Possibly part one of oh so very many.

Like I say in the vid, I could go on and on.

I was surprised at just how cathartic making that video was. It did me a remarkable amount of good to get all that off my chest.

So much so that for that reason alone, I am probably going to revisit the subject. I clearly have a lot of deep seated issues regarding the Boomers and being the brilliant communicator that I am, I might just be able to explain them in a way that my fellow Gen X people will enjoy and maybe even find cathartic themselves.

Who knows, maybe I can become the voice of my people!

What, it could happen!

There’s money to be had in being the most eloquent complainer. I think.

I posted my vid to r/GenX on Reddit. I’ve been hanging out there lately. Feels good to communicate with people who speak my language, so to speak.

Perhaps I have felt generationally displaced for a long time without knowing it.

Thank God I have my Gen X friends to talk to and share my brutally cynical and darkly satirical POV with. As the vid of the day shows, I have a lot of observations about the world that I am guessing subsequent generations would find quite toxic.

Although who knows. Maybe with the right packaging, I could be a sort of dark guru to Gen Z kids, telling them what is really going on and shedding some (black) light on the things in their lives that don’t make any sense.

They do make sense, kids. It’s just a really harsh kind of sense. Buckle up.

Today’s been alright. I am fairly certain that I can afford to order in tonight, although I haven’t crunched the numbers yet so I can’t be sure.

They’re not very crunchy numbers. Could do it on pen and paper if I wanted. But I will crunch them all the same so I know what I can get away with.

Haven’t run out of cans of pop yet. So the consequences of my deciding to not get a fridge buddy this week hasn’t had consequences yet.

It could be that there won’t be any. I might have had enough cans “in the pipeline” to see me through the week. Ya never know.

Without actually going to the kitchen and counting them, anyway.

But whatever. This entire experiment was predicated on the idea that if I went without the cans for a week it wouldn’t bother me all that much.

And I really miss ordering in. It’s the thing that most makes me feel like I am a real, competent, grown up type person who can participate in society.

Poverty isolates you from that. When you can’t do the fun things everyone else does because you can’t afford it, it really gives you that “Tiny Tim looking at the toy carousel through the toy shop window” feeling of being shut out of normal society. .

Poverty can make a ghost out of anyone.

So hopefully tonight’s ordering in will make me feel better, assuming that it doesn’t end up outside the door to the building or some other such catastrophe.

Worst case scenario, I can nuke a pot pie, but losing that money would break my fragile heart. I have way too much invested in this little treat.

Both financially and emotionally.

But oh well. I can’t control whether my DoorDash dude is a fucking idiot or whether some unpredictable and suspiciously improbable series of events will somehow fuck me over and it will be all my fault, technically.

But I have to try. I need a little sunshine in my life right now.

I’ve been in Siberia for far too long.

More after the break.

---

It made it!

I ordered Donair Dude and it arrived without issue.

Halle fuckin’ lujah.

I crunched the numbers, and they were crunchier than I thought they would be because I apparently slipped a mental gasket and forgot what calculation I should be doing and it took me some time to re-sync with my higher brain functions.

No, take beginning of the month income, divide it by five for the five weeks (grr) of this month, that gets you your per week budget, then multiply that by four to cover the four weeks remaining, now you have how much you should have come this Wednesday.

The difference between that and how much you have right now is your spendable.

Take out the remaining expenses of this week – $30 for Denny’s tomorrow, $20 for McD’s on Tuesday – and whatever remains of the spendable can go to ordering in.

And that covered my Donair Dude pretty much exactly. Woohoo!

Ya know, now that I have written it all out, I can see how that would seem like an impenetrable wall of number talk to someone less mathy than I.

I swear, it seems a lot less complicated in my head.

But I get it. Not everyone has the circuits in their brain to deal with complex quantitative reasoning. The fact that they can, in theory, do all the basic arithmetical calculations needed for the spiel I went into just now does not confer the ability to treat quantity like a baker treats dough.

Luckily, there’s people like me around who understand that kind of thing and unlike many corrupt products of the modern financial industry, I’m actually on your side.

I should have become an accountant. Or a lawyer. Or both.

Or at the very least a lawyer who does his own accounting.

Oh, I suppose I could still go to law school. Do pre-law at some decent undergrad institute (so not Kwantlen) then law school (in Halifax, so I would be close to home) then study to pass the bar and finally become a halfassed lawyer right before I died.

Might not be a bad way to go out, though, if I can get the right kind of cushy scholarships so that I can live a comfortable student life.

At least I’d be doing something with myself!

Of course, that assumes the Onion doesn’t snatch me up.

In that case, fuck law, I’m too funny for that shit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve got to stop half-assing these things.

I wrote another song.

It turned out pretty decent.

YouTube won’t let me embed it, so here it is.

Dunno why YouTube won’t let you embed certain videos. Seems to be random. Bugs me because embedding is so much more elegant than a dumb hyperlink.

What is this, the 90’s? Am I going to be using Telnet to connect to a remote Unix shell so I can use gopher next?

Anyhow, the song is not horrible. In fact it’s kind of impressive. That Johnny Cash voice really makes the whole thing work.

But I know I can do better. I just have to slow down long enough to really work on the lyrics until they sparkle.

Oh right, and I should explain : the final line of the song was supposed to be “queen and life) but somehow ol Johnny turned it into “queen life” and while I consider that to be a life goal of mine that’s not what I frigging wrote.

And I didn’t notice until it was too late to fix it.

Leave it for future generations to puzzle over, I guess.

Damn performers not sticking to my perfect script! 😛

I am stuck in that most painful of places in my artistic life when I know that my output is not good enough by my own standards and that I can do much better, but I am not yet able to make the improvements needed for complicated psychological reasons.

The only thing to do in such a situation is to keep on pushing until the blockage clears.

I’m not going there.

I suppose if I was a true artiste I might try to loosen my creative juices with some liquor, but I can’t afford that and I know very well that my escapist tendencies and mental illness make me a prime target for all forms of addiction so I ain’t going there.

My drug of choice is video games, and while that addiction can be quite crippling, it at least doesn’t shred my liver.

Not in any direct sense, anyhow.

Did my banking after Wound Care today. Which means I had to face the depressing truth of the coming five week month.

Good god that sucks.

But I will make it somehow. Sacrifices will be made. I already decided not to get a fridge buddy of cans of soda this week in order to hopefully make enough room in the budget for me to order in on Saturday night.

Probably either Subway or Donair Dude, as they are the cheapest of my usuals.

Other than financial stress and its general bummerness, today’s had a bunch of little nuisance things go wrong, none of which are a big deal on their own but the cumulative fact has been to make me feel rather put-upon by the universe.

Like, Julian said not to order my groceries until he was on the way back from his errands because Joe was coming with him and therefore there would be nobody to take my order in for me until they came back.

So imagine my surprise when it turns out Joe has been home this whole time. He decided not to go with Julian after all.

Meaning I could have ordered my groceries whenever.

Also meaning that I did not have my groceries when I made my lunch just now, leading to it being a rather bare meal.

Because I am out of trail mix and we’re out of oranges, so that’s two thirds of my lunch gone just like that.

And I wanted to transfer the last of last month’s credit card to my Amazon account, but it turns out the minimum load for that is $25 and how much did I have on my card?

$24.47! Son of a bitch.

So little things like that. It went on my Steam account instead. Which is fine and all but I wanted to put it towards that far off distant year when I finally buy that fucking power supply I need so badly.

Oh well. Life goes on. I will limp along like I usually do.

Like I talk about in the song, actually.

I need to give that idea more attention than it got today.

More after the break.

---

Some random thoughts

As opposed to my usual slightly less random thoughts.

I wonder if I make big sad foxy eyes at enough of my friends on Tapestries, someone will donate a 750 watt or better power supply to me.

I gave an online calculator my machine’s specs and that’s the level of power supply it said I needed. Between 700 and 800 watts.

Whatever. I just want my computer to stop crashing when it uses the GPU.

Of course, as I learned from getting my GPU, it would be far better if the donation came from inside Canada.

It was insane enough getting my GPU from the US before Trump came to power. I can only imagine what I would have to pay in import fees now.

It would probably be easier to just make one myself out of parts, for fuck’s sake.

It’s really more a matter of frustration now. I’ve needed the PSU for a long time and I thought I was finally going to get it this month then boom, five week month struck.

TWO IN A FUCKING ROW. Unbelievable.

My mood is increasingly rough and raw. I feel like energy is accumulating inside me and making me increasingly restless and frustrated and agitated in preparation for me (hopefully) evolving to my next level of existence.

I will know I have made it when I can do fun stuff like job hunt, explore new places via Discord or whatever, and in general try and do new things and look for new adventures without feeling like I need a Xanax first.

I know that there’s a cheerful, resilient, outgoing, enthusiastic person hidden underneath all the rubbish and detritus that has accumulated in this rusty dusty crusty old soul of mine.

If I process enough of that garbage, that much lighter and happier person will bob up like a liberated balloon and I will finally be the person I was meant to be.

I wish I could just set fire to all my bullshit and burn it like a tire fire until it is all gone.

But instead, all I can do is shovel.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I’ve made an important breakthrough in the field of theoretical hikikimori research, otherwise known as loserology.

It’s not a cure for failure to launch but I think its an important step towards one.

As seen in today’s vid.

Saying us failure to launch (heretofore called “FTL”) types have failed to grow up is hardly revolutionary in and of itself.

I mean duh.

But the connection I’ve made to childhood fear of abandonment is, as far as I know, brand new and original to yours truly.

Excuse me while I bask in my own genius.

Gee that feels nice.

Seriously though, I’ve wrestled with where this pervasive feeling of not being able to make it in the real world comes one for quite a while and so making the connection with the very important instinct of children to stick close to their parents was a huge relief.

But it begs the question of what the hell went wrong? How does a normal, successfully launched person acquire the confidence to leave the nest and how did that process fail to happen for us?

I have a brutally cynical theory and it has to do with how we are a very intelligent population of social misfires.

Basically, the difference with us is we’re smart enough to think about things the healthier masses simply do without question by following their herd instinct.

Our herd instinct either does not work or we ignore it in favour of concentrating on our abstract reasoning skills and the world inside our heads.

Don’t get me wrong : the ability to tune out the outside world and hone in on your inner voice is vital to high intelligence.

But like all good things, it can go way too far and become a serious problem.

So the idea is that regular, normal, healthy folk just do what everyone else is doing and it never even occurs to them to wonder why, let alone contemplate not doing it.

In doing so, they maintain life momentum and have the support and safety that comes from having the rest of the herd around them.

Yes, even in our hyper individualistic society, people still take a great deal of comfort from knowing they are “normal” and therefore “safe”.

Normal people are also far better at listening to their instincts than us FTL folk. Again, we listen to our intellects, and that means we tend to view any kind of mental input that is not logically connected to anything as noise and tune it out.

You know, pesky little things like emotions and instincts and empathy and people.

So while the rest of the kiddies were blithely developing normally into healthy, functioning adults, we were on the sidelines questioning everything and unwittingly robbing ourselves of forward momentum.

But lots of intelligent nerdy people go on to have perfectly normal, healthy, respectable lives, so that can’t be the only answer.

Something more must have happened to us to destroy our ability to advance to that level of emotional maturity and I can’t think of what it might be.

Probably not one single thing, but a number of different things that all can disrupt the same vital psychological subsystem for which we do not yet have a name.

This phenomenon may include more than us extreme cases that are unemployed and always online and so on.

I know a lot of highly intelligent people who got a university degree in something brilliant but impractical and then took one look at the prospect of competing with all the other people with the same degree for the incredibly small number of jobs in that field, and decided it was not worth even trying, and gave up, and ended up working the same sort of jobs people without degrees get.

Only with debt.

In a way, they failed to launch too.

This warrants further investigation.

More after the break.

---

Did we make it?

There definitely seems to be a certain subset of the population that assume that if there’s competition, we lose.

Like there is zero chance we can win over others on any level.

Now where does THAT come from? How did we end up assigning ourselves to the omega camp, the permanent losers club?

Social dominance games have to play a role in there somewhere. You grow up being the last picked on teams and being treated like the lowest of the low by your classmates and getting bullied on the schoolyard and it sure seems like that’s the role society has in store for you.

And childhood, especially early childhood, is where we get our fundamental social programming. These are our basic lessons in how to exist around others.

And I didn’t even go to kindergarten. Le sigh.

So I guess the answer to how we assigned ourselves to the loser group is that we didn’t, we just found ourselves there and adapted.

It’s probably not quite that black and white, but close enough.

And maybe we didn’t develop our social skills more because we were too busy listening to that intuitively intelligent voice inside. Maybe that’s why there is this seeming incompatibility between high IQ and social skills.

Maybe when that goes too far, you get Asperger’s. Or full on autism.

Anyhow. To attempt to drag us back to the point by our ankles.

The feeling that we come last in everything leads a lot of us to seek cooperative environments, or at least our own specialized nerdy environments where we at least stand some chance of not being at the very bottom.

Like I said, not all of us end up in the full on FTL group like me. My circumstances , with my parents taking me out of university and back into my childhood bedroom, were especially cruel and regressive.

But enough of us end up here that you really have to wonder why.

And if there is something we can do to get the fuck out of here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

With better lyrics this time!

Warning, some people (I assume) may find this very creepy.

It’s certainly better written than my Trump thing, which now embarrasses me.

Which means my artistic talent is evolving rapid, because the Dumb Donnie song was just a couple of days ago.

Presumably, I will find my little goth ditty embarrassing soon as well, but for now, I am more or less pleased with it.

One thing that bugs me, though, is that I can’t change the lyrics after Riffusion has rendered the song once. I can go into the lyrics and edit them but when I render the song again, the lyrics don’t change.

Guess I better start trying to get it right the first time, at least with the lyrics, which are my main contribution other than describing the vibe I want.

So next time I do this, which will probably be in a couple of days, I will have to keep working on the lyrics until I am sure they are good enough.

Not something I have a lot of experience doing. But I think I am finally ready to get past the “cheerfully pushing out first drafts” stage of my artistic growth and into actually trying to do my art properly.

I give it about a fifty fifty chance of working. I have a lot of emotional instability and wobbly self-esteem to overcome before I can truly become a real creator.

I just have to keep telling myself that my work is already amazing but being able to bear down and make it as good as I possibly can will take it from amazing to super mega incredible or possibly even legendary.

Maybe even good enough for someone to give me money for it!

Then I can REALLY show the world what I can do.

Still, I have my doubts. I may just end up hating myself and thinking I have no real talent at all except a proclivity for self-delusion.

I mean, I hope not, but it’s a real possibility.

I feel like so far my artistic output has been really sloppy and halfassed. I’ve gotten away with it because I am frankly so talented that my halfassed work is better than most people’s three and a half assed best, but that doesn’t make it good enough.

At some point, the diamond in the rough has to start refining themselves.

I could start trying to get an agent. Might be hard without the imprimatur of some gatekeeper or another saying my work is worth something, but I could at least link some of my videos and stories.

Assuming any of them are good enough.

Told ya I was unstable.

Honestly, an agent would be so good for me. It’s exactly what a loosely woven creative weirdo like me needs : someone with focus and drive and competence and a vested interest in selling my work because he or she gets a cut.

And social skills. Mostly of the networking variety – knowing people, having lots of contacts in the business, knowing who to talk to about what and where, and that kind of thing. I don’t have any of that.

I can be pretty charming in person, but I have been a total outsider for most of my life and that kind of makes networking tricky.

I don’t know the kind of people who know people who know people and so on.

Agents do that kind of thing for a living. Their entire real job is dealing with the real world for us dreamy creative types so we can concentrate on making good stuff.

It’s very symbiotic.

Imagine having someone actively looking for work for me!

I can only dream.

And look around, natch.

More after the break.

---

Don’t be a baby

I can no longer dodge the realization that I have certain infantile characteristics.

Thought not for lack of trying.

Passivity is the main one. Some deep and deadly part of me is convinced that if I am a good baby and wait patiently long enough, someone will come do everything for me.

Not an easy thing for a man, even one as non-macho as me, to admit.

That’s joined at the hip with the learned helplessness. The passivity is reinforced by the deep down sense that my only form of agency in the world is to attract some sympathetic person to help me.

And that’s a terrible life strategy for many, many reasons.

For one thing, nobody offers a lot of sympathy to giant bearded fat dudes. My friends do, thank God, but the world at large doesn’t exactly look at me and see helplessness.

But mainly the problem is that it requires you to remain helpless and weak and infantile or you start to feel the only agency you know slipping away and you’re faced with the ultimate horror of having to face life all alone.

To your infantile program, that reads as being abandoned, and that is every child’s worst fear. Children know, instinctively, that without caretakers they are doomed.

Hence the feeling, even in a 52 year old toddler like myself, that I can’t possibly make it on my own. And a lifelong history of hiding behind others and making them deal with reality for me instead of learning to do things by myself.

And I have been in this state of suspended infancy for 30 years.

Only now do I feel like I am finally reaching the stage where I conclude that Mommy and Daddy aren’t coming and therefore that it’s time for me to get the hell out of this high chair and toddle off to look for them.

Or forage for myself. That’s the more likely outcome.

After all, Mommy’s on the other coast and Daddy is dead. I can’t imagine there’s anyone who’d want to look after me and if they did they are probably even more broken than I am and not at all to be trusted.

So I guess it’s time for me to just wander off. I used to be quite good at that. I would wander around the neighborhood, wander away from my parents, wander around the library at school. I was a great wanderer at one point.

Then bullying came along and I was scared of everything.

Time for me to start wandering again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided to try covering something from the news.

Specifically, the upcoming postal fucking strike.

I give my opinion.

I know I repeat myself in that piece, and I wanted to eliminate that, but by the time I got that far in the editing process, I had too few brain calories left to figure it out.

Oh well. It’s not a capital crime, or CRIME.

Overall I am quite pleased with my first foray into news commentary. It was quite easy to download that news story and clip out the bits I wanted and build my commentary around what I had.

So I know I can do that. And that’s neato keen.

I got a phone call from my mother today, which was awesome. We chatted about this n’ that, including the postal strike.

Which was ironic because I was in the middle of making today’s video when she called and yet the topic came up naturally in the conversation.

I guess it’s on people’s mind.

Apparently, my mother did send a package for my birthday, it just hasn’t arrived yet. Phew. When nothing had arrived, I started to worry about her.

Had something happened, and nobody bothered to tell me?

What can I say, I am a worrier by nature. So is she. We’re a lot alike.

So I was extra glad to hear from her. Obviously, she meant to phone yesterday, on my birthday, but shit happens, ya know?

My words, not hers.

She told me that she has pictures of me that she keeps around, and that made me extremely happy because I tend to assume people forget I exist if I am not around to remind them and that I do not matter to people.

I know a lot of that is the mental illness talking. I am still working on healing the wounds that cause such feelings and attempting to correct my unrealistically negative and overly simplistic internal narrative towards that end.

I remember how I felt when I was a kid. And I remember why. And I remember going through a lot of really harsh shit back then.

But it wasn’t all bad. I was happy sometimes. I enjoyed myself. I had things I liked to do and was happy to do them. It wasn’t all isolation and depression.

It was a very lonely life a lot of the time, and it’s true that I had nobody that I felt I could turn to or talk to, and no kid should grow up that alone.

But there was happiness too.

I didn’t make it to wound care this morning. I’ve definitely got some kind of bug. This time I am sure because I still felt crappy even after I hydrated and ate.

I think I’m fighting it off, though. Which is good.

All in all, it’s been a pleasant day so far. Tonight I will do the McD’s and Zoom thing with my friends. I’m looking forward to that,

And tomorrow is Deposit Day, meaning the long haul grind of this five week month will finally be over and things can become a little rosier for a good long time.

Well, a couple of months, at least. I hope.

Oh god. Life sucks. The world hates me. I just checked and next month is ANOTHER five week month.

I sincerely thought there couldn’t be two in a row. That life could not be that cruel.

I was wrong. It totally can be, and it is.

I’m going to need a lot of time to process this cruel blow.

Well at least this time, I will know from the start that it’s a five week month so I won’t spend like normal on the first week then have to catch up.

If I can even call it “normal” any more.

Why must life be so cruel? Seriously, what the fuck is WITH this?

I hate it when my paranoid, suspicious nature is validated.

More after the break.

---

It’s really happening

The first time, I asked Co-Pilot. This time, I counted manually on the calendar.

Got the same result. Another five fucking week fucking month. Fuck.

Is this the universe’s way of pressuring me into getting a job or at least some work? Because people with jobs don’t go through this shit.

I had such dreams. I was going to finally get that new power supply. Or sign up for Descript for a month. Or who knows what else.

Now, I will be back to just scraping by for ANOTHER month.

And it makes me want to fucking scream.

I spent all of the previous month just counting the days until things went back to normal, convinced (without checking) that there can never be two five-week months in a row.

I mean, surely whatever calendar anomaly caused them was so rare as to make the odds of it happening twice in a row prohibitive.

Not prohibitive enough, apparently.

After doing my banking tomorrow I will have to sit down and crunch the numbers to see just how much the next month will suck.

Like I said above, it should be not quite as bad because this time, my money can be spread evenly over all five weeks.

So who knows. Maybe I’ll get that PSU yet. Between the $30 on my card and the ~$60 left on my Amazon account, I’d need to come up with around $40.

That might be possible.

Oh wait, I just checked, there’s only $30 left on my Amazon account.

There’s a recurring charge of $11.99 that wiped out part of it. I assume that must be what I am paying for Prime these days.

In which case that’s way too much. I should cancel it. I can’t afford that and with how little I order from Amazon.ca it doesn’t make sense financially either.

Man life has it out for me lately.

Oh well, hardship builds character, he said resentfully.

Maybe I can afford the Descript thing instead. Le sigh.

Whatever money Mom put in her package for me is sure gonna come in handy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, on my birthday, I made a thing!

And it’s even kind of good!

Here it be :

Kind of astounding what AI can do, isn’t it? In many ways, that impresses me more than mere image generation.

Because this is music and music is magic and me being able to make an entire song just be typing in the lyrics and a general description of the sound I wanted and having it come out that good, that credible, is power at its most profound.

And those fools let it fall into the wrong hands…. MINE! Muahahaha, etc.

The song’s far from perfect. I really should work on those lyrics more, some of them are rather awkwardly worded and I shouldn’t have been quite so gruesome when describing Dumb Donnie’s fate in El Salvador.

Still, not bad for something that started out as just something to write to test out what Riffusion could do.

I’ve also uploaded it to TikTok like I normally do with my videos, as well as posted a link to it to my BlueSky, where it might just catch on.

Well a fellow can dream, can’t he? In my fantasy, the song goes mega viral and catapults me into overnight fame and practically forces the Onion to hire me.

I even get interviewed on As It Happens!

Also, I’m a billionaire with an anthro stallion boyfriend and a spaceship.

What the hell, if you’re gonna fantasize, go big!

All in all, it’s an unusual thing to get up to on one’s birthday but I am enjoying it. If I had more energy, I would have searched for a bunch of images to put on the screen to accompany the music.

Would have been more entertaining that just putting the lyrics on screen, which was tedious and exacting work.

Oh well. Live and learn.

I’m framing this whole thing in my mind as my having made a gift for myself. After all, I did make something which pleases me on my birthday so I think it counts.

And it’s so rare that I can successfully create something substantial. Though I suppose I shouldn’t denigrate my other videos.

That just leads to me having to renigrate them later!

Aw crap, I am getting the strong urge to nap. Well not till I have done my words. Hopefully the sleepiness will pass and I will be able to get things done before I zonk out for a while.

I’m glad I put some effort into playing around with Riffusion. That is exactly the direction I need and want to go in my life : letting myself really invest myself into the things I do, and looking for things to do that can take that kind of investment.

Creative things, for the most part. I have enough creative energy to run a large factory. The kind that works with molten steel.

Not to make anything with it. Just because they can. For kicks.

I’ve tried out my brand new Brita water bottle. It works great but it’s kind of a pain in the ass to use because the only way to fill it is to pour water directly into the built in straw and that’s tricky to do with any precision so I end up wet.

And that’s no fun.

So what I need is a funnel. A simple little funnel to stick in the neck of the bottle so it can act like a wider mouth for the thing.

Once I got that going, filling it up will be much easier and I will use it a LOT.

If only it fit under the tap in my ensuite.

OK, that’s enough for now. Time for a well earned nap.

---

A long way up

I’ve been having trouble getting out of bed again.

The same ol’ story. In between waking up and getting up, there has to be this period where I sit on the edge of the bed while I try to gather the motive force to get out of bed and face the world.

Dunno what has brought that ol’ beast back to life. I guess I’ve been feeling a little lethargic in general. Obviously, I am not going to declare myself to be ill when it is probably just a lack of food and/or hydration.

So, yellow alert only. If that.

But it’s still troubling to be having trouble getting out of bed again. I am definitely going to be keeping an eye on the situation.

Oh well, at least I have gotten lots of birthday well-wishes on Tapestries, which makes me feel good, both for the goodwill itself and the pride I feel in myself for actually taking the initiative in letting people know it’s my birthday to get that goodwill.

All in all, very positive.

Oh, and I had a chat about what power supply to get with my good friend, nimbat, and mistress of all things hardware, Windchaser.

So I know which one I’m going to get : this one here.

Of course, I’ll need to have the money first. That little detail. Looks like birthday money is not coming along any time soon, so I would have to make up the around $65 difference between my remaining Amazon gift card balance and the price of the thing from my current cashflow.

Dunno if I want it that bad. I might prefer to wait a month before subjecting myself to another month with less spending cash.

Or I could get a membership with Descript instead. That’s around $50 and that would allow me to see if they can do what I want with my recorded audio.

If they can, then $50/month is a small price to pay for being able to just record my usual talking head video then hand it to Descript to add the images and videos.

That sounds so good.

So it’s kind of a fork in the road of destiny : I could pay for something that enhances my enjoyment of video games, or I could pay for something that might get me ahead.

Right now I am leaning towards the PSU because my satirical news idea requires a fairly specific set of images and clips and I dunno if a generic, transcript-based service would be able to keep up with that.

But who knows. Maybe it can. In which case, sweet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today is my birthday. Almost.

I explain it all here :

Still trying to work up the ambition to try my news thing, Bullshit and Lies.

Some day soon, I hope. Could be big.

So yeah, tomorrow is my 52nd birthday. Whoop de frigging do. I always want to get excited about it and make a big deal of it but I never do.

If I had my way, I’d have a big birthday party with lots of people I know and love and we’d hang out and chat and have snack and there’d be cake and entertainment – basically the whole traditional deal but, ya know, for grownups.

So, no silly hats. Or clowns – definitely no goddamn clowns. And the cake would be sugar free, which probably means I’d have baked it myself.

It’ll taste good but it probably won’t be pretty unless someone else iced it.

As for the entertainment, it would probably be just some dude with a guitar who can sing. A full band would be cool but probably way too loud and not only do I, in general, not like loud things, to me the most important part of this party would be the conversation, so music at a quiet, background level only.

Although I suppose, if the band really put on a good show, I would permit the conversation to stop while we all watched them do their thing.

But then back to the talking! Hey, it’s my party, and I love conversation.

Hmm. Maybe it could be a 70’s type party, complete with conversation pits, fondue, pitchers of cocktails, and rampant bisexuality.

Well it’s hard to throw a good orgy with it.

Do people still throw cocktail parties? They were everywhere when I was a kid. It was fashionable to roll your eyes at them and talk about how dreadful they were, especially when you were at one for some reason, but as a kid they always seemed awesome.

People hanging around being sophisticated and trying to sound like intellectuals while sipping tasty cocktails and hooking up with one another.

Sounds like a lot of fun to me, especially if you have some people truly worth talking to in the mix so things don’t become too vapid.

Turning 52 is no big deal. Turning fifty was, of course, a very big deal, and not one I’d care to repeat, to be honest. And turning 51 was a bit of a deal because it really swept away the last dregs of any denial I still felt about being in my fifties.

And speaking of which, I feel like your fifties are an odd time. You’re definitely not middle aged any more (odds are, you ain’t making it to 100) so you are definitely not young and yet you’re not really old yet either.

Not in the senior citizen sense of the word.

It’s like your fifties are a DMZ between young and old. As if you’re practicing for really being old. More or less just getting used to the idea.

It’s the age where you start thinking of yourself as old and kind of trying out the idea in conversation like a teenager learning to swear.

And you start ending sentences with, “:..because I’m old. ”

Maybe that’s a Gen X thing. I dunno. Maybe we feel the need to recontextualize ourselves in order to be properly understood.

I certainly feel old. But that might have more to do with having an unhealthily sedentary lifestyle with very little movement.

My diet is healthy but my lifestyle ain’t.

I’ve finally started doing the exercises my physiotherapist gave me last Monday, otherwise known as almost a week ago.

Well, I did most of them. Rather depressingly, I was too tired by the other exercises to do the “draw letters of the alphabet in the air with your foot” one.

Presumably that’s to strengthen the muscles the other exercises don’t reach, as well as to reinforce precision of movement.

I predict my finding it very annoying.

More after the break.

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High on life

And by life, I mean sugar.

Been to Denny’s, had a nice meal, including a lovely gooey chocolate dessert, and got my gift from Joe and Julian, which is a lovely fat little Thermos brand thermos, and of course I got my best gift, which was a lovely conversation.

So if I had to sum up this outing in a word, that word would be : potrezebie.

But a close second would be : lovely.

Unfortunately, Felicity couldn’t make it to my little birthday bash because her gout flared up and the poor dear could barely walk let alone get to Denny’s and back.

So grr at Felicity’s gout. You were missed, dear. It was not the same without you.

After Denny’s, we picked her up some stuff from McD’s, and picked up my gift from her, which is a Brita water bottle with the Brita filter built in so I can have lovely clean Brita water whenever I like.

I plan to make it my new drinking vessel. Not only should this make meeting my hydration needs tastier, I honestly think Brita water does a better job of washing the impurities out of my body than regular tap water.

Possibly because it takes the impurities out of the tap water, thus keeping it from adding to the problem. Or maybe it’s just the placebo effect, I dunno.

I think it was rather clever of the Brita people to think of this product as there’s millions of young people carrying their metal water bottles around with them everywhere these days, so why not one-up the other water bottles by making one with your very well known water filter built in?

It certainly made me want one!

I’m a little worried that I have not received a letter from my mother yet. Usually I would get one well before my birthday but nope, nothing yet.

I’m not worried about whatever card she got me or what money she put in it.

I just want to know that she’s OK.

Maybe I should email my brother.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is remarkably simple.

Some people seem to get that instinctively. These people tend to be “hyper”. They automatically turn their bodily energies into the urge to actually do things and this makes them high energy type people who, ideally, get a lot done.

They might still be anxious in the moments where they have to slow down, but at least they are being productive towards their own ends.

Contrast that with dysthymic depressives like myself whose entire motivational structure is clogged with the ice cold sludge of depression and thus that motivation cannot lead to action and instead leads to frustration, anxiety, resentment, and yes, more depressive.

It’s like having a seized engine. Stomp on that accelerator all you want, you still are not going to get anywhere and the strain of the engine trying to move the car will hurt like hell and make you feel crazy so you will stop even thinking about trying.

Thus, the depression conditions you to live a very limited life. A life limited by what your seized engine will allow. And because you don’t know what the problem is, you can’t explain why you can’t do things that, from the outside, it seems like you are perfectly capable of doing and that definitely would help you if you did them.

But you can’t and you don’t know why.

The solution, of course, is to get all that gunk out of your engine and un-seize it. And that is more or less what therapy is for, whether it’s the traditional kind or journaling or shouting harshly at trees.

Don’t worry, they’re old, they can take it.

But it takes more than getting the gunk about. You have to break the conditioning that seized engine forced upon you. You’ll have to convince your sluggish mind that it is okay to press gently on the accelerator again.

This will not be easy. That kind of deep conditioning operates on a level far below the reach of our usual conscious mind. You can’t just order yourself to forget all about that set of rules and be ready for new ones.

To be honest, I don’t know how one breaks that kind of conditioning. I have not developed this line of thought far enough for that yet.

The classic Skinner-box answer would be that you have to condition a different, healthier response via positive feedback. In this case, that would mean revving the engine and getting a positive, reinforcing response instead of pain or fear.

Simple enough in theory but I am not quite sure how one arranges that when this is mostly happening in your head.

Got to find new, rewarding, life-affirming experiences, I guess.

And become less dependent on always doing the same damned things. The last line of defense my depression has against any kind of newness or progress is that cold, exposed feeling I get when I contemplate going outside the usual even for a little while.

Like the world outside my narrow little existence is some kind of cold and brutal ice planet that makes Antarctica look like Club Med.

But it’s easy to grow to feel that way when you never go out there or even look out the window. It’s a way to make yourself feel better about “choosing” to stay in.

Instead of just putting on a fucking jacket.

For all you know, it’s nothing but warm sun on green meadows under a brilliant blue sky out there now.

And even if it isn’t, you’ve got your coat and your scarf and your toque and you know that, with those weapons, you will quickly get used to the cold once you’re out there.

And you’re getting cabin fever from being stuck inside for so long anyhow.

So get the fuck out there!

Aaaany minute now.

More after the break.

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The work of life

Life is work.

To be a live human being on this planet is always going to require doing things that are not inherently fun and thus take effort – in other words, work.

The only people who come close to getting out of that are the very rich and the very sick and even they have to invest a little effort into their lives now and then.

Even if someone brings you your meals in bed, you’re still the one that has to eat them.

And this is why treating effort as the enemy can be so deadly. And addictive. There’s nothing wrong with trying to live your life with a minimum of tedium and drudgery… as long as you still live your life.

But if this healthy desire for efficiency turns toxic, it can turn into a pathological avoidance of anything except for the things with the absolutely highest effort to reward ratios that exist.

Those are the things that become addictions. Junk food, liquor, drugs, video games, even risky sex or for that matter, knitting.

All it takes is for it to stimulate the reward center of the brain.

And thus you have the dysthymic life : doing as little as you possibly can while fixating on one or two very high reward activities and making them the center of your life.

Like me with video games.

Breaking the hypnotic trance of dysthymia is not easy. Trust me on that one. Finding the living spark within you that doesn’t want to live life like you’re in a coma will take a fair bit of digging and letting it ignite the rest of you be a gradual and painful process of slowly bringing yourself back to life.

Right now I am trying to rouse myself enough to make a quantum leap to my next energy state so I can become more active in my engagement with life and less of a passive barnacle clinging to the underside of life’s vessel and spinning my wheels while pretending I’m getting somewhere.

There’s a hell of a lot a world waiting out there for me and I am eager to go out and get my own slice of it.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am surprisingly charismatic when I am having a chat with the camera.

Oh yeah, today I talk about sleep.

Definitely time to shear my beard and trim my hair so I am ready for the summer.

But yeah. There’s a kind of warm glow to me when I am relaxed and chatting with the camera in my usual casual, unscripted way.

Script? I don’t need no stinking scripts!

The evidence shows that I really could be a YouTube star if I could just pull myself together enough to create truly fun, funny, insightful content that looks professional and has enough rewarding content to keep people coming back.

And I can totally do that. Even if it means I have to actually jot some things down first.

In like, a bare bones outline of sorts. Just enough to remind me what I planned to do. Like I used to do for my standup.

Just needed a word or two to remind me of my jokes.

This brings us back to the idea of doing my own little satirical news program. I know it’s within my technical capabilities – all I need is to refresh my memory as to how to work with overlays and I can add the images and clips to make it a newscast.

Hmm. I’ve had the idea to introduce myself by saying, “Hi, my name is Michael Bertrand and I have no idea what I’m doing. ” for a long time.

Could be a fun, slightly provocative way to start my little show. You have to admit, that would make you want to watch the video to see what the heck happens next.

I will keep it in mind.

What would I call my little show? I’d be tempted to call it “Definitely Not The News” but that sounds too derivative. Maybe be utterly ironic and call it, “Bullshit and Lies”.

Has a nice ring to it. And again, you’d probably be intrigued. What kind of lunatics would call their show that?

Answer : my kind.

And imagine how hilarious it would be if the young people decided that their most honest and reliable news sources was a show called “Bullshit and Lies”.

Might help in case the powers that be try to sue me for libel or whatnot.

What? The show is CALLED “Bullshit and Lies”. And now you want to say people believe what I say despite that?

You, sir, are severely undermedicated.

And I know I would do it with my usual wacky, unpredictable, self-referential, context-aware Monty Python ish style. So it would be a newscast style show but I am more than capable of weaving whatever other kind of crazy content I want into that simple format.

So if I decided to make a go of this idea, I guess making a video for the day would involve trolling some halfways decent news sources for stuff I can riff off of so I can slay politics with my snarky opinions.

That sounds like so much fun.

And just think of the trouble I could get myself into with my barbs!

And of course, that would just be the “monologue” style portion of the show. From there I could do a lot of other stuff once I get the monologue stuff down.

Like fake movie trailers, fake ads, fake PSAs, and pretty much any other type of parody media you can think of. For instance.

Yeah, I could have a heck of a lot of fun using comedy to throw my truth bombs out there where they can blast away the REAL bullshit and lies.

There is so much toxic ideology and garbage thinking that needs to die out there.

And I am just the assassin for the job.

More after the break.

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Building myself up

I think the big problem with my attempts to build my ego and my confidence up is that I don’t really have a solid foundational sense of self to build on.

So it kind of feels like I’m trying to cross the Grand Canyon with a house of cards.

I think some solidity is accreting over time, so there’s that. I dunno how stable it is, but I think it’s there to stay even if it still is in the process of settling in and therefore parts of it are still moving around some.

Still, I would be much better off with a layer of bedrock solid self knowledge under me. Right now my lack of anchoring in the real world makes my sense of reality fluctuate far too much as the sands of my mental (and chemical) state shift around.

Unfortunately, if I am to develop that solid self, I am going to have to make like a Boomer and go on a voyage of self-discovery and (shudder) FIND myself.

Gack. Just typing that made my eyes roll like marbles.

But, like a lot of sappy, wimpy shit from my childhood, there’s a lot of truth to it. I feel like I am trying to finally finish going through my 20’s in my 50’s, and that means that backpacking through Peru is not exactly an option for me.

In fact, disability and lack of money means that I can’t really go anywhere. It would be tricky for me to even go to a convention if it was in Richmond, for fuck’s sake.

Which leaves going on a voyage of self-discovery online, which immediately sounds pathetic and lame to me.

I mean, it’s possible. I can dimly imagine the sort of steps I’d take. But it’s not exactrly the sort of thing that fills me with anticipation and wonder.

Still, I could try exploring Discord again, looking for new people and “places” and avenues to express and develop myself around people who don’t already know me and therefore I can reinvent myself a little.

Same fox, but with way less baggage! It’s Fruvous Lite!

And that would mean being willing to just try shit on impulse. Self-discovery is not the sort of thing that can be planned and executed logically, it comes from trying things thart seem like a good idea at the time and seeing if they work for you.

That flies in the face of my usual cautious, thoughtful nature, but that thing has grown out of control like a cancer and needs to be pruned back anyhow.

Caution means doing things carefully, and with forethought.

Cowardice means not doing anything at all.

I need to start making the other choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To be honest, I could have spent all afternoon doing it. It was an exercise of will to stop myself because I was having so much fun.

Here’s the result :

I love getting to be funny with people.

Anyhoo, like the last time, this compilation of clips was the result of me prowling around my backup of my HD from a very long time ago, back when the Earth was bright and new and the wine flowed like water and Donald Trump was just some guy.

And I look fresh and new too. Partly because back then we lived next to a mini-mall with a barbershop in it and thus my hair was actually kempt for once.

But also because I was younger and cuter and more energetic.

And I had no idea that by eating like a fucking idiot despite my diabetes I was wrecking the future for myself.

Or rather, intellectually I knew that I shouldn’t be eating like that but because it didn’t feel like it was hurting me at that time, I ignored it.

Even when I got blood sugar result that stated I might as well have cold maple syrup in my veins and my legs were being devoured by cellulitis and I was still like, oh well, shit happens, thanks for changing the bandages on my ENORMOUS WOUNDS that I KEEP PICKING AT, nice nurse ladies.

I am so ashamed of how I was back then. And what a nightmare that must have been for my poor roommates.

I’m so sorry, guys. Knowing me can be real gross and weird sometimes, I know. Especially with my warm sunny personality telling such a different story then my often shockingly terrible life circumstances.

What can I say? I’m broken.

Anyhow, another thing our little clip trip above reminded me of was that I am a genuinely cute, funny, charming, wacky guy.

There’s nobody out there quite like me. I’m a bright and shiny original and I have a surprisingly large amount of screen presence for someone so shy and I could totally make a YouTube star of myself by personality alone.

All that AND a genius level IQ AND creative talent out the wazoo?

It’s really too much. But then again… so am I!

I still need to be reminded of all that a lot because while my self esteem is stronger than it’s ever been right now, there’s still a lot of darkness and negativity inside me and these little daily ego trips of mine are my attempt to erase that shit, drive it out, send it off to oblivion where it belongs.

Because I am freaking amazing.

And I am still making the transition out of the darkness and into the light. I’m getting over being afraid to even be alive, seeing as I was never supposed to be, and I still need encouragement to live out loud, take up space, draw attention to myself, demand my fair share of things, and be ready to fight for my right to be.

Against who? My inner demons, mostly.

If there was an actual person outside of me attacking me it would be a lot more fun.

Like I was telling Doctor Costin during Therapy Thursday today, I have gone largely unopposed in life. Nobody ever told me I wouldn’t amount to anything or told me I wasn’t talented or otherwise forced me to fight back against them.

I mean, how far could I go with nobody to spite?

Only now do I feel ambition growing within me and with it the desire to prove myself to the world and show everybody just how freaking awesome I am.

And get myself some god damned money! And respect!

Especially for myself.

More after the break.

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To finally level up

Like I told Doc Costin on the phone today, getting a job would let me finally become an adult. A real, honest to goodness grownup.

And that would truly be like evolving into a higher life form for me. The good it would do my self-worth and confidence is inestimable. I honestly think that if I secured solid employment, this whole nasty thirty years of nullity would disappear behind me like fog and I would at very, very long last finally begin my life, and I would be happy.

Or at least a more respectable form of sad.

So why don’t you devote every waking hour to making that happen?

Because it’s not that simple. Not for me, anyhow.

Something being highly desirable does not automatically come with the motivation to make it happen. As it stands, I am still living my life the bad old way, spending my time hiding from the world in video games, blogging, making videos, et al.

But even that has improved. At least when I spend hours on BlueSky, I am, in fact, in communication with other human beings, albeit through the safe medium of text.

I write tons of comments there, as well as on YouTube. So even on that level I am not entirely cloaked any more.

And sometimes people even comment on my YouTube videos these days.

And those people can actually see me!

Maybe in the long term, I could even do the ultimate activity for shut-ins : live streaming! Me and an audience, together at last, in realtime.

I am a little worried about overwhelm on that one, though. I hope people would understand if a creaky old Gen X fart like me can’t keep up with the comments.

But I could see having a lot of fun hanging out, answering questions, talking about whatever is in my mind, and just soaking up the attention in general.

What can I say… I may be a fox but I’m still a ham.

And deep inside I am still that little kid trying to get people to pay attention to him. Fewer things could bring me more joy than making an audience laugh and feel good.

As long as they then fuck off, because baby, I’m gonna crash.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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