I don’t know if I really got my point across in this.

I feel like I missed something.

Oh well, at least it’s almost good.

Fun fact : that was written and performed by the guy who invented The Chipmunks.

How’s that for random?

I’m feeling okay today. My mood has been fairly stable. There’s still a hell of a lot of emotions in me that need to come out but for now they are quiescent.

Joe’s not feeling okay at all. Apparently he’s been very ill since yesterday. He didn’t even go to visit his family and play board games last night, and that’s something he normally does every Saturday night, even in this anti-social era he’s been in.

The paranoid part of me thinks, “Wow, he got out of not one but TWO social engagements this weekend, How efficient. “

But that is probably just my hurt feelings talking. I’ve already told you wonderful people about how hurt I am that Joe skips out on literally every opportunity he has to socialize with Felicity and I.

It’s like we’re just not worth the effort any more.

And I know what that’s like. After all, I suffer from depression too. I know what it’s like to feel yourself retreating from the world and abandoning all the things that normally keep your life stitched together like social time with friends and not being able to stop it.

Not that I am saying that Joe isn’t legitimately ill. I have no reason to believe that except for my own paranoid and somewhat self-centered way of thinking.

And as the skeptic community likes to point out, emotions aren’t evidence.

Which is undoubtedly true but possibly unhelpful. I am still in the process of learning not to insist on being naked before the truth any more as part of some strange kind of intellectual machismo need to be, essentially, “righter than thou”.

On the whole, I’d rather be happy.

That’s why I ask people if they rather be happy, or right. You can inflict a hell of a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering on yourself simply because you refuse to admit that someone you had an argument with a long time ago might have been right.

Your parents, for instance.

And that goes double for a naturally very stubborn person like myself. I know that I can be irrationally pigheaded sometimes. It’s something I have learned to watch out for in myself. Part of my routine, “Wait, am I being crazy?” metaconsciousness check.

When you know you’re mentally ill, you have to watch out for stuff like that.

Knowing you’re crazy is, in itself, kind of crazy. There is only so much yiu can do to try to compensate and past that point, all you can do is assume that the way you are perceiving things might not be correct, but for now you have to pretend they are.

You can’t doubt everything all the time.

What I have to be especially wary about is my emotional perceptions and beliefs. Depression is underpinned by delusions of that sort.

Like my thinking that everyone hates me and has nothing but contempt for me. I can still feel that feeling within me as I type this even though I have that feeling safely locked up and dismissed now.

People love me. I’m a very special dude.

But it’s like negative emotions grow so huge that they blot out the real world entirely. It takes a fair bit of cutting those big feelings down to size before you can see outside of them and realize how irrational they are.

I have mine locked away, like I said, as I struggle to build up my self-worth.

Luckily, I’m pretty fucking amazing.

More after the break.

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I heart this man

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel like my era has come.

Because finally, people are as pissed off and vitriolic as I am.

Turns out, all this time I was just waiting for things to get bad enough for my unhinged ranting to blend right in.

In crazy times, lunatics become prophets.

And people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more!

And this is what gives me hope. My faith in the American people being stubborn and ornery and quick to anger and disinclined towards obedience is getting more and more justified every single day.

Oh, and so is the fact that they feel no need to remain consistent. Not only does the fact that they voted for Trump not keep them from giving their representatives hell at town meetings, it just makes them even angrier because they feel betrayed.

Now is not the time – and I can’t stress this enough – for saying “I told you so”.

Now is the time where we support these people with kindness and forgiveness and cheer them on in their profound sense of umbrage and be ready and willing to finally show them, not just tell them, that we are on their side and Trump is not.

Trust me, they are ready for this message. We, the left, have a golden opportunity to show the people what real populism looks like. Show them that we have plans that will help them the moment that we are in power. Concrete plans that address their needs in terms they can understand and see and most importantly feel in their lives.

It’s time for another FDR to come along to convince the rich that it’s this New Deal or them getting strung up by their thumbs and used as a piñata by an angry mob.

And if we can offer the people real, comprehensive, understandable solutions that will directly improve their lives, they won’t care if Fox News calls it socialism.

All they will care about is that their kids ate better this week.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Aaaand today’s vid might seem familiar.

See, for those who don’t know or don’t remember, I executed that same concept in a video from a long, looong time ago.

But I felt it needed a remake because the previous vid was quite crudely accomplished in terms of my presentation style and I am much more sensitive and sophisticated now.

Plus in the first vid, I didn’t have a shirt on so I looked naked.

I am quite pleased with how the remake turned out. I think I projected my warm and caring personality really well.

Like I said in the vid, I’m not trying to attack or hurt anybody with my vid. I just want to show women how life looks from a man’s perspective by putting them in our shoes. Give them a taste of how harsh life can be for straight men.

I realize the concept is somewhat out of date. I think most Millennial and Gen Z ladies are far more likely to view men as human being with feelings than the more defensive (for good reason) women of previous eras.

Feminism makes things better for men too, at least some of the time. The overall tension level between the genders has gone down a hell of a lot since women needed “Take Back The Night” campaigns and a can of Mace in their purse.

And I honestly hope this trend continues and the amount of attention the opposite gender gets ends up being a little more evenly distributed, so that plain girls get more love and knockouts like my sister Anne don’t have to suffer through the opposite extreme and end up with way more attention than anyone could handle, and not always the good kind either.

Unfortunately, we can’t limit whom we attract to only people we’re attracted to, let alone only to people we’re attracted to who won’t turn out to be horrible.

And she attracted some doozies.

At least we have dating apps now. Those can at least filter out the obviously unsuitable people. The people who have guns in their profile pics, for instance.

I’m considering making another foray into the online dating world. It’s never worked out for me before but I am more stable and confident now and better suited to the task of wading through the waves of boring dudes to find the occasional pearl.

I hope I’m getting less easily discouraged in general. I’ve been very flighty in the past. The slightest thing going wrong could put me off something because deep down my permanent state of crisis mode gave me the flight response of a rabbit on crack.

Still, maybe I should pop a Xanax beforehand just to keep myself level.

It’s hard to convey what it’s like to be anxiety-prone, especially to people who have only ever known me in full Fruvous mode.

But the wildest, weirdest part about it is that the anxiety is beyond your control. The mechanism that triggers that flight response is automatic, and far too sensitive.

And once all that adrenaline is in your system, your ability to deal with situations rationally goes out the window.

You’re on the fast brain circuit now and it doesn’t care about nuance, logic, or long term consequences, all it cares about is escape.

Which is better than a fight response, come to think of it. My anxiety is fairly unlikely to land me in jail.

I think I need to forgive myself for the things I do when I’m not rational. That would go a long way to keeping that toxic “I’m so stupid, stupid, stupid!” response under control so that it doesn’t make things worse.

No wonder I have such a strange, strained relationship with self-control. I have been trying to apply slow-brain criteria to fast-brain moments, and worse, pursuing a futile fantasy of permanent self-control.

Like I could keep my system from activating flight mode by sheer force of will.

More after the break.

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Chicka the Chinese, the Chinese dinner!

Having some Bamboo Express tonight.

I started out wanting my beloved Meat Marinara pasta from Pizza Hut but the weirdest goddamn things happened.

OK, first, the DoorDash site said our local Pizza hut was closed. Said it has closed at 7:30 PM. On a Saturday.

A likely story.

So I went to Pizza Hut’s own website, which I have also used before, and even earned the occasional free item that way.

They have a points thing. It’s pretty cool, actually.

So I’m on Pizza Hut’s site and I click on the Pasta tab and… nothing. Absolutely nothing comes up. Not a single dish.

All the other tabs worked normally. I checked. But no pasta.

I briefly thought about getting pizza instead, but nah. If I wasn’t going to be able to get the pasta I wanted, I would get something completely different.

So I ended up my usual from Bamboo Express instead. Number One combo dinner : Pork Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Pork, and Beef Chow Mein.

At least they still do a combo meal. A lot of places gave up on that. They probably realized that people were getting good value for their money and thought, “No! If they want three different dishes they should have to buy three separate full priced dishes!”

Or do like me and just order from somewhere else.

I don’t like ordering the usual way. I need variety. I am guaranteed to get bored of any individual dish long before I finish a full order of it.

Combo meal are exactly my speed.

I dunno why ordering in always turns in to such an adventure. Especially on Saturday nights. I should learn to be Zen about the whole thing and withhold all expectation. Cease my futile efforts to control outcomes when all we can truly control is ourselves and how we react to the ever flowing river of time that is life.

I think I just invented Zen Stoicism.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s video ain’t about much.

So, now you know how my day has gone, more or less.

I do have a small confession to make : I knowingly bought an American product with my groceries this week.

You see, the only sugar free jam Superstore sells is from Smucker’s, whose mother corporation is, of course, American.

So I had no choice but to buy from those American mother Smucker’s.

The alternative would be to go jamless, and peanut butter sandwiches are way, way too boring to even contemplate.

Unless they’re on toast.

That did get me thinking about the future of our supply chain, though. Theoretically, if enough Canadians refuse to buy an American product, the supermarkets et al will stop stocking them and stock Canadian equivalents instead.

But what if there is no Canadian alternative, as in my case? This is a question of conscience that millions of Canadians must be facing all over the country these days.

And suppose the tensions escalate to the point where we just plain stop importing American products completely?

The American made goods remaining in the country would dwindle in supply and presumably rise in price and it would be time to seriously investigate whether it’s profitable to import said goods from elsewhere.

We already import our chocolate bars from the UK, sort of.

Luckily, I don’t think we get anything we absolutely cannot do without from the USA. We pump our own oil, grow our own wheat, raise our own cattle, and generate so much electricity via hydro that we sell a lot of it to the USA.

And we’re slapping tariffs on THAT, too. Mua ha ha. Just try to power New York City without us, Trump.

Otherwise, my day has been routine and unremarkable. I am still playing Divinity : Original Sin 2, though now I have moved on from the main game and I am investigating the mod scene.

It’s quite robust, which pleases me. And Steam has a workshop for the game, which means I can browse mods via Steam and install them with just one click.

And that pleases me even more.

Of course, this means that I have not yet bought myself a new game, I guess because I don’t actually “need” one yet.

DOS2 is still keeping me busy enough.

My friend Maelkoth is bugging me to get this game called Dungeon Siege 3 because it’s only $3 and he says it has amazingly good writing and voice acting.

I downloaded the demo and it does seem well made but because it’s a very old game the controls are not great and that bugs me.

I may get it, I may not.

I suppose what I am afraid of is that if I get a new game, I will forget all about DOS2 and what I am doing in it.

Why that would be a big deal, I dunno. I’ve already beaten the game again. Dropping it now would honestly be no big loss.

But I guess it’s just an excuse for me to be my usual indecisive self. Ho hum.

Still, I have almost $65 in my Steam Wallet and it is definitely starting to burn a hole in my pocket, so to speak.

I will make up my mind soon. Most likely I will do it rashly and impulsively after I get sick and tired of my own waffling.

And then, of course, regret my purchase and beat myself up for not thinking about it more, even though thinking about it did not lead to a solution.

Some things…a lot of things, actually… cannot be solved by thinking. There are too many variables and too many unknowns. At some point, you have to make peace with making arbitrary, emotional decisions for the things that cannot be calculated.

And that’s most things.

You can’t always know where the road ends before setting foot on it. In fact, that is almost never a possibility.

So the choice is either go nowhere and live like a dead person, or get out there and learn and explore and get hurt and learn and LIVE.

I’m learning to choose the second one.

More after the break.

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You know what comes next?

The guillotine, motherfuckers. That’s what comes next.

So which seems better, losing 10 percent of your money to higher taxes, or being hauled out onto the street and decapitated?

Note, you will still be rich. All that will change is the number that comes up when you check your account balance. Other than that, your life will barely change at all.

And more importantly, you will get to keep it.

I am going to keep reminding people that there are billions of us and thousands of them and we can take everything away from them any time we want.

We, the people, are in power. Their power comes from us forgetting that fact. That’s why they work so hard to keep us disconnected and distracted.

Oh, and in case you’re one of those sad traitors who has been fooled into thinking you’re one of them, not one of us, I will remind you that to the top one percent, there is no difference between your upper middle class ass and a hobo on the street.

We’re all just poor people to them. Groundlings. The unwashed masses. PEASANTS.

Still feel like you’re above the rest of us somehow? That they like you more than they like all the other serfs?

You’re right. They love how suicidally stupid you are. They laugh themselves sick when they talk about you, you god damned quisling sonderkommandos. 

What else are they going to think about the sheep willing to completely sell out all the other sheep just for the vague impression that the shepherd likes them best?

But they’ll end up as mutton just like the rest of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, maybe not ALL…

Nothing particularly revolutionary about that vid, and yet I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it’s because I was being very candid and open and I think that imparted a certain amount of warmth to what I was saying.

I will have to remember that for future vids.

The camera picks up honesty remarkably well, at least for me.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Talked about how relatively unemotional my family was and is. We all ended up being highly intelligent and deeply neurotic, and I think that came from the top, from our mother.

My mother, being a teacher, did an excellent job of encouraging and nourishing our young minds but not a lot to help us mature emotionally.

The truth is, we were never all that close. Especially not me, the uninvited one. I was telling Doctor Costin about how when my babysitter Betty would take me to her house when I was a wee thing, I got to see a family that was radically different than mine.

I’ve talked before how I had to figure out that despite all the yelling and swearing and verbal roughness, they were not, in fact, angry with one another.

That’s just how they communicated. Loud, blunt, open, and direct. So very, very different than my cold and constipated home.

But what I was talking about today is how Betty’s family was constantly doing things for one another. Their milieu might have been rough but their hearts were warm and they were always doing things for one another and in general they seemed to face the world as a group or a team and my home was just not like that.

We always just kind of did out own thing. I can’t even imagine asking one of my siblings for help unless the stakes were pretty dire. I don’t think any of us would dream of imposing on one another like that.

And that’s pretty messed up, to be honest.

We could chatter all day but displays of emotion were not a thing. For one thing, we didn’t want to upset our mother.

Not upsetting her is like a prime commandment for all of us kids. We shield her instinctively because her being upset upsets us severely.

We feel what she feels, I guess.

And so we became kind but aloof intellectuals, just like her. None moreso than me.

In fact, of all four of us Bertrand kids, I’m the most like her.

We also talked about how I have never been emotionally close to anyone. At least not after elementary started and Betty went away.

That’s when the emotional coldness really set in, causing me to continue to withdraw from the world deeper and deeper into myself.

I keep imagining myself as going around the world in a human-sized mecha suit in which I clumsily pretend to be human and present but all the world sees is a hologram of me and the real me is miles and miles away.

Like my mother, it’s not as if I am cold in any obvious way. I come across as a warm, genuine, and kinda wacky dude just like her.

And if the situation calls for it, I can being a very sensitive and insightful listener who makes people feel heard and understood.

And it seems like I am getting very close to those people. And I am. But then again, I am not. I am getting close like a therapist would, not like a friend.

The truth is that I don’t really know how to open up to people. I intellectualized everything even when I am talking to my therapist.

I want to change that. I want to be more emotionally open and present and real. I want to truly connect with others for the first time in my life and that means abandoning my posture of the curious intellectual and risking being “out of control” and, heaven forbid, doing things for purely emotional reasons.

I need to let go of that chokehold my ego has on my id so that I can just relax and do the best I can with being myself.

I think that’s how normal people do things.

It’s worth a try.

More after the break.

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Relax and let go

Let’s poke this particular knot : the moment of error.

That’s the moment where you realize that you’ve fucked up big time. Everyone has been there. It’s a very bad feeling.

But it’s what happens immediately after that I’m interested in tonight.

The self-repudiation. What form does it take?

For me, it usually takes the form of excoriating myself for not thinking. I’m such an idiot, if only I had given it two seconds thought, why didn’t I do that, argh.

Which is understandable, and even healthy when done in a balanced way.

But taken to the sort of scourging extremes a mind like mine takes it and it becomes the birthplace of “the committee” that insists that absolutely no action can be taken without its express approval to make sure you’re not doing something “stupid”.

And it does not approve much.

In fact, in my case at least, “the committee” has metastasized into a thick wall inside me that lets almost nothing through and so I remain “safely” constrained.

But hey, at least I’m not doing anything stupid, right?

I’m not doing anything.

And all out of a hyper-neurotic fear of making a mistake. But what’s the big deal about mistakes? You learn from them and move on.

I act like the whole universe is booby-trapped and only by inaction and staying within my tiny comfort zone can I avoid catastrophe.

But it’s just mistakes. They’re part of life. And eminently survivable.

Total inaction on anything that isn’t a “sure thing” is far too high a price to pay.

I think I need to think about this some more now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here’s today’s vid.

I feel a little bad about saying that it’s not a trick, because it totally is a trick. I’m trying to trick Republicans into remember their real values, the things they have always held to be true and that they have always thought they believed in.

It’s my shock treatment for severe cases of Fox News poisoning. Part of how the Trump cult works is that it keeps its adherents too busy performing mental gymnastics as they desperately dodge the truth of Trump’s horribleness for them to remember what they truly believe or apply any actual tests of truth to what Trump says and does.

So I want to wake them up to their real, core beliefs. These people are not monsters. For the most part, they are good people whose one moral weakness is that they are followers by nature and do not have it in them to reject their shepherd outright.

Until the shepherd rapes their wooly little butts personally, or those of their family. Then suddenly they are all shocked and offended and surprised because suddenly, politics is real and not just something on the TV or Reddit and what they espouse and believe has actual, real consequences to them, personally, and not just “other people”.

I honestly believe that this phenomenon explains why it has to hurt them personally before they see it as a problem. Until then, politics aren’t real. They’re just a place where you can dump all your negative emotions and express all the rage and frustration that you can’t express at the real source of your problems, like your boss, and you don’t have to restrain yourself or worry about the consequences because it’s not really real anyhow so you might as well let loose.

I came to the conclusion in my late teens that people, for the most part, believe what they need to believe. This is especially true in the arena of politics because its abstract nature makes it a perfect place to imagine things are however you need them to be.

The only place more effective for that is religion. And unfortunately, one of the the ways in which the USA lags behind the rest of the world is that they still allow politics and religion to merge and mix.

The rest of the world shut that shit down ages ago. Just try to claim you’re God’s chosen one here in Canada.

People will blast you with disapproval from all angles because that is not merely blasphemous, it’s indiscreet. You are baring in public that which should be private.

And in a reserved culture like ours, that’s just plain NOT DONE.

Anyhow. My point is that we need to reach out to the Trumpers of the world and see them as the tragically flawed but otherwise good people they are and do the one thing we can do to lead them out of the terrible trap they are in :

Become a superior shepherd.

Be willing to, gently but firmly, lead them away from the vileness in which they find themselves enmeshed and into the pure green pastures where they can thrive.

To do so will require being very understanding of who they are and how they think because what works for them might well seem patronizing or even insulting to liberal intellectual types like ourselves.

Like direct emotional appeals. We can’t be afraid to go directly for the gut. Accept that these people cannot be reached via logic and evidence because their beliefs were not the product of reason, they were formed to meet a need.

Find that need, and fill it better than the current coterie of fucktards.

It shouldn’t be all that hard.

More after the break.

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Last of the month

Hit the end of the government cheque month today, the 19th of March, which is exactly two months before my 52nd birthday.

That doesn’t mean anything, I just thought it was neat

Checked my VISA card and found I had $50 left on it. After hemming and hawing and agonizing over what I “should” do with it, I said fuck it and ordered in.

So I looked over some options on DoorDash. But most of them seemed way too expensive for my budget.

Or, in the case of one place, the burger had brie on it. Plus it was expensive.

I’m not paying you $25 for a burger and fries no matter how “bistro” it is.

So I gave up and went to our old friends at Donair Dude. I am currently in cholesterol heaven as I eat lamb donair meat on a bed of fries.

That plus a big veggie samosa was $30. Still not cheap compared to when Julian is nice enough to get me McD’s, but it makes me happy.

I love lamb so damn much.

That leaves $20 on the card, which I will just put onto my Steam account, raising the current balance there to around $60.

I am getting to the point where I am going to take the plunge and actually buy a new game. I don’t know why I am so hesitant – if I don’t like it I can just return it.

I just have a nervous and fretful temperament, I guess. I suppose that’s yet another thing I need to learn to accept about myself.

Science says that temperament is permanent. You come out of the womb a nervous baby, you’re gonna be basically nervous for your entire life.

It doesn’t have to make you miserable, though. Not if you stop trying to fight it.

I feel like for my whole life, I have been trying, unprompted, to force myself to be the person I want to be or feel I am supposed to be, and it’s taken this long in my life t figure out how self-destructive and futile that is

One of the most important determinations in any person’s life is, as the cliché goes, who you really are. And that includes figuring out what parts of your personality are permanent and thus something you’re just going to have to deal with.

I’m a shy, nervous, silly, and not very sensible or practical dude.

But I am also incredibly intelligent, with enormous creative energy and talent, and unique and powerful insights into how things, and people, work.

And I am starting to think that all of that comes from the exact same place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess I might as well get this out of the way first.

Is it just me, or does it like I killed and mounted Eeyore?

Anyhow, as you can see (and hear) from the above, I don’t have a lot on my mind right now, or at least, nothing currently outputting to my conscious mind.

I’m pretty sure that my subconscious mind would still be processing stuff even if I was a coma. That’s just the way I am.

In that case, I hope it would all take the form of an exciting metaphorical adventure.

Some sort of quest to wake the giant, or something.

Finished my playthrough of Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive (aka final – Ed.) Edition. Ascended to the titular Divinity, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds because it’s not like you get to actually do anything with your new powers.

I guess godhood would be rather hard to program into a game. Even vaguely defined “divinity” would probably end up being either boring or just maddeningly vague.

I guess I was wrong about the title having nothing to do with the content of the game. The subject of Divinity is actually central to the whole plot of the game.

But the Original Sin bit is still a load of crap.

Now, I am at a crossroads. I could :

1. Do another playthrough. As usual, I have already started one. That’s how I deal with the post-completion depression that often comes with finishing a game. As depicted in this song. I could just keep going with that playthrough, maybe after looking through the rather enormous collection of mods for the game for something to make a second playthrough more fun and exciting.
2. Play through Baldur’s Gate 3. That would complete the “trilogy” of games by Larian Studios. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one hell of a game, even though it has nothing to do with the previous two games, and there would be a sort of logic to completely the triptych. But that game, being modern, has a tendency to make my computer crash. And…
3. Buy a new game. There’s the Spring Sale underway on Steam and I could get a number of games for rather good prices. Of course, being recent, they might crash my computer too, sight. I really need to get that new power supply. And then ask Spuug to install it for me. Should be way less complex to install than the GPU.

So that’s where I am right now relative to my one and only hobby, gaming. Right now I am leaning towards getting a new game and taking my chances with crashing.

If I do get something new, it will probably be the blazing hot “new” release Elden Ring, a 3D ARPG from last year that was all the rage during those bright and shining pre-Trump days, or Palworld, which is a Pokémon clone with guns.

I’ve enjoyed that kind of monster collecting game before, but the real appeal to me is that this particular game has a lot of very spicy mods for it that will let you interact with your monsters in a more intimate way.

Gotta fuck’m all, after all.

But I know that adult mods tend to only be amusing/arousing for a little while before they become old hat, so I am not sure they are enough of a reason to buy a game.

So I will probably end up getting Elden Ring.

Or, ya know, being paralyzed be indecision until the sale is over and I can’t afford anything recent again.

That’s always an option.

More after the break.

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Through a glass darkly

Got my new glasses in the mail today.

They don’t work any better than my previous pair, at least not yet.

I am going to try to keep them on as much as possible in case my eyes just need to adjust to them.

But needless to say, this development has depressed me.

I was so looking forward to nice, normal glasses I could wear all the time instead of my current pair which make me farsighted and thus are useless to try to wear when I am reading or using my computer, and that’s most of my day.

So far, I think I’m habituating to the new glasses, but only time will tell. It might turn out to just be hopeful thinking.

If the glasses are, indeed, unsuitable, I will be faces with the thorny issue of why.

Did I accidentally give the glasses company my old prescription? I don’t know. It’s possible. But the new glasses seem to have a different effect on my vision than the previous pair, so I don’t think so.

Are the new pair defective? Possible. But I don’t know how I would figure that out. So for now I will have to assume that they are functioning as intended.

Is it the worst option, namely that my eyes are just plain too fucked up for glasses now? I really, really hope not.

If I go blind, I will kill myself. There’s no way I could handle that.

Luckily I have a needle in the eye appointment next week so I can just ask Doctor McKay about it. See what he thinks.

It could be that it’s hard to correct my vision while this swelling issue that is the reason for the needles remains unresolved.

So I am still holding out hope that if Doctor McKay and I can get the swelling to go down and stay down, my vision will improve dramatically.

Especially in my left eye, which is the more fucked up eye.

It will be tricky, keeping the new glasses on for extended periods. I can feel eyestrain building up in my eyes and my forehead from all the straining to see I am having to do just to see what I am typing.

And I have the WordPress screen font turned up pretty large.

We will see how things go. I will keep the new glasses on for as long as I can stand it, anyhow, and maybe my eye muscles will adjust.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye on the situation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welp, he’s my video for today :

I’m thinking I was maybe a bit too harsh.

I mean, I believe everything I said in that video. Conservatism is the political ideology is stupidity. Its media’s real purpose is to hide the actual complex and nuanced realities of life from people so that they do not have to face the harsh truth that they are actually just plain not smart enough to understand the world, let alone have opinions about it.

All of that is true but not useful, as Felicity would say.

And it represents only part of what I want for the world. As I have discussed before, part of me is a fire-breathing truth-spitting iconoclastic ideologue looking to shake the walls of Heaven with my words, and part of me just wants everybody to come together in peace, harmony, and understanding of our mutual shared humanity.

What can I say, I’m a complicated man. I contain multitudes.

I suppose that, just for public sanity’s sake, I may have to choose which side to go with one of these days. I can’t be like Don Rickles, acerbic and insulting one moment then an overflowing pot of human warmth the next.

At least, I don’t think I can do that.

But for now, I am just stretching my capabilities and learning what I can do with this whole YouTube thing. I mean, that’s just my third video of this new era. I haven’t even started to find my real voice yet.

And who knows, maybe tomorrow I will be full of loving kindness.

Like I said. Complicated. Like I am part Martin Luther and part Jesus Christ.

I do have an intent behind the video above. I want to activate shame and outrage in my conservative targets because I want them to get mad enough that they have to prove to me that they aren’t stupid by actually thinking of counterarguments.

And that’s the long game I am playing. If we can get them truly thinking about their opinions and testing them against reality, the side of the angels wins in the long run. Even if all they are doing is looking for ammunition to fire back at me.

So am I just trolling? Well no. I’m not just trying to piss people off so I can laugh at them. I am trying to challenge them in order to make them mad enough that they are willing to do whatever it takes to defeat me – even think for themselves.

But in the interests of full disclosure, there’s part of me that just wants to have people to debate with because that’s my idea of fun.

More fun that just burning my brain cells with video games, that’s for sure.

And I want to contribute to the public discourse. That’s one of the main reasons I want to become a pundit.

The other reasons are more selfish. What can I say, I’m only human.

I want nice stuff too!

But I also think I have a very unique and distinctive point of view that could move the public discourse along by prodding people to think about what they believe and why.

In that, I would be playing the role of the trickster. That’s the trickster’s karmic role, to wake people up and get them thinking, whether that’s with delightful comedy or searing diatribes or insightful political commentary.

And I can do all of those!

And I’m willing to cautiously believe that this YouTube thing might be an actual purpose and a role for me in life.

Certainly if I attract an audience, whether they’re for me or against me, I would feel like I am doing something with my life for once.

There’s got to be some righteous purpose for all the stuff going on in my head.

Or at least a way to make a living.

More after the break.

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The first step is change

When I was a “too smart for his own good” bored out of my mind in class because thw work wasn’t even in the same galaxy as being challenging for me, I would look around at my fellow students studiously beavering away at the classwork and wonder what it is that made me different from them.

I eventually came to the conclusion that part of the difference was self-image.

They didn’t think of themselves as the kind of people who get good grades, nor did they want to become that kind of person, so they struggled. Often they came from families where academic achievement was either passively or actively punished because it made the child not “fit in” with their family and/or one ot both of the parents was very sensitive about their lack of book smarts and would undermine the child out of their own jealousy or hurt feelings.

My “advantage”, therefore, was that I came from a very intellectual family where curiosity and learning were very much encouraged by my mother the teacher and there were lots of books lying around that I could read and feed my mind.

But even moreso, I was way too socially clueless for me to know I wasn’t “supposed” to be so overwhelmingly bright and by the time I figured that out, I was far, far too stubbornly prideful to pretend to be dumber than I am for any reason.

Pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to pull that off anyhow.

The conclusion I draw from this is thus : if you are going to set out to learn something, the very first thing you have to do is make peace with the fact that you are going to become the sort of person that knows that thing.

For example, don’t take a cooking class unless you’re certain that you are ready to become someone who knows how to cook.

If the knowledge conflicts with your self-image, stay home, because no matter how hard you try to put the knowledge into your mind, your identity will spit it right back out again.

Me, I’m socially inept enough to be a total polyglot nerd. There is literally nothing I could learn that would conflict with my self-image and/or my social role.

There would be things it would surprise me to learn, like sewing, but I’m not against it.

SO before you set out to learn something, ask yourself what you assume about the sort of person who knows that kind of thing, and if you want to belong to that group.

I think it could clear away a lot of roadblocks for you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kentucky Fried Chicken now has onion rings!

And they are quite good, too. I got them instead of fries with my KFC order last night. They are just the right amount of crunchy, which I quite like, and of course have lots of delicious onion flavour as well.

And they’re not even greasy! Truly a culinary marvel.

Anyhow, here’s a thing I made today.

Bluesky is a-Twitter (LOL) with calls for Chuck to resign and let some liberals who actually believe in things take over.

And that’s made two things connect in my mind : calling people like that chucklefuck Chuck a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) and how I have been saying that we are in an era where the next generation rises up and kills the old dinosaurs like Chuck in order to really address the important issues of the day.

I was originally talking about the brewing outrage in Republican circles that might one day lead to Trump’s impeachment and arrest, but it applies equally to the current situation in Democratic circles plus it’s a pun.

So consider this current situation to be the asteroid that wipes out the DINO-saurs and makes actual fucking change not just possible but vitally necessary.

The barbarians have breached the gates and seized the capital and it’s going to take real guts and true passion to save the Library of Alexandria from these assholes.

Oh wait, this just in, Elon defunded all libraries.

Civilization sure was nice while it lasted.

I’m still mulling over exactly what I am going to do with my newly regained powers of video. The truth is that there is absolutely no reason to get particularly fancy with the videos. YouTube’s culture not only doesn’t call for slick video production, I am pretty sure people don’t even trust it.

And that goes double for TikTok. I must admit, I miss TikTok. My experience of it was quite positive, even when I got in trouble for daring to suggest that we, as a culture, have gone too far in the hunt for predatory pedophiles.

Heck, I didn’t even suggest it. I just asked if maybe it was true.

But it kicked off a whole lot of people completely freaking out on me and I replied to every single nasty comment and I absolutely LOVED it.

I need to get into that kind of trouble more often. Come at me, bro. I’m feisty AF and I love verbal combat above nearly any other activity.

But I can see how the role of YouTube provocateur might lead me down a dark path because the more controversial I am, the more views I get and hence the more $$$.

So I would have to watch out for that.

I know it’s possible to use TikTok on a Windows machine. You just have to use an AndroidOS emulator, which would help me in other ways too.

Like with those damned websites that require a cell phone to sign up.

In general, I should work on setting up various forms of crossposting. I’ve been doing this blog for an audience of maybe five people tops for a long time and it would not be that big of a hassle to look for some WordPress plugins that could crosspost this stuff I write to like, Instagram and Tumblr and Wattpad and the like.

I dunno. Where DO people post their long form text content these days?

I could even, in theory, use one of those voice AI programs to turn my text into audio and then turn that audio into video for YouTube.

I dunno though. It might be weird to have people I don’t know reading this thing of mine.

I might start actually worrying about how people are going to react to what I type instead of just basically writing whatever pops into my head when I sit down to write.

Oh well. Time for me to FINALLY take a shower with my new cast cover!

If this works out, I’ll buy one for the other foot!

More after the break.

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Apres le deluge

Well the cast cover worked out great.

It’s basically just a long plastic sleeve with a big gasket (think “rubber ring”) at the top. Your leg goes through the ring into the plastic sleeve and the gasket seals around your knee and keeps the shower water out.

So yay, that part of the problem is solved and I can shower comfortably again!

Trying to make do with plastic shopping bags and tape was never gonna work out for me. I don’t know what competence magic Albert did when he fastened the bags around my feet, but it’s definitely beyond my meager capabilities.

You know, technically, dyspraxia is a learning disability, and that means I am both a wild out of control genius and learning disabled.

Something for me to think about in the future.

Anyhow, I was able to take a nice hot shower without the bandage on my left foot getting wet at all, and that makes me very happy.

Makes me feel that important bit more human, you know?

Watched a movie called Wild Robot with Julian last night. Holy crap, the feels. The plot is a mess structurally. The initial plotline ends and then the movie just keeps going.

For like, another hour.

But that’s forgivable because the movie has a very big heart and evokes very big feelings, especially in a big softhearted furry like me.

Plus one of the main characters is a fox named Fink.

And he starts off cynical and manipulative but through the magic of helping the robot Roz raise the little gosling Brightbill he learns warm values.

And there’s this scene near the end where Roz is going to go away from her new forest friends so the people hunting for her don’t put her friends in danger and Fink has this breakdown where he tells Roz that she can’t go because he needs her because she’s his only friend and he’s never had a friend before.

And that just wrecked me emotionally.

I’m tearing up just thinking about it right now. Because I am that fox. That scene plugged directly into my sad and lonely childhood and I felt everything that Fink was feeling and I cried.

Not as much as I should have. Stupid male emotional constipation, was I really that worried that Julian would think I’m a wimp?

But I cried, especially when I tried to tell Julian during the credits about what was making me so sad and I couldn’t get two words out before the emotion overtook me and I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t make more words come out.

And I am very glad all that happened. I need to cry. I need to let my emotions out in a way that’s way less cerebral than writing about them. I need to express myself.

Maybe one day I will get to the point where it doesn’t take a movie with a fox in it to push me to tears. The only other scene in an animated feature I can compare it to is that sequence in Zootopia where Nick talks about his trying to become a “boy scout”.

That’s basically what happened to me too, Nick. Thought I was starting to fit in then a bully chased me off.

Maybe I should watch the Fantastic Mister Fox again.

Catharsis is healing, after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You might want to skip this one, Julian. I’m not looking to put you or Felicity in the middle of anything but I just have to get all this off my chest.

I feel like Joe has completely given up on me.

And not just me, us. He never participates in any, and I mean ANY, of the usual ways we used to get together as a group.

No Zoom calls Tuesday and Friday after midnight. No Denny’s on Sunday night. No getting together with Julian and I to watch Colbert at midnight. No nothing.

He’s technically been back home for months now and to my surprise my life has barely changed at all. The only difference is that every now and then, seemingly entirely by accident, I see him for like half a second.

You know, just enough to confirm that he IS around and therefore he definitely IS avoiding me as opposed to when he was sick and living with his family and therefore had a pretty good reason for not being in my life.

Now, all he does is make vague noises about insomnia and being tired to Julian and it’s a magic “get out of all socialization” card and permission for him to just plain not bother with us any more.

And that really, really hurts.

To say it breaks my heart is a vast understatement. It crushes it. I always thought he enjoyed spending time with me and Julian and Felicity but apparently it was an onerous task he was dying to escape this whole time.

And I know what’s happening.

Warning, I’m about to be creepy in that special way of mine.

I know that when it comes time to decide whether or not to participate in one of our activities, he is choosing the immediate warm comfortable relief of saying no and enjoying the euphoric rush that we introverts apparently get when we dodge socializing.

Hence people talking about feeling positively giddy when plans fall through.

Not me. As patient readers know, I don’t take disappointment well, and Joe has been disappointing me over and over again for months now. I really love spending time wth him and I thought he liked spending time with me, but apparently he didn’t like it enough for it to be preferable to staying in his room.

And I know that he has not been thinking about the cumulative effect of every single time he fails to show up for me. Every time the possibility comes up, it’s just so much easier to say no and heave an internal sigh of great relief at all the social wear and tear and effort you just avoided.

And I am sure he doesn’t feel like he’s rejecting me/us every time, but that is definitely how it feels to me.

I mean, there’s a part of me that resists being social too. I’m an introvert as well. Being social drains me. It takes effort for me to overcome that.

But I do it because I love my friends and I love spending time with them so unless I am definitely sick, I am going to be there with and for them.

To me, all this is intuitively obvious. We express how we feel and what we care about through our priorities. When you de-prioritize people, they notice, and it hurts.

And knowing that spending time with me is not all that important to him feels like being stabbed in the heart with an icicle.

This has been building up in me for weeks and I feel better now that I let it out.

Thanks for reading it!

More after the break.

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I made a thing!

This time, with the camera a decent distance from my face because I’m not recording myself with a tablet and therefore myopically needing to be close to the screen in order to see what I am doing.

Now I have a great big monitor for that, yay!

And I had fun doing some basic video editing. I’ve got all the linkages in the process working so I can record stuff whenever I like.

I’m not ready to commit to X minutes for Y days yet, but I’m getting there.

Next time I’ll comb my hair first.

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My life on the Z list

I suppose I should start reading up on how to be a YouTube star.

I know I won’t enjoy it. I never enjoy reading those kinds of instructional things. I am not great at following instructions and everything I do is about self-expression so I also don’t like being told how to express myself.

Plus I lack self-discipline, I suppose.

But I will make myself read up on the basics of YouTube self-promotion so that I can get that much right at least.

I know that a big, big part of promoting your content these days is crafting the perfect title and thumbnail. And that’s kind of a drag.

But it doesn’t matter how good your video is if nobody clicks on it.

I can probably manage the title, that’s just words and I am good with words. And it might be fun coming up with clickbait-y (but honest!!) titles.

I’m willing to zazz up my content to give it maximum appeal but I am not going to use those titles that actually have almost nothing to do with the content.

God, those piss me off.

But my opinions have a tendency to be kind of provocative at times, and well, I am not above maximizing that effect in my titles.

I don’t wanna do the thumbnails though. That’s graphic design. Ick.

I hope that out there, someone has a template for Photoshop or the like where I can just type in the words and it handles the “typesetting”.

All in all, it should be interesting to finally launch myself into the much richer medium of video content instead of just doing text all the time.

Words are great but they’re limited, you know? Even mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mood is better today.

Yesterday it was pretty dark. Not for particular reason I can think of, just that part of my long mood cycle I guess.

I suppose that’s another thing I need to get used to about myself : I’m moody. And my moods don’t necessarily proceed logically from anything in my life.

And that’s frustrating.

My overly logical and controlling mind wants everything to proceed logical via a known and controllable cause and effect and has a very hard time accepting that some thing happen “just cause”.

I mean, they have a cause on the fundamental scientific level. Everything does. Presumably a Clarke level alien could track my brain chemicals and activity and show me exactly why my mood shifts like it does.

But I sure as heck don’t know.

It does feel like a cycle, though. A process. Some deep part of me is on a long loop kind of like a conveyor belt in a factory, and the factory is smelting and refining me as I pass through it, and even though the belt is very long, I am still keenly away both that I am going to end up back at the beginning again and that I am not really getting anywhere.

I still feel like a passenger in life. A spectator. A tagalong. Life is something that happens to other people, not me. I’m just this strange and unique creature who is always on the outside looking in and who has no idea what it’s like to actually be apart of things.

But perhaps there is strength to be found in my strange life in suspended animation. I certainly have an extremely unique point of view and some very deep insights into how things work and how they SHOULD and COULD work.

And I am passionately interested in what is going on in the world, and I feel like I could make a valuable contribution to the public discourse if I could only get over myself.

I’m working on it.

At least I think I am. I dunno. Maybe this life of mine really is a conveyor belt and the unhealthy part of my mind has gotten very good at creating the illusion of progress while keeping me “safe” by making sure I don’t get anywhere or change anything.

I’m definitely of two minds about nearly everything.

There’s the healthy, sane, expansive, confident, upbeat side of me that can’t wait to go out into the world and find fun things to do and cool people to meet.

That’s the side of me that really just wants to go play with the other kids.

But the other part of me is still that traumatized little monkey who was raised in isolation and then introduced to the other monkeys and instantly freaked the fuck out.

My isolated life has made me ill suited to go play with the other kids. The sheer volume and density of the fear involved is staggering. I had to learn, at way too young an age, that my only safety lay in nobody noticing me because I stayed hidden away.

And the only place I was truly safe was alone, at home, in my bedroom. That was the only place I could let my guard down and relax the hypervigilance and feel, well, as safe as I am capable of feeling, anyway.

Even in here, the permanently panicking little animal inside me never truly relaxes. That’s the part of me that has been hiding deep in the darkest recesses of my mind and calling the shots from in there with the cold yet crazed calculation of a mighty villain.

He’s just trying to be safe.

But I don’t know what it would take for him to realize he IS safe. Has been for a very long time. The things he fears so much are just ghosts of the distant past.

But he’s afraid to relax and let go.

Because that’s when they GET you.

And that would be the worst thing possible.

More after the break.

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Everything is fine

That’s what I am telling myself and sending it as deep as it can go.

Everything is OK now. I can relax. That scared little animal inside me can finally calm down, lay down, and have a nice long rest.

We’ve made it home safely. In fact, we’ve been home for a very long time.

And we have nothing to fear in the big wide world but our fears themselves. We are perfectly capable of handling whatever life throws at us.

And even if we get overwhelmed and freak out again, so what? Hang in there and wait for a little while and it will go away.

Anxiety is not destiny, for fuck’s sake. It’s just the result of a malformed adrenal response being triggered by innocuous things and if I just hang in there rather than fleeing I will see how meaningless it is.

And there’s always Xanax.

At this point, I feel like what remains of my skinsuit of fear is really just a kind of chemical residue remaining in my system entirely shorn of any cognitive justification.

So much for the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. According to it, if I change my thinking I will change how I feel!

Yeah right. Fuck off, CBT.

Ahem. Anyhow, knowing that all this fear holding me back is basically biochemical bullshit does help me push through it.

Sure, the alarms will go off, but I don’t have to listen to them. I know they are meaningless and represent nothing but a broken warning system.

I feel like I am building up the strength and will to make a big leap into something new. Like making my way onto YouTube again.

I look at my YouTube account and see over 300 videos there and I realize that I am perfectly capable of creating content daily.

Only now it would be much more well produced and way, way funnier.

I could really rock the YouTube world but I have to get started and established first. Make a “workflow” that makes creating videos as seamless and friction free as I can.

Any minute now. I swear to God. It’s coming.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.