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.