That title is my way of admitting that I have no idea what to write about tonight in my signature “honest yet oddly endearing” style.

It’s a great combo if you can pull it off. But be warned – what you see in this space is the product of many many years honing a particular persona and if you choose to try to emulate it, do not expect similar results right away.

In other words, “Professional driver on closed track. Do not attempt. ”

It’s always going to bug me a little that “don’t try this at home” type warnings are viewed as necessary. I was a kid when the whole “imitatable acts” cases went through, and I never bought the whole notion that children’s TV programs should be held accountable for some dumb kid getting hurt because he was imitating He-Man’s powerup sequence and got hit by lightning.

Well, okay, that never happened, but still.

If Little Timmy (or Tammy) falls off the stoop and cracks their wrist while pretending to be their favorite cartoon hero, that has nothing to do with the cartoon. It could just as easily been a passage from the Bible they were imitating, or even something straight from their own fertile imaginations.

And it takes a very special kind of twisted, impacted, super entitled middle class mindset to even try to blame the cartoon for what the kid did. To me, it has always seemed like a combination of the hysterical NIMBY parent feeling guilty about letting the child get hurt and a completely and total inability to take responsibility for one’s actions if doing so conflicts with that great rush of righteous anger that comes with throwing the blame on an outside force, however dishonestly.

I mean, what kind of person does something like that?

Had a bit of a cock up on the job front. Apparently, I was so tired and spaced out when I did my episode last night that I totally forgot to actually send it to Prasad.

And I did not realize it until this evening, so it was very late. Technically. I doubt he would have looked at it before Monday anyway, but still.; I goofed up.

And you know what? Whatever. The only workable solution to the way I freak out over these things is to immediately relegate them to the past and move on. Exoriating mtself over them is counterproductive, to put it mildly, and so I am better off just taking it philosophically, even when that makes me seem like an irresponsible dickwad to other people in my life.

It’s not that I don’t care and it’s not that I am not sorry. It’s just that dwelling on it for any period of time leads to very bad things for me, and I have to start that particularly energetic downward spiral by nipping it in the bud the moment it begins.

I don’t like that it has come to this, but I see no other route. My only consolation is that I am confident that it will be a temporary stepping stone towards getting the sort of sold sense of self-worth that can weather dealing with my own failures without it initiating a total cascade failure of self-loathing in my fragile psyche.

It’s hard to be me. I don’t recommend it. Would not incarnate thusly again.

Actually, I don’t have it all that bad. I have loads of talent and intelligence, I have safe and stable life circumstances, I have a tiny but steady gig as a writer, and I have a Skyrim habit that brings me many hours of fun every single day.

It might not seem like much from society’s point of view, and there’s a lot of people who would call me a loser. But I don’t care. All I care about is enjoying the life I have and letting other drives work their way to the fore before making any big decisions based on an arbitrary cluster of “shoulds”.

One voice getting louder every day as how dissatisfied I am with my writing for Prasad lately, and how the work itself isn’t really doing it for me any more.

As my father would say, I really outsmarted myself on that point. I gave Prasad my ultimatum without even considering the fact that if he accepted my terms, that meant I had no choice but to keep doing the work.

D’oh! So I figure I will keep going for twenty or thirty more episodes, or maybe 35 more so that I hit 100, and then reevaluate.

I’d like to think that I will also look for other work during that period, but I have to be realistic about my energy levels. Or maybe the right term would be “wherewithal reserves”. I only have so much energy I can devote to trying to change the envelope which defines me, and I have to strike when that reserve peaks.

Until then, no pressure, whatever. Maybe I will suddenly get inspired and spend an afternoon on UpWork applying for things I’d enjoy. Maybe I will do nothing of the sort and end up just playing more Skyrim. I couldn’t really say.

But both are fine. I am currently getting through life without a lot of pain, worry, fear, strife, or chaos, and so if that continues, fab.

And if that leads to my reaching the point where I am ready to reach out and strive to make it to the next level of growth and achieve a superior equilibrium, that’s awesome too. Both are good.

What is important is that I keep fighting to learn how to lead a natural life, free of corrosive self-consciousness and n-dimensional paranoia so I can simply be myself and trust that will be enough.

I get closer every day. Now and then I remove another of my radical self-consciojusness and move cloer to living in harmony with myself in the world. Eventually, I will have ripped out all the unnecessary superconscious machinery that does nothing but sap my clock cycles and my will to live, and then I will be free to life life with the carefree attitude and easy self-confidence I had when I was a preschooler.

I can picture this new version of me so clearly in my mind.

And if I can do that, I can make it real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.