to do it instead.

Not that I think my roomies hate looking after me or anything.

It’s a “me” thing.

I want to have basic dignity and self-respect and no amount of telling me that I should already have them because I’m perfectly fine as I am is going to change that.

I have to become a grownup somehow.

Or I will never be able to forgive myself for living.

More after the break.

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I am a dumbass

Tonight, I was delighted to realize, after crunching the numbers, that I did, in fact, have enough money to order in tonight.

Yay for that.

I was so delighted, in fact, that I completely forgot that our buzzer isn’t working, ergo when the food arrived, I would not be able to let it in.

Which means it is currently sitting outside our building, presumably quite cold by now.

Because I am a dumbass.

Joe and Julian will pick it up for me when they come home. Then directly into the fridge it will go to probably sit there until Monday night because it’s too big a meal to have on a Sunday when I will be going to Denny’s for dinner.

Luckily, it’s just plain lamb curry plus an order of rice so there’s nothing in it that I have to worry about going bad before J&J get home.

Meanwhile, I am eating a PB&J instead of delicious curry because I was too bummed out to make anything else for myself.

Oh well. Whatever. It will all work out fine eventually and it was not all that dumb for me to forget that the god damned buzzer wasn’t working.

Man, I do not update my brain with new information all that easily, do I?

I was excited to be ordering in and my brain just reset to the default (buzzer works) and I did not realize my error until it was too late to cancel my order.

Ah well. I’m good at a lot of things but reality ain’t one of them.

No wonder I prefer to live online and in video games.

Of course, if I didn’t live my life that way and instead had a normal life, I would probably have had to get a lot better at dealing with the real world.

Instead, I am this strange half-formed otherworldly creature who exists primarily in the world of his computer and who can’t really handle the real world at all.

Oh well. At least I’m making progress getting back on to UpWork.

Freelance dollars ho!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, of course, my vid.

I did the lyrics on screen thing this time, and it was an annoying amount of work just to add some fairly meh visual interest to the video.

I think next time I do either a song I wrote or one I sang, I will take the plunge and try to make or find images to go with the lyrics instead.

I mean, yeah, that’s going to be a lot of work too, but at least it will give people interesting things to look at.

And using my AI image generation skills for something a tad more presentable than deviant smut would be quite interesting, though I would have to be sure I didn’t get too sucked in to the process.

It can be quite engrossing.

The real issue is my current inability to work on long term projects. This daily routine of mine certainly keeps me going and makes me at least marginally productive, but it severely limits the scope of what I can achieve and that is starting to bug me.

The REALLY real issue is carving out time to work on stuff outside my usual “working hours” and thus sacrificing more of my precious, precious “gaming time” to do so.

Big frigging deal. Being creative is more fun anyway.

Repeat until believed.

I mean, I know it to be true, but knowing and believing are two very different things.

Knowledge is data. Belief is an emotion. You can know a hell of a lot of things without feeling them at all.

Take it from one who knows.

For example, I have known for my entire life that I am extraordinary. Learned to read at the age of three, never had to study, etc.

But I never felt extraordinary. I just felt weird. Alienated from others.

Not really human, really.

I can very easily understand why some people embrace outlier ideas about them “really” being their fursonas or werewolves or angels or aliens or elves from Avatar or whatever else in the world of media resonates with them in a way that normal mainstream culture never did.

Because alienation hurts, folks. It hurts like hell. And these “other” identities provide a much more satisfying and supportive answer to the question of why you can’t connect with your fellow human beings than the real answer.

Which is that you’re just kinda… broken.

For some reason, society and you did not connect on a very important level and you found yourself feeling like an alien in your own culture and wondering what the hell is wrong with you that makes it so that what works for others doesn’t work for you.

I can point to reasons why I’m broken from my past. Raped as a toddler, no kindergarten, so far ahead of my peers I couldn’t relate to them, and so on.

But regardless of the reason, there was not a place in society for me that I could see and without a place in society you cannot connect with the rest of humanity and thus the humanity inside yourself.

So much of what and who we are is defined and developed by interacting with others that a socially isolated childhood does enormous harm to a developing child.

And the cold cruel truth is that developmental windows do not come back. The harm from my socially isolated childhood will be with me till the day I die.

Like a disability, I can learn to live with it and to a certain extent compensate for it, but it’s still not the same as being normal.

And so I grew up in a very cold and isolated world of my own and could only look in at the warm and vital world the rest of humanity seemed to live in without having any idea of how lucky they were to feel alive like that.

I worry that my current isolation can never truly be breached. I mean, here I am with perfectly lovely friends who love and care about me and yet I feel alone a lot of the time.

Even as I sit here, I feel like I am a million miles away from everybody else and I am so very dead and cold and numb inside that it’s like I am not even part of the human race.

I don’t feel human.

Even though I know I am.

More after the break.

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The sunrise of the soul

That’s what I am trying to pull off as I strain against the ice that holds me down and keeps me from becoming who I am truly meant to be.

And it ain’t this sad little form of mine, I can tell ya that.

I will be so much more.

But right now, I’m still in the egg, waiting to be born. I need to come out of my shell and that means finally facing the world instead of living my entire life with my back turned to reality as I stubbornly remain fixated on my screens.

Screens are not and can never be enough.

But they can feel like enough. Sitting here with all this information and entertainment and interaction at my fingertips did a very good impression of non-isolation in my life for way too long a time.

Thinking about my future, where my life was going, what I wanted to be doing with myself, and so forth and so on was depressing and scary so I didn’t do it.

It is, rather pathetically, that simple. A very easy formula for wasting your entire adult life being buried in video games and the internet so that you never have to face the depressing and terrible reality of your life.

Which is only so depressing and terrible because of your lack of dealing with it, of course. Funny how it works like that.

Obviously the only solution is to wade into the much and deal with things.

But I don’t feel like I can do that alone and I don’t have anyone to do it with.

I’m coming to realize that a lot of my problems in life stem from the limitations of always doing everything alone.

But I don’t know how to work with others. The ship may have sailed on that for me. I might be stuck doing everything myself because my social abortion of a childhood made me too impatient and hostile and suspicious of others to work any other way.

There are worse fates. At least I can do fairly amazing things by myself. That helps.

But I worry that it’s impossible for anyone to truly get close to me.

Because nobody ever has. That’s both my doing and theirs.

A deep animal part of me can only see other people as a threat.

And I hate that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, today’s vid, which is just me yakking about stuff.

Yes, I finally have a smartphone. Huzzah. I will share the number with trusted folk upon request so that you may text me.

I mean what the hell. Text is a large part of what I do all day anyhow.

But like I said before, there will be absolutely no games installed on it, EVER. I don’t want to get drawn back into gaming in bed and absolutely wrecking my sleep.

I will use the thing to listen to podcasts or YouTube vids or whatever and of course I will use it to communicate but that’s it.

My video game free time in bed is precious to me now.

Besides, if I start adding games to it, I will end up doing crosswords all day.

Secondly, holy crap, I just made this :

Turns out the magical folk at Perchance have bestowed another miraculous tool upon the creative landscape, and this one makes COMIC STRIP PANELS. Holy CRAP!

This could be huge, folks. The imgen engine still doesn’t quite handle text right, but it’s pretty damn close, and that means it might be close enough for me to work with.

Hank Watches Television could actually come back! Although this time, I think the farm animals would be terminally online instead.

And because this is Perchance and they are magical. it’s all totally free. That is especially welcome after going through three “free to try” sites that do the same thing but want my money.

Well fuck you. I’m a Perchance fox.

I am going to master this comic making tool and then I will start putting out some sort of webcomic, possibly on a daily basis.

Having to make it a panel at a time is a bitch, so expect me to be exploring the world of single panel comics for a while.

But holy batshit, Fatman. COMICS.

Next up we have the most wholesome, heart-melting, life-affirming video ever.

Damn I wish I could embed Bluesky videos!

Anyhow, here it is.

Is that not the greatest dog ever? They’re helping the baby walk! Nobody taught them to do that. They figured it out on their own and all because all mammals instinctively are gentle with children and do what they can to help them.

And it doesn’t matter that we’re different species. Clearly all mammals are programmed to recognize children of all species, and instinctively care for them.

And if that doesn’t warm your heart, you are god damned dead.

What else, Oh right, the thing I set out to talk about.

When doing Therapy Thursday today, the issue of my need for a very particular kind of control came up and something crystallized for me.

I love it when things do that.

I realized that it’s as though at some point, my overweaning intellect took total control of my psyche and my soul and declared that from that point on, all my impulses, instincts, motivations, drives, and other motive factors has to go through it for approval.

And it doesn’t approve much.

What’s worse is that this created a system where all those motive factors were treated like alien impulses trying to take me “out of control”.

And that’s just so damned wrong.

These are the mechanics of why I find it so hard to get motivated to do things. On some primal level, my stupid brain attacks and destroys urges to do things because it’s stuck in “freeze and hide” mode and thinks that impulses will get me “caught”.

The only safety is in stasis!

What a terrible way to live.

More after the break.

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Permanent flight or freeze

Otherwise known as “getting stuck in run and hide mode”.

Somehow, I need to deep down into the deepest levels of my psyche and convinced that scared little animal of mine that everything is safe now.

That’s nothing you patient readers haven’t heard before, of course.

But I feel like I have a better understanding of exactly what the stakes are and what the problem is now. Like it’s the same problem but now I see it more clearly than before.

And I know I will be able to bring more mental weight to bear on the problem now. I was talking with Doc Costin today about feeling like I am straining against my confinement and how my growing discontent and restlessness, while unpleasant, will be key in marshalling enough spiritual force to finally break these chains.

They’ll break when I don’t need them any more, I know, annoying jedi master.

Still, I feel like I am straining against myself now. Like my project to push energy deep down into the core of my mind is really picking up steam and I am melting all that frozen feeling inside me at an unprecedented rate.

And occasionally, little shoots of hope and motivation push up through the ice. They don’t last very long but they are there. The future in which I do the things I feel like doing because I feel like doing them seems closer than ever.

It’s just a matter of dismantling this cruel and irrational empire of ice I have been living in so that I can let my feelings flow and change in a natural way instead of keeping everything bound in ice like a stranded freighter deep inside me.

Those times when I manage to let out some tears or some anger have shown me that it is that emotional ebb and flow that brings mental health for me. My feelings have to flow like blood through veins in order for my mind to balance itself and stay “clean”, and if that means that on some obscure level I am “out of control”, so be it.

Better anarchic happiness than inanely ordered misery every single god damn day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If I’d really wanted to, I probably could have come up with another rant.

And don’t get me wrong. I’m very glad that some people found my ranting amusing and/or informative and/or illuminating.

But I don’t want to be “that angry guy” who builds his persona around ranting. That’s way too restrictive. And proscriptive – what if I’m just not angry that day?

Nah, I will continue to have the one unifying thing about my content be me. You either like my stuff and my style and my wit and my personality and so on or you don’t.

I do this to express myself. That is the primary mission of both the blog and the videos. I am a high strung creative type who needs to express his inner energies in order to be anywhere in the same neighborhood as sanity.

Who knows, maybe one day I will discover the perfect way to express all of my copious creative juices in one glorious endeavor and actually be able to have some time of actual lucid mental health at the end of the day,

Oh right, the video. Here it is.

I kinda had that back when I was doing my Million Word Challenge and was writing around 1,667 words a day,

There were days in there where I would go do stuff with Le Gang after a day of writing and be a way more relaxed and groovy version of myself.

More or less the version of me I have always wanted to be. Relaxed, confident, positive, expansive, witty, all very very Sagittarius.

But all very groovy and harmonious like a Taurus like me desires.

What can I say, I am a complicated dude with a lot of elements in his chart which quite frankly do not fit together at all.

Back to the vid. It took a major act of will to resist the urge to put the lyrics on screen in that vid like I usually do.

But that’s one hell of a lot of work and by the time I had the MP3 of the song done it was already 3:15 pm so I decided I would resist the urge this once and just put it out there with the vinyl loop as a background and see how that worked out.

Well I still have the urge to put the damned lyrics on the screen. And relatedly, I have the urge to tell myself that if I want to do a song I need to do it before it becomes time to make the video of the day.

That probably won’t happen. I am too much of a slave to routine right now to subtract from my oh so precious gaming time in order to do something creative spontaneously.

Even though somes I get really bored in the morning and don’t feel like playing a video game, I want to do something more.

One day, that irrepressible energy will break through and force me to do more with my life because the alternative will be to go completely insane.

Until then I will trudge along like usual, I guess.

That same old death march to the grave, no detours, no side trips, no looking at the scenery too much, just moving forever inwards until one day time and obesity fbnally catch up with me and I just plain drop dead.

That would be nice. Skip the whole slowly dying while fulla of tubes eking out my last in total terror and misery thing.

Just, “Well, I guess that’s all for this life. I’ll never talk to you nice people again. Bye!”

And then I just keel over and fall apart.

More after the break.

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Such wanton profligacy!

I ordered in tonight. And I am probably going to do it again on Saturday night.

Truly, I am a dissolute spendthrift with nary a thought for all that is good and decent!

Seriously, though, I had to crunch the numbers today to figure this out and even with my crunchiest numbers it’s gonna be close.

Basically, to stay within my means, both meals must be less than $25.

Tonight’s Donair Dude repast was $24.47.

Not bad considering that I got a veggie samosa for an appetizer and a massive order of fries smothered in lamb donair meat and sauce for my main.

I could have gotten a donair wrap instead, or poutine for a few bucks more, but this is what I was in the mood for.

Fries, donair sauce, and MEAT.

I like having the occasional especially carnivorous meal. Not only does it let me assure myself that I am, indeed, getting enough vitamin B12, but there is a certain atavistic satisfaction to having a belly full of meat.

Perhaps some hidden evolutionary lever is telling me I’m a good hunter.

Today’s been good. I am more or less back to my baseline of misery. My nose is still running but that’s a seasonal allergies thing.

But otherwise, I feel fine. Even better since Julian noticed that the thermostat in my room was set to “medium”.

No wonder it felt like it was super hot out when it was only 25 degrees! D’oh.

Oh well, I am not a sensible person and so while maybe I “should” have thought of that when it seemed weirdly hot in my room, I didn’t, and odds are I wouldn’t.

At least not for a while. It might take a long time for it to occur to me.

I just have to take a few deep breaths and remind myself that I am, in fact, a genius, and we genii often have trouble with the here and now realities of life.

For the millionth time : I need an assistant. Someone to cope with things for me so all I have to do is make good art and they take care of the rest.

I guess that’s what all us dreamers want, whatever our speciality. Someone to watch over us as we live in the space between our ears.

Maybe some day I will have that. When I can pay for it.

Till then I will muddle through like always.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s all Robin Williams’ fault!

Well, not really.

I talk about it here :

To be clear, I wish I could be a more positive person. And maybe I will be when I finish venting my bile and ridding myself of this emotional excess cargo.

I’m done with letting this stuff out at a slow trickle or even a steady stream.

I want to vent on an industrial scale so I can get this shit DONE.

G’won! Giddout! Amscray! All you suppressed emotions have been freeloading off my precious mental resources for way too long, and now your ass is being evicted.

Whatever that takes.

And that includes violating my usual fluffy cute and harmless persona for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I still strive to be that way.

But I won’t be able to truly be Fruvous until I shed a lot of ugly emotional weight and that means being pissed off a whole bunch.

My backlog of unexpressed rage stretches for miles.

But all of that is not the true reason I feel cranky today, or at least, not all of it.

Because I am also sick. It’s my usual syndrome. I feel drained, and my muscles feel like they are just hanging off of me. Everything I do takes considerably more effort than usual both due to the energy drain and my muscles being really stiff. My nose is running, of course, and occasionally that makes me cough.

Blah blah BLAH. All the usual bullshit. None of it is what I would call severe, although the muscle stiffness is really a bitch when it comes time to use the bathroom, but they were enough for me to decide not to do Wound Care and exercise at the Kinsmen Center today, damn it.

But this syndrome of mine is quite possibly viral, something my weak immune system can’t quite seem to finish off, so I am not going to expose sick people at the CHAC to it, let alone the old folks at the CHAC.

Is it possible have just like a mild case of long COVID?

I don’t think it’s dehydration alone this time as I have been hydrating aggressively and while that has eased the muscle stiffness somewhat and I don’t feel nearly as bleh as I did this morning, but I am still pretty sick.

Oh wait, I have naproxen. Time for one of those.

Basically, overall, I feel very poisoned and toxic and bleh. Like I should leave a trail of slime wherever I go, or maybe leave glow in the dark footprints.

And apparently, this is just something my body has to go through periodically. And I use that term loosely because it’s not like it happens at regular intervals.

That would imply mercy.

If it’s not the produce of an inimical microorganism, then I dunno. I can’t imagine anything in the body that could malfunction in a way that causes that particular constellation of symptoms all at once now and then.

Possibly some obscure gland ain’t doing its job.

Well at least I finished my “Because… ” trilogy. And who knows, maybe there will be more of those in the future as I rummage around in my emotional attic and find more stuff I have to throw out.

And for an emotionally stunted writer like me, there’s only one way to express my emotions and that’s by writing (or otherwise expressing) them.

And that’s where you fine folk come in. Without someone to receive, I can’t send, so thank you, my loyal fans, for making this whole thing possible.

I literally could not do it without you.

More after the break.

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Any other things?

Well I returned that “Tactical Breach Wizards” game when I realized that there was no circumstance in which I could imagine playing it again.

So I might as well get my money back and get something else.

Then I bought a game called Geneforce 1 – Mutagen based solely on the fact that my good buddy Maelkoth is a huge fan and I have to say, I’m enjoying the game so far, but um, not unreservedly.

Because the concept is great. You’re a wizard who summons creatures to fight for you.

There’s two other character classes, but when summoning critter like that is an option, I am going for it.

I mean, who wants to be a fighter in a game like that? Not me.

And so far the plot is interesting, the writing is good, the world seems well fleshed out, but there’s one little problem.

The game looks like this :

And I get that it’s a remake of a much older game and a lot of people are nostalgic for that kind of “retro” gaming, but I am old enough to remember when that’s just what games looked like so in my mind it doesn’t look “retro and cool”, it looks “old and crappy” and I find that depressing.

So I might not keep the game. I dunno. I feel like returning an otherwise great game for purely aesthetic reasons would be shallow of me but I suppose if playing the game depresses me, that is reason enough.

I’m just glad Steam isn’t a person because they would be getting SO sick of my buying and returning things by now.

I am still playing Darkest Dungeon a fair bit. It’s wild how the devs who made the game managed to make something so enjoyable to play out of such basic ingredients.

Your characters are basically animated paper cutouts. The missions you go on are procedurally generated (random). There’s only like three location types, so three kinds of backgrounds and critters. You spend all your time in either a room or a corridor between rooms. Everything about it is very basic.

And yet, somehow, I love playing it. I love the Edgar Allen Poe-esque dramatic horror of it all, I love the many character classes for your heroes, I love the battle system, the voice acting for our macabre narrator is superb, and the writing is great at conveying the kind of dark and grim atmosphere on which the game relies.

Apparently there’s a sequel but it’s nothing like the original, presumably because this time they had an actual budget.

Still, it shows that I can find a game and settle on it sometimes.

I’m not a total flake!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, part 2 of my “Fru gets mad at motivational bullshit” series.

This time, it’s “live your best life”.

Like I said yesterday, I have finally clued in that topics like this are a way for me to tap in to a lot of the latent bitterness and rage that pollutes my soul and drives my anxiety and neurosis just from the strain of keeping it contained.

Time to let that shit out as much as I can. I will be so much better off without it. I have so much pain frozen away in the cold storage of my soul where I just kept shoving it rather than deal with it all these years.

And clearing out the anger opens the channels for better things as well, like hope, inspiration, ambition, joy, and even good old fashioned lust.

I love lust. It’s always been there for me when I need to heat up this frosty old heart of mine and connect with something live and warm and vital.

It’s not as good as real human connection (I assume), but as a reliable source of ignition that’s always close at hand (snrk) it can’t be beat.

I kind of use music in the same, although in that case it’s a way to access my deep emotions rather than my primal life force. Music cuts right through my bullshit intellectual emotional defenses and all my left brain crap and makes me feel without my overbearing superego getting in the way.

That’s why it’s so important to me. I feel like it’s very close to being sacred to me (as I understand the term) because to me, it’s this mystical thing that lets me access that deep mysterious powerful part of my mind that has always spooked me because it gave me feelings that didn’t make sense and made it hard to concentrate on reality.

Come to think of it, that still happens. I still have times when my inner world grabs so much of my mental bandwidth right in the middle of talking with someone or otherwise trying to deal with real life in realtime that I can’t concentrate at all and end up being functionally debilitated by my extremely rude and demanding inner world.

On some level, I must have given my deep thought processes unlimited access to every single part of my brain, not leaving anything behind for anything else, including, say, maintaining my mood or functioning as a human being or being an adult.

And I’m not sure how I would change that. And I am even less sure that I want to. Messing with my brain’s settings on that deep a level seems fraught with peril, and I don’t think I have that kind of courage.

Not yet, anyhow.

I know that I have vast reserves of strength and power within me. Nothing in my life has tapped into even one percent of my potential and I am not sure what even could.

And so I circle back to the idea of my having gone to medical or law school. I could have seen just how far my academic genius could take me.

Oh, but you still could! You’re not dead yet. Where there’s life there’s hope! It’s never too late to have a happy childhood! Go for it!

Yeah, seriously, fuck OFF, Oprah. I am nowhere near alive enough for bullshit like that. I can barely find the motive power to get out of bed some days.

I sure as hell don’t feel like becoming a lawyer at the age of 60 is a viable life choice.

What I really need is a strong, supportive, sexy man.

Or a very large amount of money.

Or both, if that’s an option.

More after the break.

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Rumble grumble snarl

Getting my anger out like I’ve been doing does feel kind of weird.

I’m so used to being “the cute one”, harmless and friendly and lovable, that when I step outside of that role in order to let out some demons, I feel kinda alienated from myself.

But it’s something I have to get done. The only cure for emotions is to feel them. Nothing else known to this here universe of ours will get rid of them.

So you options are to find a way to feel and express them, or carry them around with you for the rest of your life.

And that second option is very, very expensive. It costs you a lot of mental bandwidth, psychological effort, emotional strain, and just plain stress to keep it all locked up.

Still a popular option, though. Kind of like always making the minimum payment on your credit card. Sure, you are paying way, way more over time that way, but what they’re counting on is you thinking, “Wow, I pay this and the problem goes away for a month? Golly, that’s awesome!”.

There are a lot of people out there perfectly willing to prey on people’s lack of willingness to think about long term consequence and/or do the math.

And I find that very frustrating because I know these people are capable of figuring these things out in a literal sense but are temperamentally disinclined to do so.

Oh well. Not everybody has Taurus priorities. Presumably money isn’t that important to these people on an emotional level.

Anyhow, back to keeping things repressed.

I don’t know how long this rant thing will keep going. I know that I have at least one more in me, but after that, who knows.

I might really tunnel down deep and release as much of my anger and bitterness about my childhood and how it turned out as I can.

That would be a whole different level of venting. Potentially a lot more dangerous and explosive than just bitching about stupid New Age happy face insipid bullshit.

But if it gets me closer to sanity and living an adult life, I’m all for it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided that today was a good day for some spleen venting.

And you all get to hear it!

Oh well, beats me ranting at you in person, I guess.

Anyhow, here it is :

I wonder if I could write a book about how to be positive when you’re Gen X.

A lot of us are around my age and starting to look back on our lives and see a lot of being cranky and difficult and thinking, “And what did all that get me? A heart attack, a divorce, and kids that hate me for good reason. ”

Or something like that. I’m spitballing here.

So maybe now is the time to finally give being positive a chance. Yes, we all grew up with “Have a nice day!” and all that rainbows and unicorns fake positivity and the world of advertising trying to get excited over inane crap, but that stuff’s way back in the rearview mirror now and maybe, just maybe, those dipshits had a point.

All that snarky sarcasm only really makes sense if you’re fighting a defensive battle against a sea of shallow stupidity, and in case you haven’t noticed, that sea ain’t here anymore and our angst is increasingly absurd without it.

So what the hell. Maybe it’s time to give cheerfulness a try.

But I know that won’t be easy for us. I can’t imagine a day when all that “be positive” bullshit doesn’t make me wanna roll my eyes and growl. Certainly I am never going to be on board with all that “live your best life” and “carpe diem” crap.

Of course you’re living your best life, Oprah, you’re a fucking billionaire.

As for Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society with all that “carpe diem” stuff, I’m sorry, professor, but I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

Seize what? and how? I need details dammit.

Don’t get me started. Those are rants for another day.

So how do I smuggle positivity past all my spiky angry defenses?

I only have one idea for that : spite.

Be positive to spite the world that’s trying to hard to bring you down. Use being upbeat and cheerful as a big middle finger to this dark and depressing world. Prove to the world that it doesn’t get to dictate who you are or how you feel.

I don’t know if this approach would work for anyone but me. In fact, I am not sure it will even work for me, to be honest.

But it’s all I’ve got so far.

At least I am finally trying to tackle all my latent rage. Like I allude to in the vid,I thought of the subject of today’s vid and how angry it made me and thought, “Wait a minute, that’s something I can vlog about and maybe do myself some good!”.

So, there it is, me baring my guts as usual.

You know, being really brutally honest and open and vulnerable seems to be very popular online. Especially with comedians.

So it’s occurred to me that it could be my lack of normal social boundaries due to way less than normal socialization as a child could be the key to my success.

There would be a certain justice to that, it’s true.

On a deep level I honestly don’t know any better. For whatever reason, I am an inherently overt person. I don’t hide what I do or who I am, I hate having secrets, I don’t give a flying fuck what people think of me, and I am honestly so pathetically needy that I would tell anything to anyone just to keep them paying attention to me.

Oy, do I have issues.

More after the break.

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Watch them dance!

Check out this parrot dance.

Those are some very impressive moves!

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The soft cell

No, not these lucky gentlemen :

No, the cell of which I speak is the cell phone Joe was super nice enough to buy me!

I really do have the awesomest friends ever.

So I have finally, at long last, joined the millennium and become a cell phone user.

I haven’t gotten one before now because we have a landline and that’s what I am used to and so it didn’t seem like it would be worth the money to get and pay for a cell phone just so I could make phone calls during those brief times when I am not home.

But over the years, the inability to text with people has become a nuisance, as has my inability to do god damned two factor authentication, and so I had been thinking of getting myself a cheap pay as you go phone for those particular applications.

But now I don’t have to! Joe has solved that problem for me and I am tickled pink.

I am going to set some ground rules for myself, though, because I do not want to end up a sleep deprived zombie like I was back when I had a tablet.

So I am not going to put any games on this cell unless I am literally about to end up in the hospital or otherwise be in a situation where I will need to entertain myself for a long time while being nowhere near my computer.

Second, this thing does NOT come to bed with me. Ever. I will use it sitting here at my computer or not at all. That’s where I will keep the charger too.

Because even without games, the temptation to veg out on the cell instead of sleeping will be too great if it’s close at hand and I need real sleep, god damn it.

Bed will remain for reading, sleeping, and playing my synth.

I know that these rules will not be easy for me to stick to but I am determined to protect my precious four hours of solid sleep a night so I will see it through.

Of this, I swear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh no, not again!

Ha ha ha.

I sang a song. A capella, as has become my custom, as I am apparently incapable of singing properly while a karaoke track is playing in my ears.

Here it is :

I have thought about adding the karaoke track after the fact. That would solve the problem of my rather barebones vocals just sitting there all by themselves.

I might even sound like a real musician! Imagine.

But so far, I have not gone through with that idea because I am not sure I am up to the potential technical challenges of syncing the karaoke track with my vocals.

I mean, I’m pretty sure my musical sense is good enough that my vocals would be the right tempo and key, but I know how incredibly fussy I can be about timing so that if there’s even the slightest discrepancy I will notice and it will bug me and I might not know enough to fix it.

Or maybe I’m just too lazy to bother. I dunno.

What I’m really getting at is that I feel guilty about today’s video and its lack of production value. When I have done that kind of video before, I have put the lyrics over a black background on the screen to give people something to look at besides me.

But this time, I decided to let it all rest on my vocal performance and stage presence and see how I felt about that.

Not good, as it turns out.

So, lesson learned. Next time I sing, I will go back to the usual lyrics on screen format, or come up with some other way to add visual value to the vid.

I mean, I have standards.

When I remember them.

I’m working on it.

Today’s been pretty decent so far. Pondering what I want to order for dinner tonight.

Originally I was gonna get pizza, because the whole of the CHAC smelled faintly but distinctly of pizza yesterday when I was at Wound Care.

Not sure what kind but it definitely had green peppers.

But now I am not so sure. I might get Donair Dude or maybe Chipotle instead, and have them put green peppers on that.

Or not. Whatever. The wheel is still spinning, all possibilities are in play. I live in the heart of downtown Richmond so I am surrounded by possibilities.

Been playing a lot of Darkest Dungeon. I think I am past the major learning curve now. I had to start over a number of times because I ran out of money and that’s pretty much game over at that point.

Wish I had known I could sell off excess Trinkets back then. Oh well.

And in the larger sense, I have been brooding over what I do with my time and my life and whether I could be getting a hell of a lot more out of my time on Earth if I could just break the hypnotic spell of routine that I’ve been under for so long.

So I am still a wizard way up in his lonely tower as of yet, but I am looking down at the real world down below and wondering what I might find out there if I tried.

I know that this life and this routine of mine is killing me. But knowing that is not enough. I still don’t feel like I have the will and the focus and the drive to break free.

After all, I’ve lived like this for 30 years. It’s all I know. My entire adult life has been video games and the internet and spinning my fucking wheels and the idea of departing from that to theoretically greener pastures is terrifying to me.

It’s like stepping into outer space.

But maybe I am making too much of the whole thing. Maybe I should think of it more as quietly sneaking out the back door to poke around the base of my tower a bit before going right back into hiding.

Kind of like a mouse coming out at night.

I, too, am a timid and easily spooked critter.

But I’m working on that.

More after the break.

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A long dark trip through Hell

Sorry if that comes across as a tad melodramatic.

But that’s what I feel I need in order to become free. I need a long trip through the fires of Hell in order to burn away all broken flesh and diseased skin still clinging to my soul so that I might come away clean and fresh and new.

Once again I note how I have totally switched to fire imagery lately.

I choose to view this as a sign of progress.

And that makes sense, because fire is what I need right now. I need fire. Passion. Desire. Ambition. The id. The living, breathing life force within all living beings.

It’s the lack thereof that has left me so cold inside. The airy world of the mind can do a lot of amazing things but it is the light that gives no heat. A balanced mind and personality requires cozying up to the fire inside and let its heat melt all that god damned ice inside that somehow convinced you it was a part of you.

But it’s not.

And it can all melt like candle wax and run down the drain and no part of me will be lost.

Instead, I will regain myself. After sloughing off all that dead tissue, my true self can emerge into the sunlight and breathe free.

My internal springtime is, admittedly, running a tad behind schedule. But it’s coming. I am thawing out and waking up and learning to actually function, and I am turning the heat up a little more every day until the light shines through.

Or maybe until my light shines out.

Because remember, you can’t let yourself out without letting the world in.

Make your choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear, I started off trying to do something lighthearted and relatable.

But then I drifted.

Perhaps some of us are just not meant to end up where we’re trying to go.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I want to pick at the issue of my not doing what I should do some more.

I really meant it when I said that the things I could do or should do seem like they exist in the world outside my microscopic domain. As if I am a prisoner in a tower and things like that are for the people I see passing by on the street below.

And in my tower, I am a wizard, with grand magicks at my command. And I can see a lot of the world from my lofty aerie so I know a surprisingly large amount about it.

But don’t be fooled by the illusions I project into the “real world” down below. I am not really there at all. The real me stays up in the tower where he’s “safe”.

Ha ha ha. “Safe”. From everything but HIMSELF.

He really needs to spend more time outside of the tower. To get away from the demons and ghosts and sadistic corrupt judges of his own creation.

But he’s scared.

Maybe he needs to consult the mighty wizard Xanax some more.

Characteristically elaborate metaphors aside, this separation between the world and I clearly has to end, and I know better than to wail about how “I dunno how to do that!”

Sure ya do. You just fucking do it. You put down the video games and go in search of things to do that might actually mean something to you. You go out into that big wide internet and look around for opportunities and adventures and fun stuff to do.

You just don’t want to.

Because you’re scared.

So that leaves you (me) stuck holding out for some kind of truly magical solution where I can somehow leave my clammy cloister without increasing my stimulation level or doing anything else difficult and/or scary.

But there’s no way to let myself out without letting the world in and I have protected myself from true contact with the world ever since being raped as a child proved to me that the world was horrible beyond all comprehension and therefore the only way to be safe was to withdraw from it as far as I could short of catatonia.

It’s crossed my mind. Just a thought.

Give up on everything, stop doing things entirely, completely withdraw from reality, and surrender myself to the whims of fate entirely.

Will I die? Will I be discovered and put in an institution? Will anyone really care? Will I just end up lying in a gutter in the DTES being used as a punching bag by the children of junkies and pimps?

Probably not. Eventually I’d get bored and need to get up and pee as well. Catatonia is something you really have to commit to and my need for high levels of mental stimulation plus at least minimal control over my fate would betray me.

But the idea does cross my mind now and then, when the depression is surging and my motivation is tanking and I can’t remember why I do things any more.

I guess that’s where the hypnosis of routine rears its ugly head once more.

I won’t truly grow until I finally step off this train car of mine and explore the big loud chaotic world outside my tower.

But I’m scared.

More after the break.

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Discovered via Julian

I am absolutely entranced and excited by this person’s work.

Their work is so perfectly cinematic! I have never seen 3D computer storytelling done so perfectly. I am dying to know how the hell they pull it off.

I assume it’s via a whole bunch of tools I am not artsy enough to use.

I’m a writer, dammit. The only technical requirement for that is typing!

I wonder how long it takes to make a vid like that. Probably a heck of a lot of person-hours go into it.

Although the prospect of AI someday making doing things like that as simple as just inputting the script is a tantalizing one.

I’m a writer, yes. And that means I do not have great interpersonal skills. We are a withdrawn and introverted bunch.

So to be brutally honest, the idea of making movies without having to involve other people has enormous appeal to me.

Because I don’t wanna work with other people. Other people suck.They’re flaky and unreliable and can’t stay focused and don’t take things seriously enough.

That is such a Taurus litany.

The smart thing for a creator like me to do would be to try to put together a team of good, smart, dependable people who can do their work on time and take something they are not getting paid for seriously and then use said team to make stuff.

Like Maglot the werewolf has apparently done. Bravo for him!

I’m sure that I could lead a group like that. I could be the creative visionary like Walk Disney or Jim Henson who makes the amazing dreams for them to turn into some kind of reality via art.

I can write it. I can do voices for it. I could direct the voice recording sessions. I could probably be the producer.

But I can’t do the rest all by myself. Not yet, anyhow.

Go, AI, go!

Until then, I will see about contacting Maglot and seeing if there is literally anything I could help him with so I can be a part of his team.

I will be a virtual janitor if that’s what it takes. But I really want to be part of the team that makes things of that quality.

With my luck, it will turn out that he’s a loner like me, does the whole thing himself (somehow), and is definitely not looking to collab.

Oh well, I have to at least try.

Because ya never know!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.