I’m having my usual busy Friday.

Ya know, wound care at 9:15 am, then ordering my groceries online, then at 2 pm heading out for my weekly shower at Rosewood, then back here just in time to have lunch and start blogging.

And today, while Albert was showering me, I got to think about I tend to be a very agreeable and accommodating person to the point where it becomes problematic.

Because it’s very hard to me to ask for what I want or speak up for myself. The urge to tell people what I know they want to hear is far too strong. It makes it hard for folks to care for me because something might be going terribly wrong with me and they would never know because I would just keep it to myself.

Well, I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone with my symptoms.

I’ve gotten better about it as my health has gotten worse. I still find it very hard to speak up and tell people what’s wrong with me, because when I was a child, that didn’t work.

I would try to tell adults about my issues and just get brushed off.

But there’s nothing quite like illness and pain to get you to rethink your attitudes about a lot of things. Suddenly, shit gets real, dawg. Fuck your neurosis.

That’s how I learned that I was completely alone in the world. And were I made from sturdier stock or more ambitious temperament, that feeling of being alone might have sparked in me the urge to prove to the world that I was just fine by myself and I didn’t need anyone else at all.

But my soul is emaciated and paper-thin, so all it made me do was withdraw even further into my mind and away from the world that I could not survive alone and could not get any help with either.

I’m way too fucked up for anyone’s love to get through to me.

Crap. I need sleep, badly. I am going to have to lay down for now.

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Now where was I?

Forgot I had not finished Part 1 of my writing, so now here I am at 9:23 pm needing to write slightly less than 650 words in one go.

No problem at all.

Was weird to get that sleepy so fast. But I’d had a long day with all the wound care and groceries and shower and whatnot.

But whatever. I usually write all of part 1 in one sitting, and that’s 600+ words.

So really, it’s more like part 1 and part 2 just switched places for today.

Anyhow, back to the self-therapy.

I wish I was a more robust kind of person. But I suspect that a very big part of my problem with that kind of thing is my very weak connection with my id.

I have taken refuge in the crisp but chilly world of the mind far too much and for far too long, and it has left me feeling only weakly embodied and merely technically present.

And I know that has to end. I need to bring myself into balance instead of being so very lopsided in the direction of the ego and I can only do that by spending less time looking at screens and more time actually interacting with the real world.

Or at the very least, increasingly the depth and scope of my screen time. Go out into the wilds of the internet in search of remote work and new social experiences.

The image that keeps crossing my mind is of me throwing a grappling hook out into the ether then pulling myself along by the chain attached to it.

A strange image, to be sure, but it encapsulates how I feel about reaching out beyond myself into the real world in search of a new anchor point or two.

Still feeling nervous about the phone call from the SkillUp people on Monday. And I know why. It’s because I will have to explain the stark raving lunacy of my life so far and admit to having fucked everything up so completely that I am 51 years old and have never even entered the workforce.

And I am so ashamed of what a loser I am that explaining that will hurt a LOT.

All I can do is make myself think about all those lost years now and then and hold them in my mind for as long as I can stand to do so in order to drain some of their power.

Because they are definitely something I need to get over before I truly move on with my life. They are gone and I can never get them back and I don’t know how to handle that.

All I can do is grieve. Let the pain and loss and the horror I feel at what I have done to and with myself wash over me so I can get to the other side of them.

The only cure for emotions is to feel them.

The only way out is through.

I wish it was as simple as telling myself that there’s nothing I can do about it now so I might as well forgot about the past and concentrate on making my future better.

But it’s not that simple. I am not yet capable of that level of hope.

I feel like I have only just arrived at the possibility of positivity, and true hope, full and strong, would be asking far too much of my sad little spirit.

But my deflated soul is slowly filling up with air and systems that got mothballed a long time ago are struggling to come online, and over time, I am sure I will perk up more.

Like I keep saying, I know there is a very upbeat and positive person lurking within me and waiting to emerge.

I can feel him within me, like the shadow of someone I might have been. A happy, optimistic, pragmatic dreamer dedicated to making amazing things happen.

The kind of wonderful things that give people hope.

Maybe in order to find hope, I need to give it to others first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to my extraordinary level of insight, that is.

I’ve always been able to see right through people, although it didn’t surge to Hannibal Lecter levels until somewhere around grade 4 or 5 .

For me, other people’s emotions are simply present to my mind. They always have been. And that forms the basis of my ability to “read minds”.

Or at least it sometimes seems to others like I can.

And to be perfectly blunt, they have no idea.

Because, as patient readers know, I learned at a fairly young age that people do not like it when you speak casually about their innermost secrets.

Seems to make them feel vulnerable for some reason.

To me, I was talking about obvious truths about people. And I was only trying to help. But of course, part of the very foundation of what lets human beings get along in a world full of strangers is the privacy of our own souls.

So I had to eventually learn to keep my observations to myself and to at least try to act as if I had the same barriers to understanding as everyone else.

And that’s not easy for me. To be honest, I have a very hard time imagining what the world would be like without my X-ray mind.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have other people be these opaque black boxes whom I could only understand through that which they openly express.

I mean, if you think I’m reclusive now….

And maybe that’s a big part of why I did not end up on the autism spectrum despite a childhood that seemed almost tailor made to produce it.

I’ve never found the behaviour of my fellow shaved apes baffling. I have never been limited by the confines of logical reasoning and deduction in how I understand people. To me, it is intuitively obvious that everyone does what they do and says what they say for reasons that make sense to them and in the context of their own lived experiences.

And that’s why I am such a passionate humanist. I can feel in my soul how everyone is vulnerable and weak and foolish and incomplete, and it only makes me love them more.

We truly are just a bunch of wounded souls stumbling around in the dark trying to find that door into happiness.

There ain’t one. Nobody has ever been happily ever after, and the only way to be happy until the day you die is to die in the middle of an orgasm.

There are worse ways to go.

Things can get better, though. But happiness is always going to take work. There is never going to be a point where you can just be happy all the time.

Even billionaires have bad days.

Hence why it is so toxic to view effort as the enemy, as depression forces you to do. The tragic inner conviction that most things are not worth the effort keeps you unhappy.

The big problem is that thanks to anhedonia, for you, it’s true. Only the most extreme positive reward to effort ratios can penetrate depression’s numbness. Everything else is, to you, unrewarding in the extreme.

So whether you get your extremely low effort reward stimulation from alcohol or drugs or gambling or risky sex or even video games, we all self-medicate in our own way.

A neurosurgeon once suggested that we could treat depression with a sort of emotional pacemaker implanted in the brain that provided a low level of stimulation to the reward center of the brain at all time, or perhaps in response to low levels.

I’d be willing to give it a try.

Now where’s the closest trans cranial magnetic stimulation place…

More after the break.

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Video Era 2024

That’s what I hope to launch soon, once I get the technical issues ironed out.

Which probably means paying Corel for the update from Video Studio 2020. Grr.

There are probably freeware video editors out there, but unfortunately I only like the Corel one. None of the others have the hyper efficient “mark and cue” editing style that I have grown to adore.

Compared to it, everything else is weird and clumsy and overcomplicated.

Unrelatedly, I have finally made an optometry appointment. I have needed one for quite a while as it’s getting harder and harder for me to read text.

Especially the text in paperback books. And most of my books are paperback.

So clearly the issue has reached crisis levels.

I booked an appointment for next Tuesday, and then someone from the place (the pathetically named FYIdoctors) called me, and it’s a good thing she did.

Because apparently I have to pay half of the fee for the appointment, which means I will need to show up with $65 in my pocket.

Nice of the province to give me money to live on then claw it back with a copay.

What is this, the USA?

Oh well. At least I will leave with a new prescription and be able to buy some glasses online that do NOT make me farsighted and that therefore I will be able to wear them all the time like a normal nerd.

My phone conversation with the person from SkillUp will be happening Monday morning at 11:15 am and I am extremely nervous about it.

Like I’ve said before, I know that’s irrational. It’s not a job interview, for crying out loud. I am just going to talk with this person about my educational options.

And I can do this. I’m very good at education. I am positive that I can take an online course then ace the certification process and acquire an actual job skill or two.

Right now I am aiming for system administration. I am positive that I can learn how computer networks are run and do a good job of it.

I have a good head for systems.

I could try other things they offer, like online bookkeeping, but meh.

I’m very, very good at accounting. But it’s so incredibly boring.

Even with spreadsheets to do all the math.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The image of me holding myself hostage deep inside my mind popped into my head just now, as I was wondering what to write about, and so here we are.

I’ve envisioned myself as being my own jailor and tormentor a number of times in this space, so on paper^[1] this really isn’t all that different.

And yet, it is. Because it paints a bullseye on the self-victimization of my inner child and how desperate a situation that is.

That poor boy sleeping inside me locked himself in a cage in order to keep the evil real world at bay and retreated into his world of screens and diversions, and at some point along the way he got lost within himself and he’s looked for the way out ever since.

Even though he knows why he’s trapped and knows that he will only find the exit when he stops needing the maze, still, he keeps looking.

I guess it’s better than doing nothing. And he can’t do nothing. He is far too agitated and paranoid and squirrelly for that.

It may not seem like it, but mine is a very restless soul. That’s why I have to fill my mind with distractions that rip my life away.

Video games are perfect for that purpose. They engage me fully because they are an interactive non-stop stream of mental stimulation that keeps me from sitting around actually thinking about my life.

Because my life sucks. So I avoid thinking about it at all costs. Which is why it sucks.

Fixing it would require that commitment to being here and real and taking up space that I was talking about yesterday.

Maybe I need to finally finish being born.

Hold up. my IBS is spazzing out.

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Well that was fun.

Trigger warning, poop talk ahead.

I knew trouble was brewing when a certain deep gurgling, a sound like a chainsaw revving underwater, came up through my guts from below.

Long, hard experience has taught me that this kind of thing and the accompanying sensations can only mean one thing ;

The contents of my lower intestine were liquefying.

And that ain’t good.

Sure enough, before long I had to go poop, and nothing solid came out. That was to be expected, at least if you’re me.

And you might be. I’m a complicated dude.

What I did not expect was for it to burn. That’s not a normal part of this process. And I find myself worrying about what it means.

There’s been no radical shifts in my diet, so that’s off the table. I haven’t suddenly developed a hankering for jalapeno poppers or anything.

That leaves two main avenues of explanation : either something is irritating that general peri-anal region, or something is making that which passes through it irritating.

Amounts to the same thing, I guess.

Something definitely caused everything in my gut to be pulverized like I had a blender in my descending colon.

Presumably, there was a bottleneck somewhere along the line – a place where the intestine narrowed and caused a backlog (sic), and that backlog only cleared when the stomach contents had been reduced to something thin enough to pass through anyhow.

That doesn’t explain the burning, though. My biggest worry, and I have no idea how reasonable this is, is that somehow stomach acid is making it out of the stomach and into my digestive tract where it definitely does not belong.

Makes you wonder how the stomach keeps the acid in but lets food through.

Maybe it doesn’t. I dunno.

More after the break.

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The boy in the bubble

That’s me, I guess.

The difference between me and that famous boy, besides my having a functional immune system, is that his reasons for isolation were very much real.

Mine aren’t. They’re thirty years out of date. And that’s just the issues I have related to bullying and such.

Patient readers know that the real issues started when I was raped as a toddler. That’s when my flight from the unthinkable brutality of it into the depths of my enormous mind and then slammed the door behind me.

And I have been locked in there ever since. And no matter what I try to tell myself, that scared child within me remains convinced that if that door ever opens, the world will come in and destroy him.

And maybe it would, in a way, because if that door opens, he’ll have to wake up.

And grow up, and he – and I – are terrified of that. The healthy side of me wants to grow up and become a real person more than anything else, but the unhealthy side views that prospect with the stark animal terror of a fox beset by dogs.

I tried not to go there with that image but my muse insisted. Damn it.

And that terror harmonizes with the fear from being raped and somehow it all turns into the suffocating casket I live in, the one that is way way too small for me because it was made to fit me when I was much smaller (in all senses of the word) and which has been killing me with how cramped and distorted I have to be to remain inside it.

But it’s my turtle shell. And that makes me cling to it like Linus with his security blanket even though that shell is far too small for me now.

Time to shed that shell and grow another. And that means facing that feeling of unchecked terror and getting on with things despite it.

There will always be a part of me that wants to just keep hiding from the world and being “safe”, and there’s no reason why I have to abandon that completely.

But I need to open up my shell enough to let the air and light in, and let me feel the sunlight on my skin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, let’s try to assemble a more coherent identity for myself, because right now, I am all over the place and that’s not good.

Q : So who is this Fruvous guy anyway?

A : Oh, he’s great! He’s so witty and funny and sweet. I’ve never met anyone like him before. He radiates warmth and sympathy, and just being around him makes me relax and feel comfortable. And he’s so smart! He is truly one of a kind. I’m happy I met him.

Did I miss anything?

Obviously I was going for a positive spin on everything. After all, if I am going to construct an identity, it might as well be a healthy, self-respecting one.

Now there’s an idea.

And looked at the way I looked at it up there, I am a pretty amazing dude. And I am sure my friends, both fuzzy and human, would agree that I am definitely one of a kind.

And I don’t disagree. Factually. All of those wonderful attributes apply to me and do form a potential foundation for my identity. A good one, no less.

But the facts can only penetrate so far into my mind, heart, and soul and while they penetrate a little further every day, there is still a very stark dividing line inside me where past which the good things stop and everything becomes stark and barren and cold.

And I think part of me – the sick part – likes it that way

Perhaps that line marks the place where the intellectual cage I built around myself to survive being raped as a toddler begins.

I know that there is within me a permanently freaking out critter that screams NOBODY TOUCHES ME and is ready to bite the head off of anyone who tried to get too close.

And that’s bad. Very, very bad.

Because I hate being so alone all the time. And not just on the outside. Yeah, I spend the vast majority of my time alone in my room, but that’s not the part that really hurts.

It’s the inner solitude that feels like it’s killing me. It’s the fact that I have been all alone in my inner world for my entire life that does it. I don’t have any other emotional influences within me – no memories of positive input from others – that I can draw upon to bolster my mood.

I’ve been so heartbreaking alone for my whole life and even now, despite having absolutely marvelous friends in both RL and VR, I still feel isolated and alone on the inside and it’s not hard to see why.

Nobody can get past that line.

That leaves me in a constant state of emotional starvation. And that in turn makes me very, very hungry for any kind of positive emotional input.

Romantic love would be nice. That could help me thaw out. If it was the right dude it might even lead to my finally opening up instead of being sealed inside myself.

Sex could play a big part there. It’s so life-affirming and intimate and joyful.

At least if you’re doing it right.

I mean, clearly this inner famine has to end and that means I need to find whatever I need, inside my head or outside of it, in order to truly open up to the world.

To let the world in. To let people in. To fully commit to being present and alive and real and part of the human race. To breathe free and relax on the inside and end that freaked out little critter’s rage and terror and bring it home at last.

My childhood wasn’t all misery. There were times when I felt good. Sunny days where the sky was blue and the pavement was warm and life seemed pretty okay.

Even happy days spent watching TV and reading.

And I need to remember those days and add them to my inner narrative.

It hasn’t all been bad.

In fact, some of those things were pretty darn good.

More after the break.

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The long awakening

Got another one of “those” phone calls at around 10:45 this morning.

The one where one of the nurses at the wound care place (the CCC) calls me up and asks, “Are you on the way here?”.

And I’m like, “No, because my appointment isn’t till 3 PM!”

And the nurse says, “No, it’s 10:45, man. ”

At this point, Julian shows me the actual printed schedule we were given and yup, it says 3 freaking PM on it.

And this just keeps happening.

They move the appointment without telling me. And then I have to go without a bandage change for another three or four days because of THEIR mistake.

Luckily, that won’t happen this time. My nurse had an opening tomorrow at 10:30 am, so Julian and I will be showing up then.

I am getting rather peeved at this damned SNAFUs.

---

Otherwise I am doing OK. Glad I will be getting my bandages changed after all, although it’s going to be a little weird to have them changed again two days later, at 9:15 am on Friday.

Yeah, you wanna bet we made sure the nurse was on the same page as us THIS time.

I am happy with the depth I have been digging into my own psyche. I am confident that I am slowly mastering the ability to move in the direction of maximum pain and discomfort and thus find the most therapeutically useful insights.

Maybe “insights” is the wrong word. Too intellectual. The real work is all emotional, but sadly the only route I know to the emotional is via the intellectual.

Hence the endless self-analysis. A more emotionally normal person would not have to write thousands and thousands of words in order to heal their own mind.

It would probably just happen. They’d have a big emotional experience, possibly attributing it to their faith, and that would be it.

But us neurotic intellectuals need the help of therapists and journaling and so on.

Because we have to understand everything. We can’t just let things take care of themselves. To us, the very idea seems like madness.

So we’re all at least somewhat crazy.

Ironic, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am definitely feeling rather off right now.

At least I headed off the worst of it. About an hour ago, I started feeling increasingly bed. Headache, nausea, muscles aching.

It was bad enough that thought of the ER or UC danced before my eyes.

They did the foxtrot, of course.

But I took the appropriate measures. I got some hydration and some nutrition into me, then I lay down in bed with the fan on and pointed at my fevered brow, and proceeded to unclog my ears and nose.

That did the trick and I was soon feeling a lot better.

Pretty sure my blood sugar was starting to melt down there but getting some trail mix into me put a stop to that.

Speaking of trail mix, there’s something very weird about my latest bag of it.

It’s President’s Choice’s Almonds, Raisins, Cashews, and Cranberries trail mix. ^[1] It had been on my DoorDash account as an alternate to my usual trail mix(es) for ages and this week it was, as it were, pressed into active duty.

It sounds like a perfectly straightforward mixture, and for once, I can be completely sure that a previously untried trail mix does not contain any fricking candy.

But when I opened the bag, an odor escaped that did not make me hungry, It was not the smell of almonds, raisins, cashews, or cranberries.

It was the smell of dry dog food.

And I have a personal animosity toward that smell because I grew up four blocks from the Sur-Grain (pronounced “sure grain”) Feed and Fertilizer plant and on very bad days the wind would blow that exact scent into my neighborhood.

And I haaaaaate that smell. It’s like it goes straight to my gag reflex. Just thinking about it makes my throat threaten to close off.

So I was not at all happy that this odor was coming out of a bag of what was meant to be Fruvous Chow.

Luckily, that scent dissipated after a while, and I was able to eat the fucking thing.

And that’s when things got really weird. Because, I shitteth thou not, sometimes when I eat a handful of it, it tastes like fish.

To me, at least. Smells like it too. And like, WTF is up with that?

It seems to be something that all four constituents of the trail mix are coated in to some extent. When I eat them separately, the flavour either is not there or is pretty faint.

But put them all together and somehow, inexplicably, things get fishy.

I assume that it would not taste piscine to anyone else. My taste buds are just as off kilter as the rest of me and sometimes I taste things in a way nobody else does.

Luckily, putting some in a bowl and leaving it exposed to the air for a while cuts through the fishy flavour, so I am able to eat the stuff.

But still, what the exponential fuck? In general, nothing that is not fish should taste like fish, and that makes me what the frick I’ve been eating.

And my bladder has been anxious lately. I get the need to pee more often than usual but each time it’s a much smaller amount than usual. As if my bladder shrank.

And that has me very worried because I have experienced this symptom twice before and both times it was a sign that my prostate was infected.

So you can bet I am checking my urine for traces of blood each time I pee.

And peeing hurts a little right in that area around the spot where the bladder empties into the urethra. And that’s also a sign.

I hope it clears up on its own.

I don’t wanna go to the ER or UC!

More after the break.

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On our backs

My back has been bothering me again recently.

It had be behaving itself for a long time. I hadn’t felt the need to take one of my Cyclobenzaprine muscle relaxant pills in months.

But now that spasmodic pain that clutches at my spine and makes me cry out in pain and/or fall onto the bed when I try to stand is back, and that kinda sucks.

The pills do keep it under control, thank God. But I wish I knew what changed both to make it go away and to make it come back.

I want it gone again, hopefully for good.

Otherwise I am feeling okay-ish. Pretty much the same as when I wrote part 1 : not sick in any particular way (except back spasms, grr) but not feeling quite right either.

I’m doing okay emotionally. I have periods where I feel pretty depressed – I am processing a lot of deep changes as I dig myself out of this grave – but I just wait for them to pass and don’t take them too seriously.

It’s all part of my recuperation. Getting better is often a messy and difficult process but I know that as long as I keep trudging along as I unburden myself, I will eventually make my soul light enough to float up into the sky where shiny people like me belong.

Because I deserve so much more than this sad little life of mine. I should at the very minimum be making a comfortable middle class living with my outrageous talents.

Or at least enough to pay someone to come in and clean my bedroom and ensuite. Top to bottom, spic and span, so clean you could perform surgery there.

I’d pay someone $200 for that.

I can’t really do it myself. Not yet. I need to go a lot further down the road of taking responsibility for myself and accessing my true energies before that.

I mean, ya never know. I might suddenly find the ambition to at least clean off my bed so that I can flip the mattress over so the springs don’t impale me so much any more.

And the other side should be a lot cleaner too. Way less sweat absorbed into it.

i wonder if the province would buy me a new (to me) bed if I asked?

After all, I’m not fussy about the color…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, hear me out.

Right now, all the good and righteous people of the world are worried about all the terrible things Trump promised to do.

But that’s where the ray of hope emerges, because look at those two words :

Trump promised. And we all know that, as with all sociopaths, promises mean absolutely nothing to him. They are just words you say to get people to do what you want them to do. The idea that they should have any existence past the point where the person did what you wanted them to do is absurd to them.

And his people did what he wanted them to do : they voted him into office. And now they have absolutely no hold over him because he can’t ever be re-elected.

Luckily, changing THAT would requite a constitutional amendment.

So maybe Trump will do the terrible things he promised them he’d do. But maybe not. We know that he’s even more senile, childish, and impatient now than he was when he won in 2016.

Who knows if he will even remember what he said on the campaign trail when it comes time for his inauguration on January 20th.

So that’s it. That’s the slender ray of hope I have come up with today.

It’s not a lot but so far it’s been enough to stop the spread of the cancerous despair that has been fomenting in my soul since I read the news he had won last Wednesday.

Assuming he really did win. Not that I suppose it matters now as it’s not like anyone is going to be investigating this election once it’s faded from the public’s mind, but I still think there is strong chance that he and his cronies cheated to get the win.

That would be straight from the fascist playbook he has apparently been following. Rigged elections are a favorite of dictators all over the world because they want people to think their people love them but don’t want to leave it up to the people to decide that for themselves. So they cheat.

Hence the “elections” where there’s only one party to “choose” from. And the unspeakable obscenity of fascist dictators celebrating their election “win”.

And we know that his supporters are perfectly willing to rig things in his favor. That’s why they have been infiltrating election boards and other similar bodies for the last four years. They wanted to make sure their guy won.

Because right wingers have never ever truly believed in democracy. Democracy is too complex and chaotic for them. It has doubt and uncertainty built right into it, and they hate both of those things.

After all, the people might pick the wrong party!

Which brings me to my other bridge of potential hope, which is, believe it or not, the members of the Republican Party.

Look, I never said it was a particularly good bridge.

But we will see if the Republicans in the House and Senate and the Supreme Court are as obedient as we fear they will be.

Hopefully we will find that there are some things they just won’t do.

Heck, we know from his first term that his own staffers will absolutely refuse to follow blatantly insane or evil orders.

Now I don’t know what kind of mental defectives he will hire this time around. I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to work for or with him.

But if we’re lucky, the only people who will work for the second Trump administration are either deranged idiots like RFK Junior or, god willing, true patriots who actually do believe in democracy, sanity, and freedom.

And that’s all I’ve got for now.

More after the break.

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The Purple Menace

I was all ready to record a video for today. Basically I was going to talk about all the things I talked about in part 1 today.

But in video form!

However, I remembered my purple problem from yesterday, so I prudently recorded a test video to see if the same thing would happen again.

It did. It was perfectly normal when I recorded it but the moment I switched over to editing mode, the purple was back.

And that really pisses me off. I mean, it’s a brand new webcam and these days, recording video is one of the simplest things a computer can do.

I mean, I am not even asking it to stream anything anywhere.

And it’s such a weirdly specific problem that Googling it did me no good. As is almost always the case with me, nobody else in the known universe has had the problem I am having and so I am SSOL.

Ask you father what that stands for.

Eventually, I gave up on Google and decided to take my video capture business elsewhere (grr) by trying out an el cheapo freeware video capture app I downloaded several geologic epochs ago.

And it worked! Sorta. Not really.

The audio was out of sync with the video and it was capturing maybe twelve frames per second so it was janky as yesterday’s fuck too.

So, no video for today. I will try again tomorrow. I am not quite ready to commit to some specific number of days and/or minutes yet, but once I get the technical issues ironed out, I might just go for it.

My suspicion is that this purple bullshit is not there by accident but that it’s something that was deliberately programmed into my video editing suite by Corel so that I couldn’t keep using Video Studio 2020 and would have to pay to upgrade to CVS 2024.

If so, it’s only $25 or so, and I can spare that. So whatever.

But if I pay them that money and the purple shit doesn’t go away, I am going to be SUPER pissed off.

I mean, as errors go, it makes no sense. I could understand if the video turned into video noise, complete with awful sounds, when the program went to encode it. Or if it recorded nothing, or I saw an error screen or somesuch.

But WTF is with the purple?

That has to be a result of planned obsolescence, right?

It’s so hard to tell when my paranoia is justified.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I did it.

This morning, I arranged an appointment for one of the Skillup counselors to talk to me about what skills I want to up.

At 11:15 on Monday, November 18th, I will have my chat with these lovely people and together we will figure out what the hell to do with me.

That gives me plenty of time to let all my irrational “failure to launch” fears to come to the surface so I can deal with them once and for all.

There’s the baseline fear that I’ve been dealing with forever, which is a fear that I have volunteered to have a big angry hand to reach down and rip me from my nice warm cozy casket and that will leave me naked and exposed to the world and no longer able to dive into my hidey hole whenever I feel overwhelmed.

Which is insane, obviously. So am I.

That’s the thing about mental illness. It’s crazy.

And crazy people do and think and say and believe crazy things. I know that as a “mental health services consumer” I am not one hundred percent in control of myself and my mind and my soul and so on, and that’s a very hard thing to face when you are the product of an advanced democratic pluralist individualist culture based squarely on the bedrock principle of individual responsibility.

So far, the compromise I have used to solve that critical conundrum has been that I control my actions and that’s all society can ask of anyone.

But now I am thinking that, as logical as that sounds, whether it’s a sane thing to do or not depends highly on how many of your impulses to act you are stifling.

With me, the answer has been, “almost all of them”, and that’s way too much.

And all in the name of “control”. Well, to paraphrase m’man Nietzsche, you are not truly in control of yourself until you can control the urge to control yourself.

The ascetic is just as decadent as the debaucher because they are both the product of an impulse running wild, without restraint.

The debaucher has a lot more fun, though.

Anyhow, my supposed self-control has been so thorough and efficient that it’s kept me from doing anything except blogging and playing video games for decades.

And here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all this magnificent talent and personality going to waste because it’s locked behind a gate made of mental illness.

Well, it’s a tragedy, innit?

Clearly I need to learn to ease back on the parking brake and let my wheels spin freely until I can learn who I really am and what I really want.

I know I want money. Duh. And I want to earn that money. It would do wonders for my mental health if I could, at long last, actually support myself.

I mean, I wouldn’t turn down a million bucks. But I would still get a job of some sort.

People take earning a living for granted. We are largely completely oblivious to our social instincts that demand that we serve the tribe.

But that’s where the whole “wanting to be part of something bigger than ourselves” comes from. It’s ancient instincts telling us to find and serve a tribe.

Modern employment serves that role. Your job is your tribe, and if you are disabled, you are not getting that need met at all.

Hence the massive amount of guilt I carry for never having entered the world of work at all and being 51 years old.

That’s a lot of time without a tribe.

And all our instincts insist that being without a tribe is an emergency and we need to find one ASAP.

Unless, like me, you are socially damaged and hence afraid of people.

Then you’re just plain fucked.

More after the break.

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Haven’t been seen

I had hoped to have some more video to showcase today, but I got stuck not being able to think of what to talk about.

Oh well. Perhaps something will come to me as I blog.

Either way, I am not going to let indecision stymie me again. Instead, I will take the same attitude I do to this blog and just talk about whatever is on my mind when I sit down, and if that fails, just start recording and see what the hell comes out of my mouth.

Like with this blog, all I really need is a starting point. A jumping off point where I can get the ball rolling and let my natural loquaciousness take care of the rest.

What can I say? I always have a lot going on between my ears.

Some days it’s a wonder that I can even get to sleep.

I think I am slowly adjusting to the fact that Trump will be president again. And I am bracing for all manner of horrors. This time is going to be so much worse.

For example? Putin just invaded Estonia.

And you know what that means? It means Ukraine is fucked. But Putin is not going to stop there. He will attempt to conquer all the old Soviet republics, and the world is going to face a stark choice :

Either let him, or start World War 3.

Now, given that Putin’s forces can’t even conquer Ukraine, and they would potentially be facing opposition from the entire fucking world, it could be a very short war.

But Russia has the bomb. They could still destroy the world. Out of spite.

Ain’t that a lovely thing to contemplate.

A lot of my American friends are worried about him essentially disbanding the entire FDA and letting food regulations go all to hell.

And that’s just one area of government he could dismantle.

It really is the coming of the reign of the mad king Donald down there. We had better really enjoy our Christmas this year because God knows, it might just be the last good one for a very long time.

I’m just hoping he’s too senile and spoiled to do anything much now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey, check out this YouTube video! It has me in it!

Yes, that’s me in a talking head video. In the future I will add at least a little panache to the vids in case anyone wants to actually watch the thing, but for my first video after a very long absence from YouTube, it will suffice.

Like I said in the caption, I know that is sounds like I’m in a cardboard box. Dunno what’s up with that. I will have to inspect my new toy and see if there’s tape or a sticker over the microphone that I’m supposed to remove.

Still, the visuals are sharp and beautiful like digital video always does, I think digital video looks better than reality, myself.

So cool and clear and stable!

I think it looks better to me because it compensates for all the tiny little distortions to our vision caused by the fact that we live at the bottom of a sea of air and that air moves in current and waves around us that our mind edits out of our consciousness.

After all, it’s not useful information for most of us most of the time.

Digital video does all that for us, thus relieving our mind of the task.

Well, that’s my theory, anyhow.

Like I say in the vid, I’m not sure what I will do with my freshly renewed video capacities. I could embark upon another video quest – two minutes for 20 days, maybe – but I feel a highly uncharacteristic desire for more definition than that.

Could our boy finally be growing up? Is he ready to commit to an actual format? Can he summon the self-discipline to actually stick to a topic?

Maybe. I will at least give it a shot.

Because I want to build a brand around myself. I want people to have some idea of what I produce and while it is, in fact, entirely possible to build a brand around your personality, and have people watch you because they like spending time with you, that’s a pretty risky gambit and I would want to have something that gets people to come experience my personal fabulousness themselves.

Which brings me to the real problem, which is that the various parts of me don’t really fit together. Am I a comedian? A pundit? A laid-back commenter? A deep diving psychologist talking about what lurks in the collective unconscious? A high flying philosopher exploring the very roots of morality?

I am all these things. To my mind, they are all a part of me that expresses some drive or impulse in me and thus choosing which one is the “real” me seems hopeless.

It’s like asking which feather is the real chicken.

But one can’t very well advertise oneself with the slogan, “Watch Fru! He’s a bunch of things all at once. :

Kind of hard to build a public persona out of that.

Given the recent utter disaster down south, I do feel a call to finally mount my pulpit and start sending my words and my truth into the world.

My powers of oratory and my articulacy and my personal charisma could make for a powerfully persuasive presence and who knows, maybe I could attract an audience and build a following and even have some actual impact on the world.

I have a lot of very powerful truths to speak to the powers that be, and my thoughts and my anger could stir the world to action on climate change before it’s too late.

Kinda makes it seem like I have to do it, doesn’t it?

But I am not good at doing what I am supposed to be doing.

So we’ll see.

More after the break.

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I blather on and on

Another video so soon? Wow!

Like the text on the screen says, I dunno where the pink came from, but I did not want ot lose sincerity by redoing it.

Maybe I will export the audio and do a whole new video for it at some point.

Well I managed to do a political polemic. That felt good.

Well, recording it did. And publishing it did. The in between was irritating.

I’d forgotten just how annoying editing video can be. Especially when your skills are as rusty as mine are.

That’s why the above is rather sloppily put together. I am so out of practice! I don’t even remember how to make it center elements on the screen.

And doing it by hand results in something that looks like it was pasted together by an overly enthusiastic eight year old.

Oh well, I will get back into the hang of it if I keep at it. And it does feel very good to put not just my words but my passion and my sincerity and my personality out there for all the world to see.

I am painfully shy yet the idea of that video being seen by others does not bother me.

Well, like Will Smith said, my life is a cage but on stage I’m free. I would be more comfortable performing at Madison Square Gardens than during cocktails afterwards.

If there was a place for me to add tags in the uploading to YouTube process, I missed it. I guess that’s why people sweat bullets trying to come up with the perfect title and the perfect thumbnail to make people want to click.

I dunno. I’m new at this. I will figure it out as I go.

Which is my way. I could never be the perfectionist who could never let anything be seen by the public unless they were absolutely sure it was as good as can be.

Yeah, ick. No thanks. I would never produce anything then because the creative fires would go out way before I could finish and bang would go my will to keep going as well as my ability to believe in what I have done.

So all I can to is make it, shove it out the door, and start on the next thing.

And get better as I go.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…the crazy is getting in.

And I don’t know what to do about it. Like I said on BlueSky, I am so used to being paranoid and anxious for no good reason that I don’t know how to handle being freaked out when it’s actually justified.

Oh, and it turns out that the election down south wasn’t the only reason I was feeling down yesterday. I also have a bug of some kind.

Call it a head cold, if you will. I once more have that soreness that goes from my lungs up through my throat and into my ears.

Along with the usual malaise and tiredness that comes with these things. i feel positively drained, and that means I’m either ill or some vampire felt snacky.

Pretty sure I haven’t invited any in lately. Unless DoorDash people count.

Come to think of it, being an old fashioned delivery person – the kind you paid in cash – would be a pretty sweet gig for a vampire.

People invite you into their homes all the time. When you’re hungry, you just drain your next customer. It would totally work.

For a while, at least.

I’m not really depressed about developments down south any more. The depression is in the process of morphing into something else : rage.

And with that rage comes a steely determination to fight Trump on every level all the time. We’re talking total resistance. Give that cancer of the body politic absolutely no cooperation. Make his life as difficult as possible.

Oh, and gather evidence for his next impeachment.

We know the storm of stupidity and evil is coming and now, in the last days of sanity, we have our chance to batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, put up the storm windows, and dig in.

Because we know what is coming. We’ve been here before. And this time, we know exactly what we’re going to get from him and his pet Senate and Supreme Court, so we are in the perfect position to ready ready to rumble.

The next four years are going to suck.

Let’s make sure they suck for HIM, too.

The worst part is that I don’t think Trump even wants the job. He hated being President the first time. Remember, he was born with a silver spoon so deep in his mouth that he farts glitter, so having people keep telling him to do things he doesn’t want to do is like hell for him.

And he is way more senile and thus more cranky and unreasonable than the first time.

Could be fun to watch him humiliate himself on the biggest stage in the world.

My god, is it hard to make the words happen when you’re this tired.

But I do it anyway because I love you people.

And because at this point, not blogging would hurt more than blogging ever will.

Back to Dumb Donnie. Remember too that he is super old and might die at any minute, leaving us with J.D. Vance as President.

From what we’ve seen so far from that weenie, he would promptly soil himself then try to run away to Acapolco.

Would be funny if the Secret Service had to launch a manhunt just to find the President so they can protect him.

I hope that, in our quiet way, we Canadians are stepping up border security. That master moron might just decide to invade.

Oh. And you can forget about Ukraine. It’s gone, baby. Once Trump is in power he will just hand it to Putin. It’s a done deal.

Sure, there’ll be the rest of us, but who in the world would dare back Ukraine when it’s clear that doing so means going against the USA?

The best we can hope for with Trump is apathy.

Maybe he won’t care enough to do anything as tiresome as war.

More after the break.

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Two steps back

Well isn’t this just fucking lovely.

Ordered a new webcam on Tuesday. It took me a long time but I finally gave up hope on finding the expensive one that I know must be in this room somewhere.

So I Googled “best webcam” and found a reputable looking “top ten” listicle.

The number one was $109. Um no. The number two was $99. Nuh uh.

But the third entry was the “best value” one and it was $40. Bingo!

So I ordered that one. It arrived today. I unboxed it, plugged it in, and tested it to see if it was working by recording some video.

Seemed to work just fine. But when I tried to play the video back, no sound.

Well fuck. Apparently the microphone in the thing ain’t working yet. And after I recorded at least three minutes of my priceless ex tempore speech!

But then I had a terrible suspicion.

Which was born out : it wasn’t that the microphone on the thing wasn’t working, it was that audio playback on my entire computer was now fucked.

I have no sound. And I must scream.

And I have been trying to get it to work again ever since. Once more in life, my attempt to make something better results in my desperately scrambling to get back to normal.

I was totally planning to post my bit o’ video here tonight and sort of reintroduce myself to the world of making videos, but now I really don’t feel like it.

I have no way of knowing if the audio recorded or not anyhow.

And I am understandably super pissed off about all this. Plugging in a webcam should not make the whole damn system silent!

I haven’t completely run out of ideas on how to make it work again. I can always uninstall all audio drivers then reboot and see if Windows detects my speakers.

I’ve had the same speakers for over a decade and they have worked just fine. But somehow, when Windows set up my new webcam, that made the system completely forget my speakers existed.

There is no device listed for them in Device Manager.

I could also try to get the speakers built in to my expensive monitor working. That’s the one part of them that has never worked, which never bothered me because I already had speakers that worked.

Not so any more.

And without working audio, I can’t watch YouTube videos, or listen to music, and all my video games are going to be so much sadder to play.

I need to get this shit working again.

And I really resent being put into this position by something that makes no sense.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know. That thing that happened yesterday. Tuesday the 5th of November, 2024.

That terrible, terrible thing.

The whole world weeps. Because we’re all going to be affected, especially us Canadians, because our countries are so intertwined we’re practically conjoined twins.

Joined at the border, as it were.

God only knows what that tangerine Caligula is going to do now. His first reign of terror was bad enough and all signs point to his second term being much, much worse.

He’s going to try to dismantle democracy in the USA and his Supreme Court is going to let him, and there’s apparently nothing anyone can do about that.

He could be the first American president to rule from jail.

Because luckily, his traitorous Supreme Court has not yet granted him immunity from prosecution for acts committed as a private citizen.

Quick, slap his ass in jail before they think of it.

But speaking of acts of treason by the Supreme Court, I would just like to point out, for no particular reason, that according to this Supreme Court, Joe Biden could order the CIA ro assassinate both Trump and Vance with, as a random example, a drone strike and as long as it was an official act, Biden would suffer no consequences.

Just putting that out there.

I have been depressed all day because of recent events. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to write about it because it hurts so bad

Which is why my language is somewhat circumspect.

I feel like I have been taking the news in little doses as my mind is forced to slowly accept the truth of it all, and each dose has made me proportionally sadder.

I still can’t really deal with it all. At best, I have gotten past the worst of it, or at least the worst of it until he actually takes office.

I know, we right-minded liberals should storm the capital on Jan 6. We should also start loudly complaining about how the election was stolen, how Harris is the REAL President, and Trump is an FBI impostor or something.

The thing is, in that case, it would be plausible. He’s put his people into election boards and other electoral roles all throughout the USA and they would be the people, as Trump so aptly observed four years ago, in the best position to bias the results.

And they would do it, too. All while telling themselves that the Democrats did it before so now it’s OK to do it back.

And the American right has never really liked democracy anyway. They love to beat people over the head with the word but their support for the actuality of it tends to fade away rapidly when you mention that Democrats are allowed to vote.

That, they’re not so fond of. They can’t see why it should be allowed.

I mean, why let people be wrong?

I am not entirely without hope. Evidence of voter fraud could surface before he takes office that would throw the whole election into doubt.

I don’t think the American system has a mechanism for a do-over election but I am sure they could figure something out if they wanted to do so.

Trump could go to jail. That might prompt a Constitutional crisis, but one of those is pretty much inevitable with him anyhow.

He’s going to want to do things that even his flying monkeys on the Supreme Court won’t allow because they don’t want their names on decisions that flagrantly defile the rule of law or go directly against the Constitution in word and in intent.

At least, I hope they will stop him.

And there is always rebellion. I do have faith in the American people’s basic ornery and difficult nature to show itself if they feel like they are being pushed around.

We live in interesting times.

And they just keep getting moreso.

More after the break.

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Thanks a lot, SkillUp!

When last we spoke of SkillUp, I mentioned that they gave me a choice as to whether they would contact me via email or the phone.

I chose email, because email is way less scary for me than the phone.

Email is patient. It waits for you to ask for it. Phone calls barge in on you, ready or not, and force you to function socially.

i have to be ready for that kind of shit.

Anyhow, Monday morning the email arrives, and what does it say?

“Click here to arrange a time for us to phone you. ”

Like, what the everlasting fuck? Why the hell did you dangle the prospect of email communication in front of me when I was going to get phoned either way?

So that’s a whole new level of gumption trap. I will do it eventually but I was not ready for that in the slightest and it’s going to take some time for me to prepare for not just the social surprise involved but also the decision making.

Like, what date and time should I choose? There’s so many possibilities.

So the whole thing involves surprise, disappointment, decisions, and a radical jump in social stimulation levels.

Yeah, thanks a lot, SkillUp!

Oh well, it will all be worth it if, at long long last, I actually acquire some job skills.

I mean, I am qualified to be a writer for TV thanks (?) to VFS, but when the teachers refused to recommend me to anyone in the biz, that left me as my own agent, and that’s not a role to which I am suited.

I could be somebody else’s agent, but not my own.

Maybe I need to find someone else in the same boat and form a mutual agency.

I’ll represent you if you represent me.

Come to think of it, I would need the same thing for editing. Maybe what I really need is a full time collaborator.

As unlikely as that seems with my social issues.

Why does everything have to be so god damned hard?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.