God damn it.

My fucking internet died for the second time today. I don’t know WTF is happening but it need to stop. It happened just as I was sitting down to blog, you know, for extra pain and suffering, and so now I am stuck typing into an Office Libra (or whatever) file and cursing fate.

Now I am too angry to post a link to my video about irritability!

Seriously, that’s what today’s vid is about. Done on the webcam attached to my PC this time, as I intimated yesterday, and this very slightly edited.

Hmmm. Forgot to put the “like and subscribe” bit on the end. Oh well, whatever.

What really sucks is that normally I am hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries when I do my blogging and with no internet I can’t do that and I miss them.

It’s not an accident that I ended up talking about irritability today. Not only is it a subject close to my personal history but I have been feeling aglow with sheer crankiness today, largely because my right foot has gone from hurting on the sole from the damage I did with my zeal to peel the un-shed skin off to now hurting in the bones and muscles of the foot as there seems to be something very “off” about the way the pain of the injuries to the sole has been making me walk and now I am walking around feeling like my ankle is half sprained already and feeling the muscles and bones shift around in gruesome and unnatural ways as I walk.

I need one of those floating wheelchairs Baron Harkonnen has in Dune.

Or a splint or the like. Something to hold the ankle in place while the foot heals so that my foot doesn’t twist out from under me when I walk, so that I end up walking on the side of the foot.

That’s not right.

So that pain had me feeling snappish and irritable before the internet died and so that is how I ended up delving into that subject in the vid.

Because as us chronic illness sufferers know, there’s the physical pain, which is bad, but then there’s the effect it has on your mood and your outlook, which is worse.

Not only can I clearly feel the walk-sprained condition of my ankle even when I am not putting any weight on the foot in question, but the prospect of being even more crippled than usual as well as the certainty of more pain in my near future as I navigate my day (meals, bathroom breaks, water refills, bookcase trips, and so on) does not exactly put me in a bright, sunshiny mood.

I have Tylenol now. Ordered it off of Amazon. Yes, I know I am a bad boy for putting more moneyin Jeff Bezos’ pocket and I don’t care.

Point is, I can treat the pain somewhat. Well, I can turn down the volume on it anyhow. Yay analgesics.

But I am really, really worried about what is happening with my right foot. I can’t quite put into words how “wrong” it feels when I walk on it. And the way my ankle is just not doing its job and that leaves the whole foot to twist in a very bad way.

I am worried that I will end up seriously hurting that foot or even that leg.

Well, I have Wound Care tomorrow so I will see if the nurse can rig me up something to make walking less of a body trauma.

I don’t even care about the cuts on the sole any more. They’ll be fine.

More after the break.

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The return of the King

Got my internet back, so hooray for that.

In desperation I was futzing with my wifi antennae, just kinda wiggling it in its weird socket ^[1], when Windows made its “a device has connected” sound and I said, “That sounds good!” and rebooted, and here we are.

I will try to make sure nothing so much as breathes in that thing’s direction again.

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Always wandering lost

But I no longer thing I am looking for a way out. A way out of what? There’s nothing really here in my mindscape except for the kind of fog that you can’t see when it’s right in front of you but can see when you look further away.

Not that I know what THAT means.

But I am not looking for a door out of this “maze” any more. I know that all this hazy bullshit will burn away like a morning fog when I am finally truly ready to go out there and face that big old world.

I know this because I know that the fog’s real purpose has always been to hide reality from me so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I have been fighting reality since I was raped when I was four, and this fog – or maze, or castle, or infinite corridor, or whatever – is my way to shrink the aperture through which reality enters my mind to a manageable size.

And by “manageable” I mean “really very small and narrow and mostly virtual”.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing how much I perceive through that little hole. Thanks to the internet and mass media in general, I can not only learn about the world, I can deduce its deeper patterns and meanings with my supercomputer brain.

But who cares? I’m still locked away in here, scared of the world and convinced, despite all evidence, that the “real world” will eat me alive because it’s out to GET me.

That’s all bullshit and lies, of course, but that’s what makes this mental illness – knowing something is not true and being unable to stop believing it anyway.

The belief expresses something in me that desperately needs it and until I find that something and give it a better way out, the belief will return like plants coming back after a forest fire.

And I am still figuring out how to deal with shit like that.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did something wacky and fun for today’s video.

I added a TikTok filter. One of those intelligent ones that adds something to the video dynamically and I must say I like the result.

Which are this :

I quite liked having that filter on. It made me feel pretty in an admittedly cartoonish way. The urge to bat those long eyelashes like I’m a feminine and coquettish Minnie Mouse or Betty Boop was strong.

Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine.

But I liked the glammed up me. Not to the point I feel like I found the “real me” or anything like that – it very much felt like a costume – but it was nice to have a chance for my more feminine side to show.

I’m the bearded lady!

Protip : The actual number of bearded ladies was quite low. Most of the ones working in sideshows et al were just fat dudes in dresses.

I mean, it’s not like anyone’s gonna inspect her panties during the show.

Well, not here in Canada, anyway.

And I suppose there’s worse ways to make a living. For one thing, when you’re not working, you can just leave the dress behind and be a regular burly bear dude if that is what you’re into.

Or who knows, if you’re actually trans, maybe it’s the beard that comes off and you can go get yourself a ladies’ night out.

Just don’t mess with the straight boy’s heads, dear. And don’t think they will be fine with your misassigned external gender if you seduce them with your feminine wiles first.

To them it won’t be just that “one little thing” that makes you different from the rest of the gals, you know what I’m saying?

Anyhow, back to me. I liked making that video, even though I feel like there wasn’t enough content in the final product.

Yes, dear fans, I feel like today’s video is underweight. I launched into that topic confident that I had enough to say about it, but I did not.

You’d think I would have learned by now not to try to do a video about a topic that just popped into my head. They need to be based on thoughts that have been marinating in my head long enough to soaked up a lot of words.

Oh well, all I can do is move on.

It makes me want to go back to doing them on the computer and not my phone, though. Not being able to edit the video has become increasingly frustrating and I feel like it’s limiting me in ways I find unacceptable.

So back to the computer tomorrow unless I am feeling too damned lazy.

Doing it on TikTok might not be better but it’s so much easier.

As patient readers know, I have been thinking about things like courage and self-discipline and “grit” lately.

I feel like, if my health allowed it, doing something rugged and manly that involves a lot of sweating, struggling, and suffering would probably do me some good.

Yes, this means your gruff and inarticulate father might have been right about that.

I have remained so unchallenged in life. Partly due to extraordinary abilities and partly do to not being the sort of person who seeks out challenges in order to better himself.

I mean, I grasp it and agree with it in theory. I am sure that being truly tested would clean a lot of the gunk out of my soul.

But ironically I lack the character to force myself to do it.

I mean, that sounds like it’d hurt, and be difficult and scary and stuff.

So I could stop being such a FUCKING PUSSY, that’s why.

My lack of courage and self-discipline is making me miserable. I have no backbone, no intestinal fortitude, no courage, no character.

I’m just an amorphous jelly barely held together by my own gravity.

So fuck ME.

More after the break.

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The paternal influence

A quick refresher on where this discussion had gone so far :

Maternal figures nurture and protect children, They offer kisses for owies, hugs for sads, and understanding for the day’s upsets.

Paternal figures do some of that too, of course, but their job is to encourage the child to take (smart) risks, expand their boundaries, fight their way through things, and in general learn that there’s much worse things than getting hurt.

Thus, we have the mama’s boy. Without a competent father figure, you get a child dominated by weakness and fear.

This is especially true in highly polarized households where the paternal figure is angry, punitive, and unstable and the maternal figure tries to compensate (afterwards) by being supportive and forgiving and understanding.

Such a paternal figure is wildly inadequate because their angry and instability make it impossible for the necessary bond of trust to form with the child and without trust in the paternal figure absolutely no developmental help can be forthcoming.

You can’t learn much from a father you’re scared of.

I learned extremely little from my late father except how to avoid him. I certainly took no lessons about how to regulate my emotions and/or behave from him. If anything, what he “taught” me was by counterexample.

I didn’t want to be like him. Perhaps I took that too far. But I digress.

So when I bemoan my lack of character and so forth, it’s not hard to see where it comes from because with how my life turned out, I am not sure where it could have come from.

My father was incompetent. My mother was emotionally absent. School was insultingly easy. I had no friends to learn from for the majority of my childhood. In many ways I grew up in a vacuum.

Like I have said many times before, it’s a wonder I am sane at all. Kids are absolutely not supposed to grow up that way.

But whose job is it to make sure that they don’t?

Nobody ever saw me as their problem, let alone their responsibility.

For most of my life I have been very, very alone.

Even when I wasn’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I made good on my threat to do more sci fi bitching, although I quickly wandered into a more philosophical and/or psychological territory.

Call it “theory of human behaviour”, I guess. For me, it’s all one fascinating subject.

That’s why, had my college education gone as intended, I would have graduated with a double major, psychology and philosophy, unless that goddamned registrar got pissy with me again and decided double majors weren’t allowed even though I would have finished with all the necessary course credits for both.

God, did I hate that prick.

Anyhow, in that case I would have finished with a major in psych and a minor in philosophy, because while I love philosophy, there’s not a lot of jobs in it.

Never major in something where the only job that major qualifies you is teaching the subject as a professor, kids, unless you think you’re insanely driven and competitive enough to beat all the other people with dumb degrees for those prized associate professor/glorified flunkie positions.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I am quite serious about the ultimate supremacy of emotion, of course. Despite being a highly intellectual individual who loves science and heavily favours things like logical analysis, advanced deduction, and reductive insight, I am not some silly German logic fetishist who not only think it’s possible to remove emotion from our reasoning entirely but for some bizarre reason thinks that would be a good thing.

Like I said in the vid, all motives are emotional, and no human action is without motive, whether your motive is to advance peace and justice for all humanity or to finally dislodge that stubborn burp, and so all human action is emotional. QED.

Indeed, take it from someone who has “been there”, worshipping some form of logic is actually a purely emotional attempt to retreat from reality into a world of nice clean comfortable abstractions where the excessively intellectual feel more safe.

What’s worse is that it’s also an attempt to dodge accountability for one’s actions. Oh, I didn’t decide to do this thing, it was the only logical course of action. And you can’t argue against that unless you can argue against their logic, and they have usually made that difficult by hiding their true motives in things like grey areas and verbal ambiguities and are generally better at that sort of arguing that the average non-intellectual.

It’s what makes certain kinds of people really fucking irritating.

But clearly that’s all bullshit. You did that thing because you felt like it. Ultimately. Your attempt at intellectual camouflage is understandable but it is truly dangerous to lie to yourself like that and tell yourself you are logical when you’re just as emotional as the rest of it, you’re just in much, much deeper denial and even further alienated from yourself and who you really are.

And that’s bad.

I am only just now learning to untangle all this complicated emotional spaghetti code myself. I feel like I am lost in a virtual realm of my own design and part of me suspects that deep down, I know what’s real and what’s mere illusion, but I am too emotionally dependent on the illusions to cast the spell that will make it all go away.

Because then where would I be? Stuck in the real world, without my primary defense of retreating into my mind? How can that be a good thing?

For me, that would mean casting myself into the yawning maw of the unknown, and I am neurotic enough to feel like unknown automatically means bad,

And I know that is cowardly of me. I have no apparent spirit of adventure and exploration. My default is to assume that only the known can be safe and the darkness outside the bright cold light of my intellect is filled with ghosts and ghouls and goblins hell bent on destroying me utterly.

When in truth, they probably don’t even know who I am.

More after the break.

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The fear in your soul

Fear doesn’t have to control a person, though. History is full of brave people who did very scary things. Ordinary, mentally well people overcome themselves every day to go out there and take on that world.

They don’t live like they are strapped in place in front of a computer and forbidden to do anything but play video games and make videos and write on their blog under penalty of being buried alive, for fuck’s sake.

So why does my fear control me? Why can’t I just push back and do whatever the hell I want to do regardless of my fears?

Where did my courage go?

I’ve got to fall back on my way too easy (in some ways) childhood.

School was nothing to me. I never even learned to study. And I think this means I never learned to overcome my own limitations and I never learned to subdue my fears.

And life didn’t force me to learn any of that either. I have always had people to hide behind. People who take care of me and handle reality for me. I lived on my own when I first moved to the GVRD and got on welfare, so it’s not like I have never ever lived on my own, and I of course managed it just fine because it’s not that hard.

Pay the rent. Shop for groceries. Pay the bills. Simple.

But since then, I’ve had roommates to take care of things for me. There was Steve, and Eamon, and Angela, and of course now Joe and Julian.

And I suppose they didn’t necessarily do all that much for me. I still did my own laundry and cleaning and cooking and shopping.

So I get the feeling that perhaps the idea of my being pathetically dependent on others is another plank of my negative internal narrative that has to go.

Piece by piece, I’mma take that god damned thing apart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Proud of myself for actually tackling a problem in an adult way and seeing it through to its resolution today.

The problem is that the password I had for my online banking at VanCity didn’t work. And I need to access my online banking for reasons of things like setting up my “tip jar” on Ko-Fi and such.

But, showing what, for me, is an unusually high level of perspicacity and general awareness, I thought to get this sorted out when I did my monthly banking today.

A quick password reset by my teller and now I am back in control, despite the fact that it was supposed to send an SMS to my cell but called the landline instead.

Whatever my teller did to update my number clearly did not work.

However, I thought to answer the call, and an automated voice gave me the one time code I needed, so it all worked out.

So now I should be able to get things like Ko-Fi and Stripe working and from there, who knows what magical doorways I will unlock.

Maybe I will even be able to get my PayPal working.

I’ve been playing around with this app called JustPlay which supposedly pays you real money to plan their video games.

And maybe it does, but as you can imagine, the cash accumulates quite slowly. So it will be a while before I accumulate enough winnings for it to be worth it for me to bother cashing out, and one of the main ways of doing THAT is via PayPal.

Right now I have a mighty and awe-inspiring $2.67 in my account. And that’s from playing their games for a couple of hours.

A job it ain’t.

At least their selection of games is good. They seem to have a knack for knowing which mobile games deliver the most addictive fun from a very simple setup.

I feel like I’m missing something. Oh right, today’s vid.

I was tempted to just keep going with all of my science fiction beefs around things like the Vulcans and time travel and teleportation and so on, but I decided that I would save those for future videos.

This morning I went to Wound Care, and I showed the nurse my very fucked up (by me) right foot, and she bandaged up all three wounds, and told me that they did not seem to be infected so as long as I keep them covered up and dry, they should heal on their own, and a trip to Urgent Care was not needed.

Phew! That would have been a pain.

I feel great shame about how I fucked up my own damn foot by compulsively peeling off the dead skin off it.

I mean, it’s natural to want to get rid of that shit. Dead skin is supposed to slough off, dammit, and when it doesn’t, we get itchy and we scratch.

Now you know where some of your random little itches come from.

But I took it to a frankly insane extent and all because it felt good to do it and because I have this crazy need to finish what I start.

It reminds me of this time when, as a kid, I was cleaning my glasses in the kitchen when I got some Windex on the wall and noticed that where the Windex landed, the wallpaper was suddenly MUCH brighter.

Intrigued, I sprayed some more on the wall, and wiped it off, and discovered that there was apparently a uniform layer of some kind of soot on everything.

I later figured out it was residue from our propane stove.

Turns out propane doesn’t quite burn cleanly. Sorry, Hank Hill.

Anyhow, intrigued by this magical find, I spray a bunch more at the wall and cleaned a big section and suddenly our “harvest” colored wallpaper (so yellow, orange, and brown) was all vibrating and glowing.

Well once I had started I had to finish. So I cleaned every wall in the kitchen as well as some of the cabinets, which took about an hour and a half.

Imagine my mother’s surprise when she came home to a kitchen that now looked like it was lighted by floodlights!

We’d forgotten that wallpaper was even yellow!

To be honest it was a bit much. Luckily it wasn’t that bright for long.

More after the break.

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Remembering that I do things

Had therapy today. Talked to Doctor Costin. Told him how I seethed and burned with resentment and jealousy that he got to go to my fucking hometown for a nice vacation while I had to stay back here wishing I was there to hug my mom.

He found that amusing. Whatever.

I need a way to get back home so I can hug her while she’s still around.

Anyhow, one of the things that came up in therapy was my fighting of the false inner narrative that I “do nothing but play video games”.

Clearly that’s not true. I do this blog, I make videos. I might not get paid for any of it yet but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

And yet the idea that I do nothing continues to feel true, and it’s from that feeling that the lie refreshes itself after I have suppressed it.

This is why CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is so limited. The bad thoughts are expressions of real emotions and unless the emotions change, identifying the lies of mental illness is less than pointless.

You’re treating the symptoms, not the disease. How fucking futile.

I am a very damaged person. When I was raped as a toddler, it shattered me, and because that terrible injury was never treated in any way because I never told anyone about it, I think I healed the wrong way.

Like a broken limb healing without support or a cast, so it ends up fucked up and fused together and leaving the person crippled.

Well I’m an emotional cripple. And I always have been. I am a fragile, awkward, maladjusted, broken creature and it’s so hard for me to imagine being any different.

It’s like trying to imagine what it’s like to be dead.

All I can do is continue to try to heal and get a little bit stronger and a little bit more alive and awake every day, and do my best to cope with this crazy world and my twisted soul.

It’s a good thing I’m cute.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And why so many of us are neurotic AF.

Here it goes :

I kind of wish I had gone into more detail. But then again, I always do. And if I had gone into more detail, it would have doubled the length of the thing and thus doubled the risk of me making a mistake that would mean I’d have to start over.

Not being able to immediately edit the resulting video is one major downside to doing my stuff on TikTok.

But it has its advantages. I think it makes my style more light and breezy, which I think plays a lot better. More appealing, makes the verbiage go down easier.

And it’s quick and easy. Just record and post. Easy peasy.

Writing the description and the tags takes more work than that.

I recently looked up what the hell TikTok Stories are. I had been wondering ever since I joined TikTok but it took me this long to realize I could just ask an AI.

Turns out they are short video clips meant to be just quick observations or hot takes on something or something along those lines.

Oh, and they are automatically deleted after 24 hours.

Says whaaat? Why, god damn it?

I guess they were looking to compete with other short-term hosting sites but for me, everything I make is sacred and a part of me so um, no thanks.

I’m a Taurus. We don’t do ephemeral.

Maybe I should join a bunch of Taoist monks and make my mandala with black and white sand and work on it till it represents me to the maximum extent, until there is no way to invest more of myself into it, and then….. erase it all.

That’s supposed to teach you about accepting impermanence and learning to let go of the material world and all that ascetic crap.

I mean, I am not disagreeing with the aim of going beyond our sense of self so that we can discover who we really are, and thus face the world with the doors of perception cleansed, like Blake said.

But letting go of the material world is not on my agenda.

I am looking to get more invested in it, not less. Right now I live in screens and ideas and thought, and that’s the opposite of secure. This world of illusion shifts according to the whims of the winds inside me and my entire affect can change in the time it takes to finish a thought.

And that’s no way to live.

I need to be more out of my head and into the world, not less. But it’s so hard to change something as fundamental as that. I have been retreating from reality into the realm of media and my mind ever since I was raped at the age of 4, 48 years ago.

Perhaps this is another case where Prince Xanax can come to my aid. It’s very hard for me to really understand the extent of my mental illness because it’s been the water I swim in for so long, but my morning with Xanax at Kinsmen give me a glimpse of life without anxiety and it’s pretty good.

Maybe I should use Xanax a little more often. Maybe it would make it easier for me to face life and deal with things and generally act like a grownup.

Maybe I don’t have to live this life of mine any more as long as I am willing to take on more chemical assistance.

Yeah, I have Paxil and Wellbutrin in my veins, but Xanax helps on a wholly different level than those.

You’re not supposed to use it as an all the time, primary defense against your symptoms kind of thing. It’s meant to be used for special occasions, for lack of a better way of putting it.

But those little vacations from my anxiety sure are nice.

Why can’t they make a long term anti-anxiety that is THAT good?

More after the break.

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Badly bolted together

Feeling weak and shaky and fragile tonight, like a badly assembled robot.

Partly because I hurt myself kinda bad. I got overzealous when I was removing the shedding skin from my right foot and manage to rip a big hole in the heel.

Plus fuck up that callous bump by picking at it, too.

Feels good to have that damn thing be smaller, though.

So I have been limping and ouching my way around the apartment today. Oh, how I have suffered. So tomorrow, when I go to Wound Care, I will have to show my self-inflicted wound to the nurse and get them to pack and bandage it, hopefully with some extra padding so that moving around doesn’t hurt so much.

I am not sure it was entirely my doing, though. Because – warning, body horror – the inside of the wound is black.

That doesn’t seem normal at all.

So I guess it’s possible that tomorrow will end with me getting sent to Urgent Care. The nurse might take one look at it and say, “You need to take this to the doctor!”

So I will mentally prepare for that.

If it goes that way, they will probably just put me on the waiting list system thing anyhow, like last time, so it’s not like I will have to wait around at the UPCC.

So whatever. I come home, I do my usual stuff, I await the text. No big deal.

I just want my poor heel to stop hurting. Today’s been a little on the miserable side because of this hole in my foot. Luckily it mostly doesn’t hurt when I am not putting weight on it. Just a faint burning sensation, easily ignored.

God, I am tired of things being wrong with me. I mean, beyond the usual things that have been wrong with me so long that they’re just part of the background to me now.

Sleep apnea, depression/anxiety, diabetes, ennui, the usual.

Right now I am gonna lay down and rests my poor foot.

My life is so fucked up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I tell you why it sucks (this time) in this here vidya of mine :

I suppose it’s probably possible that some AI out there can intelligently transform a TikTok’s aspect ratio to fit properly in a YouTube window.

Any video editing program could do it the unintelligent way just by stretching each frame but the result would be me looking very short and fat.

And I’m not short.

But I dunno. I think the real content, what I am saying and how I am saying it, still comes through even with things being squished into a shoebox.

Something to ponder for the future.

Still very upset with my first video not having any sound. I have no idea what the fuck happened there. I didn’t get any error messages and the camera gets all its input via USB so that should be an all or nothing thing.

It shouldn’t be possible for it to fail selectively like that. That’s like something from the old days of patch cables and component stereos and the four track recorder.

But whatever. Drat these computers, they’re so naughty and so complex.

Otherwise having the same ol’ day as always, the same day I have lived through tens of thousands of times over the years like it’s Groundhog Day. Just another day of sitting at this computer and entertaining myself with video games and YouTube and such.

It’s no way to live a life. What am I even waiting for? I live my life like I am in the universe’s waiting room but I am, at the old age of 52, starting to think that life ain’t coming and its up to me to make alternate arrangements.

But I always feel so damned weak and scared and small.

I know something was supposed to happen inside of me that never got a chance to blossom. I can feel all my buried potential rotting in the ground because the brain in charge of it all doesn’t work too good.

All I can do is keep trying to get a signal through all the thick cold glutinous gunk in my head so that my desires can actually motivate me to do things for once.

Like I’ve said before, very little of what I do comes from wanting to do it. The desire/action/consummation cycle in me is totally fucked. Most of what I do, I do out of a combination of habit and not knowing what else to do with myself.

And it keeps me occupied. Video games keep me from getting bored, at least in the immediate sense. They feed me a safely fake sense of progress and purpose and destination in order to keep me from thinking about how my life is going nowhere while I do nothing but run on a treadmill while admiring the view.

I know that there’s a big beautiful world outside my cloistered cell and that I could totally find a place in it for myself and my outsized gifts if I just open the door and gather up the courage to go out there and find it.

But I’m too scared. Scared of that big loud bright busy world out there. Scared of being overwhelmed by the increase in stimulation levels, not to mention the feeling of being “exposed” like I’m a doe caught in the middle of a meadow or something.

I could do it all if I had the right person to hold my hand and keep me moving in the right direction and be my anchor for when I am freaking out and feel lost and scared and small as an itty bitty mouse.

Clearly, when left to my own devices, I get nowhere.

I need someone else’s devices in order to make any progress.

Because my devices suck.

More after the break.

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In cold storage

For my entire life, it seems, I have been looking for a way to come in from the cold.

But at the same time, I’ve been scared to leave the soothing numbing influence of my depression because then I would have to feel all the things I’ve been keeping frozen in my soul and by now, at the age of 52, there’s an awful lot of them.

Please form an orderly line. You will be thawed and felt in seemingly random order. We appreciate your cooperation in this matthew.

So I hover at a sort of midpoint between the void and the Sun, wanting deeply and desperately to feel warm and safe but too scared to get close enough for it to happen.

I mean, I don’t think I even know how to truly connect with others. I can converse with them, I can entertain them, I can enthrall them, I can even cuddle up to them, or at least I could back in the 90’s.

But all of that keeps people at arm’s length in the end. It might seem like I am getting extremely close with someone in terms of sharing secrets and being vulnerable and offering creature comforts, but it’s all an illusion and my inner barriers don’t come down at all, I am afraid.

I can’t imagine what would need to happen for me to feel truly safe with someone. Safe enough to put away the act and just be me as I am, warts and all.

For one thing, my inner self is convinced that they would run away screaming if they got to know the “real me”, and that is rooted in a thoroughly polluted self-esteem that makes me feel like I am some kind of disgusting, horrifying, nauseating, pathetic, utterly repulsive thing to be universally despised.

I’ve repaired my self-worth quite a lot over the years. Those thoughts about myself no longer make it to the surface to influence or control me. I know I’m amazing.

But that toxic self-loathing still lies in the deep dark places of my soul where the light of my enlightenment can’t reach it, and it pollutes my every waking thought.

And my dreams too, probably.

But I try my best to heal anyway.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was clever and did my daily video making via TikTok while I was out n’ about today and thus saved myself a fuckload of stress and pressure when I got home because otherwise I would have had to rush a video into existence when I got home at 3:45 pm.

Hence the unusual environs and atmosphere of this quotidian little vid of mine:

What can I say, the world has room for personal journalism too. Consider me to be a modern day diarist like Samuel Pepys.

Some day children will study these videos in order to learn the life history of the man whose brilliantly articulated vision for the future reshaped society into the peaceful, prosperous, productive paradise it is today.

What? It could happen.

My skin, sadly, continues to peel. And I continue to peel off the layers of mysteriously non-detaching skin cells and, warning this is gross, keep the bit of my skin I remove in a neat little pile on my desk here.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to do this. There’s definitely some very weird and not entirely sane wiring in my head involved. The sane and sanitary thing to do with the skin would be to dump it directly into the composting or even flush it down the toilet but some loose screw in my brain makes me want to… keep it where I can see it, kinda?

Like if I just threw the loose skin away I would be losing a part of myself. Which makes me feel like a little kid who doesn’t want the hairdresser to cut his hair because he thinks it will hurt just like cutting off any other part of the body.

Eventually I will throw the damned things away. Right now I am indulging this bizarre compulsion because I have no reason not to do so and I have learned that you have to pick your battles when it comes to fighting your insanity and this definitely is not the kind of hill I want to die on.

I will conserve my mental resources on this matter so that I can better concentrate them in my campaign to free myself from my self-imprisonment.

Unrelatedly, I continue to drift off to sleep unintentionally sometimes. I am beginning to wonder if this is a contagious tendency because it always gets much worse while I am at Kinsmen and immediately after.

No matter what the source of it is, it’s annoying. Bordering on downright rude when it happens around other people. Like you’re saying they are boring.

“Forgive me, but your company is not preferable to sleep. Make of that what you will. ”

Don’t take it personally, folks. I’m just old for my age.

Lately, when I am at the Kinsmen, I find myself wondering what it would be like to be a resident in an old folks’ home – sorry, “retirement community”.

Not that I think I will be eligible or ready for one any time soon. This is speculation, not planning. But I do wonder what will become of me if/when I become further disabled.

From an entirely self-centered oral retentive point of view, it could be very nice to live somewhere where everything like cooking and cleaning and so on are taken care of for me. Part of me thinks that sound perfect.

I do not like that part of me. I wish it would just die. It represents the dark side of indolence and that ultimately leads to not wanting to bother being alive any more.

No thank you. I want to live.

More after the break.

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Screen of Green

I am pondering getting a greenscreen.

A real one, with a stand, and that rolls up when not in use, and so on.

Not like that sheet I stupidly bought way back in our Nerdvana days because I naively thought sticking it to the wall would be no big deal.

It was a very big deal. Too big for me, that’s for sure.

So no, I would be getting a proper greenscreen in order to open the door to doing videos with much higher production values as well as it just being a fun thing to play around with in general.

But I need to be honest with myself. Given my track record, there’s a fairly high chance that I will get it, play around with it a bunch, get bored when it starts to be complicated or difficult, and give up on it forever.

That’s not what I want to do or plan to do but it’s what tends to happen.

Luckily it need not be a major investment of cash. I can get a good one on Amazon for something between $30 and $60, which is not nothing at all but if it does get shoved aside and never ever used again I won’t be out that much money.

Going into it knowing how I am with these things, I will have to be ready for learning to use it being difficult and frustrating and not at all fun at first and so I will want to play with it like a toy, but it’s not a toy, it’s something I actually want to use.

Oh, and of course, there would be logistical issues regarding where the heck I would set it up and so on.

At least I have an idea of what I want to do with it : one person skits like the ones my hero Ryan George does.

Or just my usual “me talking to the viewer” vids, but in OUTER SPACE!

Any way you slice it, it would at least give me something to do with myself when I am not making a vid or blogging.

I’m at a crucial crossroads where I am realizing that playing video games all the time is something I can do and am used to doing but that doesn’t mean it’s what I want to do.

I am increasingly feeling like I am just killing time with games until its time to make a vid or blog, and that makes no sense.

Why not doing something I will enjoy more? Something creative and productive?

Why not have more fun?

Something to think about while I play video games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got political again today, at least on a theoretical level.

Here is how I would tackle Trump’s mayhem :

Of course, it’s not really a plan so much as the vague outline of one. That’s why it’s so short on specifics. It’s really just me expressing what I think needs to be done. details to be filled in later.

And it’s possible that I could lead this theoretical all encompassing anti-Trump movement. I have the oratory and organizational skills and I certainly have enough time on my hands. I could put all my passion and articulacy into a call to action and a flag, a symbol of some sort, for people to rally around.

I know, I would call it EAT, for Everybody Against Trump ^[1]. And it would be the umbrella organization for absolutely everybody who wants to stop Trump, impeach him, throw him out of office, and put him in jail.

It doesn’t matter what else you believe or where you are on the political spectrum or where you’re from or literally anything else.

All that matters is that you want to work in a directed and concentrated and practical way toward Trump’s political demise.

I would be willing to give it a very loose sort of military structure. It would be an army in the same sense that the Salvation Army is an army. The idea is of a tightly coordinated and highly focused force with a practical and easily understood goal that anybody can join if they are willing to accept the structure of it all.

There might even be a boot camp of sorts where people learn things like media skills, basic military style discipline (chain of command et al), and even get cool uniforms.

But obviously nobody will be crawling through mud on their belly while a psychotic drill sergeant screams in their ear.

Not even if you’re really into that kind of thing.

Hopefully this would scare the crap out of the right wingers. It would be their worst nightmare come to life : liberals actually getting their shit together to get things done.

LIke they do all the time, only with the advantage that we’re not dumb, evil, or crazy.

Properly organized, this would give us an unbeatable edge.

So clearly I have the necessary level of vision for the job. I could design and organize this little save America army of mine, and I might even make a decent leader of it as long as my role is mostly in the inspiration and vision department.

I am not the one for the fine details of strategy. And I would definitely need someone with a far more organized and disciplined mind than mine to keep it all functioning as a whole on a day to day basis.

I’m more of a big picture guy.

Imagine how Fox News would react to footage of a vociferously left wing organization in military-ish uniforms lined up in ranks and listening attentively while a leader like me speaks stirringly about action and protest and plans to make things better.

Fox News would go purple with apoplexy. I’d love every second of it.

Maybe it would even make a few of them realize just how stupid all their left wing conspiracy talk has been now that they see the real thing.

Except it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. It would be out front, loud and proud, fighting the good fight for all that is good and just and right in the world.

Sounds good. Think I’ll sign up.

More after the break.

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The little things

I am not, by nature, detail oriented.

Like I said earlier in this post, I am a big picture kind of guy. And the world needs people like me. We’re the ones with the vision and the imagination to see the dangers coming so we can avoid them and to dream up band news solutions to old problems that others think can’t be solved.

Of course, first we have to get people to listen to us.

For as long as I can remember, I have identified strongly with the role of the soothsayer. I can easily imagine myself as some hunched over figure from Greek mythology wandering through the agora proclaiming that I have seen the future and warning people of their impending doom.

In my case, it would be based on science and knowledge and not my claiming to hear the gods speak to me in my dreams, but it’s basically the same thing.

And I remember how upset I was by the story of Cassandra, whom the gods cursed to know the future but never be believed.

That hits way too close to home. It’s the fate of all visionaries like myself to be stuck with the task of having to talk the rest of the herd into seeing what you see. Your starting position will always be one of being a lone nut trying to talk to people about things they cannot see for themselves.

If they could see it themselves, they wouldn’t need you.

That’s why I am jealous of the prophets in societies where they believe in the power of mystic seers and have a role and a reverence for them.

They just proclaim their visions and leave the rest to the people, no convincing needed.

“Because the Great Prophet said so!” sounds like a way easier sell that trying to explain to illiterate ignorant farmers why it is better to milk the cow than to eat it.

But speaking of Cassandra, I like to imagine her in a modern day bar. day drinking. when a story comes on the news about some upcoming event and she just laughs and shakes her head.

And when one of her fellow barflies asks her what’s gotten into her, she just laughs again as she stands up and pays her tab.

And on the way out of the bar, she stops, turns to the room, and says :

“I’d tell you… but you wouldn’t believe me. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Made with the harsh but necessary truth today.

You might not like hearing it but it will set you free from ideas that are causing you pain and suffering and distress, and that is my mission.

Perhaps this makes me the X-est of Gen X’ers, but I truly believe that this is the sort of wisdom I should be transmitting to young people.

They won’t get it from their Millennial parents, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, here it is :

Some more thoughts on the subject :

1. When you think of it, changing the “price” of something from nothing to anything is an increase of infinity percent. That’s why people react to it with such outrage and indignance. It’s like suddenly being charged for air. Any positive number is infinitely larger than zero, so percentage wise, it’s one heck of a price hike.
2. The psychology of “free” things is a lot more complicated than you’d think. Get people accustomed to getting something for free, and not only will get super pissed off if you start charging for it, they will have come to think that they are entitled to get said thing for free forever. That somebody owes them this thing that they did not pay for or do anything to earn. That’s what happens when an item or service is given the market value of zero. People don’t think it is worth any time or effort or money to acquire, and that of course they deserve the thing because surely they have sufficient status or worth for something of zero value.
3. Imagine an office where, every morning, when the workers enter the break room, there’s a big basket of various muffins there. And this goes on for years. Then, one day, there’s a sign on the basket saying, “Muffins, 25 cents” and a can with a coin slot to use to pay. And people are livid. How dare someone try to make a profit off their FREE muffins? What’s next, charging for tap water? Again, the social market value of the muffins has been set at zero. It doesn’t matter than anyone can afford a quarter for a muffin. It’s still an infinite rise in price.
4. My sister Anne once tried to supplement her income by making jewelry out of wire and beads and selling it at craft fairs. And they were not selling at all, and my sister could not figure out why. Then one of the ladies who was a long time craft fair veteran told Anne what the problem was : she was charging too little. People, by default, assume things are worth what they are being charged for them. My sister had, naively, used the honest businesswoman formula to arrive at a price – her costs, her labour, plus a fair profit. And people assumed that her cheap jewelry was, well, cheap jewelry, and therefore below their status. When she starting charging ten times more, she sold everything she’d made. Sadly, this was too harsh a lesson for my idealistic sister so she didn’t do it again.
5. You might think. “Those silly people not buying her stuff when it was cheap!” but I ask you : if you saw a shiny new car with a sign on it that said, “For sale, $50”, your first thought would not be, “wow, what a bargain!”, it would be “What’s wrong with it?”. You, too, would assume it’s worth what is being charged.

For me, this kind of thing is obvious. And while I also would feel weird charging people really high prices for stuff I know ain’t worth it, I would do it anyway because I am greedy and want the damn money.

Perhaps I will do a little talk on the difference between actual value and perceived value and its role in capitalism.

More after the break.

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Passing it along

I feel like doing more vids along the lines of the one I did today.

I’m quite happy with today’s vid. I know it won’t necessarily be my most popular vid but I feel like I got my points across fairly clearly and without too much repeating myself.

Plus, I didn’t repeat myself.

I suppose I am entering the didactic phase of life which is when old people get the urge to share what they have learned with the young and thus give the young people some of the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

And that’s fine as long as you know that they probably won’t listen.

Slowing down to listen to old people you don’t relate to at all give you advice that does not seem remotely relevant to life as it is right now for people of your generation is not something that is going to appeal to many young people.

Reminds me that I should be trying to do hyper-condensed versions of my vids so that they can g out into the world as YouTube Shorts and/or TikTok vids and/or Instagram Reels and maybe stand a chance of catching on.

Anyhow, even I, as a young person who totally believed that I could learn a lot from old people and really wanted to benefit from their wisdom, found it hard to listen in practice.

I didn’t have the patience for the slow and sometimes painfully indirect way old people communicated. Raised by television, I was the classic short attention span Gen X kid.

Now it’s us dealing with the iPad generation. What goes around comes around, eh?

So we try to pass our wisdom along in hopes that they won’t have to make the same mistakes we made, but realistically, the best that we can hope for is to give them some useful context for the mistakes after they make them.

Oh, so THAT’s what that old guy meant.

Still, progress happens. In many ways the new generations do learn from our mistakes in the aggregate if not in the specific. The things we say might not live on but the changes we make to the system and society do, and so the kids of today benefit from our wisdom whether they like it or not.

And that’s good enough for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or would I? Ain’t that the eternal question?

I’ve often thought about exactly how much or how many of my “powers” I would give up to not be this sort of tragic and ridiculous thing any more.

To be competent, in my own internal lexicon. To be a real person with a job and a “third place” and his own place and money and the ability to maybe, just maybe, relax about money a little bit.

When you’re poorer than the average dirt, money is a constant concern. Odds are that if you don’t think about money, it’s because you have enough of it.

Anyhow, my point – and I do have one – is that I think about what I would be willing to trade in order to become life competent.

Not that anyone’s offering to buy my talents or anything. This is a purely theoretical exercise meant to help me think through some stuff.

It’s a hard nut to crack because my gifts are all I have in this world. Being gifted and talented represents my only value to the world and society and the fact that mental illness continues to keep me from contributing to my fullest is absolutely tragic.

So pondering some sort of cosmic exchange where I can let some of my giftedness go in order to be able to make way better use of what I have left makes me feel like I am Jack the Giant Killer of beanstalk fame trading his cow for beans.

But the only cure for my terminal case of rotting on the vine is to get up and get moving and generate my own life momentum, and to keep on investing effort into my own betterment until this ancient life of mine actually starts moving.

And to do it not knowing how long it will take or how much effort will be asked of me or where the journey will take me.

My depression absolutely hates that idea. It still has me at least partially convinced that I need to be a miser with my personal energy, even though I know in my head that if anything I need to spend it like a sailor on shore leave with expensive tastes.

And I am trying to get there. I keep telling myself that my energy needs to come up and out and shine for everybody to see, but the cold storage world of my emotional hellscape won’t allow it yet so I have to just keep imagining it until that damned spark finally re-lights my pilot light.

I certainly can’t afford to keep waiting around for the world to make the first move. For the world to show me some kind of reaction or indication or hell hostility to prove to me that what I emit is actually being received somewhere out there.

I have to just keep pumping out the content and gradually learning what the hell to do with it to get it seen and experienced.

With every video and every blog entry I get a little bit better. And I get a little bit closer to figuring this shit out, more or less.

I know that somewhere in the vast twisted forest of future possibilities lies a reality where my content catches on and I am able to make a decent living off it and become at least somewhat known.

I mean, you know, gentle readers, that on the one hand I want to be an internationally famous thinker and commentator and on the other hand I would be perfectly happy just having a small but dedicated community of fans with whom I could regularly have interesting and stimulating and maybe even productive conversations.

I swear those are a thing.

But my modest dreams can’t come true until I somehow manage to tunnel my way out of this cage of fools of mine and into the wider world.

And I guess that will happen when I am good n’ ready and not a moment before.

Until then, I just beaver away.

More after the break.

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Oh crap, the vid!

Almost forgot all about it!

I did another snide subversive political piece.

I am happy with it. I think I made my point rather well, and in a way that gets behind enemy lines because superficially it’s praise.

I love how snarky I can be!

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What about the rest?

I honestly don’t know what to do with the money I had earmarked for the power supply.

Guiltily, I have alreadys spend some of it on ordering in. I feel guilty about it because I had planned to spend that money on something of enduring value (the power supply) and here I am spending it on something as ephemeral as ordering in.

I try to convince my Taurus brain that there’s value in experiences too but it’s a very tough sell. We are Earth sign types and that orients us towards the literal.

Even flakey intellectual art fags like me.

I am pondering maybe getting a green screen. That could perk my videos right up. And I could have a heck of a lot of fun with one assuming I learn to use it to put myself in fantasy landscapes or on the moon or somesuch.

Maybe I could even do Ryan George style one man skits.

Like this one!

Unless, of course, it gets to the point where it can make a movie out of one of my scripts, in which case it will be, of course, brilliant.

We could already do it with things that are mostly dialogue. The acting would be terrible but you could get something or other that looks kind of like a movie.

AI voice, AI characters, limited palette of emotions/actions, no character interaction…. hmm… it could be done.

Maybe it isn’t as far away as I thought.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.