Well, here we are again : Fru feels sick.

And as usual, I don’t really know how seriously to take it. So all I can do is monitor the situation and wait and see what happens.

Man my life is weird sometimes.

Did my first physiotherapy appointment earlier today. It went fine. A nice lady named Ekta asked me some standard questions about my health and then we did the usual “do this, then do this with me pushing in the opposite direction” testing.

She also gave me the standard seated exercises to do. “Marching” in the air, up on my toes for five seconds then up on my heel for five seconds. and the always faintly amusing “hold you foot up and try to draw letters of the alphabet with your toe”.

I got those exercises from my case worker before but I kind of ignored them out of my usual mixture of timidity and laziness.

This time, it’s from a real deal physiotherapist so I know that there’s no chance that doing them can hurt me, and so it’s just a matter of summoning the necessary wherewithal to forge a new habit.

Luckily they are the sort of thing I can do while sitting here at Mister Computer, so that at least minimizes the disruption to my life.

I hope to turn them into a nervous habit. A productive way to fidget. Ekta says I should repeat each of them ten times and no more often than once every two or three hours, so I can’t fidget them too often, but if I play my cards right, I can turn these little exercises into a treat that I look forward to every day.

Work doesn’t always have to be work. It can be a lot like play. Spoonful of sugar style.

Mary Poppins knows a thing or two.

Certainly all forms of exercise can, with a little mental reframing, be seen as fun as long as nobody is actually forcing you to do them. And they can also be seen as a form of relaxation because they get the tension out of your muscles.

And in general dissipate excess nervous energy.

Being a depressed sluggard only makes things worse for yourself. This is, of course, the exact thing that irritating perky people are always telling us but it takes a fair bit of work on yourself before you can accept that kind of truth.

You have to fight your way through depression’s lies.

I had another rage and bitterness explosion recently. I was watching some therapist talking about the neurology of depression on YouTube and it was all very good stuff but then we came to the “advice” on how to exit the negative brain state of depression and it was all the usual chirpy bullshit about journaling and affirmations and that one word that always sets me off like a Roman candle : gratitude.

So I went off on this poor lady in the comments. Just spewed all my Gen X depressive venom into my comment telling her how her advice was worse than useless and was like a slap in the face to someone like me and how it made me want to puke.

Hey, at least I stopped myself from saying I wanted to throw up in her face.

To be honest, she was no worse than a million other idiots telling me the way out of my depression is to do things my depression keeps me from doing.

Which of course only makes me feel worse. It’s like a very elaborate way to tell me I’m fucked. Oh, so sorry, did we give you a moment of hope? Well FUCK THAT.

And yes, I know that’s the depression talking, for the most part, But what always blows me away about these experiences is how they bring out this H-bomb of bitterness and rage in me that most of the time I have no idea is there.

I assume that these experiences are ultimate quite cathartic for me.

But I would be better off venting my bile in a less antisocial fashion.

But what the hell. I got to be me.

More after the break.

---

The cutest damn thing

Apparently I left a comment on this video a year ago.

I do not remember it at all.

Which is going to seem especially odd once you’ve seen it.

How could I have forgotten something so incredibly wonderful?

The look on the little deer boy’s face as he holds up the cookie for Santa is so heartwarming it could melt a dozen Grinches.

The whole thing makes me want to hug it. It’s just so very me.

Who’s the best boy ever? YOU ARE!

---

The predictable update

I feel better now.

Not entirely better but I feel a lot better than I did earlier today. Turns out that this time, the magic elixir wasn’t water but food.

Eating makes you feel better. How very,,, counterintuitive.

I still feel vaguely ill but I don’t feel like my life force is ebbing away any more, and that’s kind of a plus. I probably just need more hydration and food.

I really wish my body has a diagnostics panel so I could tell, at a glance, what my various levels of important things are and thus be able to fix my ills efficiently.

“Oh, I see. My hydration level is in the red and my blood sugar’s trending downward. Time for a glass of refreshing orange juice. ”

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Instead, I have to make my best guess as to why I am feeling crappy.

The solution would be to develop a solid health routine. If you have a routine that supplies all your bodily essentials at a rate commensurate with their rate of use then you will probably stay hale and hearty all the live long day.

Or at the very least you don’t go thinking you have the plague when you just need to EAT. To pick a random example.

Mental note, hydrate AND eat before hitting the panic button.

Or well… I took a Xanax before going to physio, so… lack of panic button.

You get the idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Even though right now, we’re in Taurus.

But you get the idea.

If not, here’s a handy vid to guide you!

There are plenty of compilations of right wing media meltdowns over good ol’ Leo out there, but I won’t post one here because I’m too lazy to go find one.

But also because that seems a little too ill-spirited. Don’t get me wrong, I am a-tingle with joy at the panic and despair displayed by the forces of evil at this news, but I guess I am too Canadian to enjoy it too directly.

Turns out I have a schadenfreude limit. Who knew?

But that brings up an interesting subject, namely just how idealistic and “pure” am I? I have been doing a lot of defending Trump voters from baseless left wing bigotry lately, so obviously I am fairly far down the messiah path in my insistence in living by my ideals no matter the social reality I find myself in.

I will live by my beliefs no matter what. I will do so pragmatically and realistically because that’s my nature and because that’s how you get things done in the real world, but I still hold to very high ideals of compassion, understanding, and empathy.

And yet, I feel no guilt at all when I revel in the suffering of those I deem politically execrable. in general, I have never felt any need to pretend to be above that kind of thing, much to the occasional shock of my Aquarius mother.

I’ve always been a good deal more cynical and hot-tempered than her.

Than a lot of people, really. When I get into full on impassioned rant mode, most of my fellow Canadians, even those who agreed with every word I say and those who know me and love me and know that I’m a harmless floof most of the time, will want to take a few steps back from me.

Well, I am pretty big, after all. I just hide it by being a sweetie most of the time.

But lately I have been pondering my impassioned nature and how it has always made me stick out somewhat from my fellow Canadians and I have concluded that it must be my French blood.

I’m half Acadian, after all, and while I was raised Anglo, more or less, I do still have a Gallic streak in my genome and maybe that contributes to my being somewhat more emotive than is usual for Anglo culture.

Or maybe that’s too essentialist and it’s really just that I am kind of insane. I dunno.

But my hidden passionate nature makes me wonder about that French blood and whether it explains why so many top Canadian politicians are from Quebec because their culture allows for the kind of passion and drive that makes for great oratory, even if it just gets you dirty looks at the bar from people trying to watch the game.

Maybe you need to have a fire inside you that lights you up when you speak about what you believe in order to be charismatic in the political sense.

I keep telling myself that I should try to make that kind of video. Me in full on inspiration mode, expressing my beliefs with all my passion and articulacy and maybe actually making some kind of impression on the world.

So far, I’ve been too much of a wimp to do it. I know that such a move would not only mean entering a state of physical activation that I might hurt myself, or worse, say something really regrettable, but it could also mean crossing a line into a world of engagement that the sick part of me still fears.

I am still scared to leave my grotty grotto in case the big bad world out there snatches me up and I can never go run and hide again.

It’s a character flaw flaw that runs very deep, this need to be able to escape at a moment’s notice at all times.

I could call it cowardice but it’s more than that. There is a reason why I am so scared to be stuck in the real world and until I figure out what that is, I am going to keep refusing to stray very far from my tiny little comfort zone.

And I want out.

More after the break.

The raw life

I feel pretty ragged and raw a lot lately.

Like my soul has frostbite. That would track giving how much I have been talking about thawing out for a long time.

It’s not frostbite. It’s freezer burn.

Either way, it’s something that is always there lately. And it’s a major contributor to why I feel scared and desperate sometimes.

Life hurts. That sucks.

But I really don’t mind that much. To drag out an oft used metaphor, it’s like when your hand or foot is waking up after having fallen asleep.

Yeah it’s gonna hurt. Possibly a lot. But you don’t mind because you know that the pain means you’re on the way to feeling a lot better and most importantly you’re going to get your frigging hand or foot back.

There are definitely times when feeling pain beats feeling nothing, and I feel like I am in one of those times right now.

I definitely feel like I am on my way to something really big. Some kind of explosive liberation that will blast away all the ice and snow and dirt and filth and rust and decay that have accumulated inside me over the years and leave me open, exposed, and free, and ready to actually be a part of the world for once.

I just need to overcome the rest of that old fear of the outside world and convince myself that going out to play with the other kids can turn out really great, actually, and that everything I need to heal myself and feel whole again is out there waiting for me, and that there’s no predators waiting to destroy me the moment I let my guard down.

Yeah that means that I have been hiding for no good reason for a very long time. And there is nothing I can do the change that. The past has passed.

But I can do everything possible to stop doing it.

The past has passed but the future is not yet written.

And I am going to change the fucking script.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A.. slide show, if you will.

Like this one!

It was fun making one of those after all these decades. The last time I made a slideshow, we still lived back at Francis and One Road in the apartment we affectionately nicknamed “nerdvana”.

Ah, those were the days. Bigger apartment, more roomies, more energy, more excitement about life.

Also more depression, vastly worse health due to much, much worse diet (so much sugar and carbs), more health problems (like flesh eating infections) and in general life was, despite superficialities, a lot worse.

I’ve come a long way since then, even if it doesn’t always show.

I still remember being scared to walk along One Road because it’s a very busy street and it would be far too easy to, in a moment of weakness, walk into the traffic and end myself then and there.

I’m sure that’s part of why I started being afraid of heights, too.

I don’t worry about that sort of thing much any more. The void still calls to me every now and then but I know I will never listen.

Life is too much fun for me to want to leave the party early. And it’s only getting better. As I thaw out from the long Paxil winter that had me frozen in place for so long, I can feel myself reconnecting to those primal life forces that have lain dormant like roses in winter for all these years.

Oh, so many years.

Not that thawing out is easy. At times I feel like a glacier heaving and trembling as it melts, falling apart as it births its burden of ancient woes.

And I have to keep reminding myself that all that ice inside me is not a part of me. It’s merely the detritus of a dying disease taking its sweet time to pass out of me like toxins being filtered out by dialysis and as it goes out, health and vitality come in, and I open up inside a little bit more, and more health air and sunshine gets in, and the closer I get to being a true blue functional grownup.

Till them, I’m just this… thing. An odd, lumpen creature in the process of metamorphing from a far too aged larval form into something that might actually be viable in the world.

I used to think that could never happen. That things could only ever get worse for me and that I was going to have to, at some point, decide for myself when there was too little to look forward to for me to even bother living any more.

But I’m too stubborn to give up now. I am determined to spite the darkness that haunts me and push these god damned wet blankets off of me and rise up to face the world and let it see just what it’s been missing for oh so long.

Because I am fucking amazing. If I can get my ducks sufficiently aligned and my poop sufficiently grouped, I can show the world what a wild and wily wonder I am and make a very large splash in the world.

I just have to complete the process of convincing myself that it is safe to emerge from my own shadow into the warming light of day and that the resulting increase in stimulation will not, in fact, shatter my mind into a million pieces.

Just maybe knock some more of that god damned ice off of me.

Anything the light can kill is something I am far better off without.

More after the break.

---

A soft landing

After getting some of my harshness out with Part 1’s foray into poetry in paragraphs, I feel somewhat better now.

Like I said recently, the bottom of my cycle is where I deliver my payload of negativity before heading back out of range of the enemy’s anti aircraft guns.

I may have taken that metaphor too far. Even for me.

The fact that I was able to get myself some pizza has improved my mood a fair bit. I’d gone this whole month so far without being able to order in and it was really starting to bum me out.

Our little pleasures are so important to our sense of well-being.

But tonight I remembered that I had “points” in Pizza Hut’s reward system, so I checked on their website and sure enough, I had just enough for a medium two topping pizza.

Huzzah! I got myself my classic, sausage and pineapple, otherwise known as the Fruvous Hawaiian because I don’t like ham.

So maybe it’s a Fijian, or something.

I’m making it through this five week month business okay. The lack of those little pleasures of ordering in has been a drag, as has been knowing my budget has remarkably little wiggle room in it.

I could only get tonight’s pizza because I very carefully checked my finances to make sure I could spare the $8 it was going to cost me.

The “points” don’t cover the delivery cost or tip, you see.

And Pizza’s Hut’s cute little trick is to have all these great deals on their website to get you excited then at the end they hit you with the $7 delivery fee at the end.

It ends up being more or less exactly what you would pay if you went through DoorDash, but DoorDash doesn’t give you points, so I go through the website.

Plus I have to go through the website if I need to pay cash, DoorDash only takes payment via credit card.

It’s funny how the tinfoil hat brigade thought that we’d all need a “mark of the beast” chip implanted to buy things by now when it turns out credit cards do the job fine without the need for surgery at all.

To the point where I go through the hassle of buying a Visa gift card type thing every month just so I can participate in the modern economy.

Fingers crossed, they haven’t stopped accepting cash in person yet.

But I have my beady little Gen X eye on them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s that time again.

Time for my usual hand wringing and agonizing as I figure out what I want.

What I really want is for my frigging keyboard to show up. Amazon says it has till 5:15 pm and right now it’s 4:28 pm so… tick tock, Amazon!

Their tracker says it’s two stops away. But it’s been saying that for 15 minutes.

Clearly, we have a hostage situation on our hands. Possibly armed.

Anyhow, back to typing painfully slowly about my birthday.

It’s sad that I have this strange inability to connect with my own desires. To me it suggests a deeply wounded and withdrawn soul, and well…yup.

That’s what it is alright.

Like I said in the vid, the things I want tend to be wildly impractical. And not just due to being unreasonably expensive.

Also sometimes due to not being within anyone’s power to give.

It’s not like someone can gift wrap a boyfriend and a job for me.

Ergo, I am trying really hard to think of reasonably priced things that would make my life easier and I am still drawing a blank.

The thermos is about it.

Maybe some kind of lightweight collapsible stool for the kitchen? That would let me sit down while things are cooking.

Sadly one I can use while cooking is not physically possible. The stool would have to be so tall it would take an elevator to get to the seat.

But a little stool that can easily be tucked away somewhere when I am not using it could work, I think.

More after the break.

---

Animation done right

Julian introduced me to this and I am in awe of how perfect it is.

Obviously I seriously identify with our lil protagonist. I was fat, not scarred, and no pair of glasses can cover up that.

But I’ve been there, little fella. God have I been there.

You want to make friends so badly but you don’t really know how, like, at all, and once the initial burst of enthusiasm and courage fades all that energy turns into anxiety instead and the people you want to befriend seem alien and hostile and ugly and now you feel like you’re trapped behind enemy lines.

I wish I’d had a group of amazing people to help me through that. That’s why this little film is very therapeutic for me.

I was such a strange and lonely child. And I still carry around a lot of the pain and trauma from the long and deadly freeze that was my childhood.

No child should grow up so completely alone. No friends, no support, nobody to turn to when things got bad, no idea why I felt so bad that sometimes I felt like I wasn’t even real, or like I was crazy, or like the world was alien place now even though nothing had actually changed at all.

Looking back, I was a pretty mentally damaged kid.

No wonder I withdrew so deeply into myself. The real world was a harsh and lonely place where I had nobody – not family, not teachers, not any adults at all – that I could turn to for guidance, comfort, reassurance, or even just a sympathetic ear.

So I retreated deep into my shell, where at least I didn’t feel the cold so much.

Got to vent those negatives.

---

The necessary update

Oh, and I got my new keyboard.

It has that weird new keyboard feel to it. Pressing the keys feels both too hard and too soft at the same time. And kinda squishy.

Oh well, the point is, it works. It was a rough and annoying 36 hours or so sans keyboard but I made it through.

I think the old one might be salvageable. I noticed that my “water” left behind some weird crystals that gunked up the keys and caused some of them to be stuck in the down position. If I clear those out, maybe it will work again.

If so, it will become my emergency backup keyboard in case the new one gets taken out of commission at some future date.

Might as well use the new one first!

---

Another birthday idea

Oh, and I thought of another thing I want for my birthday : a cheap smartphone!

It can seriously be as cheap as they come because I don’t plan on using it for anything other than getting past two factor authentication on websites.

And maybe the occasional crossword puzzle.

But as long as it’s “pay as you go” and Android and can use our Wi-Fi for internet, I’ll be happy with it. I can just stick some money on it now and then for those rare moments when I actually want to use it as a phone and the rest of the time it’s just going to be used for logins and texting.

Oh right. It needs to do SMS texting. But it’s a smartphone, I assume they all do that.

A smartphone could also come in handy in the event that I end up in the hospital again, or even just waiting for a long time at the ER or UC.

It would not tempt me to use it nearly as much as getting my tablet fixed would. I do not want to go back to going from the big computer (my PC) to my small computer (my Amazon Fire tablet) and back again all day.

That was not good for my mental health, especially my sleep.

Plus, I have better things to do than zone out to video games all the time now.

There are job opportunities out there waiting for my extraordinary talents. There are new online environments to explore, new people to meet, new connections to make.

Video games are fun and all but no matter how much fun they are, at the end of it, all you did was play a game.

Why not get more out of life?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And a very little blog entry, too.

Here is why :

So you see, I am “typing” this in by clicking on a virtual keyboard , and boy is it a lot of work compared to using the real thing.

So expect this entry to be considerably shorter than the usual one thousand words.

Possibly by quite a lot given how much effort has gone into getting this far and this is only the 81 word mark.

Oy is this going to be a schlep.

Oh well. I’ll get it now keyboard tomorrow and this sordid escapade will be over.

I’m going to miss my fuzzy friends, though . I mean, in theory , I could log on to Tapestries via the same virtual keyboard I am using to type these words, but in practice it is downright maddening to watch the conversation zoom past you as you struggle to keep up at your typing speed.

By the time you finish typing a reply, people have forgotten the question!

It’s like trying to converse via semaphore.

Who knows, though. If I get lonely enough I might go for it anyhow. Limit myself to talking privately with one person after explaining why I am suddenly so slow.

You, my dear friends, will sadly be on half rations. 250 words now and another 250 with supper later on.

Because even getting this far has taken a lot out of me. Christ is this irritating.

It’s like masturbating with mittens on.

Only without the friction burns.

“Kitten soft” my ass!

More after the break.

The downward slope

I seem to be on the downslope of my mood cycle today.

As in heading for the bottom and gaining speed. That is not a problem unless you make it into one by thinking you’re supposed to be “up” all the time.

Nuh-uh, nope. Not possible, never going to happen. Everything has a natural cycle and fighting it only makes things worse.

Just let it roll.

So yeah, I am headed for the bottom but that’s cool. The bottom is where I dump out the next load of negatives and dreck, and that lightens my load so much that I go soaring on up into the sky again.

Lather, rinse, repeat until clean.

It’s a system that works if you let it.

There’s a whole lot of wisdom in just getting the hell out of your own way.

It takes a special kind of ignorant arrogance to imagine that you know better than millions of years of instincts and that absolutely nothing can go right without you direct and conscious control and that you alone can fend off the darkness with your mind.

It takes a lot of brains to be that dumb.

Stupid people have no choice but to rely mostly on their instincts and emotions because they ain’t got shit else.

And while that doesn’t help them with their SATs, it keeps them from REALLY screwing themselves up, too.

And amen for that because they’re the ones running things.

I’ll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s a click-worthy video title, n’est-ce pas?

I’ve already spoken to my friends (love you!) about this subject but I go a little deeper into the subject in the vid.

It’s lovely to contemplate, isn’t it? All those know-nothings with their low information lifestyles and their homespun politics hate his guts more than anything else.

Because ya know what? Being out of the loop on the news means they are not subject to Fox News “flood the zone” propaganda or any other form of mass indoctrination.

All they know is what they can see going on around them. And all of that is bad. Trump’s in charge, everything sucks, ergo Trump sucks.

It’s really quite simple.

And the demonstrations get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon the time will be ripe for me to try to launch my “#OccupyAmerica” movement.

That’s when the people fill the streets and stay there. Where they peacefully protest in a way that causes disruption and chaos and the powerful appearance of an army laying siege to the Capitol.

Obviously DC would be one of the main focal points. But the point is to send the message that life will not go back to normal until Trump is out of office.

It would be great if you could divide people into days, so that for seven days straight the crowds get bigger every single day.

And by that I mean, like, “OK, I can volunteer to do Day 3 onwards. The wife will be there on Day 5… Day 4 if she can get a sitter. ”

Can you imagine the impact that would have? The throngs outside every seat of government and every politician’s home and every other place where the billionaire class can see it just keep getting bigger… and bigger… and bigger…

The idea would be to give them the message that the flood waters are rising and the people are massing and there are far, far too many of us for their money to have a chance of helping them at all.

And all without violence. Hopefully.

The big problem, of course, is that I can’t exactly lead this movement because I am not American. With me at the helm, it would have to be more of an international thing.

Could it be #OccupyEverywhere? After all, the oligarchy is everywhere. Every nation in the world has put up with this crap.

And people everywhere are sick and tired of it.

And I have the perfect day for it – June 14, Trump’s birthday. Instead of a big fancy military parade to show off how tiny a dictator America has, flood the streets with people peacefully protesting him. Bring way more people than will be in his parade.

And be ready to be nice to the soldiers he’s forcing to dance for his obscene amusement. Bring drinks and snacks for them. Commiserate. Put everyone you can find who has ever served at the forefront of their reception.

Remind them what being a soldier in a democracy is supposed to be like. Have picnics and invite them in. Play music. Make it a real day for them.

And everyone else, of course.

The idea is to turn it into something undeniably wholesome and American. Traditional, even, in a non-restrictive sense. Fly flags, hang banners, serve food.

And make it absolutely crystal clear that everybody is invited.

Hell, even Trump himself can show up if he doesn’t expect to get to speak.

And ideally this big blowout protest party would be on Day 7 of my little plan. June 14. Trump’s birthday. A day when, no matter where the billionaires look, there are throngs of people who are very clearly not very happy with them.

We’re going to take it all back from them. We are going to break their stupid system wide open and change all the rules and burn all the corruption and pollution out of the body politic and remake the world into a bigger, better, brighter place.

So help me God.

More after the break.

---

The big idea

Everything I just wrote about Occupy America and/or Occupy Everywhere is an objectively fantastic idea. It could, no lie, change the world.

Too bad it was me that came up with it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an amazing guy. And some day, maybe I will be healthy enough to be able to take an idea like that and really run with it.

But that day ain’t today.

And that’s tragic and sad. It could be a history making movement, the kind that not only goes down in the history books but that ends up being a national stat holiday along the lines of Bastille Day, or other celebrations of revolutions past.

Today, we mark the day when everything started to get better.

What a lovely idea.

But I don’t have the energy to get it started let alone keep it going. The best I can do is put it on BlueSky and maybe make a video about it and hope against hope that I can somehow get the ball rolling despite being at the bottom of the hill.

I will try to summon what vitality I have in order to breathe life into this thing of mine, but sadly I am not a very robust organism yet.

That’s often the way with us dreamers, isn’t it? The big ideas come from fragile flowers like me who have invested enough of themselves into dreaming that they can think big, but that doesn’t leave a lot left over for a robust connection to the real world.

Perhaps the few of us who become successful revolutionaries and/or the thought leaders of entire world changing movements are the ones who are lucky enough to hook up with a high energy type enthralled by our big ideas and ready to invest their overflowing energies into seeing them brought to fruition.

Now where would a guy find someone like that?

I really should get back on to Discord.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote this and not an AI, I swear!

It was interesting to write my video instead of recording and editing it, but I doubt I will be doing it again any time soon.

I need to be in front of the camera! I need it to be about ME ME ME!

What can I say, I gotta shine.

Descript does seem to have exactly what I am looking for, though. It can take my recorded video and add images and even b-roll to it to make it more professional looking for those who want to actually watch something while I talk.

It would thrill me to no end to be able to create something that looks like a documentary.

It would make me feel all wise and stuff. Like I’m on the BBC! Like my heroes David Attenborough, Desmond Morris, and James Burke!

I am a-tingle just thinking about it.

I’m too modest to claim I don’t have a big ego. At least potentially. I certainly don’t have any limitations as to how high I want to go.

Although I supposed I’d settle for “God-Emperor of Earth”, for the time being at least.

More seriously, the whole territory of my ego is confusing and complex. I am still in the process of integrating my extraordinary abilities into some kind of stable self-image and let me tell you, that’s not easy.

I have to tread the narrow middle path between wretched self-loathing and delusions of grandeur on a daily basis.

In a way it would have been easier to just keep hating myself. But I deserve better than that. I have my flaws but I am overall a truly amazing human being and I deserve to escape this grotty little grotto of mine and get some kind of employment going so that I can finally support myself like a genuine grownup and real human being.

I have so much potential growth all scrunched up inside me, like a rootbound plant.

I need to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

Also, “cockburn” sounds like something supposedly heterosexual teenage boys give to one another in the locker room.

Now where was I? Oh right.

I have pondered just setting my ego free and seeing how high it would go. Maybe all my worries about delusional psychosis are wildly exaggerated and I would have a bit of a swelled head for a bit then things would rebalance and I’d be perfectly fine.

Better, in fact, because I would have healed a huge wound in my psyche and formed the basis for a much healthier self-image.

But it can be very difficult to separate what will probably happen from what feels like it would happen, and we are, fundamentally, creatures of emotion.

Even big brain types like me who can seem so logical and wise.

No matter what, all human action derives from emotion and there’s nothing wrong with that. Logic is just a tool, a guide toward effective action, but the actions are still going to be driven by emotion.

I could go on and on about that but you nice people have read all that from me before.

Maybe I will do a video about it some day.

If I want to get what I want from Descript, I am going to have to pay for a full membership, and yikes, I just looked it up and it’s $35/month, in USD I assume.

They know what they got is golden. Dammit. I was hoping it would be like other sites and thus be like $15/month or thereabouts.

Well I will pay for a month and then judge whether it was worth the money. If it can do what I want it to do, I suspect it will be.

Unless someone makes a free equivalent!

More after the break.

---

They got me

It bugs me that the people at Descript are going to get a hair under $50 from me for one month of their service at an actually useful level.

And even that is far from unlimited. Granted, making 30 hours of clips a month is more than enough for my modest needs, but still.

My grumpy Taurus nature is just rankled by the feeling of getting plucked by these people. I’ll get over it.

I suppose I could look for another, similar service. A poke around Google might show me a cheaper way to get the same thing done.

The problem is that the thing I want from Descript doesn’t have a single, searchable name. I want something to add images and video that go with what I am saying in my video and thus enrich the experience as well as make it seem more professional.

And feed into my dreams of being a documentary host, of course.

I’ve Googled “like Descript” and got some hits but so far none of them do that thing I want it to do.

I know that some fantastically lucky talking head type people have magical people they call “editors” who do all that kind of thing for them.

Oh how I would love that. I’d feel like I was living a charmed life!

Well, semi-charmed, anyway.

Who knows, maybe if I keep honing my skills at putting my thoughts and wisdom out there, I will reach that magic point where the water seeps through the rock and suddenly you emerge into the public consciousness

That whole, “it takes a lot of time and work to become an overnight success” thing.

I at least am hooking my content up with the wider world via YouTube and TikTok these days. So there is, at least, a chance that someone will notice my stuff and spread the world about me.

I’ve already gotten some comments on my YouTube stuff. That’s a start.

Maybe I need to lean in to doing political rants, like Rick Mercer.

Seems like the time is ripe for those.

And there are worse ways to make a living.

I’m just going to keep doing what I do and see what sprouts up.

Because really, who knows?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, was this a lot of work to make.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever listen to myself.

Actually, the amount of work it took – almost two hours’ worth – wasn’t a complete surprise to me. When I decided that this would be the time I would put the lyrics on the screen, I knew it would be a lot of work and that I would probably hate myself for starting the stupid project somewhere along the line.

But I was thinking an hour, tops. Yikes.

Oh well, it’s good for me to occasionally get in way over my head with a task. It’s one of the only ways to fool myself into doing more than the bare minimum in life and that’s good for expressing way more of my personal energies than my usual low yield life.

If I do more, I’ll be much happier. I have to keep telling myself that. I have suffered under the tyranny of depression’s soul destroying anti-action bias for far too long. I need to wake the hell up and get involved in life.

If ya know what I mean.

And yeah, I know I’m not a great singer. I think maybe I could be a decent singer if I had the focus and self-discipline to practice and do vocal exercises and such.

Maybe then I could hit those low notes, like the word “sun” on “running naked in the sun”. My voice just disappears there.

Anyhow, my main reason to make karaoke videos is to stretch myself not just vocally but creatively. It’s something unlike my usual talking head stuff and it feels good to expand my capacities that way.

As well as learning what NOT to do.

I originally tried making today’s vid in Descript but it is NOT suited to that task. Sure, the whole “edit the transcript to edit the video” thing is impressive and very cool, but it’s useless for, for instance, trimming the ends of a video or doing any of the other usual video editing things like rearranging clips, fixing audio levels, and so on.

So it’s pretty much only good for talking head videos. Fair enough.

One of these day, my video might just be one of their AI talking heads reading out something I wrote for the occasion.

That could be quite amusing.

I did make this little thing.

Oh that reminds me. Check out the sample text from this voice changer app :

Discover a world where innovation meets elegance. Introducing the Aurora Series – our most advanced collection yet. With cutting-edge technology wrapped in sleek, sustainable design, these devices don’t just perform, they inspire. Aurora – illuminating the path to tomorrow, available worldwide this Friday.

Sample text from elevenlabs.io

Their technology is very impressive but who the hell wrote that text? It’s so pretentiously corporate it makes me want to hurt somebody.

I mean, nobody expects sample text to be Shakespeare, but oy.

I am so very, very sick of bland, bloodless, mindlessly voracious corporations all trying to seem like brilliant forward-seeing creative geniuses, like they just came down the mountain from Palo Alto to share their lofty and advanced vision with us mere mortals.

You’re a bunch of sociopaths in Armani. Get the fuck over yourself.

Been doing OK, mood-wise. My inner world is rather unstable and unsettled, which is to be expected when you’re trying to change very deep, fundamental things about yourself, like your entire attitude toward living.

I’m working on it. Pouring tons of energy and mental might into opening myself up to the world like I am throwing open the drapes and opening the windows in my soul after a long dark musty winter and finally getting some good clean air in here.

Turns out the world is a much happier place when you’re not drowning within yourself.

Who’da thunk it?

More after the break.

---

Something has to give

I know that there is a limit to gradualism.

Eventually, something more dramatic is going to need to happen within my psyche. Even if that just means that incrementally I reached a tipping point and the scale flips to the other side because of that, it’s going to have to happen.

Fine. I am willing to continue to consciously devalue stability in favor of long overdue change. Stability is great and all but not when you’re stifling everything inside of you in pursuit of it

And I definitely do not feel as stable as I used to. There is an undercurrent of anxiety in everything I do now. I have these terrible moments where I feel confused and scared and like everything is slipping away from me.

And that’s fine. I know that if I just hang in there, the moment will pass, I will be able to remember that everything is fine, actually, and then I am back in the real world.

Call them growing pains. Or maybe growing pangs.

The real issue is that I don’t know what form this sudden action will take. Obviously I don’t want it to land me in jail, or ruin my relationship with my three friends.

That would be a wee bit too high a price to pay for personal growth.

I suppose I am hoping that it will be something relatively calm and consequence free. I’ll just be laying in bed one day and have some kind of psychological crisis where I feel absolutely awful and freak way the hell out, but then it will pass and I will feel one hell of a lot better because I just processed a whole lot of backed up emotion.

Kind of like having a touch of food poisoning.

But nothing is entirely off the table, legal entanglements aside. I may need to become pushy and irritable just like my late father in order to get to a saner place. I might have to go deeper into outright insanity and stare at the wall a while, or even, god forbid, be a tad psychotic for a bit.

I’ll do what I can to keep things from being too disruptive.

But if I have to lose my mind to find myself, so be it.

Today’s video is anything but… nondescript.

That’s because it’s my first video made entirely in Descript, that website/app I’ve been talking about lately.

And I have to say, I’m not sure if Descript made it all that much easier.

Obviously it’s a little easier to edit a transcript than it is to edit video, and it’s entirely possible I was able to find and remove a lot more of my ums and ahs than I am when I am editing the old fashioned way, but I still dunno.

I will at the very least try it again. It could be that once I am more familiar with Descript, and therefore more relaxed when using it, it will obviously way, way easier.

It’s worth a shot.

Plus messing around with Descript was kinda fun.

On to the subject of the vid. It all started with this animation.

Like I say in the vid, that got me thinking about the whole subject of a lack of social awareness and how it can cause grave levels of misunderstanding.

Especially amongst us nerdy folk.

As I have mentioned before, I consider being a nerd to be a mild form of Asperger’s the same way Asperger’s is a mild form of autism.

And the key to the whole thing seems to be the social awareness I talk about in the vid. “Normal” people have it, but for the most part, they don’t know they have it and are therefore unable to articulate it.

After all, nobody explained it to them. It’s something they learned via social interaction and I think the heart of that might just be the desire to “fit in”.

In trying to fit in, they tap into an intuitive sense of what the other monkeys are thinking and doing and adjust their behaviour in order to remain in sync with them.

This is all going on subconsciously, for the most part. It does not involve the rational, conscious mind at all. And that’s where the problem starts.

Growing up nerdy means “choosing” (in the purely developmental sense) to focus on the sort of logical abstract reasoning skills that things like school rely on.

This often leads to introversion, as said skills require a very robust ability to listen to one’s “inner voice”, and that requires screening out the outer world.

But the outer world is exactly where that social awareness comes from.

Basically, you can’t learn social skills if you’re all wrapped up in yourself.

Hence the continuum of nerdiness and sociability. It really does seem like the more nerdy you are, the less socially skilled you are, as if there is a finite amount of potential and the more you invest in one end of the scale, the less you have for the other.

Seems vaguely unfair.

But like I said in the vid, that does mean there are compensations for one’s lack of a social cue. We tend to do quite well in school, and in general have a strong grasp of abstract reasoning in all its forms, and that leads to a certain point of view.

One based on “leading with your head”, in other words, dealing with the world primarily through one’s abstract reasoning skills and not through other faculties like social awareness, empathy, and intuition.

Those without our advanced mental faculties have no choice but to rely on those other faculties in order to navigate through life.

That’s the main reason there is such a disconnect between us nerdy left wing liberal types and the more middling masses.

We don’t speak one another’s languages, so to speak.

But as the “smarter” half of the equation, it is incumbent upon us to learn their lingo. To learn to see the world through their eyes, without judgment or criticism, and through that learn to lead them in the right direction.

In many ways, we’re the grownups of the world. And it’s up to us to raise the kids right.

More after the break.

---

They just can’t

To carry on where I just left off (for once) :

Let’s take another stab at one of ghosts that haunts me, one that just becomes more solid and real as time goes by : what if the average person simply cannot see the world the way a liberal intellectual like myself does?

Their hardware can’t run our software. And it doesn’t matter how articulate, or compassionate, or “nice” we are, there is a complexity to our thought processes and point of view that their brains simply cannot handle.

If so, then our capacity for compassion and understanding will truly be tested because it would mean that to get through to them, we have to communicate with them in a way that we ourselves would find insulting.

We have to talk to them like they’re idiots, essentially, or what we would interpret as such if it was directed as us.

And yet, we also have to avoid talking down to them. That would even worse than just talking over their heads.

It’s a very difficult needle to thread, I will admit.

But it may well be what we have to do to lead them effectively. And it’s better than constantly beating our brains out trying to get them to see things our way when it is entirely possible that they simply cannot.

This is a traumatic thought, I realize. I don’t like thinking about it and I’m the one who thought it up in the first place. It flies in the face of the egalitarian roots of modern society which necessitate viewing everyone as fundamentally equal.

And I’m not suggesting there is a moral difference or a difference in worth between us and them. I am vehemently anti-elitist.

Which is probably why discussing this subject at all makes me feel queasy.

But equal worth does not necessarily equate to equal intellect. And it could be that for us to truly encompass this extremely unpalatable truth, we might just have to dig our own intellectual elitism out by the roots.

A stupid person has the same human worth as a smart person.

Bet you thought you already thought that, right?

But did you really?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well at least I am feeling more awake now.

I’m certainly never going to let THAT happen again.

What I should have done is just taken a nap and pushed the video making to later in the day, when I could do it properly.

But that’s exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t occur to me when I am sleepy.

Ah well, it’s water under the bridge now. It’s not like I have disappointed my legions of followers or anything.

My just under 200 subscribers will just have to deal with it.

Were I a far more organized and ambitious type, I would be working my ass off to try to get that up to at least 500 subscribers because then I could start making money from the videos I post.

At least, in theory. People would still have to watch the dang things, too.

And you know, maybe one day I will have my excrement concentrated to that point. I can certainly envision that possibility. I can see myself busting my butt to make high quality videos with mass appeal and really making a go of this whole thing.

But um, not yet. I would need to be considerably more awake first. I am still in the process of exiting my long lonely state of stupefaction and so being able to summon that kind of energy and enthusiasm and confidence is still a tad beyond me.

But there’s still that idea for a satirical news program to ponder.

I could really make something like that work, ya know?

So who knows, maybe today’s sad little video will serve a purpose. Maybe this near-failure will give me a kick in the rear and get me to try harder.

But man do I miss caffeine sometimes.

I’ve been playing around with a rather extraordinary website/app called Descript, trying to get it to work for me, because it could save me a heck of a lot of effort.

The idea is that you feed your video to Descript and it generates a transcript of it and then you can edit the video by editing the transcript.

And it has the ability to automatically detect and delete your ums, ahs, stutters, and so on, and that’s basically all I am doing when I edit my vids.

So in theory it could almost automate the whole deal, leaving me to concentrate on improving the content in other ways.

Which would be rad.

It does a whole lot of other amazing stuff too, like AI video and speech generation. meaning I could write a script and it would generate a talking head video complete with a presented and their voice for me.

That’s not how I roll but I can see possibilities for that. Like using that capacity to generate “actors” for my skits.

I could write stuff that’s just me communicating with other talking heads, like we’re on a Zoom call or the like.

For now, though, I am just messing around with Descript’s video editing function. Editing the transcript is a lot less mental work than editing the video itself, and it makes it easier to get all of my little stutters and such.

We are gradually getting to the point where I could just give an AI a screenplay and it would spit out a movie.

The acting might not be great, though. It would be pretty hard to train an AI to get that right given it’s not easy to get people to do it right.

It could probably make intelligent guesses as to the proper emotion based on context clues, but of course, acting is all about the subtle nuances.

Just like with reading faces, we human beings can detect the tiniest of variances in how something is said in order to pick up on the emotional content of our speech.

It’ll be a long time before an AI can do that.

More after the break.

---

Not frigging bad

I decided to try out Descript’s AI talking head feature.

This is the result.

And I have got to admit, my dude there sounds a lot more human and natural than I thought he would.

I can see uses for this.

One odd but not dealbreaking thing : it took a weirdly long time to generate that little vid.

As in, it’s only a paragraph and a half long yet it took ten minutes plus to generate it, and I can’t see why. It’s a pretty simple thing.

My dude doesn’t even move much.

But it could be like with image generation, where in order to get high quality results, you have to let the computer make a LOT of passes at rendering the result, each pass refining it a little bit more.

Or it could be that because I am using a free account, their system ain’t exactly in a hurry to process my request, and if I want quicker results, I should pay up.

Or it could be both, I suppose.

Whatever. At minimum, I have a way fun new toy to poke around with for a while. One that I might conceivably have a use for in the future.

Not today though. Today has been sleepy. As seen in today’s rather minimalist vid.

I don’t think I’m sick. Other than the sleepiness, I feel fine. I have a little bit of a runny nose from seasonal allergies but that’s about it.

But I will keep an eye on the situation. While making sure to keep up the hydration, even when I don’t feel like it, to avoid feelings like I need a trip to the ER when all I really need is a tall glass of water from the Brita filter jug.

I wonder if I could get one of those Brita filters that attach to the sink to work with the sink in my bathroom.

I bet that would improve my urinary health. Keep me truly flushed out.

Something to think about re : birthday presents.

I should write about what I want for my birthday soon, in case it matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.