Turns out, I had a lot to say today.

A classic case of the very “me” phenomenon where I start off talking about one subjects but that branches off into another and then another and before you know it I have talked for almost ten minutes about an only tangentially subject.

But it’s all worth saying, so whatever.

After all, whether it’s video or text, the idea is primarily to get things out of my head and into the world so that I can reduce the pressure of words in my head and maybe make some room for calmer thoughts in there.

My brain produces things to say at a ferocious pace. I can’t imagine actually being able to keep up. It’s all I can do to slow down the backlog a bit.

But as I develop as a writer, I learn to put more and more of myself and my overwhelming creative energies into every word, and so I might actually achieve some kind of equilibrium that way some day.

Either way, it’s cool. I have enormous creative energies I can tap into at will. It’s one of my many powers. I really am quite amazing when you think about it.

Insert obvious “and so humble!” joke here.

Building up my self-esteem (or “ego” as we used to call it) is a difficult long term project. It would be different if I was not so cautious by nature and worried about losing my mind to delusions of grandeur type things.

Because that’s the problem when you realize that you tower over others intellectually. The human mind is a status seeking machine and so my primitive mind immediately wants to skyrocket into a quite frankly pathological level of self-regard.

I don’t think I could become a full fledged narcissist. I am too ironic and self-aware for that. But I could see feeling like some sort of god amongst the human herd.

And that thought repulses me. I hate elitism, especially my own. But sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t be healthier in the long run if I just let my ego jetpack me up into the stratosphere and let myself float back down to Earth naturally.

But I am so scared that I would just get lost up there. I have this vision of myself as some kind of cackling loony in a cell somewhere constantly muttering to himself about how some day they will all pay and deluding myself into thinking I am doing some kind of incredibly esoteric science when all I am doing is writing nonsense on the walls with my own poop.

Sorry about that image. Did not know I was going to go there.

Or even worse, I would, like Ziggy Stardust, get sucked up into my mind and making love to my ego and be, in the real world, completely catatonic.

It would be the logical final act to my withdrawing into my mind to protect myself from the world, and I fear it more than I fear death.

The sane part of me is still desperately clinging to the edges of my reality in order to keep from being completely consumed by the hungry void that always threatens to drag me to my doom like a whirlpool.

I should probably see someone about filling that thing in. Or maybe just putting up really good guardrails so that I can relax for a minute or two.

Or, radical thought, just not be fucking crazy for a while.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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Crisis? What crisis?

Well, i guess it’s time to gnaw on this old bone some more.

Am I in a crisis? Yes and no.

The yes comes from my frustration and anger at my clogged up life and my broken motivational engine which keeps my considerable passionate energies all stopped up inside me where they can cause all kinds of mental mayhem and it is the nature of said energies to strain against their constraints and when they can’t get out that emotion has to go somewhere and in my case it devolves into panic.

I hope that all made sense.

So the sense of crisis in my life comes from all that frustrated emotion and the pain it causes me as it strains against the plug of mental illness holding it back and the energies end up backing up and venting internally in a very unhealthy way.

So in that sense, damn right it’s a crisis. One that makes me feel like I am going crazy sometimes. But it keeps me trying to shift that damned plug and each day it loosens a little more and hopefully one day it will finally POP out of there.

But in another sense, I’m fine.

I’m in no danger. I have a highly equitable lifestyle. As far as I know, there’s no health problem looming that’s going to fuck me up forever. I have wonderful friends who take care of me. I have food and shelter and clean water to drink.

I could go on like this for years. I know this because I already have. I could go on like this till the day I die, and the way it looks now, I will.

And maybe that means that I should learn to relax and just accept that. Accept that this is it and try to make the best of it so I can exit crisis mode and let my background adrenaline levels drop to a more healthy baseline and maybe make some kind of acceptable life for myself out of the ingredients I know I have.

That sounds like giving up, says a possibly unhealthy part of my mind.

And yeah. That would be giving up. But giving up on what? Maybe I would actually make much better progress against my problems if my entire nervous and endocrine systems could just settled the fuck down and let me be mellow and copacetic and healthy instead of constantly imperiled.

That does sound a whole lot better than wasting my life while background stressing constantly about wasting my life.

But I don’t know if I can switch gears like that. I think some part of me needs to strain and stretch and strive and at the very least I will need to find a healthier way to make that part of me happy if I am to succeed in mellowing out.

I know I need more in my life. I can’t just mentally masturbate all the god damned time any more. I’m awake and alive now and I know what I’m missing.

But it might just be that my best bet is the Zen solution of striving without trying. Of forgetting extrinsic goals entirely in order to focus on being myself to the fullest possible degree and to hell with logic and reason and anything else – ANYTHING else – that stands in the way of that goal.

Because this is my life and my mind and my world and they are there to benefit ME.

And nothing else matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got political again today. Eventually.

It went exactly like this :

I started out with just the stuff about the webcam working, but initially I then blathered on about the games I am currently playing till I hit the point where I realized I was boring myself and threw all that bullshit away.

And I like that I did that. I feel like I am maturing as a video maker and part of that is developing the backbone to say, “This is crap, fuck it, I’m starting over. ”

What followed was ten uncomfortable minutes of me desperately trying to think of something to talk about and drawing a total blank.

Always painful, those sorts of moments. One of the hardest parts of being a creator, at least to me, is making it through times like that.

Eventually I remembers the stuff about the outrage machine that has been waiting for me to write about it for months now and kept getting “bumped” by other topics.

Well today was the day that topic finally made it to the stage.

And it’s important stuff, I think. The internet is great at giving you more of what you like, and it judges what you like by what you engage with, and it neither knows nor cares whether you’re engaging with it because you’re happy or because you’re angry.

So if your feed is full of modern misery, it’s because according to the internet, that is what you “like” to see.

And outrage is addictive. It’s just like any other rage disorder. The “high” comes from the adrenaline rush and the way said rush makes you feel righteous and motivated and pure and makes it seem like things are much simpler than they are.

Hence why old people eagerly consume media where people like Fox News deliberately stoke their anger because being outraged makes them feel stronger and more alive.

And that goes for the left, too. There is a reason my Bluesky feed is full of hysterical hand-wringing about how awful Trump is and how the latest atrocity is a sure sign that America is sliding into fascism and any minute now there’ll be a gas chamber on every street corner and concentration camps as common as 7-11’s.

And they’re not wrong except possible in degree. But at some point you have to stop caterwauling about how awful it all is and start doing something about it.

And that means giving up on the outrage. Feel free to ignore the news for a while. Completely skip over an entire brace of outrages and blatant affronts.

These things do not require your outrage. You not being around to be frothing with rage about them will make no difference whatsoever to the big picture. You can take a pass on all his latest horribleness and nothing of value will be lost.

And something of value will be gained if it lets you concentrate more fully on driving that spear right into the conspicuously corpulent heart of Trump’s regime.

At some point you have to turn the damn alarm off and fight the fucking fire.

But of course, that’s not fun. That sounds like it might involve work and effort and risk and the horror of spending a few minutes less than optimally entertained.

Well fuck that, better the world should burn (and it is) than us having to give up even a single precious nanosecond of our “me” time.

And I am no better. Somehow we have grown incredibly dependent on these security blankets of entertainment and distraction and the very idea of leaving the comfort of them voluntarily feels like we’re being asked to do a spacewalk without a suit.

And I don’t know what to do about that.

More after the break.

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What to do about that

Oh, I dunno.

I know that stirring calls to virtuous action are meaningless. Sure, doing all you can do to bring down Trump is the “right” thing to do from the point of view of the future, but we don’t live entirely for the benefit of the generations to come, we live here now, in the present, and in the present we have to cope.

Maybe that’s the problem : that our lives are something we have to cope with rather than just relax and enjoy. I’ve written before about this modern treadmill of spending half your waking hours at work and half recovering from work is insane.

And of course it’s school that sets us up for this. The transition from hating school to hating your job is almost seamless.

That’s why homework is such an affront to a child’s sensibilities. It’s like school is invading your precious not-school time. No fair!

And of course, once people have kids and spouses and households and extended friend groups and so forth, that “me” time becomes even more precious and the idea of sacrificing any of it for abstract goals outside of your life, no matter how important, seems even more unthinkable.

And I mean, surely somebody else will take care of it, right? Because clearly somebody needs to do something about Trump. We’re quite firm on how other people should definitely be doing something about it, those lazy bums.

Just not us, because we have lives and kids and so much stuff to do.

I guess that’s why it has to have a personal impact before it stirs people to action. That takes it from the realm of the news and doomscrolling into actual, y’know, reality, and makes people see it as a threat to their families, and that can inspire action.

Then again, so does the prospect of maybe getting laid at the rally.

It takes all kinds of motives.

The next big rally is on October 13. I feel like the clock is ticking in a sense because these rallies are going to become rather sparsely attended once winter kicks in.

Maybe make the one after this one Christmas themed?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So another part of my life has gone FUBAR :

It’s been a looming disaster for a while, in retrospect. I had trouble in the past with the thing spontaneously connecting and disconnected from the smallest of fly farts in its general direction. So I saw this coming.

But what was I going to do about it? All I could do was soldier on.

That’s all I can ever do, just about. It’s my one great skill : keeping going.

Because God forbid something should actually force me off track (what track?) and make me sit still and deal with my problems and maybe even fix something.

No, I simply must keep going in my slow inexorable way, like a steamroller, mindlessly crushing everything in its path as it keeps going in the same direction forever.

I’ve had better metaphors.

Been trying to think, or feel, or hell sabotage my way through this barrier inside me that keeps me nailed to the floor and fixed in place and chained to this fucking treadmill so I can relive the same day over and over again.

New day, new creative outputs, same old habits and the same old bullshit.

I hope that some day, if I keep feeding energy to the deepest parts of myself in an attempt to jump start my life force like I am hotwiring a car, I will one day activate and wake up and be truly alive instead of living this half-dead existence all the time.

I seem like I’m here but I’m not really here. I am crouching in a bunker way down deep inside myself and piloting this clunky automata of a body of mine as I project a whole and healthy image of myself into the world that I only wish was the real me.

I would become Fruvous in a heartbeat, even if it meant being a four foot tall anthro fox in a world with no other “real” furries in it.

But then again, I am already Fruvous. Sorta kinda. He’s within me and it’s tempting to think that “becoming” him is just a matter of letting that part of me take over.

And maybe someday that will be possible. Or maybe it’s possible right now, in this very minute, and I am just too chickenshit to pull the trigger on it.

Sometimes I get the very strong urge to just throw myself off the metaphorical deep end somehow and force myself to adapt (in a healthy way) to the god damned real world for once in my god damned life.

I guess that’s my inner competent father figure longing to give me the short sharp shock that will make me snap out of this decades long daze and actually be alive for a change.

I am not against the idea. I know that sometimes that’s what will do you the most good : a shock to the system that wakes you up inside and makes you aware of yourself and your being a part of the world, even if it’s only to say, “Ow, that hurt!”.

I know that the words that have done me the most good in my life have made me really, really angry first.

Unfortunately, I am too old and infirm and impecunious to do something young and crazy like just move to a different city with no plan and no job so that I am forced to land on my feet and learn to cope.

I guess I could do something slightly similar on a subReddit. Go marching all in to some politics forum determined to seize territory and make myself known.

Put my thang down, nomsain?

More after the break.

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We can’t say that word here

This is brilliant stuff.

Personally, I am sympathetic to the concerns and goals of Happyworkerism but I don’t think it has an actual plan for the economy that would work.

The one big advantage of capitalism is that it runs itself, mostly. The government provides the infrastructure and other support (like a stable currency) but the rest of it operates more or less on its own. No central plan needed.

It’s beautiful in that regard.

Too bad a lack of policing has let it get all fucked up.

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One notch closer

I feel like I somehow got one degree closer to being a real live human being and not just a lifelike simulation of one today.

As often happens, it started off with me feeling awful. I felt terrible when I got out of bed to go to Wound Care this morning at 10:30 am. The slightest effort made me feel sweaty and sick, I felt like I weight a million pounds, and I had that ineffable feeling like somehow my soul was in a total eclipse leaving me bewildered in the dark.

But at some point today, I got better, and when that happened I realized that I now felt a bit more alive and robust and embodied and good.

So I guess my soul just had some shit it had to go through. I had reached the critical point at the bottom of my mood cycle where I shed the toxins and garbage I have filtered out of my soul’s waters and whilst the shedding is unpleasant, once that stuff is gone, my soul can bob back up higher than before without all that emotional detritus weighing it down.

And thus I make progress one dump truck load at a time.

And this time I didn’t even have to write a super depressing negative blog post or make a really dark video in order to get the bad stuff out.

Although I suppose bitching about the webcam served that function.

Oh, and the webcam suddenly started working again during Zoom. I will have to see if it will work with my video editing program tomorrow.

Because what the fuck ever, am I right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, today, when I rolled the dice in my head for what to talk about today, it came up “deep dive into my depression”, so here we are.

I get the feeling that when I was raped as a child, it caused me to bypass a very important developmental stage where you just do whatever pops into your head and organically suffer the consequences and you learn about the world that way.

I mean, I must have done some of that at one point. I wasn’t always as depressed as I would become. I remember being a kid on summer vacation and being able to decide what I wanted to do with my ample free time.

Besides watch television, of course.

But for a time I was at least somewhat happy during summer vacation at least because I had no bullies then, just myself.

And my friend from across the street Bobby for a few of those summers. Dunno why he’d be at the Votour’s house in the summer and not with his own parents, wherever the heck they were, but he and I were friends then.

And I have got to remember that. My childhood was not as lonely and friendless and isolated as my polluted inner narrative would have me believe.

I honestly wonder of my inaccurately negative inner narrative exists, at least in part, because that story of unbroken loneliness is just more narratively satisfying than the complex and layered truth.

If so, I really need to work on that. Real life is never that simple. The real world can rarely be summed up in a neat little story like “lonely boy with no friends forever”.

There were people I was friends with now and then, again, during the summer at least. There were long cold friendless stretches too, that’s not a lie or a delusion.

That became especially true in high school. Me and Heisler split up in Grade 10 and so I was all alone after that.

Well, there was Tim. He and I were friends because Mister Newcome the science teacher put us together to compete in a science competition.

We saw each other a couple times a week at his place. The thing we made for the science competition was a total joke because Mister Newcome, being the impulsive spaz that he was, put us in there before he taught us the physics we needed.

But oh well. We got to hang out and be geeky together for a while.

So yeah. Even those lonely years of grades 11 and 12 were not a total winterscape of isolation and turning inwards.

But high school is also when I become seriously depressed for the first time. The first time I felt suicidal, the first time I felt like my life was draining out of me as from an unbandaged wound, the first time I felt crazy.

Not coincidentally, that’s when I started skipping school a lot too. Some mornings the walk to school seemed impossible so I stayed home and popped popcorn for myself and watched daytime TV.

And my parents didn’t have a clue because they both left for work before I even got out of bed. And I got home before they did. So they had no way of knowing.

Well, other than to actually be around, of course.

And I certainly didn’t give a shit about school. I knew that I could get away with it on that front too. I would only show up for like half of the classes and still ace the course.

What can I say? I’m gifted.

And a lot of the teachers just read from the fuckin’ textbook anyway. Thanks, teach, I look forward to you being replaced by a text to speech AI in the future.

Needless to say, I was a very 80’s nihilistic teen. And I still feel that way sometimes.

Sometimes nihilism is the only positive response to the anxiety threatening to choke the life out of you or make your heart explode.

Nihilism is the exact opposite of anxiety.

And sometimes that’s what you need the most.

More after the break.

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Update from the other world

I’ve acquired a few video games lately while the Steam Fall Sale is on.

One is a pretty decent game with a very stupid name, Villages and Dungeons. It’s yet another deck building game – there are a LOT of them now, which is great, because I love them but for ages they were a weird obscure genre.

It’s pretty barebones as of yet but it’s in active development so I am sure more stuff will be added fairly soon, and it’s entirely playworthy, just a little lacking in depth.

I am sure it will get fleshed out over time.

I also, somewhat surprisingly, got a furry visual novel called Winds of Change.

I don’t normally do visual novels,or VNs, because they are basically books with illustrations in a vaguely video game ish form and while I love to read and I love video games, I don’t play video games to read.

But the trailer for this one intrigued me with the nice British lady telling me about all the different forms of complex storytelling involved, and so far it’s been mostly linear but with a plot that is unique and exciting enough to have me hooked.

And lastly there’s big granddaddy, Red Dead Redemption 2.

A Wild West game made by the same people who made Grand Theft Auto (hence the nickname “Grand Theft Horse”), it’s a real long shot for me because it’s a heavily 3D game and therefore is very likely to crash my computer, hard.

But I will ruefully put it on low settings and hope for the best, because if I can get it to run without crashing, it’s an absolutely legendary game that won a million awards and I am eager to give it a try.

So wish me luck on that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got pretty deep into this subject, and I am proud of that.

I think it’s an important one for those of us who are always struggling to figure out what is really going on, as Robert Anton Wilson put it.

And yes, I picked two left wing examples. That’s because the right wing examples are obvious and pervasive.

Anyhow, here it is :

But you can see how this sort of thing can happen to anyone. As far as I can tell, the zeitgeist is riddled with this kind of bullshit and I think we’re just going to have to live with that because of the imperfect nature of our minds and our consciousness.

Which is frustrating to a part time truth warrior like me, but I am above all else a pragmatist and there is little point in railing against something I can’t change.

And as a humanist, I love us naked beach apes for all our fragility and absurdity and imperfections and pretense, so there’s that too.

Plus I question the universal utility of the truth as well. In a lot of situations it really doesn’t matter whether what someone believes matches objective reality or not.

I mean, if someone genuinely believes the moon is made of green cheese, odds are that’s not going to hurt anybody, least of all them, even if they spend their free time trying to build an extremely large fondue pot.

The problem is that us human beings have a strong instinct to merge our views of reality as a way of creating a pool of shared knowledge greater than what any single one of us could know.

Like I have said before, if Conk the Caveman sees a bear in the valley with the red berries and then tells his tribe about it, now the whole tribe knows to avoid Red Berry Valley unless they plan to hunt the bear.

But this instinct was not evolved with the complexity of life in a much bigger tribe in mind. When two people’s worldviews conflict (Brank was just in Red Berry Valley and he didn’t see a bear there) this information sharing instinct experiences a conflict and that can only mean one thing : arguing.

Both Conk and Brank think they are right, and odds are, neither one is going to convince the other the truth of their opinions. So the argument is pointless, right?

Well no. Welcome to the world of discourse. Because the other members of the tribe might not have made up their minds about Red Berry Valley yet and they are waiting to see how the argument goes before they decide who is right.

See how it all works?

Fast forward to today and people arguing on the internet. Our world is incredibly complicated, far moreso than our monkey brains can handle, and so we have complex discourse and seemingly endless and pointless arguments and all of us contributing to the massive shared knowledge base of humanity in some way.

Anyhow, back to the knowledge sharing instinct. That instinct is why it bothers us so much when someone says something we disagree with. Our initial instinct is to merge realities with people and when a conflict makes that impossible, we argue.

And while it’s very rare for anyone to be convinced via argument to change their views, in the aggregate, all these little spats are how a society thinks something over, and eventually the side of right (hopefully) develops strong arguments that the side of the devils can’t counter, becomes dominant, and then that world view becomes the one we all accept and share in the future.

That’s why the arc of history bends towards justice. That’s how social progress happens. That’s how we evolve our consciousness as a species.

That’s how we make our world a better place for all.

Kind of inspiring, isn’t it?

More after the break.

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After the talk

Had therapy today at noon.

Don’t worry, it will go back to the usual Thursdays starting next week. My therapist has just been recovering from his luxury vacation to my fucking home town.

Okay, so I am still a little angry and bitter about that. I mean, what are the fucking odds. The whole world for him and his wife to vacation in, and they ended up going to the one place on Earth that would piss me off the most.

Oh well. Some day I will go back and hug my Mom, probably for the last time.

I’ve pondered whether or not I’d move back. I mean, it’s not like it really matters where the bedroom with my computer in it resides.

I could have the exact same lifestyle in Timbuktu, language barrier aside.

Of course, this location has one unbeatable advantage : my friends. So moving back home would mean swapping my friends, who have looked after me for over a decade and who love me a lot, for the family I barely even know any more.

Put that way, no, I don’t think I would move back. I could see myself going home for a summer, maybe, but I have roots here in BC now.

Dunno what my brother Dave will do once my mother’s gone, though.

Damn I hate thinking about stuff like this.

But some day she won’t be there and my bro will be all alone in a house that is way too big for one person and everything there will remind him of her and he might just need to have his little brother around.

Lord knows it’s not like my two sisters will move back home.

We Gen X have reached prime “losing your parents” age and as a generation we’re going to have to deal with that. Despite all our bitching about Boomers, it’s going to be a much colder world when they are gone.

And then we’ll be the ones expected to be the wise and responsible ones.

And we’re not cut out for that, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now you’re thinking, Trump? I hate that guy! And I certainly don’t respect him!

But remember, you don’t have to like someone to respect them, nor do you have to think they are a good person or are right about things.

In the case of someone like Trump, even treating him like you would another adult is too much respect shown to him.

I go into further detail here :

Don’t lecture Trump and his cronies. Scold them. Tell them they are being very bad and that they need to stop it this second or there will be trouble.

What we need is an older woman of absolutely towering resolve, respectability, and scariness to make videos where she calls these people out exactly like the misbehaving children they are and tells them to clean up their mess and put things back exactly how they found them and then go to their rooms without supper.

I even have a name for her. We can call her Nanny State.

And I bet it would work on them. Their childlike fascist mindsets would not be able to resist the power of female authority. Sure, some of them would raise a fist in protest and swear they don’t care what she says, but even they would be feeling the power of it and before long they would be looking for excuses to comply.

And respectability is key. It has to be someone their primitive minds can’t find a way to just dismiss via some inane categorical.

It has to be someone who is powerfully dominant on all levels.

Basically, we need Margaret Thatcher, but not evil.

Heck, it could be Thatcher full stop. If she were still around she would be absolutely livid at the pathetic state of British conservative politics right now.

But I digress.

I bet it would even work on Trump. We know he fancies himself (quite tragically) to be some kind of prime male authority figure, and his fanbase is so pathetic that they actually accept such a cowardly, weak, dishonorable, dishonest, and disgusting man as one, but I bet if a woman with real power behind her personality told him what to do, he would very strongly want to comply.

But regardless of the form it takes, I am serious about not treating him with any respect any more. No more frothing at the mouth about what a bad president he is, no more railing against his fascist government, no shaking your fist at the sky.

Because when we do that, all he hears is, “I am very power and important! Look how my enemies fear and hate me!”.

No, we have to start talking about him like he’s making an embarrassing spectacle of himself all the time, how people are looking down on him as a result, and how all the sorts of people even a moron like him respects are laughing at him behind his back and have about as much respect for him as they do the town drunk.

Right now, he thinks he’s pulling it off. He thinks all the world leaders like and respect him. He thinks his billionaire buddies think he’s the greatest. And he feeds on this idea of being important and respected constantly.

We need to take it away from him. Force him to recognize that he’s nothing but an embarrassment and a laughing stock and a loser, so big of a loser in fact that even becoming the most powerful man on Earth couldn’t cure it.

Destroy his sense of social dominance. Let him know that he’s nothing but a toddler with a handgun and he should slink away and hide forever because there is no cure for the amount of shame and embarrassment he should be feeling.

It would be a psychological assassination and nobody deserves it more.

More after the break.

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😎 Tell me if this showed up as a happy face in sunglasses for you.

If it did, then hey, I can use emojis in this thing!

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Yet another incident

Warning, the following involves not making it to the bathroom in time.

Well, as I often say (to myself) the first thing disability takes from you is your dignity.

Then again, I suppose this could have happened to anyone, more or less, so perhaps I just prefer to blame it on being disabled.

I was watching things on Zoom with Le Gang when I realized I needed to poop. But it was 9 PM and Felicity was leaving at 9:30 PM so I thought, “Why disrupt our viewing when I can just go after she leaves?”.

It was a stupid thought, and social anxiety was definitely a factor. I didn’t want to interrupt everything and make things awkward by telling people I had to “go”.

So I waited and I waited and watched stuff with my friends and added the occasional comment and meanwhile the pressure in me was getting pretty bad.

Thus, the stage was set for disaster.

The final video ended and I got up to make my all important trip, trip, trip to the loo (my darling) but something had gone wrong in my skeletomuscular system because I went up but then I toppled over onto my front.

Needless to say, containment was breached. Ain’t nobody gonna be able to hold it in when gravity conspires to squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste.

So I had to make it into the bathroom with a pantload and then I had a small brief blissful window where I could forget what I had clearly felt happen in my pants as I finished what the fall had started and then I had to delicately take off the pants so I could rinse them out in the sink.

Like I said, it could happen to anyone who waits too long to go poop, but the fall was quite possibly the fault of my disability.

There was definitely dizziness involved. So maybe it was a blood pressure thing.

All I know is that I went up and fell down in the space of a second. And that, of course, when I felt it happen.

That is a very terrible feeling. Anything involving errant defecation taps into a very ancient bit of programming in our brains that was instilled before we could even talk and stuff that old always has a powerful impact.

Oh well. It’s over. I handled it. I rinsed out the pants so that they who do my laundry are not overtaxed by my needs.

What can I say? Shit happens.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God damn it.

My fucking internet died for the second time today. I don’t know WTF is happening but it need to stop. It happened just as I was sitting down to blog, you know, for extra pain and suffering, and so now I am stuck typing into an Office Libra (or whatever) file and cursing fate.

Now I am too angry to post a link to my video about irritability!

Seriously, that’s what today’s vid is about. Done on the webcam attached to my PC this time, as I intimated yesterday, and this very slightly edited.

Hmmm. Forgot to put the “like and subscribe” bit on the end. Oh well, whatever.

What really sucks is that normally I am hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries when I do my blogging and with no internet I can’t do that and I miss them.

It’s not an accident that I ended up talking about irritability today. Not only is it a subject close to my personal history but I have been feeling aglow with sheer crankiness today, largely because my right foot has gone from hurting on the sole from the damage I did with my zeal to peel the un-shed skin off to now hurting in the bones and muscles of the foot as there seems to be something very “off” about the way the pain of the injuries to the sole has been making me walk and now I am walking around feeling like my ankle is half sprained already and feeling the muscles and bones shift around in gruesome and unnatural ways as I walk.

I need one of those floating wheelchairs Baron Harkonnen has in Dune.

Or a splint or the like. Something to hold the ankle in place while the foot heals so that my foot doesn’t twist out from under me when I walk, so that I end up walking on the side of the foot.

That’s not right.

So that pain had me feeling snappish and irritable before the internet died and so that is how I ended up delving into that subject in the vid.

Because as us chronic illness sufferers know, there’s the physical pain, which is bad, but then there’s the effect it has on your mood and your outlook, which is worse.

Not only can I clearly feel the walk-sprained condition of my ankle even when I am not putting any weight on the foot in question, but the prospect of being even more crippled than usual as well as the certainty of more pain in my near future as I navigate my day (meals, bathroom breaks, water refills, bookcase trips, and so on) does not exactly put me in a bright, sunshiny mood.

I have Tylenol now. Ordered it off of Amazon. Yes, I know I am a bad boy for putting more moneyin Jeff Bezos’ pocket and I don’t care.

Point is, I can treat the pain somewhat. Well, I can turn down the volume on it anyhow. Yay analgesics.

But I am really, really worried about what is happening with my right foot. I can’t quite put into words how “wrong” it feels when I walk on it. And the way my ankle is just not doing its job and that leaves the whole foot to twist in a very bad way.

I am worried that I will end up seriously hurting that foot or even that leg.

Well, I have Wound Care tomorrow so I will see if the nurse can rig me up something to make walking less of a body trauma.

I don’t even care about the cuts on the sole any more. They’ll be fine.

More after the break.

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The return of the King

Got my internet back, so hooray for that.

In desperation I was futzing with my wifi antennae, just kinda wiggling it in its weird socket ^[1], when Windows made its “a device has connected” sound and I said, “That sounds good!” and rebooted, and here we are.

I will try to make sure nothing so much as breathes in that thing’s direction again.

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Always wandering lost

But I no longer thing I am looking for a way out. A way out of what? There’s nothing really here in my mindscape except for the kind of fog that you can’t see when it’s right in front of you but can see when you look further away.

Not that I know what THAT means.

But I am not looking for a door out of this “maze” any more. I know that all this hazy bullshit will burn away like a morning fog when I am finally truly ready to go out there and face that big old world.

I know this because I know that the fog’s real purpose has always been to hide reality from me so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I have been fighting reality since I was raped when I was four, and this fog – or maze, or castle, or infinite corridor, or whatever – is my way to shrink the aperture through which reality enters my mind to a manageable size.

And by “manageable” I mean “really very small and narrow and mostly virtual”.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing how much I perceive through that little hole. Thanks to the internet and mass media in general, I can not only learn about the world, I can deduce its deeper patterns and meanings with my supercomputer brain.

But who cares? I’m still locked away in here, scared of the world and convinced, despite all evidence, that the “real world” will eat me alive because it’s out to GET me.

That’s all bullshit and lies, of course, but that’s what makes this mental illness – knowing something is not true and being unable to stop believing it anyway.

The belief expresses something in me that desperately needs it and until I find that something and give it a better way out, the belief will return like plants coming back after a forest fire.

And I am still figuring out how to deal with shit like that.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did something wacky and fun for today’s video.

I added a TikTok filter. One of those intelligent ones that adds something to the video dynamically and I must say I like the result.

Which are this :

I quite liked having that filter on. It made me feel pretty in an admittedly cartoonish way. The urge to bat those long eyelashes like I’m a feminine and coquettish Minnie Mouse or Betty Boop was strong.

Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine.

But I liked the glammed up me. Not to the point I feel like I found the “real me” or anything like that – it very much felt like a costume – but it was nice to have a chance for my more feminine side to show.

I’m the bearded lady!

Protip : The actual number of bearded ladies was quite low. Most of the ones working in sideshows et al were just fat dudes in dresses.

I mean, it’s not like anyone’s gonna inspect her panties during the show.

Well, not here in Canada, anyway.

And I suppose there’s worse ways to make a living. For one thing, when you’re not working, you can just leave the dress behind and be a regular burly bear dude if that is what you’re into.

Or who knows, if you’re actually trans, maybe it’s the beard that comes off and you can go get yourself a ladies’ night out.

Just don’t mess with the straight boy’s heads, dear. And don’t think they will be fine with your misassigned external gender if you seduce them with your feminine wiles first.

To them it won’t be just that “one little thing” that makes you different from the rest of the gals, you know what I’m saying?

Anyhow, back to me. I liked making that video, even though I feel like there wasn’t enough content in the final product.

Yes, dear fans, I feel like today’s video is underweight. I launched into that topic confident that I had enough to say about it, but I did not.

You’d think I would have learned by now not to try to do a video about a topic that just popped into my head. They need to be based on thoughts that have been marinating in my head long enough to soaked up a lot of words.

Oh well, all I can do is move on.

It makes me want to go back to doing them on the computer and not my phone, though. Not being able to edit the video has become increasingly frustrating and I feel like it’s limiting me in ways I find unacceptable.

So back to the computer tomorrow unless I am feeling too damned lazy.

Doing it on TikTok might not be better but it’s so much easier.

As patient readers know, I have been thinking about things like courage and self-discipline and “grit” lately.

I feel like, if my health allowed it, doing something rugged and manly that involves a lot of sweating, struggling, and suffering would probably do me some good.

Yes, this means your gruff and inarticulate father might have been right about that.

I have remained so unchallenged in life. Partly due to extraordinary abilities and partly do to not being the sort of person who seeks out challenges in order to better himself.

I mean, I grasp it and agree with it in theory. I am sure that being truly tested would clean a lot of the gunk out of my soul.

But ironically I lack the character to force myself to do it.

I mean, that sounds like it’d hurt, and be difficult and scary and stuff.

So I could stop being such a FUCKING PUSSY, that’s why.

My lack of courage and self-discipline is making me miserable. I have no backbone, no intestinal fortitude, no courage, no character.

I’m just an amorphous jelly barely held together by my own gravity.

So fuck ME.

More after the break.

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The paternal influence

A quick refresher on where this discussion had gone so far :

Maternal figures nurture and protect children, They offer kisses for owies, hugs for sads, and understanding for the day’s upsets.

Paternal figures do some of that too, of course, but their job is to encourage the child to take (smart) risks, expand their boundaries, fight their way through things, and in general learn that there’s much worse things than getting hurt.

Thus, we have the mama’s boy. Without a competent father figure, you get a child dominated by weakness and fear.

This is especially true in highly polarized households where the paternal figure is angry, punitive, and unstable and the maternal figure tries to compensate (afterwards) by being supportive and forgiving and understanding.

Such a paternal figure is wildly inadequate because their angry and instability make it impossible for the necessary bond of trust to form with the child and without trust in the paternal figure absolutely no developmental help can be forthcoming.

You can’t learn much from a father you’re scared of.

I learned extremely little from my late father except how to avoid him. I certainly took no lessons about how to regulate my emotions and/or behave from him. If anything, what he “taught” me was by counterexample.

I didn’t want to be like him. Perhaps I took that too far. But I digress.

So when I bemoan my lack of character and so forth, it’s not hard to see where it comes from because with how my life turned out, I am not sure where it could have come from.

My father was incompetent. My mother was emotionally absent. School was insultingly easy. I had no friends to learn from for the majority of my childhood. In many ways I grew up in a vacuum.

Like I have said many times before, it’s a wonder I am sane at all. Kids are absolutely not supposed to grow up that way.

But whose job is it to make sure that they don’t?

Nobody ever saw me as their problem, let alone their responsibility.

For most of my life I have been very, very alone.

Even when I wasn’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I made good on my threat to do more sci fi bitching, although I quickly wandered into a more philosophical and/or psychological territory.

Call it “theory of human behaviour”, I guess. For me, it’s all one fascinating subject.

That’s why, had my college education gone as intended, I would have graduated with a double major, psychology and philosophy, unless that goddamned registrar got pissy with me again and decided double majors weren’t allowed even though I would have finished with all the necessary course credits for both.

God, did I hate that prick.

Anyhow, in that case I would have finished with a major in psych and a minor in philosophy, because while I love philosophy, there’s not a lot of jobs in it.

Never major in something where the only job that major qualifies you is teaching the subject as a professor, kids, unless you think you’re insanely driven and competitive enough to beat all the other people with dumb degrees for those prized associate professor/glorified flunkie positions.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I am quite serious about the ultimate supremacy of emotion, of course. Despite being a highly intellectual individual who loves science and heavily favours things like logical analysis, advanced deduction, and reductive insight, I am not some silly German logic fetishist who not only think it’s possible to remove emotion from our reasoning entirely but for some bizarre reason thinks that would be a good thing.

Like I said in the vid, all motives are emotional, and no human action is without motive, whether your motive is to advance peace and justice for all humanity or to finally dislodge that stubborn burp, and so all human action is emotional. QED.

Indeed, take it from someone who has “been there”, worshipping some form of logic is actually a purely emotional attempt to retreat from reality into a world of nice clean comfortable abstractions where the excessively intellectual feel more safe.

What’s worse is that it’s also an attempt to dodge accountability for one’s actions. Oh, I didn’t decide to do this thing, it was the only logical course of action. And you can’t argue against that unless you can argue against their logic, and they have usually made that difficult by hiding their true motives in things like grey areas and verbal ambiguities and are generally better at that sort of arguing that the average non-intellectual.

It’s what makes certain kinds of people really fucking irritating.

But clearly that’s all bullshit. You did that thing because you felt like it. Ultimately. Your attempt at intellectual camouflage is understandable but it is truly dangerous to lie to yourself like that and tell yourself you are logical when you’re just as emotional as the rest of it, you’re just in much, much deeper denial and even further alienated from yourself and who you really are.

And that’s bad.

I am only just now learning to untangle all this complicated emotional spaghetti code myself. I feel like I am lost in a virtual realm of my own design and part of me suspects that deep down, I know what’s real and what’s mere illusion, but I am too emotionally dependent on the illusions to cast the spell that will make it all go away.

Because then where would I be? Stuck in the real world, without my primary defense of retreating into my mind? How can that be a good thing?

For me, that would mean casting myself into the yawning maw of the unknown, and I am neurotic enough to feel like unknown automatically means bad,

And I know that is cowardly of me. I have no apparent spirit of adventure and exploration. My default is to assume that only the known can be safe and the darkness outside the bright cold light of my intellect is filled with ghosts and ghouls and goblins hell bent on destroying me utterly.

When in truth, they probably don’t even know who I am.

More after the break.

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The fear in your soul

Fear doesn’t have to control a person, though. History is full of brave people who did very scary things. Ordinary, mentally well people overcome themselves every day to go out there and take on that world.

They don’t live like they are strapped in place in front of a computer and forbidden to do anything but play video games and make videos and write on their blog under penalty of being buried alive, for fuck’s sake.

So why does my fear control me? Why can’t I just push back and do whatever the hell I want to do regardless of my fears?

Where did my courage go?

I’ve got to fall back on my way too easy (in some ways) childhood.

School was nothing to me. I never even learned to study. And I think this means I never learned to overcome my own limitations and I never learned to subdue my fears.

And life didn’t force me to learn any of that either. I have always had people to hide behind. People who take care of me and handle reality for me. I lived on my own when I first moved to the GVRD and got on welfare, so it’s not like I have never ever lived on my own, and I of course managed it just fine because it’s not that hard.

Pay the rent. Shop for groceries. Pay the bills. Simple.

But since then, I’ve had roommates to take care of things for me. There was Steve, and Eamon, and Angela, and of course now Joe and Julian.

And I suppose they didn’t necessarily do all that much for me. I still did my own laundry and cleaning and cooking and shopping.

So I get the feeling that perhaps the idea of my being pathetically dependent on others is another plank of my negative internal narrative that has to go.

Piece by piece, I’mma take that god damned thing apart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Proud of myself for actually tackling a problem in an adult way and seeing it through to its resolution today.

The problem is that the password I had for my online banking at VanCity didn’t work. And I need to access my online banking for reasons of things like setting up my “tip jar” on Ko-Fi and such.

But, showing what, for me, is an unusually high level of perspicacity and general awareness, I thought to get this sorted out when I did my monthly banking today.

A quick password reset by my teller and now I am back in control, despite the fact that it was supposed to send an SMS to my cell but called the landline instead.

Whatever my teller did to update my number clearly did not work.

However, I thought to answer the call, and an automated voice gave me the one time code I needed, so it all worked out.

So now I should be able to get things like Ko-Fi and Stripe working and from there, who knows what magical doorways I will unlock.

Maybe I will even be able to get my PayPal working.

I’ve been playing around with this app called JustPlay which supposedly pays you real money to plan their video games.

And maybe it does, but as you can imagine, the cash accumulates quite slowly. So it will be a while before I accumulate enough winnings for it to be worth it for me to bother cashing out, and one of the main ways of doing THAT is via PayPal.

Right now I have a mighty and awe-inspiring $2.67 in my account. And that’s from playing their games for a couple of hours.

A job it ain’t.

At least their selection of games is good. They seem to have a knack for knowing which mobile games deliver the most addictive fun from a very simple setup.

I feel like I’m missing something. Oh right, today’s vid.

I was tempted to just keep going with all of my science fiction beefs around things like the Vulcans and time travel and teleportation and so on, but I decided that I would save those for future videos.

This morning I went to Wound Care, and I showed the nurse my very fucked up (by me) right foot, and she bandaged up all three wounds, and told me that they did not seem to be infected so as long as I keep them covered up and dry, they should heal on their own, and a trip to Urgent Care was not needed.

Phew! That would have been a pain.

I feel great shame about how I fucked up my own damn foot by compulsively peeling off the dead skin off it.

I mean, it’s natural to want to get rid of that shit. Dead skin is supposed to slough off, dammit, and when it doesn’t, we get itchy and we scratch.

Now you know where some of your random little itches come from.

But I took it to a frankly insane extent and all because it felt good to do it and because I have this crazy need to finish what I start.

It reminds me of this time when, as a kid, I was cleaning my glasses in the kitchen when I got some Windex on the wall and noticed that where the Windex landed, the wallpaper was suddenly MUCH brighter.

Intrigued, I sprayed some more on the wall, and wiped it off, and discovered that there was apparently a uniform layer of some kind of soot on everything.

I later figured out it was residue from our propane stove.

Turns out propane doesn’t quite burn cleanly. Sorry, Hank Hill.

Anyhow, intrigued by this magical find, I spray a bunch more at the wall and cleaned a big section and suddenly our “harvest” colored wallpaper (so yellow, orange, and brown) was all vibrating and glowing.

Well once I had started I had to finish. So I cleaned every wall in the kitchen as well as some of the cabinets, which took about an hour and a half.

Imagine my mother’s surprise when she came home to a kitchen that now looked like it was lighted by floodlights!

We’d forgotten that wallpaper was even yellow!

To be honest it was a bit much. Luckily it wasn’t that bright for long.

More after the break.

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Remembering that I do things

Had therapy today. Talked to Doctor Costin. Told him how I seethed and burned with resentment and jealousy that he got to go to my fucking hometown for a nice vacation while I had to stay back here wishing I was there to hug my mom.

He found that amusing. Whatever.

I need a way to get back home so I can hug her while she’s still around.

Anyhow, one of the things that came up in therapy was my fighting of the false inner narrative that I “do nothing but play video games”.

Clearly that’s not true. I do this blog, I make videos. I might not get paid for any of it yet but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

And yet the idea that I do nothing continues to feel true, and it’s from that feeling that the lie refreshes itself after I have suppressed it.

This is why CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is so limited. The bad thoughts are expressions of real emotions and unless the emotions change, identifying the lies of mental illness is less than pointless.

You’re treating the symptoms, not the disease. How fucking futile.

I am a very damaged person. When I was raped as a toddler, it shattered me, and because that terrible injury was never treated in any way because I never told anyone about it, I think I healed the wrong way.

Like a broken limb healing without support or a cast, so it ends up fucked up and fused together and leaving the person crippled.

Well I’m an emotional cripple. And I always have been. I am a fragile, awkward, maladjusted, broken creature and it’s so hard for me to imagine being any different.

It’s like trying to imagine what it’s like to be dead.

All I can do is continue to try to heal and get a little bit stronger and a little bit more alive and awake every day, and do my best to cope with this crazy world and my twisted soul.

It’s a good thing I’m cute.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.