You know, I can be pretty charming when I just start the camera rolling and ramble on.

Case in point :

One of the unintended consequences of spending a certain portion of every day staring at my own face as I edit my videos is that I am finally developing the basic awareness of my appearance that should have been there since I was a toddler.

It’s almost like something really terrible happened back then that interrupted my development at the anal stage and sent me back to the oral.

But then I’d be really passive and weak willed and prone to getting other people to deal with reality for me while I mostly just sat in filth doing very little all the time.

Wouldn’t that be pathetic.

The other developmental stage where a person might become more conscious of their appearance is their teen years, when it suddenly occurs to them that they might want someone to be attracted to them for the sexing.

But not I. I was a closeted fag in small town Canada in the 80’s and that meant that there was no safe way for me to explore my raging sex drive.

Were I a more id driven fellow, I would have no doubt been driven to try to find something any way I could.

But I was too “smart” for that.

So I never really engaged in normal teen life at all. I had friends in grades 6, 7, and 8, and we did stuff like hang out and play video games or watch movies or TV, so that was at least somewhat normal, but that’s where it ended.

And where it still ends, really. I love hanging out with my friends but it would be a lot more “normal” of me to also have a love life.

As well as a job, but let’s not go there.

Presumably, a more emotionally mature human specimen would be driven by their instincts to go out into the world in search of sex and love.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live like that, more’s the pity. Patient readers are intimately familiar with the perils of a life like mine where you aren’t “driven” by anything at all. Not a single functional drive.

All because at some point I decided that I, the absurdly rational I, had to be “in control” and that meant only doing things I have rationally decided to do.

Turns out that doesn’t work too good. We’re not meant to live like that. It’s a tragically unbalanced and unhealthy way to live and it’s what has led me to be the hyper-intelligent infant I am today.

That goes a long way to explain why I am so “stuck”. I never developed any of the instincts that drive normal human emotional growth and so I have a very weak connection to the very mainspring of life, the id.

So I have led this extremely passive life where I do very little based on my desire to do it and do most things out of habit and routine so I don’t have to decide.

I’ve never even decided where to live. Every time I have ever moved, it has been because on some level people got sick of me and kicked me out.

Until I found Joe and Julian, who have given me my forever home.

My whole life, all I have really ever done was react to things. Change never came from within. It was in response to externally sourced changes.

Like I have said in this space before : too adaptable for my own good. If my life isn’t changed by something outside myself, I don’t change either.

Hence being “stuck”. Without drives and instincts prodding me into action, how am I supposed to generate any momentum in life?

Where would they even come from?

No wonder I am such a paradoxical creature.

The fox in the glen has magical powers but he never uses them.

Because he’s scared.

More after the break.

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On being dead

Or if not dead, then frozen.

That’s what my being “stuck” feels like. Like I’ve been frozen immobile by some terrible chill and need to find some kind of cosmic microwave oven to thaw me out.

Did I mention I’m eating a TV dinner right now?

No mystery as to where that chill comes from – being severed from my id. When I was raped when I was four years old and I retreated deep into the depths of my extraordinary mind, I basically cut the cord to my id and stop being a “natural” human being in favor of hiding in a world of icy abstraction.

And the thing about being cold is that if it goes on long enough and/or the damage is severe enough, it doesn’t feel like cold any more.

You just feel numb.

And it’s easy to mistake that numbness for being okay. After all, says the child mind, if it stopped hurting, that means you’re okay, right?

And sure, you’re not really okay. You’re still deeply and horribly injured and it’s going to go untreated for a very long time. And that’s going to twist and distort everything about how you develop from that point on.

And you hadn’t even finished primary brain growth yet.

But being numb lets you escape the damage and pretend things are okay and show a bright and shiny face to the world in order to protect your wound from being poked at by the curious (who won’t be able to help anyway) and lets you fool yourself into thinking you’re okay and even into forgetting the horrible injury at your core and instead just blaming yourself for being so god damned broken.

So, ya know. The system works.

And so you spend the rest of your life mindlessly wandering naked through the midnight tundra of your mind looking, without hope or anticipation, for shelter.,

And escaping this frozen purgatory will require hooking up that id that got severed in your escape into your mind so very long ago.

Good luck with that.

I have come to a terrible conclusion!

Namely that I am going to have to start writing notes before I make my videos, at least if they are more than just me vlogging about my day or whatever, because I keep getting partway into a video when my mind goes totally blank and I forget at least half of what I had intended to say and I end up dissatisfied with the final product.

Aging plays havoc with our working memory, and mine was prone to randomly dumping its contents even when I was a kid, so there might be a LOT of note-taking in my future.

In the meantime, I will at least write notes for my vids at least some of the time, and that means I will need to exercise a little more self-discipline.

Speaking of which….

Either than, or I have recently made a quantum leap in brevity. This would please me enormously because I’ve always thought of myself as being too prolix, and I have been striving to make my writing more compact and impactful for God knows how long.

So it’s possible that I am just getting my point across faster now. In which case, huzzah.

But that would not explain the feeling of an icy cold wind blowing through the shockingly empty caverns of my mind all of a sudden.

That must be what it feels like when people find their minds going blank when they sit down to write an exam or the like.

But in my case, that’s knowledge, and I can almost always dredge up things I know.

It’s trying to think of things to say while recording that has been suffering lately.

Also, my little comment about lacking self-discipline got me thinking about the subject, and while my point about it having made my life harder still stands, in other ways I have demonstrated a lot of self-discipline.

For example, in writing 1K words a day since 2011.

And I got to that level of self-discipline exactly how I said : by repetition. I just did my thousand words a day for long enough for it to become normal to me and at this point I am pretty sure I would go (more) insane if I didn’t have this outlet.

You have to teach your words that they have a way out into the world.

And it’s getting that way with my videos too, even though I have only been doing them for like four or five months.

This time, it’s also my personality and expressiveness that have found out there is a way out and have started clamoring for it every day.

I am still pondering ways of making my videos way more ambitious and more professional looking. I feel like I need to make a quantum leap to a new energy level with both my vids and my extremely geeky metaphors.

I feel like I could make something truly amazing if I could get my shit together. These videos of me talking are okay for TikTok because that’s what a lot of TikTok is like. But on YouTube they look so boring.

And I want to make stuff with pizzazz. Stuff that, to the best of my ability, seems like actual television to me.

Or at least like the other YouTubers I admire. Ones that, I must stress, are actually making money at it.

I want to be like them so bad. I want to have a large and attentive audience who actually listen to and respect what I say and who appreciate my words enough to want to buy my merch, join the channel, stalk my Discord, or whatever.

I don’t care. I just want the money.

More after the break.

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Getting it together

So what do I mean by getting my shit together and why do I find it so hard?

In my case, getting my poop in a group would involve gathering up all the loose threads of possibilities in my head and putting them into a single coherent picture that could then be used to go forward as a single, powerful, unified whole.

Which sounds really impressive. Yet a big part of me rejects it utterly.

Because i am very much a creative type person and as such I don’t like those kinds of constraints. I like to keep things loose and open because that is how creativity works best – when your mind is as open to connections as possible, without a lot of walls and barriers getting in the way.

So it really comes down to the question every kind of creative must face at least once – are you willing to make artistic sacrifices in order to make your talents pay?

And I’m not sure, to be honest. I certainly don’t want to do it. If I wasn’t so interested in finding a way to pay my own way for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t do a damned thing I didn’t feel like doing and would just continue to let my creativity express itself in whatever way it happens to come out that day and be done with it.

But I want to finally become a real, honest to goodness grownup, and my best long term bet for that is to learn to make some dosh with my creative talents.

It needn’t be a lot of money. I would be quite happy to just make a minimum wage living on my videos. After all, it’s not about getting rich, it’s about finally being self sufficient.

By my calculations, a minimum wage living gets you $2856/month dollars before deductions in this province. I get $1375/month on disability.

So that would double my current income, more or less. Not bad. To me, that seems like I would be living in the lap of luxury.

And it’s probably doable… if I can get my shit together.

And I don’t really wanna.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was doing the Therapy Thursday thing and talking to Doc Costin about how I feel like the real me is that scared little animal hiding way down deep in my psyche and how the person I normally think of as myself is, in a very limited sense, a false front I constructed in order to hide that scared little animal.

And I had just told him about how I think getting to the heart of my problems will involve dealing with that scared little animal and we had come to the mutual conclusion that my best way to do that would be through fiction and that’s when the phrase “the fox in the glen” popped into my head like a secret whispered in the dark.

And that’s how I ended up making this :

I briefly considered marking that video as having been made for kids, but it isn’t, not really. That’s why it has the hashtag #storiesforbigkids because it’s really a story for the inner children of other wounded grownups like me.

And I might write more stories like that. I have at least one more chapter’s worth of ideas bubbling in my head. I can see myself continuing it as a series just like I did with those Fruvous stories long ago.

Maybe I should call my scared fox “little Fruvous”. Because just like the Fruvous who was adopted by the nice family next door, and made their Xmas a little more festive, this little fella is also me.

He’s just a version of me designed to help me deal with that scared little animal inside me as opposed to the previous version who was there to deal with my feelings of having been abandoned by my family.

Who knows. Maybe I will write a happy ending for Lil Fru, too.

That would be nice.

I feel even more like I am getting very close to the actual root of my problems now. Lil Fru is at the heart of a lot of my problems and has been pulling the strings behind the scenes for a very long time as he follows his own extremely fear filled agenda.

And that agenda is all about feeling safe. Safety above all else. Safety as the only thing that truly matters. Safety that required eternal hypervigilance because the moment you drop your guard, that’s when they GET you.

Meaning you can never actually believe you are safe. You can never truly relax.

Which means you are very, very tired.

Lil Fru doesn’t even remember what it’s like not to be tired any more. He has been running on fumes for a very long time. This is his “normal”.

Maybe it’s better if I don’t put everything about me into the Little Fru stories, because that would make them even more brutally depressing that the Big Fru ones.

What can I say? My truth is an unpleasant one.

I mean, it starts with a child being raped, for fuck’s sake.

I also talked with Doctor Costin about eventually having to remember the actual rape so I can finally finish processing it and let those memories go.

Not something I want to do, obviously, but I am willing to do it if it means I can find some peace of mind and finally feel like I am home safe.

That means convincing Lil Fru that he’s safe, too. So my thinking is that this will mean taking those terrible memories he’s been holding for so long away from him so he can finally lay down and rest.

He is, I am sure, at the heart of all my anxiety and high-strung agitation. Also quite possibly at the heart of my extraordinary creative and intellectual energies.

Being crazy can have fringe benefits, after all.

But I still think I’d rather be sane.

More after the break.

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The infantile response pattern

Consider this to be an appendix to my thoughts on the billionaire brain.

It will be observations on how some people act and consider yourself warned that once you see this pattern, you will see it everywhere.

This response pattern has three main output modes : anger, sadness, and contentment.

Anger is how they demand that their needs be met. They might pound the nearest surface, scream, throw things, and get quite red in the face.

Sadness is how they announce their needs are not being met in a way meant to elicit sympathy. Crying, especially directed towards potential caregivers, is the main mode of expression, with the desired effect of eliciting sympathy, comfort, and nurturing.

Contentment announces that the needs have been met for now and is, of course, expressed via smiles, laughing, and contented little noises.

You may have noticed how I have carefully avoided mentioning anyone’s age. That’s because, while I call this the infantile behaviour pattern, it is found in a hell of a lot of adults as well, especially the wealthy.

Because wealth infantilizes. A wealthy person is like an infant in that they don’t do anything for themselves. Everything they do, they do through those around them.

The main difference is that infants can’t do it for themselves. The rich can, but won’t.

And it doesn’t matter how rich or successful or well-educated the person is, they will still yell when they are unhappy, cry when they want comforting and reassurance, and babble contentedly when they are content.

This is especially noticeable in the classic angry cigar-chomping man. Imagine replacing that cigar with a pacifier and the picture is complete. This is a person who only knows how to relate to the world through anger.

And when perturbed, what do they do? Scream, yell, pound, and throw things while their faces turn red.

And they will often mix in some crying about what a martyr they are and how cruel life is to them and how they don’t deserve all the abuse they are getting from these lazy and stupid and ungrateful people that surround them.

But note how passive this all is. Like with the actual infants, it’s all about getting the response they want from others.

Often while hilariously insisting that they could do a better job themselves and how they are so much more ruggedly independent than you.

Sure, boss, that’s why they kicked you upstairs.

So now you have a quick n’ dirty guide to all the big babies in the world. Feel free to apply these lessons to the next overgrown infant you encounter.

Even if he’s the President.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the vid du jour :

Nothing staggeringly new in this one. I somehow thought I had a lot more to say along the “they didn’t vote for this” line, but once I started recording most of it fled from my mind and so I ended up repeating some of the stuff from earlier this week.

This is the problem with doing things directly on TikTok. I have been contemplating taking another stab at learning to do at the very least basic cut n’ paste video editing on my phone to get around this issue, or at least summoning the wherewithal to export the video to my PC and edit it there before putting it on YouTube.

But whatever. It’ll happen or it won’t. I won’t hold myself hostage to it.

On to the topic. The good news is that those flu-like symptoms I was experiencing never turned into an actual illness… for the most part.

But I noticed just a little while ago that I have been feeling more tired than usual lately. It’s getting harder and harder to motivate myself to do things. I’ve been spending a lot of time just sitting on the edge of my bed again, feeling kind of lost.

And getting myself moving feels like it’s taking twice the usual amount of effort. And once I am moving, it feels like that is taking more energy than usual too.

I have been getting that “rusty” feeling lately. Like every move I make requires overcoming a stiff resistance that was not there before.

So it could be some kind of bug. One that forgot to take the muscle stiffness of the flu with it when it left.

How very inconsiderate.

Or it could be something else causing a systemic inflammatory response. Those have definitely been known to cause that “rusty” feeling.

Or it could just be a symptom of being really fuckin’ old. Can’t ever rule that out.

But a more specific diagnosis is generally desirable.

Or it could be psychological. Maybe something is going on deep in my subconscious mind that is draining my motivation and making me want to turn away from reality and hide from it all and not have to deal with things even more than usual.

If so, I can accept that. I know that I am definitely operating on some very deep layers of my mind these days and surgery of that sort is bound to cause some disruption, kind of like how you can’t have roads without them needing to be closed sometimes.

In a way, I would greatly prefer that this was all a symptom of my attempts to shift my attitude and repair the deep down damage of all the corrosive isolation I have endured.

Most of it seemingly by choice but actually as a result of being driven to isolate myself most of the time by my pervasive anxiety.

It’s only when I am alone that I come close to feeling safe.

I’m working on it.

And I mean, even when I am here by myself in my filthy bedroom, sitting at this computer. I am still caged in by anxiety.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to do anything of the job type things I “should” be doing like getting back on UpWork or something similar.

Even something as seemingly benign and harmless and simple as that increases my social stimulation level and triggers an anxiety response.

And I am so damned sick of that bullshit.

Anxiety is my jailer and my tormentor. It keeps me living this pathetic routine existence where I live the same sad day over and over and have little to no adult dignity or self-respect at all when by all rights I should be living like a king off of all the money I make with my outlandish amounts of genius and talent.

And I can bitch and moan till the cows come home about all I “should” have by dint of my overwhelming and magical specialness, but I am never going to have it unless I can get the fuck over myself and go out there and get it.

At least there’s always Xanax.

More after the break.

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What I tell myself

Then again, getting all tough and butch with myself like that doesn’t seem to help. In fact, it probably does more harm than good by increasing the very pressure that I withdraw into myself to escape.

Why do I have to be so god damned complicated?

So anyhow, while it feels good to vent my frustrations with my life and my clogged state of being on myself in some vain attempt to jump-start my life, it is probably ultimately counterproductive and just another way for me to vent internally.

Instead of figuring out some safe way to externalize or harness the anger so that I can be nice to myself and give myself a break.

Which brings me to the realization that I might not hate myself any more but I am still not very nice to myself. And I think that means that I have a very long way to go before I can manage to forgive myself for how I am.

I am not sure if that means I haven’t really stopped hating myself or not.

I certainly get angry with myself fairly often, and that’s probably not good.

That’s probably internalized abuse. Or something just as bad. But I just get so sick of putting up with my own bullshit sometimes.

Not that getting mad at myself helps, of course.

And round and round and around we go.

Wow, I had no idea what a bunch of dorks those guys were.

But I know that every whirling wheel, no matter how fast it’s going, has an angle of centripetal escape that you can find if you sit still and watch for a while.

And if all else fails, just crash the motherfucking thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m not feeling great at the moment.

A partial explanation as to why can be found here :

But now I have had a bit of a nap and woke up feeling worse than before. I feel pretty ill at the moment. My breathing is slightly rough, my lungs and throat and just inside my ear canals feel raw and sore, my muscles ache, and I have a nasty headache.

So I might be becoming ill with my usual flu-like bullshit. Or worse.

I will hydrate and rest and get Vitamin C and see how things turn out. Hopefully this will turn out to be just another one of my weird transient ailments and by this time tomorrow it will be gone and forgotten.

But, as always, I will be monitoring the situation, ready to flee to the ER or UC if things take a turn for the worse.

Right now, my symptoms are mild. But having had pneumonia that might well have killed me once in my life, I desperately want to keep it from happening again.

I distinctly remember the day I went to the hospital for the pneumonia. I was getting ready to go hang out with Le Gang on a Friday night when I had a real “come to Jesus” moment of clarity where I examined how I felt and came to the conclusion that how I felt was NOT normal and I had to go to the ER.

That’s when the triage nurse was so shocked by how low my blood oxygen was that she instantly turns the oximeter away from me so I couldn’t see the reading and went and got a more senior nurse, plus another young nurse, to come see.

I could tell by the wide-eyed and worried looks they were giving me that I was in serious trouble. And what followed was 8 or 9 days in the hospital, on oxygen and heavy duty IV antibiotics most of that time, and the distinct feeling of having dodged a bullet.

I am quite pleased with that “this is not normal” moment. I feel like that judgment, which may well have saved my life, was very mature and adult of me. It meant that I had to disrupt my plans for that evening in order to go to the hospital, which is never fun, and I am very glad I made that call.

It proved that I am not a total idiot when it comes to looking after myself.

When I was talking to not-Galina today, she mentioned how if I could somehow pay for someone to deep clean this room of mine, the province might spring for a service to come keep things clean.

That would be nice. And looking around this room of mine, it’s really just the end of the room with my computer in it that needs cleaning, plus the bathroom.

And the bathroom is not that bad.

Now I doubt that cleaning services have the option to pay for just half a room to be cleaned. In fact they might have like a three room minimum or somesuch.

And there is also the fact that Joe and Julian do technically owe me a thorough room cleaning as that’s what I have asked for as a present for two birthdays in the past.

I suppose the compromise would be for them to pay for the room cleaning. That way their obligation would be discharged without them having to do it.

Now I am going to go lay down for a while in hopes of feeling better when I wake up.

More after the break.

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How I really am

Was re-watching this recent video of mine when it occurred to me that I have no idea how to even tell how I really am.

That’s how disconnected from my true self I have become. The very question is painfully perplexing to me.

I don’t think I am capable of ever answering the question, “But how are you REALLY?” honestly even to myself.

Don’t look at me. I don’t fucking know.

My instant gut level response is “bad”. I know I am not truly well. I know that, deep down, I am a very sick man who has been suffering from the effects of a mind malformed by a deep and terrible untreated trauma for almost 50 years.

And I am only 52.

I get through life, such as it is, by ignoring that scared little animal deep inside me and living a life where I never have to decide what to do with myself and I can spend almost every waking hour pretending to be someone I am not.

Who is also the person who I would rather be. And that’s a big problem.

Because it means I never face the true causes of my problems. I escape them instead.

Because who wants to be scared and sad and filled with trauma and pain? When there is a very well established alternative?

Sure, in the long term, it’s a terrible alternative. It’s like treating a toothache with pain medication instead of going to the dentist to get it fixed. Sure, it treats the symptoms, but the root problem festers onward.

And in a way, I feel like that’s what I have been doing with my therapeutic journey. Therapy and journaling and vlogging help, but at the end of the day, they mostly just make me feel better in the short term while long term progress remains painfully slow.

But I don’t feel like I have the spiritual resources to speed the journey along via transformation. I can’t imagine going on some kind of deep mystical introspective journey that bypasses my heavily compromised rational mind and its corrupt gatekeeping in order to manipulate the symbols of my mind directly and allow me to do that badly needed surgery on myself that would let me heal.

So, instead, I just keep spinning my wheels, getting next to nowhere, knowing I am getting closer to liberation every day but also knowing that my progress is so slow that I might die before I truly get anywhere.

But hey. As long as progress is being made, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

TIme for me to tell people things they really don’t want to hear again, I guess.

Now because I think this will get me in trouble, it won’t.

But it is my truth to speak, and so I am speaking it, and I will be glad I did so no matter how it’s received.

In fact, I already am.

Anyhow, here it is :

I will admit, I think I did good work in this one. The more of these I do, the better I get at expressing how I truly feel in a clear, eloquent, and above all sincere voice.

And this is something I feel strongly about. I know, the voice of wrath is hard to ignore and the urge to scream at the people you deem responsible for the horrible state of America right now is very strong, and venting it feels very good.

Well go ahead and vent. Get it out of your system. Scream to the high heavens about the horror and the injustice and the evil of it all.

Shout. Shout. Let it all out.

And I don’t expect everyone to be able to follow me on this journey. If you’re just too damned angry about the whole thing to even think about forgiveness at a time like this, I understand. You have your own journey. I do not judge you harshly for it.

But if you can move past all that – and I know that’s not easy – you might just be able to join the movement that stands the best chance of actually defeating Trump.

Because like I said in the video, if we can be superior shepherds to these people – and the bar is very low – we could lead them away from Trump and leave him utterly abandoned and alone and suffering the consequences of his own sociopathy at long fucking last as even Fox News and the others abandon him.

And you know what? If they want to pivot and say they were never all that into him, go ahead and let them save face that way.

Above all, we must not give in to the urge to say “I told you so!” or try to force them to admit that they were wrong.

That will just drive them back into Trump’s lumpy disgusting arms.

Instead, we need to extend all the mercy and forgiveness and understanding we can to them so they can feel safe – safer than they do with Trump in particular.

Give them every reason to think that you can protect them from both him and his cronies and all the chaos and ruin they have unleashed, and that you can and will make things normal again.

These people are big on normalcy. They see the world as a hostile and dangerous and treacherous place and they need everything they can to combat that.

It’s like they have a collective panic disorder. I can relate.

A very delicate part of my stratagem is needed to not attack Trump directly. Don’t even say his name. If you attack him while he is still their shepherd in their minds, they will close ranks to protect him and their minds will slam shut.

Instead, talk about principles. Nice, warm, safe, normal, mainstream principles like loyalty to country, freedom of speech, equality (not diversity), and so on.

Trust that this will highlight how badly Trump fails every single one of them.

Then offer his adherents a wholesome, feel-good, normalizing way out. Talk about things going back to the way they were before and how wonderful it will be to have a government for the people again, one you can rely on.

They will eat that stuff up with a spoon, and we’ll mean every word.

You just have to put the message into language they can understand and accept.

And remember that appealing to their emotions is more important than being exactly accurate in everything you say.

This is politics, not a fucking exam.

More after the break.

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Not an exam

Picking up where we left off… the dude at the beginning of this song gets it.

You’ve got to talk to people in language they not only understand but that makes them feel comfortable and safe and understood.

And to hell with whether your fellow liberal intellectuals think you sound smart. You’re not talking to them, they’re already on the same side as you.

That’s the giant leap we leftie types have to make. We have to stop thinking about what brings us status and acclaim in our circles and worry instead about what kind of thing actually appeals to our MAGA friend.

And, most importantly, we have to love and respect them. We have to throw away our middle class bourgeoisie prejudices that make us look down on those people and consider them laughably inferior, again, by our standards and look upon these people as our friends and neighbors and equals with whom we wish to connect.

That’s what true liberalism teaches.

They are not the enemy. Trump is the enemy. And he does not own these people. They can be brought back to the side of the angels if we can just shed out prejudices, refuse to act like Fox News says we act, and instead reach out a helping heart and head and hands to truly help these people in ways they can see and understand.

And be direct. Don’t say “we’ll guarantee a living wage”. Say, “We will raise the minimum wage by $2.50 an hour. ”

Don’t say, “We believe in universal daycare”. Say, “We will bring you free daycare so that you can go to work and earn a living. ”

Don’t say, “We want medicare for all!”. Say “We want you to never have to see another doctor’s bill or hospital bill ever again!”.

Give them something concrete and directly applicable to their lives to look forward to and you will win their support.

And the Republicans are completely unable to follow suit.

With people like AOC and Bernie at the forefront, we could usher in a new blue era.

But we have to get over our bullshit first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I talked about today. Pain, and fear, and my relationship with each.

I am feeling emotionally raw and sore but also determined and stubborn today, and this is how I ended up expressing it.

Don’t judge me.

I think I might actually losing patience with and mercy for myself too. I am sick and tired of being such a god damned weakling and coward, with no structure to my personality and no grit to my character, and I am open to learning hard male lessons that hurt but make me stronger.

I need to be stronger.

Being a pathetic piece of puff pastry ain’t cutting it any more.

And that means standing up against my pain and my fears. I need to do less surrendering to the bullying forces inside me by letting them dictate what I can and cannot (mostly cannot) do and more defying it by doing what I want to do instead.

And I know that’s gonna hurt and be scary and all my old, bad instincts will be screaming at me to give up and run away and hide and do whatever is easiest like I normally do, but I am fed up with that bullshit and I am ready to walk through the fire so it can burn the weakness and disease out of my soul.

And I have finally learned to take all that rogue mental energy and use it against the depression instead of leaving it to rattle around in my noggin and become anxiety.

Or tension. Or just plain stress.

So when I am having one of my bad moments where I feel like leaping screaming from a window just to express the insane energies surging within me and making me feel like I am going insane, I stand a pretty good chance of remembering to take that crazy energy and focus it like a laser beam as I use it to blast away at the numbness and the deadness and the sheer frozen bloated carcass of my depression.

Now I am working on doing that in less dire moments.

One thing that has been on my mind lately is the deep, thick, implacable wall of ice that separates me from other people.

I feel like I am so far away from other people that it’s no wonder I feel so cold. All those lonely years made me retreat deeper and deeper into myself to escape the cold and ironically the deeper I withdrew, the number I became and the further from others I was, which only made my world even colder.

I guess there is only so long that you can leave the door open for others despite the bitter cold blowing in before you finally shut that damn door so you can at least feeling your own damned heat, paltry as it is.

It’s one way to adapt to being so god damned alone, both inside and out. I suppose a more extroverted type would have poured themselves into doing whatever it took to make friends, but I just gave up and withdrew.

And that let the ice creep in and take over. Like my own personal ice age.

So for a long time now, I have been struggling against my fears and my despair and my numbness to move my sad little planet a little closer to the sun.

But it’s a tough job because the version of me without those massive ice walls to protect me is so alien to the person I am right now that it’s very hard to argue with the voice that panics at the thought of losing my ice because it equates that with death.

Death and liberation as often mistaken for one another.

Now I need to lay down and nap before Denny’s.

More after the break.

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Could be better

But then again, that’s true of everything.

Occurred to me that there is a lesson I know I need to learn but that clearly is not sinking in and that is there is a vast and extremely important difference between “could be better” and “not good enough”.

I have an extremely creative, incisive, and penetrating mind, and that means that at all times and in nearly all things, I can see a way something could be better.

And as it relates to the world, that’s okay. It sometimes leads to me being frustrated by things I think are stupidly designed, but other than that, fine.

But as it relates to myself and the things I do, it’s the depths of madness.

Because once my mental illness got hold of a tool like that, “good enough” vanished. “Could have been better” means “not good enough” means “failure”, and that means that I and the rest of the human race are constantly failing at everything.

But it only counts when it’s me.

This is, I think, the primary weapon of my self-destruction. If even the tiniest bit of suboptimal performance means humiliating and shameful failure, then obviously my self worth does not stand a chance of surviving.

And this is how my internalized rage is vented against me. It uses the very thin and brittle veneer of reason and logic offered by hiding itself in my highly analytical and intelligent mind to pursue its real agenda of giving me a very self destructive way to express some of that deep down dirty rage I keep buried deep inside.

This naturally leads back to where I always end up : the choice between taking it out on myself or taking it out on others.

Neither are acceptable but taking it out on myself is less unacceptable. So that is what happens until I come up with a third path.

Which might start with re-imagining it as finding someplace for that angry energy to go. Emotional sublimation is a real thing and perhaps it is even possible to transform that rage into a power source for something more positive, like productivity, or joy.

That’s hardly going to happen overnight. The gears and linkages involved in transforming the rage into something better are quite complex and need to be made of some pretty strong stuff given the load they’ll need to take.

But at least I am thinking in the right direction now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Decided to talk about my “smooth persona” defense mechanism today.

What the hell, I have been digging into the soft tissues of my deepest issues, might as well tackle one of the biggest.

I do this knowing I am throwing myself down one hell of a rabbit hole.

Anyhow, here it is :

Oh well, thank goodness I am primarily about the words not the image. Which is, I suppose, why I blog so much.

The words need to get out of my head somehow.

Anyhow, on being fine. The truth is, I don’t even know if I’m fine or not. This smooth persona of mine, the unflappable affable adorable Fru, runs pretty deep and it’s precisely because, like I say in the vid, I don’t like being me. I’d rather be him.

So I guess I spend so much time pretending to be him that the real feels safe hiding in the depths of my mind and most of the time I can fool myself into thinking I am him.

And I am. But I’m also not.

It’s very complicated.

The brutal truth is that if I am not my smooth persona, I have no idea who the hell I am. There’s an impostor at the controls deep inside of me and I know next to nothing about him except that he’s very, very scared all the time.

No wonder I prefer to pretend to be Fru. It lets me get away from that eternal fear (which can become explosive rage at any moment) and pretend to be calm.

But I am calm. It works. Mostly.

It’s all a mirror maze in my head. Image and reality collide and overlap and all the main lines of defense in my head band together to try to stop me from talking about this.

Well too bad. I’ve made the incision and we’re going deep.

I find it virtually impossible to even imagine responding to “How are you?”, even very sincerely said, with anything other than some variant of “I’m fine”.

But if I am so “fine” then why is my life how it is? Why do I feel the need to spend all my waking hours staring into screens and determinedly NOT being myself? Why do I have this fear as cold as the void wrapped around my heart and constantly threatening to glaciate me out of existence if I don’t obey it?

If I’m fine, why am I crazy?

A partial answer would be “because I hide how sick I am even from myself”. I learned, at some point, to pull myself together and put on a brave face and go out into the world as if I was not in pain, and I’ve been doing it so long that I believe it most of the time.

And objectively speaking, why wouldn’t I? Who wants to be sad and hurting? Who wouldn’t want to flee that shit any way he can?

Of course, that means never addressing the real, deep down, carcinogenic rot that eats away at my soul and may some day consume me.

Which is dumb. Understandable, but dumb.

I guess that the first step in dealing with that endemic pain is to go down to where it is and just sit with it for a while. Let it be felt and heard. Witness its message.

It won’t be easy or fun, but by God, it might just work.

And IDGAF about the pain any more anyway.

More after the break.

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Who is this guy anyway?

One thing about being an arguably fake-ish person is that you have control over a fake version of you.

You can sculpt and mold a manufactured persona to be (in my case) as charming and pleasing and fun as possible without the “real you” getting in the way.

I dunno. Maybe that’s not that different than how most people form their outer social persona when they’re a teen and I am just too socially damaged to know it.

And of course, there is no clear line of demarcation between the fake me and the “real” me. This persona of mine might not be entirely “real” in the absolute existentialist sense but I have worn it for a very long time and it fits me very well.

So don’t worry, gentle reader, I am not planning any sudden, radical shifts of personality. I will still be the same dear sweet lovable Fru I have always been until further notice.

I can’t imagine wanting to be any other way. Being lovable is too much fun.

But I will allow that unexpected aspects of my personality might emerge, I might get a bit louder, a bit pushier, maybe a tad obnoxious at times as I try out a more solid and self-confident version of myself.

I still don’t see a path out of my self-loathing that doesn’t involve its opposite, self-confidence, in large amounts.

In other words, I think I need to let myself get that “big ego” everyone was so worried I would have as a kid.

I mean what the hell. I have amazing abilities. I can do things nobody else can do. I see things – possibilities, opportunities, solutions – that nobody else sees. I have enormous intellect, charisma, personality, charm, and wit – it’s only fitting that I have an ego to match it, or at least enough of one to freaking like myself.

The alchemy of my soul demands that I synthesize the antidote for the poisons within me. Simply removing the toxins without it is not an option.

In a way, it’s all about learning to harness the incredible energies within me so they can take me somewhere instead of treating them like they are the enemy and suppressing them in order to make being a inert more comfortable.

Fuck being comfortable.

I want to be alive.

And if that means tackling my anxiety head on, so be it.

I have Xanax!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what I rambled on about today. To wit :

Perhaps I am learning to recognize what is and is not part of what I am trying to say.

What’s next? Writing a script?

Nah. I speak my mind and mean what I say. I am expressing myself when I am talking to the camera, and I can’t be sincere if I have rehearsed it all.

Still, I’ve been doing a lot of brooding on the subject of raising the production values of my little videos. They are going to need a cosmetic makeover if I hope to get my words and my feelings in front of a larger audience.

And I do.

One thing I think I will return to doing in the future is editing out every little um or stutter or y’know. I stopped doing that in order to cut down the workload of making my videos to something that seemed less onerous and more natural sounding, but now the little imperfections are bugging me again and the popular YouTubers I follow and admire certainly don’t leave them in, so that’s something worth doing.

Plus I notice that the popular YouTube and TikTok stars put a lot more little edits in between phrases to break up the monotony and I will look into that, too.

It’ll be like, “Trump is a fascist (edit) He’s destroying America (edit) We have to rise up. (edit) ” and so forth.

Seems silly on the surface but it actually makes things work better. It keeps the viewer’s nervous system from learning to tune out the repeated stimuli of your speech and thus keeps them engaged.

And modern media is all about the engagement. Keeping their attention is worth $$$.

Not that I am looking to go super commercial or anything. At least not with my little talks. Those are all about expressing myself and exercising my oratory skills and if they happened to gain a big audience, great. It would be nice to make $.

But that’s not what they are for.

On the other hand, there’s the eternal question my shrink, Doctor Costin, brings up often : why don’t I make something funny?

I know I am a brilliant and hilarious comedy writer. I know that I am capable of making wacky, hilarious, amazingly fun stuff.

I even know a bunch of tricks for making that kind of thing “on the cheap”, so to speak. I could steal the format from the CBC show Wiretap and just slap a phone filter on one half of a comedic conversation and pretend I am getting a phone call.

The other person could be represented by a photo or picture.

And of course, in this creepy but convenient era of AI voices, I could have any celebrity or fictional character I wanted on my “call in show”.

Could be a lot of fun.

Or there’s the “one person skit” thing I see folks doing. My main concern there would be that I don’t own enough different kinds of clothes to represent different characters.

A trip to Value Village might solve that, though. Get myself some hats, some junk jewelry, some cheap sunglasses..

But I would only be able to do Value Village if I get a superior mobility device. I am not going to make it around that place with the walker.

Makes me realize why people like me get those electric scooters. At least those who scoot can go to stores almost like a normal person.

I haven’t shopped in person for over three years.

I miss my independence.

More after the break.

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I must relate unto you my tale of nerd glory.

It involves an episode of Um, Actually, and this game from it :

I take slight exception to the opening statement, though.

I don’t enjoy correcting others.

I just don’t feel like I have a choice.

ANYhow, the game in question involved naming as many dragons from a 5×4 grid as possible, and I found glory in the fact that I um, actually, did quite well in it.

Here is the grid :

And I knew :

1. Um, the one Sean Connery voiced in the movie
2. Dunno, pass
3. Falcor the Luck Dragon from Neverending Story
4. Haku from Spirited Away
5. Spike, my crush from My Little Pony
6. TROGDOR! from Homestar Runner
7. Dunno, pass
8. Dunno, pass
9. KING GIDORAH from the Godzilla movies
10. Fin Fang Foom from Marvel Comics
11. Dunno, pass
12. Pete’s dragon from Pete’s Dragon, who has a name but I dunno it
13. Mushu, as voiced by Eddie Murphy in Mulan
14. Toothless, the star of the REAL How To Train Your Dragon movies
15. Dunno, but I kicked myself when I found out it was Paarthunax from Skyrim, who is AWESOME and I played through that game SO MANY TIMES
16. Dunno, read the book a number of times as a kid but don’t remember a dragon
17. Dunno and was horrified to learn that supposedly THAT is the Jabberwock? UM NO IT AIN’T.
18. Dunno, pass
19. Dunno, looks vaguely familiar, but pass, and…. drumrolls please…
20. LOCKHEED, Kitty Pryde’s pet dragon from X-Men!

I was so stoked when I saw Lockheed after all these years. I adored him in the comics, who wouldn’t? – but hadn’t thought about him in years and so when I saw him in the grid it was like reuniting with an old friend.

Oh. And I am the only one who identified him. None of the contestants showed even the slightest glimmer of recognition.

And THAT is my moment of nerd glory. I knew something they didn’t!

Normally I am very hit or miss with the game. More miss than hit. I just don’t have that mental encyclopedia so many other nerds do, plus there are so many nerd franchises that are now core, like Harry Potter, that I know almost nothing about.

If it wasn’t in the first movie, I dunno.

So when I got 9 of them (9.5 if you count #1) including my beloved little Lockheed, I was ever so pleased with myself.

And that’s why I just had to share it with you, so you can bask in my glow.

Don’t worry, I’ll get over it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something rather big came up in therapy today, so I made sure today’s video was on that subject so I could make sure to externalize the thought before it got away.

It went almost exactly like this :

I had never consciously examined the role my hometown and home province might play in my mental illness before, so this was quite the revelation.

I feel like I am still processing it, and will be for some time. The place I come from is, as Doc Costin pointed out, a lot like my depression, to the point where in my mind they are now contiguous – one is merely an extension of the other.

But the place one comes from is such a fundamental part of who we are that it’s hard to really examine it, even though I haven’t been there for 17 years.

From a very young age, I knew I would have to leave. That sleepy small town vibe has no room for mega-minds like my own. My intellect alone meant there was nothing for me in my little town.

Not to mention being gay. Though I understand that’s gotten much better now.

Too late for me, but still, that’s nice.

I learned a lot when I took that trip home in 2008. It was the first (and only) visit since I had moved Away, and it made me realize just how sleepy my sleepy little hometown of Summerside really was.

It’s like the whole town lived at 60 percent speed. The people there don’t see it because they are all moving at that same speed. and there is this palpable sense of quiet despair and fatalism that things aren’t ever going to get better and you’re best off just living your day to day life without thinking about anything more.

After all, why ever dream of something better when you know it will never happen? You would only be torturing yourself for no good reason.

And boy does that sound like my depression.

I imagine that for most of the town it works out alright. It’s not like they live in squalor and misery. They have their jobs and their families and their socializing and their church and those things keep them busy and give them purpose and life momentum.

And the idea that there could be something more to life, that things could be better and that the stultifying slowness rots the soul, either never comes up or comes up and then is vehemently suppressed by the masses as an unconscionable disruption of their peaceful slumber in an attempt to make them unhappy with their lives.

Plus there’s the inferiority complex. Part of the anti-ambition that is fundamental to the Island character is the deep, keen awareness of just how small and silly and weak a province we are and how absurd it is that we’re a province at all.

And that gives us the little-guy feeling of being nowhere near as good or worthy or important as the big provinces and that makes us keep our metaphorical head down.

And I think I’ve been keeping my head down in that exact same way for a long time. I have a deep feeling of not being as real or grownup or legit as other adults and it fills me with enormous shame at being so weak and incapable.

At the same time, I know that my abilities put me far above others. And I hate that.

I just want to be a person, with a job, and a nice place to live, and a husband, and to stop being a drain on the system and contribute to it instead.

And I want this oversized abilities of mine to finally become of use to me instead of hanging around my neck like my buddy Albert Ross.

If I keep investing in my own growth, I will outgrow this cage of mine and finally be able to stand up and take my place in the sky.

I have already outgrown that lil town I grew up in. I’m over it now.

Time to move on.

More after the break.

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Leave yourself behind

I think that, unconsciously, I have been clinging to parts of my past out of a blind fear of losing them somehow.

As if I have to hold on tight to every strong memory or they will disappears like morning dew and be gone forever.

And with each of this time anchors, I split off a piece of myself and that little piece stays in the past and divides my mental and emotional resources and I am sick of it.

Time to pull up stakes and let the chips fall where they may.

It’s not like I will literally forget my past if I don’t hang on for dear life. That’s not a possibility. I have an excellent memory and will retain the important stuff.

No, the issue is my emotional investment in the past. It’s the leaving part of myself behind that is the problem. Not only does that divide my resources, but even worse it keeps me from being able to move on with my life.

In fact, arguably, “moving on” is the very thing these anchors are there to prevent. As if there’s no difference between getting over something and “losing” it.

Perhaps this is a deep and hidden cost of my insistence on remembering things exactly as they were, in crystal clear HD, without nostalgia or fading.

All those emotional wounds have been kept fresh and bleeding in the deep freeze of my overweaning superego, ready to traumatize me all over again.

Maybe memories have to fade or become sanitized by nostalgia in order for us to be able to get on with life without a lot of old baggage weighing us down.

Maybe this is one of the many ways in which doing what made sense and seemed logical has, in fact, been very stupid and caused me a lot of pain.

Maybe even people like me are not smart enough to raise ourselves, especially if we stubbornly refuse to let a belief in magic or any of our instincts help. I just wanted to stick to what’s verifiably real.

Turns out that’s not enough.

And all because I couldn’t just relax and trust my instincts. I had to be “in control” of myself at all times. And that meant quashing anything that didn’t “make sense”.

Well it ain’t too late to learn different.

Might as well start now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.