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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

Clearly this is becoming a series.

Mostly because if I do something twice, I feel compelled to do it a third time.

But I already know what I will be talking about in the next one, so there’s that.

Anyhow, you know this isn’t aimed at you, so here goes :

I have finally started tapping into my deep wells of both sarcasm and cutting observation in order to put my work and my words out there in the world and I must say it feels pretty good.

And I have already gotten both praise and backlash and I love both so I am quite happy with how things are progressing.

But my ambition remains to go huuuuuge with my words. I want to be a globally recognized thought leader whom people turn to for my vision, my insight, my unique point of view, and my ability to be more right about a lot of things than everyone else.

I want people to say, “Boy, I can’t wait to hear what HE has to say about this!”, both on the left and on the right, and it would make me so very, very happy to know that I am sparking discussion and debate all over the world with my thought provoking takes on the world we live in.

That would make me one very happy trickster. I would know that I was doing my duty to get people to think and grow and expand their minds, even if initially they are only doing so in order to better disagree with me.

When people think, we win. It’s the sleeping brutes we have to watch out for.

Now what else should I be typing about? Oh yeah, my day.

---

Time for a life update

Did not make it to Kinsmen. Last night and this morning I was having one of my attacks of flu-like symptoms. Raspy throat, scratchy lungs, stiff sore muscles, energy drain, all the old familiar faces.

It’s clear up a little bit since. My lungs and throat are still out of whack but some rest and fluids seem to have cleared up the drained feeling and moving around some today and getting some sunshine and fresh air seems to have helped my poor muscles.

It’s amazing how often that in order to get better, I have to do the exact opposite of what my stupid body wants me to do.

No, don’t pick that itchy as hell scab. Move those sore stiff muscles. Don’t eat the stuff that looks so tasty but it’s fulla sugar so you know it will make you sick.

Anyhow, I did make it to my doctor’s appointment today.

Being too sick to go to the doctor is something I reserve for when I need to be way more irrational for whatever reason.

We talked about my high blood pressure. He tried to measure my BP the old fashioned way, with the pressure cuff and stethoscope, and it didn’t work.

Could have told him it wouldn’t work, but would he have believed me?

Once we moved on to the automatic digital method, he discovered that my blood pressure is, indeed, too high, but that the difference between my sitting and standing BP was so great that upping my BP meds to lower my sitting BP would lead to my BP dipping so low when I stand up that I’d pass out.

But he referred me back to Doctor Shari and I will talk it over with her eventually.

Unfortunately it took a long time to get back home. When I was done with Doctor Chao, I got his receptionist to call Julian.

I had to do that because my dumb self forgot his phone at home. Which meant a lot of being bored while waiting. D’oh.

But Julian did not pick up. So the receptionist left a message. Then we did the same thing half an hour later. Same result.

Another half hour later and it finally occurs to me to get her to call Joe’s cell instead. That works, and gets the ball rolling for my pickup.

Then I have another brainwave and realize that I can wait for pickup outside in the fresh air and sunshine if I just used my walker’s seat.

So I got my fresh air and sunshine despite missing Kinsmen.

Turns out the problem was that Julian’s cell ran out of power.

Oh well, excrement occurs.

More after the break.

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plussingthetrigger

Another home run from Kee

Wow, does this guy get me.

Yup, this is pretty much it.

Like I have said before, what sanity I retain I think I got from my babysitter Betty.

So things didn’t really go all to hell for me until I got to school and there was nobody looking out for me or who even cared about me any more.

And so I became more and more withdrawn. At first I tried to make friends and get along with others but there’s only so much rejection a sensitive child can take before they conclude that there is nothing out there for them in the world of other people.

Like I have also said before, my shyness is somewhat paradoxical. I can seem outgoing and friendly and even charming but that disappears at the slightest sign of rejection or even just non-inclusion as I am crushed like the hothouse orchid I am.

In a sense it would be less confusing if I was just plain antisocial all the time. Might even be healthier for me, really.

But that’s uh, not how things turned out.

I mean, I need a Xanax to do my stuff at Kinsmen and yet I record a video of just me talking every day and think nothing of putting it on YouTube and TikTok.

I never had any trouble speaking up when I knew the answer in class. Yet I hid from my fellow students during lunch and recess.

I was a complicated child, and now I am an even more complicated man.

I hope that at least makes me interesting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am quite proud of the video I made today.

Don’t take it personally. If you’re reading this, odds are heavily in favour of it not being addressed to you.

See the title if you get a tad confused. If that doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not for you!

Anyhow, here it is :

The choice to address it to the viewer in the second person (“you”) was quite deliberate. This vid is me aiming flaming truth arrows right at the heart of the modern right wing in order to break through their thin patina of justifications and reveal unto them just what worthless fucking cowards they are for being such pathetic stooges.

And all because the alternative is to think for themselves. Unacceptable!

I pondered trying to work that angle of insult into the speech in today’s vid but it already has a small amount of topic drift so I left it out.

But perhaps that will be the angle for my next verbal tactical assault.

I posted that vid to BlueSky, of course. I know it will appeal to my fellow lefties. My hope is that it spreads far and wide enough that some actual right wing fucknut types will see it and feel the sting of my extraordinarily sharp observations that cut them to the quick.

One does what one can.

The dream, of course, would be for this to bring down a torrent of incoherent and badly misspelled abuse from MAGAts on my head. Think of all the fun I would have responding to these pinheads and crushing their tiny minds with my mental might.

Bring it, motherfuckers. I will strike you down with God’s own thunder.

Actually, fuck that. I will strike you down with MINE.

My butt problem continues. The inflatable donut is back – Joe used his magic powers of knowing where he left stuff or saw stuff to retrieve it – and it helps but my weight squooshes the air out of it pretty fast.

Guess I need something with a stronger valve.

Obviously I don’t want to start buying cushions again. I remember how none of them worked for me before, possibly because I am quite fussy when it comes to my comfort, especially the comfort of my big beautiful bum.

So right now I am rather uncomfortable and will be getting off the computer the moment I am done with my words in order to let said profound buttocks rest.

I wonder if there’s butt exercise I could do to build up its core strength.

I wish I knew what the hell I did to make the pain go away last time. Did I just subconsciously learn to sit a different way? A way that did not create pressure points to torture and torment me?

I have no idea. Like I said before, this problem seems to have been coming on slowly over a space of months, so it’s not going to be a simple matter of making an adjustment.

Something changed within the butt itself, and I wanna know what.

My ass wants answers, dammit!

I suppose I could talk about it when I see Doc Chao tomorrow about my high blood pressure. Clearly the hypertension is my top level concern but if he has some suggestions as to what to do with my butt, I’m all ears.

I just like saying butt a lot. Hee hee hee.

I’ve also had a few attacks of very mild shortness of breath lately. Nothing I would call 911 over, just feeling a little out of breath at odd moments, and earlier today I had a dizziness attack when I was getting my clothes for today off the shelves.

Once more, I was saved from a nasty fall by my giant bed.

Without it, I would have to go around wrapped in bubble wrap.

More after the break.

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Feel so tired

I just came back from getting my supper out of the fridge and I am way more out of breath and tired than usual.

And that’s after a shorter trip than usual because all I had to do was grab my leftover Subway from last Saturday night plus a can of pop and a piece o’ fruit.

No waiting around for the microwave at all.

Maybe that’s the problem though – no pause in the middle. Hmm.

Anyhow, more worrisome than the being out of breath and my heart and head pounding and so forth is this scratchy, sore feeling in my lungs.

Uh oh. That feels distinctly viral. I will do my best to hydrate thoroughly and see if that fixes me up but if not, I might not make it to Kinsmen tomorrow.

Which would kinda suck.

I will still make it to my doctor’s appointment regardless, of course. Apparently I need it more than I even knew when I made it.

Like I said, it could all go away with sufficient fluid intake. We’ve been down this road together before, dear audience, and what seems dire turns out to be nothing or nothing much at any rate.

But I do not like the feel of it at all. This plus that dizzy spell I had earlier point toward there being something draining my system and I do not wish to end up with god damned pneumonia again so I am gonna be real careful about this.

I swear that my body chooses when it knows I will be going to the doctor in order to get ill. LIke on some deep level I have been suppressing my own symptoms and only the prospect of actual care can cause them to surface for real.

That’s a depressing thought.

I will keep you updated, dear readers. And I will be monitoring my own condition very carefully because if this gets worse, it’s off to UC or the ER for me.

Because I am NOT getting pneumonia again dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starting with my own, of course.

Considering the amount of time I spend making outrageously and delightfully filthy AI art, my libido is in working order, more or less.

It’s a fun hobby because it motivates me to learn to make the AI art generators do what I want them to do and that, in turn, encourages me to stretch my visual imagination and try to learn to be as specific as possible.

The AI art generators punish non-specificity by creating Cronenbergian horrors that look like someone crossed this website with the last 20 minute of Akira.

Let’s see if I can find a creation of mine I am willing to share with y’all.

Pretty sure that one won’t get me in trouble. Probably.

Still pretty harmless. OK, one more :

I think that’s probably enough for now. Right? Right.

And then there’s this rockin’ gem :

Holy shit, right? That sounds so good. That channel, Fake Music, has a whole bunch of similarly funkified versions of 80’s and it blows my mind, man.

I am also jealous of the name Fake Music, because that’s what I make and now I can’t call it that and it’s like the perfect name.

I might call mine “synthetic tunes” if I ever organize my stuff into channels. I like the sound of that. It sounds like exactly what you would expect people to be listening to in “the future”, at least if you were around for New Wave the first time.

I’m getting the itch to write another song. Something more personal. So watch this space for my next mopey folk song built around an elaborate metaphor for my inner life.

I’ll call it, “Emo, the Tragic Dragon. ”

I’ve been struggling with my “shoulds” today. As in, my idea of what I “should” be doing but I am not doing because I am just letting my usual routine carry me along instead.

And I know that’s the wrong way to be looking at it, and I am trying to get over it. There is nothing I “should” be doing except staying alive and trying to stay healthy. That is all society asks of a disabled person like myself. I don’t “owe” anyone anything else.

What I continue to desire is to do things I want to do, because I want to do them. Need and “should” don’t come into it. I will be much better off if I learn to simply follow my desires without putting any pressure or stress on myself.

Because it’s the pressure and stress that triggers the avoidance and it’s the avoidance that keeps me from getting anywhere in life.

But so far I still lack the courage to simply step off of my well trod path and go looking for whatever else out there seems fun.

For me that might as well be a spacewalk. That’s how big of a step it feels. Like I would be venturing into the hard vacuum of space.

Which is ridiculous, of course, and obviously a delusion spun by my mental illness in order to “keep me in my place. “

But my place kinda sucks.

Somehow, I am going to find a way to stop withdrawing so hard so I can emerge from my shells and take a look around me at long last.

And that means giving up on giving up on reality.

And that means going back to where it all started.

And that’s not gonna be fun.

More after the break.

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Your pet Fruvous

As I have mentioned before in this space, as sad as it sounds, it has does me a lot of good to start thinking of myself as a pet rather than a burden.

Not that any of it makes sense at all when it comes down to it. Via the province, I pay my own way in this household, so I’m not a financial burden except in small incidental ways like the gas money to drive me to my medical appointments.

It says something about my mindset that I think about things like that.

And yes, my roomies help me with my walker when I am getting in and out of the car. And that’s very nice of them and I appreciate it a lot, but the still-sick part of my mind insists that this makes me a burden on them even though they are not, in any way, complaining about it.

So the pet thing helps me to recontextualize it all. After all, pets always involve a certain amount of effort to care for and look after. And unless you are very small of soul and puny of heart person, you don’t resent the pet for it, because you know you get a great deal from having your cat or dog or budgie around as a companion and looking after them is, if you are strong enough to see it, actually part of the pleasure of it all.

We humans have instincts to care for beings who are dependent on us, after all.

So imagine myself as serving that function in the lives of my friends, both offline and on, helps me to quell the evil voices in my head telling me that I am nothing but a liability to all who come in contact with me and…. well, everything that can lead to.

I’d still much rather be earning a living as a normal, tax-paying, decent citizen as opposed to being a burden on the British Columbia taxpayer (albeit a microscopic one), but at least thinking of myself as a pleasant pet who provides a companionable presence and amusement and occasional bits of adorkable incompetence (as well as. of course, my top notch analysis) makes me feel like there is, in fact, some point to me being alive and that I do, in fact, contribute to the world in some way.

Digging myself out of the deep hole which swallowed my self-worth for so long is taking a long time, but I am getting there, little by little, every day.

I even like myself some of the time now.

It’s a start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.