Why do I do things like this to myself?

I know beforehand how much work doing a Lyrics On Screen (LOS) video for a song of mine is going to be, but I plunge headfirst into doing one now and then anyhow.

Oh well, it’s good to challenge myself now and then anyhow. Might help me teach myself not to be such a god damned wuss all the time.

They say we often have to “re-parent” ourselves, which has always seemed like an absurd idea to me, because if I had the sort of internal resources to pull that off. I wouldn’t need to do it.

It’s not like there’s a loving and competent parent just waiting in the green room of my mind for its cue to come on stage and take over.

But of particular difficulty for me is attempting to re-father myself. It’s too late, I am a lifelong wimp and coward and not much I can do will change that now.

Maybe the right husband could help me through it.

Anyhow, here’s the fruit of my labour :

I mean, I’m not two people. I’m one and a third people at best. I really don’t understand how someone is supposed to pick themselves up by their own shoulders.

Perhaps I am being too literal about the whole thing. Or too thorough in my imaginings.

I try to be nice to myself. I do my best to send love and acceptance and warm happy vibes down into the lowest levels of my soul to keep that shivering little panicky beast down there some life force to live on.

I want to rescue my little critter so bad. I want to hold him and stroke him and soothe him and calm him and give him a loving home and a place by the fire just like in those Fruvous stories I wrote so long ago.

I guess those stories were my attempt at a kind of rescue and I am positive that writing them did me a lot of good by opening up happier possibilities in my mind.

But unfortunately my mind has problems even an imagination as powerful as my own can’t solve. At some point real healing has to happen, and that’s going to mean dealing with a lot of stuff I don’t wanna have to deal with, and digging that up takes time.

The good news is that I feel like I am digging deeper than ever before these days. It means the going is pretty rough because of the amount of resistance I have to overcome just to do anything on this level, but every single spadeful of dirt yields a treasure trove of catharsis, so I am gonna keep plugging away at it.

I might not be able to re-parent myself yet, but I am getting pretty good at believing in my own outsized abilities and my ability to perform wonders and miracles.

I even manage to remember that most people would not have written a thousand words a day for 14 years and counting and made over 500 videos and that the fact that I have done something like that must count for something, even if I have a lot of trouble valuing these things myself.

I guess I have a whole lifetime of taking my amazing abilities for granted to get over. Most couple couldn’t have gotten through school, including university, without ever having to learn to study either.

I never learned to recognize the value of these things both because of the evil forces in my mind that negate any notion of self-worth in me as a threat to the existing order, and because nobody else ever seemed to value them either.

I guess I taught people that they were no big deal with my own attitude.

If only I could go back in time and convince my child self to start making a big deal about himself and his abilities and stop being such a pushover and start demanding to be treated as an equal at home and at school.

This is the point where my therapist would ask me what I can do with that energy now.

And I don’t know. It’s not like I have authorities to stand up to now. It’s just me all by myself in the frozen hellscape of my inner world.

All my bullies are in my head now and they’re so much harder to fight that way.

More after the break.

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That one couplet

In the song I sang today is this couplet :

“But I was a fool
Playing by the rules”

Winner takes it all, abba

…and that activates something in me. Some kind of freaky twisted primal rage makes me want to scream, “Because FUCK your rules! I don’t follow the rules… I make the rules you fools end up following without once ever looking up from chewing your cud to ask where the rules came from in the first place. Answer : people like ME. So it doesn’t matter if you follow the rules, break the rules, exploit the rules, bend the rules, or hide behind the rules, as long as you are following my rules, you’re in my world and playing my game, fools. ”

Look, I told you it was fucked up and twisted. That’s the side of me that comes closest to being some sort of cackling psycho. Kind of like the Joker plus Hannibal Lecter.

But unlike the Joker and the good Doctor Lecter, I take responsibility for the kind of contempt you can feel for ordinary people when you’re a genius like me and I don’t pretend it entitles to harm anybody.

And no matter what, I am a humanist. I love the humanity in people, in ALL people, and it really doesn’t matter to me if they are smart like me or not.

That might affect with whom I wish to converse but it does not limit anyone’s humanity.

And that’s all that really matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But then again, you already knew that, didn’t you?

Here’s the latest reason why :

I guess that’s what happens when I am talking, slightly nervous, and my hands aren’t busy typing or using the mouse.

Anyhow, so, yeah. Problem not solved, god dammit. Turns out my current power supply matches the specs that website’s power supply calculator gave me, and does so at a higher rating than the one I bought, so back to Amazon goes the new one.

Once more I must remind myself that while brilliant, and deep, I am not wise when it comes to actually living life and I might just be one of those people that has to learn where the walls are by crashing into them at speed.

What the hell. Might as well keep on trying.

What I really want to talk about today, though, is my learned helplessness. I touched upon in yesterday’s blog entry and afterwards decided that, given how hard it is for me to talk about it, I should talk about it.

Nobody ever said self-therapy was easy.

I know that I learned my helplessness at an early age. As the youngest of four, giving up and waiting for someone to come along and do it for me was a viable strategy.

After all, odds are that someone was going to come along and take it away from me and do it themselves without having the patience to teach me to do it so they didn’t have to do it for me any more anyway.

But obviously this does not teach a person rugged self-reliance. Like I have mentioned before, I had no competent father figure to teach me to persevere, surmount obstacles, overcome my own limitations, and take risks.

So the helplessness pattern persisted. And now I am 52 and there is still some deep and vital part of my mind that feels like my only chance for survival is, like I said yesterday, to remain appealingly helpless and clumsy so that some adult might come along and rescue me from myself.

Not gonna happen, obviously, but that part of my mind that thinks that way is pretty major and it remains stubbornly stuck in that mode.

And it’s a major obstacle to my quest to become a real live human adult, with a job and everything, just like everybody else.

There is a soothing fatalism to helplessness. After all, if there’s nothing you can do, then you don’t have to do anything. You can end up like me, brain the size of a planet but stuck playing stupid fucking video games all day because your brain is wired for anxiety like it’s booby-trapped trenches and even the tiniest toe tap into new, grownup type territory makes you panic like your ass is on fire.

It isn’t. I just checked.

I know I’m not truly helpless in any logical, sane way. I have enormous power in this mega-mind of mine and there’s all kinds of things I can do. I could be a total whiz at so many things if I could just get over myself and get out there.

Even if it has to be through screens.

But I am just so scared of everything. And far too accustomed to this super passive life of mine. And too weak of character to do much about it but keep doing like I do and occasionally poking my head out to look for some way out of this hole I am in that would actually work for me.

I guess the real problem is that with my mental health burdens, merely longing for true adulthood does not provide nearly enough motivation to overcome the intense friction and inertia that depression represents.

And I am still far too withdrawn into myself, and terrified of extending myself into the harsh hard vacuum that lies outside my teeny tiny realm.

It all makes me feel so…. helpless.

And I am shockingly okay with that.

More after the break.

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The opposite of withdrawal

Let’s call it “advancement”.

That’s what I lack. I only know how to withdraw further into myself. What advancement I do manage on my own tends to be extremely tenuous and hesitant and my little tentacles are ready to retract back into me like a measuring tape when you press the button at the slightest stimulus.

And then, odds are, you will not see them come out again for a very long time.

Hence my being such a timid creature overall. Any moves I make towards that big beautiful world out there are opposed by this overwhelming inward tide that screams at me that out there lies only doom and only in seclusion can there be safety.

And it’s wrong, of course. But it’s also very loud.

It’s like having a smoke detector that is way, way too sensitive.

Yeah, you know full well that there’s no fire.

But you still ain’t making any toast.

When I visualize my frightened self, a very very harsh imagine of some fragile fractured creature with the stumps of tentacles burned all the way down to the nub sticking out of it just sitting there, shivering in shock and pain, unable to do anything else.

God, that’s harsh and depressing. But that’s the image my mind gave me.

And it fits. I wish it didn’t, but it does.

That’s how being raped when I was 4 years old left me and then being ignored and resented by my family and bullied in school only shriveled my tentacles even further until I was, like I have said many times, a robot who went to school.

And that’s how I am right now, too. Just a terrified and shell-shocked creature hiding deep within myself with my back turns to the world because the world is pain and badness and all I know how to do is hide away from it.

And until I can convince my critter it’s okay to come out, that’s where I will stay.

But it feels good to get a lot of that bad stuff out on the page, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, due to my computer being weird, I recorded my video straight to TikTok with my phone instead of via my webcam on my PC like usual.

The following is the result :

It’s high time I mow my beard, I think. It’s reached a ludicrous level of shaggy bushiness and I look like the patriarch of some fucked up tiny religious sect that practices bigamy and incest up some mountain somewhere.

Anyhow, I think I come across pretty good given that it was just me talking into the camera on my phone. There’s one spot where I could have edited out a stumble before I put it up on the YouTube but I left it in because it adds authenticity.

And I’m lazy. That’s always a factor.

I am glad I have now tested the TikTok to YouTube pipeline. Luckily it was quite simple. There’s websites you can use to download stuff off of TikTok just like there’s ones to download off of YouTube.

I have also finally remembered that I can “favorite” stuff on the TikittyTok so I have been favorite-ing the really good stuff I see.

I mean, check this shit out!

Like I said in my comment, instant like and fave! I mean, it’s a cute animal singing an awesome metal song from the 90’s.

That’s so “me”!

And speaking of which, here’s a kickass Asian rocker chick shredding the fuck out of Master of Puppets on her violin.

Aw HELL yeah. She is freaking awesome. She even has a proper heavy metal facial expression. She’s so awesome that, gay as I am, I kinda want to fuck her.

A little. Not really. With me, attraction to women always ends when the clothes come off in my mind.

I love your beautiful soul and brilliant mind, dear, but um…. not the plumbing. Sorry.

I’m sure it’s a perfectly lovely vagina, but I am not, as of this moment, into that.

I always hold out hope that I will one day evolve into true full bisexuality. It would be more in line with my trans-materialist nature where, to me, people basically are who they are on the inside and the outside doesn’t really matter.

Which is remarkably mystical for a rational materialist like myself.

The difference is that I understand that the “truth” and power of a metaphor does not make it a physically real thing.

Hence my thoughts on God and love. Both are equally “real”.

Also, God is not love. Love is God. Remember that.

What else have I got… let me see…

Oh right, there’s this bit that I thought was utterly brilliant.

It really shows what you can do with just a camera and some friends if you have enough imagination and understanding of comedy.

It’s exactly the sort of fast paced, high density, hilarious content I want to make some day. Just get together with some fun folk and do silly shit like that.

Maybe when I am just a little bit saner.

I will have to confirm that links like those work in our Zoom meetings so I can share all this awesome stuff with my friends.

Oh, and I absolutely love this guy. Warning, it’s quite long, but totally worth it.

He’s cute and dorky and funny and I am totally in like with him. I want to cuddle him up like the adorable muppet he is and help him save animals.

Oh right. He loves animals too. Enough to want to build a shelter for them with his bare hands. And I totally get it.

My social issues make me do stuff all by myself too. At this point, I honestly can’t imagine collaborating on things with other people.

It would be so much slower and less certain and messy!

I might be able to handle it if it’s the sort of thing where I can do my part then just send it off to someone else to do their part and so on.

Collaboration without the need for cooperation, I suppose.

I am such a mess!

More after the break

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What starts with an X and ends with… an X?

I felt myself becoming anxious about Spuug^[1] coming over soon, so I took a Xanax.

And this is a good step for me. I was emotionally self-aware enough to feel the problem coming on and had the forethought to head it off at the pass, so to speak.

Good for me. This is how I will slowly learn not to stumble and fumble (and crumble) my way through life like I have no idea what I’m doing.

This “innocent waif” thing has gone on long enough. My survival does not have to rely on being appealingly helpless and clueless. I can and WILL get my shit together so I can feel good about myself and not have to rely on others so much.

I know that nobody is complaining about how much of a burden I am, but there is still such a thing as pride and pride begins when you can stand on your own two feet and face the world without fear or shame and find a place and a way you can contributing and start being a real live legit grownup at long long last.

Some day I will put all this heinous and pathetic bullshit behind me and become someone I can respect and the whole of my life up until then will disappear in the rear view mirror and I will finally be free.

Until then, all I can do is keep hacking away at the walls that bind me, trying to break on through to the other side… or maybe realize I’ve been out there all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And all I really want to do right now is take a nap.

Here is why :

With apologies to the ghost of Robert Frost :

But I have promises to keep
And words to write before I sleep
And words to write before I sleep

So I will have to just muddle on through like I always do.

I suppose if I was a more driven, focused, and disciplined person, I would not find myself muddling through and improvising quite so much.

But I would also be way more serious and way less fun and my boundless creativity would be smothered under all that structure, so fuck that.

Patient readers already know the story behind my lack of self-discipline. School was always so easy for me that I never even had to study, so I never had to develop any kind of grit or determination or the will to overcome myself to get by.

And there was certainly nobody in my life who cared enough to tell me to straighten up and fly right, for fuck’s sake, or I would end up just another hikikomori statistic, another brilliant little birdy who failed to fly when kicked out of the nest.

In that sense, there was no failure to launch. We launched just fine.

We just crashed immediately after.

Because something happened in our development that left us convinced that there was no way we’d survive in the outside world.

It doesn’t make any logical sense. We general possess the basic skills needed to make it in the world. Paying bills and rent is not all that complicated, after all.

Working a job is a whole thing, but it’s possible to survive without one, and what the hell, flipping burgers ain’t that hard either.

I wonder what role inadequate father figures play in our debility. In the classic gender based parenting setup, your mother is the one who cares for you, nurtures you, looks after you, and keeps you safe.

And the father is the one who is supposed to encourage you to take risks, learn from your mistakes, overcome your limitations, and strive.

You can see how such a balanced setup could lead to a well grounded, confident, secure young person who is ready to take on the world.

But if one of those roles is not adequately fulfilled, the child ends up highly neurotic.

Without a sufficient mother figure, the child never learns caution, restraint, nurturing, gentleness, and how to express love.

And without a proper father figure, the child grows up to be cowardly, timid, fearful, scared of the world, abd with zero confidence in their ability to take risks and survive let alone their ability to overcome their fears in order to grow strong and resilient.

And that sounds like us failure to launch types to me.

So often we are highly intelligent and creative yet we lack the sort of confidence and self-assuredness it takes to expand our boundaries, overcome our limitations, and go out and find our place in the world.

Instead we collapse in on ourselves due to a total lack of grit and internal structure and so we never graduate into pre-adulthood, let along becoming actual grownups.

Especially if, like me, you were removed from university halfway through and forced back into your childhood, essentially, by selfish Boomer parents.

I still haven’t gotten over that and it happened thirty years ago. Blaming my misfortunes on my parents is not very productive and indeed functions largely as a cheap excuse not to take responsibility for myself, but it’s all I have for now.

I want to get over it and move on with my life. But I can’t. The wound is too large and I am going to need to do some serious healing before this spindly soul of mine is ready to stand on its own.

Or I dunno. Maybe that’s just a bullshit excuse and all I really need to do is get the fuck over myself, grow a pair, and get on with it.

Guess we’ll never know.

More after the break.

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Gnawing on that limb

The fact that the best metaphor I can think of for what it feels like to go against the groove I am stuck in is a trapped animal having to gnaw off a limb to escape a trap is fucked up beyond belief even by my standards.

And I know that it’s the latest – and possibly the last – manifestation of the power of my mental illness to keep me in my place. It provides a deep primal form of resistance to action because now my insanity has highjacked the instincts that keep us from hurting our own bodies by telling us not to do things like bend our wrist too far or over-extend our elbow or the like.

They say that in order to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself, and I feel like that’s the crossroads I am at right now.

I have successfully penetrated to the very heart of my madness and now I have to work up the nerve to kill it even though I know it’s going to make it feel like that would be like killing myself, or worse, mutilating myself horribly and permanently.

I know that it’s an illusion of sorts. I say “of sorts” because sometimes what seems like an illusion is a representation in symbolic form of a true force or idea in the mind and in that sense it is “real”.

I think what is really going on may be that I am close to breaching the outer wall of my enclosure and hence the struggle between my desire to be free and my desire to be “safe” within these walls is reaching a fever pitch and the question of, “Do I really want to go out there?” will have to be answered in the firm affirmative some time soon.

After that, whatever happens, happens.

It’s not like I’m in control anyhow.

Don’t ask me, I just work here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I discussed my relationship with the waters of the world.

In other words, I talked about how I pee a lot.

Look, they can’t all be brilliant political analysis or mediocre original songs, okay?

Here it is :

I talk about whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write or record. That’s how I make sure I am never at a loss for what to write or talk about.

There’s always something there for me to capture and record. Sometimes it takes a non-trivial amount of pre-recording skullduggery to find it, but there’s always something floating around in the primodial soup of my fertile mind waiting to be born.

I truly have had those thoughts about the water cycle while peeing before. It annoys me how many people don’t know about the water cycle and therefore think stupid hippie thoughts about limited amount of fresh water, oh no.

IT FALLS FROM THE FUCKING SKY. It literally rains it. And the world is covered in oceans. Water is the second least limited resource on Earth, just behind silicon.

Which, for those who dunno, what most of the Earth’s crust is made of.

To me, science has always been kind of spiritual, or at least, it occupies some (but not all) of the space a religious or mystical spirituality would take in my mind.

Science can never fully replace religion because it can’t perform religion’s emotional tasks. It can totally provide you with a cosmology and understanding of the literal, non-personal ways the world works and it can even give you a sense of awe and wonder and being part of something much bigger than yourself.

I mean, you are life. You are that which reverses entropy. As far as we know, that makes you unique in the entire universe.

Though I hope we find out we’re wrong about that.

But science can’t comfort you when you lose a loved one. It can’t shore you up when you feel like you’re falling apart. It can’t give you someone to blame for your troubles and thank for your boons.

The fact that these emotional needs are neither rational or logical in no way obviates them or makes them disappear. They are a crucial part of what it means to be human, and all the evolutionary psychology in the world can’t change that.

And yet, there are millions of us hapless humans trying to pretend like those things don’t exist or don’t matter as we struggle through life and wonder why life seems so damned hard and the world seems so hostile and cold.

Because you’re not drawing on all the resources you need because those resources, as literal explanations of the world, are irrational and not “real”.

Well here are the opening words of my Gospel : God is as real as love is. Both exist only in the hearts, minds, and souls of human beings and are therefore not “real” in the way a chair or the planet Venus are real.

But we share that world where love exists. It might not be something you can point to in the world and say, “Look, there it is!”, but nobody would deny its reality.

God, as an idea, as a force, and as a mythological figure, can be the same. You can believe in an imaginary God, knowing you made Him up, and He can, at all times, be exactly what you need Him to be, and nobody can tell you different.

After all, He is your imaginary friend, and He works however you need Him to.

I am not sure if I can ever make that journey myself. I am too “practical”, too “pragmatic”, too “logical” to invest my emotions in something like that.

Maybe I will get there someday. I sure hope I do. I have been a wounded idealist suffering on the altar of “truth” and “logic” for far too long.

Maybe in order to heal, I need to stop being so god damned literal about everything.

Maybe I need to stop fighting it and finally admit that all that post hippie crap about the power of imagination might have actually had a point.

Maybe I have been starving at the feast this whole time.

Or maybe not.

More after the break.

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Still broken after all these years

Remember this song?

It’s become quite de rigeur in mental health circles then days in mental health circles to tell people like me that we are not broken, and I totally get why and I am sure being told that helps a lot of people, but for me that just ain’t gonna cut it.

Because if how I feel doesn’t qualify as broken, shoot me in the fucking head, because that means I can’t ever get better.

So this can’t be what normal feels like. It just can’t.

And I can feel how broken I am. I am intimately familiar with the ragged edges of my massive mental wounds. I can tell that parts of my mind just plain don’t work. I can feel them hanging there like paralyzed limbs in my mind.

And I can barely even conceive of what it would be like to be otherwise. I can only imagine it as a purely theoretical state, like imagining being able to fly, but
my brain breaks when I try to imagine it as as a day to day, moment to moment reality,

Still, I am doing what I can to get better. It’s difficult because of just how ingrained this rotten little rut of mine has become and how emotionally dependent I am on it and how impossible it feels to escape it.

But I will do it one day. One day I will finally be so sick of this bullshit that I am ready to gnaw my goddamned arm off to get out of this trap.

Until then, I will muddle through like always, all my phantom limbs intact.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We have never had much of a relationship because I have never had much.

Including way too many years in which I had absolutely none. Nothing. Zero, zip, zilch, nothing. I had room and board thanks to very kind and understanding friends, or my parents just kind of being stuck with me, but I had absolutely no money of my own.

This was supposed to give me plenty of incentive to go out and get a job.

Instead, of course, I just adapted. It’s what I do.

What was missing from that equation is that I had never had very much money so I did not miss it when it wasn’t there.

For me, that was business as usual.

And it’s the same now. I have adapted to my current income level and can get by pretty well, so I am not filled with a yearning need for employment.

But still, sometimes, I try.

Like I keep saying with monotonous regularity, I’ve never had a real job or supported myself, so that entire world of employment is a misty neverland to me. It might as well be Avalon, or Cair Paravel, or Mars.

I might admire it from afar and think that it looks like a positively heavenly place, but I obviously never expect to find myself there.

Instead, I am slowly burrowing around in search of alternate ways to make a living, like being a YouTuber.

This is not, I assume, a likely or sensible way to try to make a living. But I am not a likely or probable guy. Nothing I do really makes sense or is a wise choice or would strike a dispassionate onlooker as particularly “smart”.

And for me, trying to make it as a YouTuber just kind of makes sense. It suits me. It’s something that I can do by myself from this very computer and it uses my skills as a communicator and personality and it lets me express more of the creative energies that my spirit teems with than blogging every did and I am not exactly better the farm on my ability to make YouTube pay me a living.

And maybe that’s my problem. I don’t have a burning passion driving me to just keep on trying to achieve those big old dreams of mine.

What dreams? I don’t have those kind of dreams. I am way too chilly inside for burning passions, at least so far, and everything in my head is geared towards maintaining the status quo of my stupid fucking life and so something as disruptive and disquieting as a big beautiful dream does not stand the slightly fucking chance in me.

I stay comfortable. To my excessively lackadaisical spirit, being driven by fear of failure or a need to prove myself or even just wanting to “be somebody” seems like a total drag, man, and way too much work, not to mention stress and strain and pressure.

If I am to find my way out of this pathetic little pit of mine, I will have to go in the opposite direction and learn to live for fun and relaxation and pleasure and joy and all the other good things.

And if that happens to include something “productive”, great. I honestly would be a lot happier if I had productive things to do, but I am not (yet) capable of generating those things for myself.

By default, all I do is entertain myself to make it through the day.

And that just isn’t enough any more. I need more substance in my life.

And that will NOT be comfortable.

More after the break.

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Life with stuff in it

The brutal truth is that my life has nothing in it.

Nothing that means that much to me, anyway. Obviously I don’t just stare at the wall all day. I’m not catatonic. I do things. I make videos. I write for this blog o’ mine.

And that’s actually a lot more productive than a lot of disabled folk. All my ex-roomie Angela did was watch TV and hoard things.

So clearly some part of me is driven to make something beyond myself. I need to output to the world somehow. I need to make things and put them out into the world. I need to create and display like an old time artisan.

But what I am doing just isn’t enough any more. Adding the videos to the mix was a fantastic start to making something that’s a tad more visible than this obscure little blog of mine that I don’t even promote anywhere or show anyone.

So there’s that. But I crave more and I think what I really crave is connection with the real world, however mitigated by screens it perforce has to be.

My life is far too ephemeral and insubstantial. Video games are such bullshit because they make you feel like you’re doing things and getting somewhere, but it’s all a lie.

It’s all just hamster wheel BS to fool me into inaction and wasting away. There has to be a way or two for me to connect with someone of greater substance and meaning where I can use my fabulous skills to do something with a little fucking weight to it.

I know that I am capable of truly amazing things but first I have to be able to calm down and focus just enough to harness my abilities to my ambitions and desires so that they can pull me out of this rut and maybe even bring me things I can be proud of.

Actual achievements, not just imaginary rewards for running in place the longest.

Maybe if I can get something like that going, I will feel more like a real person and not just some broken cipher without merit or meaning or even reality.

Maybe that’s what happens when so much of your life is unreal. It’s all just pixels on a screen and has no other sensory reality to it and so the line between what’s in my head and what’s on my screen gets very blurry and it all starts to seem imaginary and unreal.

Just like me.

So for the n-teenth time, I tell myself that I have to get out of this box I am in and out into the real world so I can breathe the fresh air and feel the sun on my face and maybe even feel like I am really here for once.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, of course, is today’s vid :

I mean, it’s an amusing enough observation, I guess. But I was stuck for a topic because I lost a lot of time deciding, in the end, not to do an acapella today (I Was feeling too damned fussy, apparently) and so this moisture idea was somewhat of a last minute idea for a video.

Was I too circumspect? I am not good at euphemism. If I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble with the almighty masters of YouTube, I would be graphic as hell.

“Ladies, all these products to keep your moist are really about GETTING and KEEPING your PUSSY WET. It’s about VAGINAL LUBRICATION. In both genders, it’s about making sure you are READY TO FUCK. Get it?”

But I guess I’d have to put that talk on some feminist porn site or something.

Anyhow, let’s leave the vaginas behind for now and talk about intention.

There is a persistent delusion lurking in the human mind that everything we see is in some way the product of somebody’s master plan.

It’s the anthropic principle written in the language of sociology. Our social instincts insist that there always is someone behind the scenes controlling everything who has a plan and knows what they are doing and can control future outcomes and so on, and this goes all the way from thinking someone must be stealing your newspaper in the morning to thinking God must exist.

I’ve been seeing this a lot on BlueSky lately. People thinking Trump has some kind of evil master plan for America or talking about how “they” attack education because “they” want people docile and stupid or how RFK Junior is trying to “cull the population” with his terrible policies.

But these are all comforting lies hiding the ugly truth that these people have no plan. They are toddlers with handguns and are ruling entirely based on their own outdated and irrational beliefs with no more plan than to keep attacking the things that make them angry by telling them they are wrong about things.

Such things could only be evil, of course. No matter what they are. Even if they are objectively verifiable truths, they are evil and must be punished and destroyed for saying you are wrong when you “know” you are right.

I mean, what else are you gonna do? Think?

Obviously, all conspiracy theories are products of this anthropic attitude. No matter how intricate their theories or how evil “they” supposedly are, it’s all just a soothing lie we tell ourselves to make the world seem like a more rational and orderly place.

Indeed, the whole reason this illusion always stars powerful people of malign intent is that this is what qualifies them to rule according to our lizard brains. It makes them “strong” and ruthless and dominant and to the primitive parts of our brains, that means they are fit to rule and can keep you safe even if they only see you as a pawn.

I mean, can you imagine a conspiracy where all the shadowy figures are super nice and just want what’s best for everyone?

They would have a lot of explaining to do regarding the state of the world, right?

But wimps like that wouldn’t make us feel safe at all. That’s why even the most benevolent of leaders, like Optimus Prime or Jean Luc Picard, has to also be the strongest in some way.

Anyhow, to get back to the same area code as the topic, we will continue to act as though everything is planned because we have no choice. The true chaos of world full of individuals, all different from you and just as valid as you, is not something the human mind can process. We have to make up simplifications just to be able to cope with day to day life, let alone politics.

So we pretend like Donald Trump or space aliens or “the Jews” are behind everything, when in reality, civilization is just an emergent phenomenon of the human race.

Like I said here.

More after the break.

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Am I threatening?

Yes, to some. I don’t want to be, most of the time, but I am.

To be honest, it’s kind of amazing how nonthreatening I am most of the time. After all, I am this ginormous dude with a big personality and a sky high IQ and loads of presence.

I could be downright terrifying if I wasn’t so mild and harmless.

Instead, I’m a teddy bear. A gentle giant. When you’re big and potentially scary, you subconsciously learn to compensate by being as non-threatening and genial as you can be and that’s how the gentle giant comes about.

I genuinely don’t want to scare or threaten people. I want peace, harmony, and happy vibes at all time. Yet I know that, just by being my big shiny brilliant self, I have made some people feel intimidated and inadequate.

And there is only so much of that I am willing to own. As long as I am not doing anything to actively frighten, oppress, or denigrate other people, I feel free and empowered to blast that big personality out there at max volume and people can just deal with it.

I do my best to be friendly and funny and fun to be around, so it’s not like it’s some kind of torture to be around me. I hope. People seem to like me, especially when I can get out of my own way and just be my true jumbo bag o’ fun self. People seem to really like me when I am that way.

Thank you, Lord Xanax, for showing this to me. Before Xanax and Kinsmen, I only ever saw that side of me at conventions, either sci fi or furry.

Nerds. They’re my people. They’re my tribe.

But it turns out I can be like that around ordinary people too. Old ones, at that. All I need is a little chemical help in shutting down a certain oversensitive alarm system called anxiety so that I don’t have it screaming in my ear all the fucking time.

God, I wish I’d had Xanax at VFS.

I would have been so much cooler!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When I warn that this might mess with your head, I mean it.

In this talk, I challenge things that are normally so unquestioned as to be part of the cultural background, the water in which we swim.

But fish don’t know they’re wet.

Anyhow, here it is :

More on point, they’re the thoughts that make other people go, “Huh….” as they rub their foreheads because I am making their brains hurt.

At least I know when I am doing it. That’s an improvement over a younger me, who would just trot these things out then wonder why the conversation died.

You killed it, younger Mike. You didn’t mean to do it, but you did it all the same.

It’s things like that which assure me that I have that whole “have your own unique personality and point of view” thing they tell young YouTubers to have and I have it in very large amounts.

I have an incredibly unique point of view and personality. I am confident that some of the thoughts I think and have thought (and will think) have never been thought by another human being in the history of humanity.

And may never be thought again, come to think of it.

Must keep putting them out on the internet so they are available for future generations!

Unfortunately, being a magical visionary thought leader type does not, in and of itself, get one noticed on YouTube.

I am still pondering ways to make my vids more appealing. I keep telling myself that I need to start making my points in a more compact and pithy way so that they can fit within a one minute YouTube short.

And I am pretty sure I can do it if I stop being so lazy.

I could easily take some of my more provocative and stimulating positions and get the essence of them across pretty quickly.

Especially after I have made a longer video about them. My vids where I present my case for something, like today’s vid, would make excellent rough drafts where I figure out what, exactly, I am trying to say and how to say it before I then can condense my verbiage down to a minute.

Who knows, maybe I will use my video making time to make a bunch of those one of these days. I can see it being kinda fun.

I might even take notes. Fancy that.

And it would certainly be something different to do. Something that might even lead to my attracting more viewers.

Which reminds me. It has occurred to me that I have to up my promotional game by including (sigh) links to my Patreon in my descriptions and outros.

That is going to be so hard for me. Every Gen X fibre of my being (and that’s most of them) rails against doing something so obvious and commercial.

So I will have to figure out a sufficiently sarcastic and self-aware way to do it like I did with my little Like and Subscribe outro.

Would you believe that I recorded that thing with zero pre-planning or forethought and I got it in the very first take?

I am just that amazing. Comedy just radiates from me like body heat.

So yeah, I will herd people towards my Patreon and I suppose I should get a Kofi too as those seem popular for, I assume, people who are too cool for Patreon.

Next thing you know, I will have my own Discord server that is only available to members of my channel and things will get all elite n’ shit.

Honestly, like I said once before a long ol’ time ago, I would be happy just to have a small community of interesting people with lively and curious minds that I could draw upon for the thing I love the most in the world, intellectual conversation.

If I had that, I wouldn’t need anything else. And I wouldn’t care if it made me money either, although that would, of course, be nice.

But today I realized that once my new power supply is installed in my computer, the question of “what would you do with the money?” is kinda solved for now.

That was the last thing. Once my computer is fully future proof for a while, I am all out of grand financial ambitions.

My next tier is things like a new (smaller!) bed, and those don’t come cheap.

And there’s always sex workers…. mmmm…

More after the break.

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24 Karrot Gold?

Downloaded a little app called Karrot, and it really says something about how terrible and stupid app names have gotten that a name like Karrot seems normal to me now.

Downright respectable, even.

Anyhow, Karrot is your typical buy/sell/trade marketplace. I checked it out on a whim because I saw an ad for it that claimed people used it to give away stuff for free, so I figured, what the fuck.

So far, I am not seeing any really wild deals. If people are giving away stuff for free, I ain’t seeing it. Maybe they just don’t do that around here.

One tiny bit of amusement – in order to sign up for Karrot, I had to give them my location so it knew what “neighborhood” I am in, and it gave me a choice between two – am I in City Centre, or Brighouse?

And I’m like….”Both!”

I chose City Centre.

So after failing to find free stuff, I browsed for a bit before suddenly realizing that I had no money to spend so what the heck was the point?

All my spare cash is in this new power supply. And I am quite proud of myself for finally biting the bullet and buying the damn thing.

And this week’s groceries came in below budget, so who knows? Maybe I can even afford to order in tomorrow night.

As long as it’s something cheap, like Subway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Boy, this song really takes me back.

More seriously, here’s my own video for today :

No heavy handed political message today. I’m done with that for now. Now I am back to being easy breezy Fru wondering about the weird shit his health does.

I mean it about the people who leave comments, by the way. Nothing encourages me like engagement. I even appreciate the sad right wingers who tried to refute my analysis of people like them.

Or rather, failed to do so, attacking my implied worldview instead.

I guess they must have thought my analysis of folks like them was correct. I totally nailed their flaws, defects, and general patheticness.

Nice to know I got it right.

Moving on, after I made today’s video, I decided it was, indeed, time to give UpWork another try. But it was the same as before. No matter what I did, it didn’t recognize my ID, leading me to wonder if it just doesn’t recognize IDs from BC at all.

IT’s not like our IDs are weird or anything. They’re perfectly boring standard photo ID type documents. They don’t have holograms on them or anything.

Anyhow, after the damned thing failed to recognize my ID no matter what I did, I gave up and decided to sign up for one of UpWork’s competitors, a site/app with the depressingly low effort name “GoLance”.

Make UpWork seem dignified and respectable by comparison, dunnit?

Oh well, as long as I get work and get paid through them, they could be called DoctorFart.com for all I care.

Superhero or villain? Tune in and find out!

Come to think of it, I think Doctor Strange is the only major superhero with Doctor in his name. All the other Doctors, like Doctor Octopus and Doctor Doom, are villains.

Even superheroes who genuinely have doctorates like Reed Richards and Bruce Banner don’t make it part of their hero identity.

We really don’t trust smart people, do we?

Anyhow, where was I? Freelance job hunting, right.

So far, GoLance hasn’t asked me to scan my ID or anything stupid like that, and the site seems reasonably solid and well organized.

Apparently there’s no bidding on contracts like there is on UpWork. To be honest, I am not sure what people mean when they are talking about bidding. When I was active on UpWork, everything was done via proposal. If I wanted to apply for a contract, I would fill out a form for my proposal for that job, and the body of that proposal would be my pitch for the job.

Yeah, there was a proposed payment involved but I never thought of myself as bidding on anything. It’s not like some sort of horrible reverse auction where the lowest price wins every time. That would be terrible for the freelancers as it would drive the rates down into the gutter.

Anyhow, I am done with those assholes. On to GoLance.

So far, they don’t seem to have much creative work. Which sucks. But I did a lot of other stuff for UpWork clients. Scut work, really, but what the hell, work is work. If I can do it and they’ll pay me for it, bring it on.

Like I said, it would feel good just to have something to do. I am sick and tired of wasting my time playing video games. I want to do something with a purpose.

I’m sick of feeling like a hamster on a wheel.

I want to feel like a real live adult type human being who gets things done instead.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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I pulled the trigger

Oh yeah, I finally ordered that new power supply for this ‘puter of mine.

It’s sitting in its Amazon package on the bed behind me. Joe just brought it in from outside the apartment door for me. Thanks Joe!

I must say, I am somewhat alarmed by how damn heavy the thing is. I hope I ended up with the right thing. I ordered what my friend Windchaser told me to order, so it should be all aces from that angle anyhow.

It’s probably just that this is what power supplies weigh these days. I know that to do their job of converting wall current to something the computer can use, they have to have a fairly large condenser in them in order to store the power while it’s being converted, so it would make sense if that made them heavy.

Same reason the adapters I used to get so I could play my handheld video games without batteries used to weigh so much.

I can still smell that combination of plastic, rubber, and ozone odors they gave off when they heated up.

I spent many a happy hour bathed in that scent.

That probably cost me a minute or two off my life. But it was the 70’s, when people still smoked indoors and nobody gave a shit about seat belts or children and lawn darts were considered totally normal toys.

We clearly had no idea what the fuck we were doing.

Anyhow, power supply. I will check to make sure I got what I ordered but assuming I did, it will have to wait till darling Spuug, my tech support cat, can come over next Wednesday to install it for me.

I don’t do hardware. Hardware scares me. If it involves the inside of the computer I leave it to someone more technical than I.

I know that’s silly. The inside isn’t that much more complicated than the outside. It’s still mostly a matter of plugging things into things, like putting together a component stereo.

Still, I would rather not go there. Plus it gives me an excuse to see Spuug and give him a hug and talk with him about science and other nerdy topics.

He’s going to be in Richmond that day for a Linux User Group (LUG) meeting, and it’s at the Richmond Public Library which is like three blocks from here, so it’s the perfect time for him to drop on by.

And I am not in that much of a hurry to get my computer completed correctly.

I’ve waited this long, after all!

Of course, this means I don’t have any spare cash left this month, but whatever. I knew that if I was to do it, I would just have to grit my teeth, spend the money, and deal with the fallout afterwards.

It cost me $85. It would have cost $115 but I got a “like new” used one.

Amazon themselves guarantees it, so I figure I can trust the self-interest of vast faceless corporate monoliths who don’t want to have to pay to replace it.

That’s how the system is supposed to work!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, my vid of the day.

I’m not that happy with it.

Here it is :

I didn’t totally feel like doing another video in the “Why you…. ” series and it shows. I had some ideas of where I wanted to take it and I thought they were enough, but the previous two vids were way tighter and more focused and I think it’s because I gave myself more time to think over what I wanted to say.

A lot of stuff from the first two vids was stuff I have had lying around in my brain for a long long time, so it comes across better.

Oh well, iterative learning isn’t always pretty. The next one will be better.

Anyhow, I thought I’d talk about my relationship with my brother Dave and how the fact that at points he was scaldingly jealous of me and my genius and how that affected me.

Had I been a different kind of kid, I guess we would have fought a lot. At least, that seems like a more normal reaction to a jealous older brother. And we did argue from time to time, especially when I was in elementary school, but for the most part his jealousy just was not part of my universe on a conscious level.

I was such a sensitive and empathic child that I learned to hide my light under a bushel in order to not upset him. It’s not like I couldn’t tell he was jealous of me, he was not exactly subtle about it, but I didn’t fight him on it, I just… adapted to it.

I don’t like interpersonal conflict. I will always, all things being equal, choose the peaceful option. Me shining bright upset him so I didn’t do it around him.

It really was that simple.

And for the most part it was subconscious. It happened on that deep and mysterious level where we negotiate with one another without even realizing it as our souls act like people sharing a row in coach on an airplane, moving around looking for a way we can occupy the same space comfortably.

I am guessing other people do not perceive said space consciously like I do. But I am a strange and mysterious critter and see much that is unseen.

And fail to see things that are seen, and trip over them, and fall, and say ouch.

Such is life in this material existence.

Anyhow, it’s hard to track how much this not wanting to outshine my brother has affected me. I did it because I didn’t want to upset him, not because I was afraid of hi or anything like that, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get my shyness reinforced that way.

I am only now getting to the point where I am willing to truly let myself shine. And I am really only getting started with that. I can go way, way brighter than I ever have before, what with my megawatt brain and jumbo personality.

In fact, sometimes I think I belong on a stage, where I can shine all I want and people kind of expect it. Maybe as a performer, I could finally truly express myself.

Too bad I’m a gimp. Le sigh.

For the most part, I am just not equipped to handle other people’s jealousy. I had fellow students in my various schools who in retrospect were clearly jealous of me, but at the time it didn’t even really register.

Which must have been infuriating, I suppose. Oh well. I was just being me.

I guess a big part of it was that I was so naturally gifted that I excelled others without even trying and thus I never saw others as rivals myself.

When I told Michael McNally I was happy he had won some dancing competition, I was being absolutely sincere, and in my own clumsy way I was trying to compensate for his jealousy of me by showing him he was good at things I couldn’t do.

That’s not how he took it, though. He gave me such a look of burning hatred that I am surprised he didn’t hiss.

To this day, I dunno what I’d do if I found out someone was seething with jealousy for me. Try not to shine too much when they are around, maybe.

I am just not built for that shit.

More after the break.

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Now roll 1dbrains

I am feeling rather mind scrambled at the moment, like someone shook my brains in a Yahtzee cup and pitched them against the wall like dice in a back-alley craps game.

I’m sure I had a bunch of ideas as to what to write here earlier today, but of course, I never write that kind of thing down, so they’ll all in the random file now.

Most things end up in the random file, at least for a while.

Tonight’s dinner is another of those President’s Choice dinner. They are, so far, a lot nicer and somewhat larger than the Michelina’s I am used to eating, but they are also over twice the price, so it’s a tradeoff.

I can probably buy one a week without breaking the bank.

This one is General Tao’s Chicken, so I hope he doesn’t know I have it. Ha hah.

I first had this dish as General Tso’s chicken at a Thai place in Portland, Oregon. It was my first time ever eating Thai so big Brian got a big order of this because it was the thing on the menu that would look the most familiar to a rube like me who had only ever had “Chinese” food before then.

He’s a sharp dude. When I knew him he’d survived as a social worker for six years way back in the 90’s. So his people managing skills were on point.

It said it was medium spicy on the package, and I agree. That was like, normal spicy. I probably should not have ordered it, given the occasionally explosive results of my eating spicy food at my age, but so far so good.

And it was quite tasty, too. I won’t get it again, but it was nice.

Now to lay down so I can suddenly remember what I meant to write about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.