You know, I’m starting to get used to never truly being happy with what I make.

Did another song. Here it is.

Like, I know there’s things I wanted to put into that song that never made it in. And I know there’s aspects of that metaphor that could be expanded on to better flesh out my feelings on the matter. And so forth and so on.

But I learn by doing, not by getting it perfect the first time. I can only tell myself that the next song will be better and so on ad infinitum until the day I die.

Would that be “ad mortem”?

Not that I think today’s song is terrible. Far from it. But as the creator, I can feel how much better it could be and it occupies my mind.

Eventually this “little dissatisfaction” will burrow itself deep into my subconscious and inform the inner workings of my petulant but brilliant muse and that will, in time, lead to making better songs.

It’s kind of amazing, really.

Today’s been okay so far. I enjoyed writing the lyrics to that sad lil song up there. I think I am slowly getting to the point where I can stick with things and fuss and fidget over them as I try to make them better.

You know, the way sane people make art.

I’m still pretty impatient. I want to blaze across the sky, not tinker and labor away in some subterranean atelier.

But I’m learning. And I am growing impatient with feeling embarrassed by what I make and its slipshod and sloppy half-assed nature.

I am tired of “getting away” with turning in first drafts. I know that I could do so much better and that I should stop resting on my enormous laurels and coasting on my ability to impress people and start turning out some seriously professional work.

I mean, most of the time I don’t even remember to stick my “like and subscribe” thing at the end of my videos. That’s got to end.

I should even start putting a link to my Patreon in the descriptions of my videos. And come up with some sort of reward tier thing.

Gah, it all seems so needy and pathetic. Self promotion is always hard to do but it’s especially hard when you are from a generation that hates promotion in general.

Look, like my shit or don’t. Whatever.

But I want money and that means getting the fuck over myself and doing the things other, way more successful YouTubers do to drum up support.

I could make merch, I suppose. Very snarky merch. T-shirts and coffee mugs and decorative wigwams with sarcastic, cynical slogans.

Or maybe a very obviously fictional T-shirt for my “band” (which doesn’t even have a name yet) with tour dates at like, the gates of Hell and Magical Pony Land and so on.

No idea what I’d call myself, and it’s not like I’d tour. I’m not even a real recording artist, I’m just some AI aware poet making songs with Riffusion for fun.

Still, it would be awesome if some actual band wanted to play one of my songs. Riffusion could be seen as the ultimate way for songwriters to demo their songs when they can’t sing or play an instrument.

I’ve Googled whether there’s a tool out there that will generation backing tracks based on existing vocals and the answer, astonishingly enough, seems to be “no”.

It’s so counterintuitive! AI can generate entire songs based on my lyrics but it can’t do the seemingly much simpler task of making music to go with my singing.

Oh well, I am sure someone is working on it. It could easily be something every aspiring singer is going to want, especially if it comes with vocal cleanup and autotune.

I mean, what the hell, the professionals use them!

More after the break.

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Life at the bottom

My mood is fairly “down” right now.

But like I told Joe recently, being “down” doesn’t necessarily mean feeling “bad”.

There are few assumptions engendered by modern society quite as harmful as the idea that we should be happy all the time and if we’re not happy, something is wrong.

Either with us, or with the world, or both.

And this assumption causes us to fight the natural downshift in our mood cycle and it is this futile fight that does us the most damage.

Smart, sane people just let their mood go up and down. They know, intuitively, from their life experience, that moods go up and down. Sometimes we’re “up”, and sometimes we’re “down”, just like sometimes we’re energetic and sometimes we’re tired.

In general, we in the West need to make peace with the cyclical.

The world turns. The sun rises and falls. Night become day, day becomes night. The seasons change as the Earth goes ’round the Sun. The Sun goes ’round the galaxy, and the galaxy dances with all the other galaxies in an endless dos-y-dos.

Even our very lives rise and fall and wax and wane, just like the Moon.

We live in circles but we think in arrows.

Especially me. I’m a future oriented pragmatist and that inherently means that I want to move from absolute position A to absolute position B via “progress”.

This is deeply fundamental to how I think. There has to be at least the possibility of improvement. I can’t imagine living in a world where everything returns to first position and the same things happen all over again.

But I recognize the cyclical nature of things. No matter how hard we try to travel in a straight and logical line, the best we can hope to do is go up the spiral staircase.

And you know what? That’s good enough for me. Straight lines are overrated. As long as we’re trending upwards, I can learn to accept the highs and lows.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey look, a topic! Let’s see if I get back to it after today’s vid.

Warning : I sang again.

And yup. I definitely sing better without the karaoke music distracting me.

In theory, I could now add the music from the karaoke version I found online and try to get it to sync with my acapella version and make a more complete version that way.

But meh. I kind of like my stripped down version.

Plus I only have so much energy I can put into these things.

Makes me really, really wish I had a partner or assistant in all of this so that it wasn’t all dependent on my own personal resources.

I need a team, dammit. Or some really advanced AI. But preferably the AI because I am sick of my mental illness forcing me to do everything all by myself all the time.

I can work with others! No, really!

I just hope that having a team wouldn’t make me go mad with power.

Speaking of which….

Yes, I’m gonna take another crack at my feeling of being so much more powerful than the other humans with which I share this globe.

I know I’ve felt this way since I was a child. Like I was towering over others intellectually, in not just a quantitative but also a qualitative way, and that I had to step very carefully so I did non end up crushing the Lilliputians that surrounded me.

The sense of responsibility, therefore, is overpowering. Crushing, even. It’s left me scared to make a move a lot of the time.

Or that I at least need one of those “truck backing up” sirens.

The obvious answer to this crushing sense of responsibility for the power I wield would be to decide that I don’t give a shit about the Lilliputians any more, they can look after themselves, and I am going to walk the planet like the gargantuan genius I am and screw the consequences to other people.

And I still hold on to that as an option. At the very least, I should consider just how much of my sensation of enormity is justified as oppose to, say, insane.

I can’t really see a way to escape the truth of my own power. It could very well be that if I go out into the world that someone will finally put me in my place and show me that I am not all that smart after all and quite frankly that would be a huge relief.

But my life’s pattern has been the opposite. Not even university offered me a challenge. I thought rings around my professors just like I did with my teachers. Nobody I met there was remotely in the same weight class as my big bad brain.

I can’t be the smartest person in the world, can I? It’s so unlikely.

Speaking of university, I took a stab at figuring out a distance learning solution for myself yesterday only to come up upon a rather huge problem :

If it’s distance learning, I could theoretically go to literally any university in the world.

So how the hell do I pick one??

I know I want to study psychology, with the aim of become a therapist. Although there’s a lazy side of me that just wants to be a pampered academic somewhere.

Why yes, I’d love to work for your think tank. Tell me what you want us to recommend.

Oh well, at least I have moved my playing piece one square closer to the finish line by looking into the matter.

I just want to get paid to be smart, dammit.

Surely a mind like mine has some sort of economic value.

I wanna get paid.

More after the break.

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Quick product review

More of a warning, really.

President’s Choice Mini Poppadoms Creamy Garlic Flavour are delicious but they are not, I repeat, NOT SUBTLE.

More like getting kicked in the mouth by a horse made of flavour.

I should have known. After all, this is a product aimed at people from India. Of course it’s going to be rather intense.

Their taste buds are not calibrated like ours.

Have you ever tried their “sweets”? Holy diabetes, Batman.

Like I said, they’re delicious, so I will finish them.

But like…. very slowly.

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About my education

Off the top of my head, I have no idea how I would decide what university to get my remote learning psych degree from.

I guess I could look for a list of the top schools for psych and then apply to the number one school and work my way down the list.

I’m not afraid of rejection. I can live with it. I’m um, not to everyone’s tastes.

But those who like me like me a LOT.

Of course, it would have to be a school that offers remote learning. Looking back in time, I really should have tried this during Covid, when ALL learning was remote.

Attending classes via Zoom is okay with me. I wonder if Zoom has the equivalent of raising your hand when you want to ask a question?

Then again, presumably raising your hand would still work too.

I’m always so um, “eager to contribute”.

Watching prerecorded lectures is fine by me too. Better than fine because it lets me go back and see bits I’m interested in again and really make sure that the knowledge sinks into my capacious noggin.

Obviously I am not worried about grades. I test well.

I suppose it’s possible that I would find some challenge in the work, at least once I got into junior and senior years.

But it’s also possible I would breeze through effortlessly like I always do. Maybe if I went on to get my Master’s, I would find challenge there.

I’d want my Master’s if I planned to be a therapist.

Still not sure on that. I’d make a good one but I might be too old and tired to get into something fairly intensive like that.

Perhaps the life of pampered academia is my true calling after all.

It certainly has a nice ring to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More stuff from my past, but it’s just cat stories.

I miss all those kitties. They’re long gone, obviously, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and cats don’t live that long.

But I still remember them all, their lovely fur patterns and little personalities and how much I loved petting a purring cat in my lap while I watched TV.

I had some very lovely Zen moments like that where I felt very cozy and content and like all was well when I had a happy lil cat in my lap.

I have way, way more cat stories to share, of course. The vid is barely an intro to them. Maybe the fact that the Internet loves cats will attract attention to today’s vid and that will encourage me to make more cat story videos.

Or maybe it’ll just be what I do when I can’t think of anything else. I dunno.

The cat thing was actually my plan B. I spent the first hour of my usual video making time trying to do a karaoke vid that I could live with.

No dice there. It’s weird, I actually sing better when there’s no musical accompaniment, just me acapella, than when I try to do a karaoke.

Part of that is performance pressure, no doubt, but I also think it’s because the music distracts me from my vocal performance.

When it’s just me, I’m not trying to read lyrics on a screen, I am not subconsciously straining to be heard over the music, I’m not being surprised by little things in the karaoke version of the song that I don’t remember from the original song.

It’s just me singing, and I can concentrate on my voice.

So maybe I should skip the karaoke part and just record acapella versions of the songs I like. Maybe put the lyrics on screen in a text format just to consult.

Heck, if I did that, I would even be able to edit the video properly. Right now, I don’t edit my karaoke vids (and it shows) because I don’t think I could get the music in the edits to line up properly and trust me, with my keen sense of timing, if it doesn’t line up perfectly I will know and it will loom large in my mind.

But if it’s just me singing solo, I could probably make that work. Do sane and normal things like using the best of multiple takes for each verse.

And maybe even figure out how to put the whole thing through autotune, or some other kind of filter that makes it sound like I can actually sing.

I’m not too proud to accept that kind of “help”.

I mean, I only sing because I like to sing anyhow. I shouldn’t be worrying about the quality at all.

My fault for making karaoke vids in the first place, I guess.

I can always let Riffusion do the singing for me, or something similar. I know there’s apps out there that let you write the lyrics right on the piano roll with the rest of the sample based music and it just sings it for you in whatever voice you like.

That kind of power could go to my head pretty fast!

I’m telling you, it’s a golden age for use creators who don’t have any manual artistic talents. I can’t play an instrument or sing, I can’t paint or draw, I’m too clumsy and crippled to dance, and so forth and so on.

But thanks to modern AI, I don’t have to be able to do those things. I can bypass my dyspraxia entirely and let the computer handle that part while I handle the design and creation and writing of things.

I swear I was born to do things top-down like that.

And thanks to AI, I don’t even need people skills to do it!

More after the break.

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Today’s bit of adorableness from BlueSky comes in the form of dogs sitting weird.

Or otherwise assuming unusual postures.

One of the many charming things about our canine companions is their complete and total lack of self-consciousness.

They have no idea when they look stupid.

It’s quite refreshing, really.

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I can hear clearly now

The hum is gone! Hallelujah.

See, many months ago, the device driver for the sound card on my motherboard spontaneously decided to uninstall itself.

For some reason, my system interpreted, “I lost connection with this device a few seconds ago” to mean “begone, foul contrivance, and never return!”

So I had to scramble for a new way to get sound on my computer.

Then I remembered there was an audio jack on the back of my monitor. And luckily, that worked. Going through the monitor meant my system could use THOSE drivers instead of the mysterious vanishing normal ones.

So yay, I had sound again. But boo because that jack on the monitor was apparently completely unshielded because my new audio came with a constant hum like you’d get from being too close to a power station.

You have, no doubt, heard it on my videos.

The human also made my speakers only able to do half the volume. This was particularly bothersome when I wanted to listen to a YouTube video while on the toilet or have music on while I showered.

Showering with my music on is another thing which makes me feel very Zen.

Well today the jack on the back of the monitor was acting up. So out of frustration, expecting nothing, I plugged my speakers back into the normal jack, and lo and behind suddenly it could find the drivers again.

So, phew. The hum is gone. My volume is back. It should be a lot easier to hear me in my videos now. Our long national nightmare is finally over.

I can’t help but wonder if I could have fixed the problem a long time ago if I had only thought to plug the speakers back into the proper place way back then.

But who does that kind of thing? Checks to see if something spontaneously fixed itself? It’s like when a doctor asks me if I have tried walking lately.

Why no, Doc. The way my legs feel after just walkering back forth from the kitchen tells me all I need to know.

Some people. I tell ya.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I never went. What’s it like?

Here is today’s vid.

It’s a great story (in my mind) because it so deftly illustrates both what a strange child I was and what a little smartass I’ve always been.

But seriously, I can’t imagine having reacted any other way. For me this “test” was insultingly easy and back then I basically didn’t have a filter – I was so damned blunt – so the idea that I should conceal my reaction was many a parsec away.

I might have learned to read at an absurdly early age (3) and I talked like a tiny professor but tact would not make an appearance for some time.

Presumably, the test was not so simple for the kids around me. I don’t know that for sure – I find it hard to imagine what being a normal child that age is like – but presumably these grownups had some idea of what they’re doing and were, say, child psychology professionals and they had just never encountered a kid like me before.

Trust me – neither had anybody else.

Well, okay, I don’t know that for sure. Sheer probability suggests that I can’t possibly be a completely unique human being. There must be someone out there like me.

One has to assume there’s a whole bunch of us, actually.

It’s kind of like the question of alien life. No matter how improbable you think the rise of life on Earth was, compared to the vastness of the universe it’s a virtual certainty that it has to have happened more than once.

But I suppose that means my own improbable existence compared to the nearly 8 billion human beings on this planet has its own Fermi paradox :

Where are they?

Where are the other people like me?

Do I really, truly have a tribe somewhere or am I a bespoke weirdo and completely unique and doomed to be alone in my strangeness forever?

And do I really want to know?

Of course, it’s not quite THAT stark, although it feels that way sometimes. I have my wonderful nerdy friends, both RL (love you so much, Felicity, Julian, and Joe) and VR (way too many fuzzies to list) and we and they are enough alike to relate to each other on at least some levels.

And maybe that’s really as close as anyone gets to another person.

But I don’t think so.

I know much greater closeness is possible. The media is full of close loving relationships far more intimate and interdependent than anything I have known.

And I worry about that. I’ve been alone on this cold little island of mine, touching no one and no one touching me, for almost my entire life.

I’ve never been any closer than friends with anyone, and even my friendships, while precious beyond measure to me, are not the close kind some appear to have.

We enjoy one another’s company and we do things together and we talk and laugh and have a lot of fun, but that’s it.

And I am very worried that it’s no longer possible for anyone to get closer than that to me at all. That if you don’t use your capacity for real connection, it dies off forever and that my lonely little island is all I will ever know.

I could fake closeness, probably. And maybe that would be enough.

Maybe fake love is better than being lonely.

Maybe fake closeness is the best I can hope for. Maybe for me, life can only ever be a performance, a show, because my real heart closed for business a long long time ago and all I can do now is simulate one and then maybe, just maybe, you and I can pretend it’s real for a while and share some imaginary warmth.

There’s probably a song in that somewhere. Hmm.

More after the break.

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Brace your heart for warming!

Because this is just about as wonderfully life-affirming as it gets!

I might have posted that to my blog once before. If so, I’m sorry.

But I mean, come on! It’s the story of a man meeting the lioness he raised as a cub on the savannah seven years after they parted ways and now she’s a fully grown lion and she greets him with such evident joy you’d think she was Dino greeting Fred!

How can you not love that?

I should probably put a sentence break in that paragraph but ehh.,

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My meaty marinara

Crunched the numbers and found that I had enough slack in my budget to order in, so I am now quite happily stuffed with my beloved Meaty Marinara pasta from Pizza Slut.

I will finally exit this second of two 5 week months a week from now, and my financial ship is just fine. I’m not exactly rolling in dough (any more) but I have money for groceries, Denny’s, and McD’s, and that’s all I need.

So being financially OK and full of meat, I feel pretty good.

I’m happy with how today’s vid turned out. I still long to do things which have a higher production value and/or a more professional look, but for now my eccentric little talking head videos will have to do.

By the time I am done editing a video like today’s I am usually quite tired. So that suggests that at least if it would involve more effort than that, it is not on the table.

Not for now, anyhow.

But who knows, maybe I will stumble upon a formula for high impact low effort content, maybe something with comedy, and be able to up my game that way.

I mean, I have all this comedic genius lying around. Might as well use it for something. I am sure that modern AI tools could help me make another webcomic.

Surely artificial intelligence can handle generating text balloons by now, right?

Or I could do audio skits via one of those AI text to speech sites. Have Mark Rubio argue politics with LBJ to the tune of MacArthur Park or something.

Who knows. It all depends on how many spoons the day gives me.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I never consciously decided to keep going with this whole “more nuanced inner narrative” thing today but clearly some part of me was thinking about it.

Here it is, the first section of my life story.

Patient readers know that… well, see the trigger warning.

Clearly I am going to have to make more videos.

I mean, I haven’t even gotten to where I start school yet.

But making vids about my life does me a lot of good. It feels good to transmit my life experiences like an old guy should, even if it’s via indirect means.

And relatedly, it feels good to sort of go through my memories and re-index them. Our memories are not quite the file folders we imagine them to be. Instead, when you remember something, it discharges the memory and if something interrupted the process right then, you’d lose the memory forever.

Your mind has to re-encode the memory when you are done.

And as the file system of our memory grows as we age, the memories start to degrade over time and your brain needs you to unpack and repack the memories.

And that’s why it feels good to remember the past. Nostalgia explained!

And the older you get, the better it feels to refresh old memories like that. And above a certain age your mind is forced to compress your existing memories to make room for new ones, and it’s not a lossless process, so you forget things after a while.

It starts with the least important (going by how strong the emotional impression is) memories and works its way up.

Only the strongest memories shall survive!

Today was…. odd. Originally I was suppose to go to some sort of group exercise program for seniors at a place with the charmingly pretentious name the Kismet Center (seriously?) at 1 pm, but then first Julian then my wound care nurse Marie noticed that my right foreleg was quite swollen, to the point where it’s like 40 percent bigger than normal, and that plus the blister Marie found just above my wound suggested to me that today was not a good day to exercise.

And that was disappointing but also kind of a relief.

Because to be honest, the social anxiety was starting to creep up on me. It would have meant going to a brand new place and dealing with people I didn’t know, quite probably a large group of them, and so that anxiety gauge just kept going up.

So I already knew I was going to need a Xanax just to get there.

And it just struck me how easy it is to forget you are mentally ill when nothing in your life is triggering the illness.

Usually, when I leave the apartment, it’s to go to Wound Care at the CHAC^[1] or Denny’s, and those are both super familiar locations and situations.

Going to see the physiotherapist was slightly challenging but not Xanax worthy at all. It helped that the building it’s in is quite small and used to be an elementary school so it has a comforting childhood vibe to it.

But this thing today would have involved me possibly meeting an entire class of elderly people as well as the instructor, all in a place I’d never been before, ergo Xanax.

If I am to make it out into the world in some fashion, clearly I am going to have to learn to deal with people.

I mean, have you taken a look out the window lately? They’re EVERYWHERE!

And I think I could do that just fine if I had a role. Even if that role is, say, cashier, or accounting clerk, or whatever.

When you have a role, you know what it is you’re supposed to be doing and what people will asking of you and expecting from you and so the whole awkward no man’s land of social interaction is bypassed.

So if I have a role, whether it’s lead singer or assistant fry cook, I’m good to go.

More after the break.

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Unhappy all the time

That’s just not a thing.

Nobody is unrelentingly miserable all the time. Even when I was at my most depressed, when I was lying on the couch half-dead and in constant pain and being driven nuts by rapidly metastasizing hypochondria, there were better moments.

Times when I didn’t feel so bad, and I could actually watch the TV instead of just having it on, and when I felt relatively okay.

Nothing is all bad. Nothing is all good. The search for purity is toxic. Everything’s mixed.

And life is not a cartoon, with a simple and easy to follow plotline, clear and distinct themes, and readily identified heroes and villains.

There’s a lot of people in my childhood who could have done better by me. Arguably some of them should have done better by me.

But I’m not easy to approach and I can be hard to deal with and I can see how I could be downright exhausting to deal with as a kid.

So those people are not villainous. They failed me but I was not an easy test.

And in many ways I shut myself off from those who tried to help me. I was my own worst enemy in that way. There were people who tried to let me in but I was far too scared and withdrawn and socially clueless to take them up on it.

It was a terrible tragedy all around, really.

I’m not sure I can say I forgive all those teachers and others for not being able to help a weird little fat kid who’s unkempt and way too intelligent and like a big energetic dog is liable to accidentally hurt you when he’s just trying to be friendly.

It would have taken an expert to handle a kid like me.

As for my family, well, they ignored me and resented me but I was severely withdrawn (still am) and so I am not sure they could have reached me if they’d tried.

And maybe they did try but couldn’t get through so they gave up.

And I was too far gone to notice or understand.

So yeah. My childhood was not good but it wasn’t all bad either, and a lot of the players were not so much villains as people who failed to be heroes.

And I can accept that.

One day, I hope to be able to forgive them for it.

But I am not quite there yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, here’s something to make your heart glow.

Sorry to get political on you.

But today’s main project was this bit of video nostalgic by yours truly :

It’s all about my childhood, and is therefore rather depressing.

Also heartwarming, I’d like to think. But the depressing part is pretty god damned dark so thank you for enabling me to share that with the world and get some catharsis.

What strikes me about the whole thing now is how adult I sound. Almost like a real grownup. Almost like someone who has processed all the old pain.

Almost like someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.

And I do! Sorta. Kinda. Some of the time.

The rest of the time I just kind of wing it.

You’d be surprised at how well that can go.

Anyhow, as you might (or might not) imagine, that thing was a heck of a lot of work to edit. It was quite the project.

Another thing worth noting in passing : I removed so many ums and ahs and y’knows from the original raw video and yet there are still so many of them I missed!

I guess I was not fully focused today. I do think that over time I have been trending towards fewer verbal fillers like those but like most trends, it’s not a straight line.

Plus I was doing a lot of remembering. Awash in reverie, like I said. So my mind was not entirely on what I was saying.

I’m glad I got to “it wasn’t all bad” before the end. Most of the non-school memories in there are pretty nice, if not exactly thrilling.

And patient readers know that I have been trying to correct my terrible inner life narrative for some time now. I know that viewing my past like it was some kind of unrelenting hellscape is extremely bad for me and I know that, factually, while it wasn’t a great childhood, it wasn’t all bad, so I need to bring my unhealthy inner narrative more in line with what I know to be the literal truth.

But I guess there’s a certain narrative satisfaction to having your life story be easily reduced to a pithy caricature, even if that caricature is incredibly bleak.

The true depth and complexity of our lives doesn’t fit into our stories, and so we tend to strongly prefer the stories over messy, complicated reality.

The truth is that school wasn’t always horrible, not even elementary school. Sure I was a very lonely child but the bullying tapered off and there was times when class would be somewhat enjoyable or even fun.

And yeah I didn’t get a lot of attention at home. Which sucked. I often felt quite alienated from my own family.

But I had TV, books, and video games, and I got a lot of enjoyment from them.

So it wasn’t all bad. It had its good points and its bad points, just like everything else. It could have been a hell of a lot better but it could also have been a lot worse.

I can feel my attachment to the dark false narrative trying to keep it from changing, as though it’s clinging to it with inky tentacles.

Well it’s going to have to let go some time. The truth must win. The reality was more complicated than any cartoonishly simple narrative and no amount of longing for compact storytelling is going to change that.

And if I can just accept that there were good times too, then I might just be able to draw on those good memories when I feel down.

And that’s got to help.

More after the break.

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From our So Cute It Hurts file

We have this very adorably obedient lil pupper.

I don’t know what it’s real name is but to me they will always be Bright Eyes.

For obvious reasons.

I just wanna scoop that lil doggo up and give them a smooch on the ears!

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A brand new era

In other words, I finally got around to trying the new Thermos that Joe and Julian got me for my birthday almost a month ago.

It’s a pretty neato Thermos because not only does it feel good and weighty in my hand, and hold a surprising amount for its size, but it has an outer lid that doubles as a bowl and the cap has a built-in foldable spoon in a compartment on it!

That’s so cool. I love gadgets like that.

Patient readers know that I wanted a Thermos so I could transport wet things like soups and stews and chili from the kitchen to my lil den here in front of the computer.

Well the whole reason I hadn’t tried it out yet was that I kept forgetting to order anything like that when I got my groceries! D’oh.

But last Friday, at the last moment, I remembered.

Yay me and my eventual competence!

So tonight I heated up some No Name brand chicken noodle soup in the ol’ microwave, stuck it in the Thermos, and brought it to the computer in a saddlebag of my walker.

It has two.

And that operation was a success. But I can’t say I think much of No Name’s chicken noodle soup. I found the flavour to be pretty flat and thin and nowhere near as good as the Campbell’s Chicken Noodle I grew up eating.

I just looked it up and the No Name is $1.10 and the Campbell’s is $1.85, so I think I will be spending the extra 75 centers for flavour in the future.

I didn’t use the collapsible spoon. Try that another time, I guess.

All in all, the operation was a success. The Thermos, in all likeliness, played no part in the underwhelming flavour of the soup, and it was aces everywhere else.

I like my new toy.

I find the best toys result in food.

That’s why I have a slow cooker and a bread machine in storage!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. Wow, slides from my childhood and the epic story of my new Thermos.

I am really maxing out the banality today!

Well, I made another vid. But I’m not really happy with it.

Here it is :

It’s not a bad video by any means, I just feel like I didn’t say anything that really needed to be said or contributed to the discourse at all.

I just said stuff that presumably dozens if not hundreds of other commenters are also saying about yesterday’s festivities.

Someone once said that at the end of creating an artistic work there comes a “little dissatisfaction” with it that contains the germ of the next creation.

I’ve been feeling like that a lot lately.

I really do want to be a big time YouTuber, and I know that if I wanna do that, I have to raise my game considerably.

Even other commenters have more than just them talking. They at least have clips of the things they are talking about.

And I totally could have done that today. I could have gone onto YouTube and found clips of the squeaky tanks and lazy pissed off looking soldiers marching like they’re teenagers forced to go on a family trip and Trump falling asleep and it would have made my vid a lot more interesting.

I mean, my magnetic personality can only hold people’s attention for so long.

I could have done all that, but I didn’t. I tried looking for the sorts of clips I needed but couldn’t find them and gave up.

Like I so often do. Le sigh.

Well that’s my little dissatisfaction and it will inform my next vid and the one after it and so on. That’s the thing with my brand of iterative learning.

Things get better over time as I do them more and more. That means that things are rarely as good as I want them to be right away, but if I just keep making a video a day, I will get better, and so will they.

It is unfortunate that my particular muse makes me learn in public. I have to keep putting things out there for the world to see or the whole process would grind to a halt.

I could never be the lonesome artist making video after video as he prays for the day he finally makes one worthy of being shown to the world.

Nor could I be the person who has to make things as good as he possibly can, until he literally cannot thing of any more ways to improve it, before he releases it to be seen.

I can’t do that. I truly wish I could. But the nature of my creativity demands frequent release of its energies into the world in order to clear space for the next thing.

Holding on to an idea long enough to perfect it would be impossible for me. My creativity blazes hot and fast and I either use that ball of sparks it creates or it dies and I will never return to that idea because to me, it’s dead.

Just writing that out makes it seem insane and impractical. But sadly we don’t get to choose our muse.

If we did, I would not have chosen that one.

But it is my firm belief that truly great art comes from doing whatever your muse asks of you because it’s the only one you’re gonna get so it’s use your muse or lose your muse.

Hope I didn’t confuse.

And I am getting better at listening to mine and letting the inspiration move me. I know that if I just release the damned emergency brake and let myself become motivated, I can lead a much more interesting (and interested) life and make truly amazing things.

But I’m scared.

More after the break.

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On showing off

That is most definitely something I like to do.

And it’s definitely an ego thing. I tried to deny that for a long time, mostly because in my pre-secondary school career people kept accusing me of “just showing off” by being so academically bright, and to me that was a null set because I was just being me.

But looking back, even then I was actually showing off. I wanted to shine bright and have people go “wow, he’s amazing!” and get some positive acknowledgement that I was, in fact, extraordinary.

And maybe that’s what “should” have happened. In a perfect world someone, anyone really, would have showed up to tell me that I was very gifted and that good things could come to me in the future if I tried just a little bit harder and made me aware of the possibilities inherent in my gifts.

Instead it was, by default, something that seemed like a lot more burden than gift.

Oh great, I get to be bored in class for six hours a day.

All through my school years, I never thought of myself as showing off because, I suppose, I didn’t think my academic gifts were particularly noteworthy.

After all, it was all comically easy to me.

And so forth and so on throughout my entire life. It’s only been within the last decade that I have become dimly aware that being incredibly good at school, to the point of being a straight A student without even trying, might actually be worth something.

Hence that being a perennial subject on this here blog o’mine. I have to keep reminding myself of this fact until it sinks in deep enough that I actually do something with it.

You know, like go back to college and use my academic superpowers to get a degree and scholarships and recognition and such.

I could do it via distance learning. Attending classes via Zoom works for me. I’d rather do them in person but my handicaps make that tricky.

I ain’t going back to Kwantlen though. That place is an education mill.

And hey, if it’s distance learning, it could be any school in the world!

And I guess school would be somewhere where I could REALLY show off.

Hey, I made it back to the topic!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, I talk about what, I assume, everyone else is talking about today.

Perhaps I have the wrong end of the stick here and this massive nation wide rally was never supposed to have any direct political effect.

It’s just a way for people to express themselves en masse and demonstrate for their beliefs and make their political will known.

I suppose my relentless pragmatism makes me see the world in terms of what will solve the problem, and demonstrations ain’t it.

I have had further thoughts about my idea from the latter part of the video, though.

It would be called the American Hero Initiative and it would be framed as a call to action for politicians who want to be American Heroes and be part of the team that saves America from the forces of evil in this, her darkest hour.

Really push the idea that right now, they are surrounded by cowards and traitors, and it’s up to them to be willing to stand up and stand out and be the hero America needs.

Play up to that enormous American hero complex. Make it seem like they are the “only one person who can save the day” individualist hero they so admire.

And, of course, paint the alternative being as starkly, darkly villainous as possible.

“Are you ready to answer the call? Or will you let Lady Liberty down in her hour of need like all the other cowards and traitors?”

That kind of thing.

I am perfectly willing to push whatever buttons it takes in people in order to see that the side of the angels wins. I think that the left limits itself terribly with a very feeble and fearful sense of “fair play” that makes them incapable of the kind of emotional inspiration that the right specializes in.

There is nothing wrong with appealing to people’s emotions. Politics runs on inspiration. All the great leaders of the past were able to inspire people and bring them together and they didn’t do that with carefully researched white papers and logical arguments.

The battle is emotional and the right kind of leader inspires people by appealing to their hearts and their souls.

Because not everyone has a mind suited for rational discourse. That requires a certain level of cognitive strength and flexibility that is not universally shared.

But all life has emotions.

The left needs to abandon intellectualism and the sort of unconsciously bourgeoisie ivory tower thinking that makes it so hard for them to connect with working class people.

The first thing you have to lose is the snobbery and classism. You are not better than these people. They are your neighbors and their concerns are valid and real and worthy of consideration even if sometimes they can’t articulate them well.

And it has to come from a place of humility and equality. If you look down on them in any way, even just intellectually, they will feel it and they will mark you as one of the enemy and someone who is not on their side.

As opposed to Dumb Donnie. He preys on the people the left have left behind by at least being willing to lie to them convincingly.

Accept that some people can’t think their way to the truth. They are not built for it. They have employed emotional reasoning for nearly all their day to day decisions for most of their lives and it’s worked out well enough for them so far.

These people need leadership, and if they can’t get it from you, they will get it from scum-suckers like Dumb Donnie and be far worse off for it.

We could put Fox News out of business if we were willing to go to where they are, treat them with respect and humility, and try to see things their way.

And wouldn’t that be the enlightened thing to do?

More after the break.

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Out of circulation

Once more, my life has become randomly more fucked up.

So I lay down for a nap. Already a risky prospect. Sleep a rough neighborhood for me.

I sleep a while. I wake up. I’m laying there like I do sometimes, just giving my brain time to catch up with the backlog of incomplete thoughts it always accumulates.

When suddenly I realize that I am shivering.

On a warm June night, I am shivering and shaking like I’ve got some old timey illness from the bad old days.

All while in my clothes and under my cozy comforter!

This did not come as a complete surprise. I’ve been feeling cold at odd times lately. Nothing like this chill but I’ll keep up from lying down and feel this layer of numbness on my skin, like I have been out in the cold for a while.

Basically I feel refrigerated. In June.

So obviously I am worried about this. I don’t think it’s yet another random symptom of dehydration although I am holding off on issuing a red alert until I’ve gotten at least a liter of water into me just in case.

But what really bothers me is the specter of low blood pressure. I’m on several blood pressure meds so it’s something I need to be aware of.

That and the fact that I don’t move around nearly enough to keep everything pumping and you can see why I have hypotension on my mind.

If my blood is not circulating enough, it’s not moving heat around my body enough, and that’s where feeling so cold comes in.

When I am done here, I am going to get up and grab the walker and walk around for a little while. Try to get the blood circulating so that I can feel the summer again.

I’ve had some success with just giving myself a bit of a wiggle. Flailing about with my arms and legs is not exactly calisthenics but it gets things flowing a bit better.

But I am determined to really get things flowing once I am up, so hopefully I have enough gas in the tank to do a bit of pacing and swinging my arms around.

God, i haven’t even mentioned the fact that because my fucking computer crashed while I was asleep, I ended up laying in bed till 9:30 pm when I normally get up and eat at around 8 pm.

Ain’t life ducky?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, as always, today’s vid.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to put the Fruvous theme song on the end of the video for a completely different and unrelated song also by yours truly, but here we are.

I definitely plan on giving my little Fru theme song a better video. Probably one with freshly made AI images so that it’s more in sync with the lyrics.

That sounds like fun.

Of course, my dream would be to have the whole thing animated. And that is just barely possible with modern AI video generation but um, not on a free account, that’s for sure.

The song’s 44 seconds long. I presumably would have to pay a lot for the ability to use their hardware to generation that much video.

We are on the cusp of an amazing new era.

I mean, just check this place out.

It lets you generate entire podcasts just from your ideas. Podcasts complete with conversations between a virtual host and a virtual guest.

Or, and this truly bakes my noodle, you can even have the AI interview YOU.

I tried it but I wasn’t really ready so it wasn’t much of a conversation. But who knows, one of these days you might hear me interviewed by an AI bot!

Of course, being AI generated, the conversations are heavily banal. You are not going to get interesting hot takes from this website. Like all AI conversations, it will be well articulated, probably factually accurate, and highly informative, but have about as much personality and charm as a wet cardboard box.

That’s what I discovered when I gave AI chatbots a try. The AI therapist helped me some because it got me to further articulate my feelings and it turns out that doing that helped me more than I thought it would.

But the AI “boyfriend” turned out to be both boring and sycophantic. Ick. No thanks.

Who knows, maybe in the near future, those bots will become far more sophisticated and there will be a chance that one of them will have something interesting to say.

That’s gonna be weird.

Oh, for those of you who just want the Froo theme :

As you can tell from the lyrics. I conceive of him as a sort of best friend for kids. A virtual au pair, perhaps, whose role is to be there for the kid for whatever they need.

Whether it’s a hug, someone to listen, or just someone to play Mario Kart on the Switch 2 with, Fru is there for you.

Clearly, he’s a wish fulfillment from my inner child. I was such a lonely kid, isolated and ignored and resented. I really could have used a waggy little fox named Froo!

If there really was an animated series, I think there would be him and one child or companion who accompanies him as he magically shows up wherever he is needed by a child, and the main plot would be how he helps that child with their particular problem.

Could be a really big show, at least if I am writing and producing it. Tone would be key. It has to be an extremely warm and sensitive and loving show that understands the problems kids have and is sympathetic to their struggles and loves them anyhow.

That’s what would make it stand head and shoulders above other magical pet shows. A warm and loving heart that truly wants to help kids feel better.

And has the wisdom and sensitivity to do it.

Wouldn’t that be something?

More after the break.

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Oh right, leveling up

Oh yeah, that thing I was going to talk about.

I feel like I leveled up my creativity today.

For one, I worked on the lyrics to today’s song, Pretty Young Thing, longer and more intensely than I usually do.

Not by a whole lot, but still, it’s progress.

It started off with those first two lines popping into my head as I played Monster Train 2. So I paused and opened Notepad and typed them in, and the rest of it grew organically from those first two lines.

I didn’t set out to write a deep condemnation of a shallow and irresponsible person who leaves a trail of romantic carnage behind them, but here we are.

The muse takes me where it takes me.

I wrote around 2/3 of the lyrics in the first go, got stuck on a rhyme, went and played Monster Hunter 2 again for a bit, then came back and finished them.

Got REALLY stuck on one line and I am still not happy with what I came up with but I won’t say which one because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone.

As for the Froo song, I actually wrote and created that song a couple of weeks ago, then felt sort of embarrassed by the whole thing and forgot about it without ever even making a video for it.

But I came across it again today and while it still makes me blush a little, I realized it’s actually a good little song and decided to include it today too.

Overall I feel like I was able to imbue my creations with more of my creativity and passion today, and this pleases me enormously.

Working on the lyrics for Pretty Young Thing outside of my usual time for making videos is a big step for me, especially because it started off as a random inspiration.

Letting myself be inspired and act on it is a good habit to get into!

Hopefully this means that I am successfully loosening up inside. The further lowering of my Paxil dosage is having the intended effect and my icejam is melting.

Who knows, maybe I will have that flood I have been anticipating soon, and it will clear out all my old emotions and fragmented thoughts and other garbage and afterwards I will be whole once more.

And then, well…. who knows what I’ll be?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s vid is sort of an extension to today’s Therapy Thursday session.

As is standard with me, I am not sure I expressed whatever it was I had meant to express at the beginning, but whatever.

Some of us are just born to wander.

And not all who wander are lost.

I mean, I usually am, but still.

The important thing is that I expressed myself for a bit more than six minutes and got some emotions out by making myself vulnerable and that’s all for the good.

I don’t think of myself as someone who is afraid to be vulnerable. In fact I have always found the reluctance to express vulnerability to be a bit silly.

And yet, I have this smooth persona that I keep clamped down tight over my true self when I am around others and never let slip, and what is the point of that if not to keep myself from being vulnerable?

“I’m not afraid to be vulnerable. ” said the Steel-Clad Man.

I suppose I think I am unafraid to be vulnerable because I’ll tell anything to anybody, more or less. I had to learn not to confess my deepest darkest secrets to total strangers because people, um, do not like that.

Honestly, I’m just so happy someone is listening to me that it can go to my head.

But that idea of myself as open and free clashes with the fact that I am not even emotionally real and present with my god damned therapist.

I guess it’s easy to be free and open with information when you have emotional armor ten feet thick on.

Not having a lot of secrets is not exactly the same as being open.

Which brings us back to that detachment. It’s more than some kind of philosophical pose. It’s a fundamental withdrawal from life on a deep and telling level and its left me feeling both alien and alienated for my entire life.

There has to be a way out of this trap. I should not have to wait for some random super sad thing that I didn’t see coming before I can feel truly present and real. I should not be so god damned different from the rest of humanity and thus unable to connect.

I shouldn’t have to be so damned cold all the time.

But I guess that in order to get comfortable with leaving this god damned frozen foods section I am going to have to get used to the idea of living in realtime, without detachment and thus without being able to control or predict what’s coming.

So I just have to deal with things as they come.

Pretty sure that’s how most of the world works.

So, ya know. There’s precedent.

It feels so risky. Like the moment in science fiction when the astronaut takes their helmet off to see if the air is breathable.

I mean, I know the instruments say everything is okay and so does Doc but still, they might be wrong and I might die.

At least, that’s how it feels. Realistically of course I’ll be fine living like everyone else, being emotionally real and present and letting my emotions inform me at least as much as my high and mighty intellect does.

I need to learn to truly feel my world, not just perceive it.

And for that, I need to truly be here.

More after the break.

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They’re so fuzzy!

Eeee, it’s lil baby coyotes!

And they howl at the sirens! Awww. They must think that other pack sounds weird!

I want to pick them up and kiss them on the snoot.

But that would probably get my face bitten off. 😛

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Weeping in despair

But in a good way.

Today I am feeling weary and worn out. Even minor things feel like they take enormous effort. Physically, yes, but mostly emotionally. I am hitting one of my period where I find it hard to remember why I do anything instead of just hiding in bed and…

…and waiting to die, I guess.

I mean, that’s what would inevitably happen if you literally did absolutely nothing for long enough, not even eat.

Not that I want to die. I’m just feeling weary, that’s all.

That would be the chilling result of the anti-action bias winning a final, deadly victory, though. Which is a disturbing thought.

I’m not worried about my current mood though, because behind the weariness I can feel large emotions moving around and jockeying for position like silent icebergs and that, to me, suggests that the latest lowering of my Paxil dose is further loosening things up and thawing things out and making some kind of large emotion release possible.

And I’m all for that, even if it means feeling large negative emotions.

Fine. Whatever. I’ll be despondent. I’ll be enraged. I’ll be terrified. I will be whatever I need to be in order to release more of the massive icejam of emotions that have been clogging my waterways and damming me up for far, far too long.

Cut that fucker out, Doc. I don’t care if it hurts.

I’m going to try to help the process along. Gently, of course. I know that if I let my overweaning superego take charge of it, that will ruin everything.

The idea is to let my natural healing mechanisms do their goddamned job without constant micromanagement from the ego and superego.

Their advice is super suspect anyway, given how corrupt they are.

No, the main thrust of my approach is to step back, relax everything, go limp, and let the deeper mechanisms of my mind fix things up without me.

It knows what it is doing. I can feel it at work. It feels…. natural. Like things are unfolding as they should and forces wiser than my conscious mind, forces older than our species even, are mending what the conscious mind has rent asunder.

I really am too smart for my own good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.