Another one coming to you via TikTok, although it’s also been crossposted to YouTube as well, of course.

I like doing my talks on TikTok (TikTalks?). It’s breezy and easy and I have become rather good at talking to the camera with a minimum of um and ahs and stammers and such, so I can just blab into my phone and have it come out pretty good.

Plus I use a saturated colors filter which makes things look nice.

Anyhow, here’s me venting my neuroses about being sleepy a lot :

Of course, falling asleep during exercises at the Kinsmen put me in pretty good company. There’s a lot of people who are prone to nodding off in our group.

Of course, most of them are thirty years older than me. Hence my worry.

I must say that going to the Kinsmen does, on the whole, make me feel young. As far as I can tell, only Judy and I are Gen X aged. Everyone else is in their 70s and 80s and a few of us are 90+.

And we have varying degrees of mental clarity as well, of course, from “perfectly normal” like Lynda (who is 80) and I to “here but struggling” like an elderly ex-firefighter at my table all the way to “barely here at all” like Margaret who moves very slowly and often has no idea what is going on.

So I guess I can see a preview of my future there. I will experience all of those stages of life if I insist upon hanging around and not dying.

And I plan on it.

I could go on and on about how I’ve not even lived yet but that doesn’t seem productive.

I’ve been trying to shock myself into action by pointing out my own failing to live to myself in an attempt to galvanize myself into changing things.

And it has an effect. I can feel parts of my sleepy mind trying to wake up in response to the defibrillator current I’ve been pumping into myself (Clear! *bzzzt*) and the numbness recedes a little bit more every day.

And who knows, maybe one of these days a vital circuit will finally wake up and start feeding power to the rest of my machine and suddenly this whole damned haunted carousel will start up and resume spinning and I will finally be, like… awake.

But maybe not. I might die living exactly the same way I am living now, and that might happen soon or by some miracle of modern medicine I might live to be as old as my friend Lynda and never have escape my petty little pit of despair at all.

Earlier today, I was pondering the idea of being comfortable and how to get anywhere in life you have to sacrifice some comfort in favour of action.

You can’t live life getting somewhere while doing nothing, like you’re being carried around on a litter. And the most comfortable thing to do will always be nothing, so in order to do anything, you have to accept a lowering of your comfort level.

One useful definition of decadence, therefore, might be the unwillingness to do that.

Or you can learn to accept that the comfort of ennui in the doldrums of life is not worth preserving if it comes at the cost of going absolutely nowhere in life in a way that gets more humiliating and depressing with every birthday.

And by you, I of course mean me.

More after the break.

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Oh, and the skin on my hands continues to peel. Still dunno WTF is up with that. I am thinking I will make an appointment with Doctor Chao tomorrow because while it’s a mostly harmless phenomenon right now, it could be a sign of something much worse.

And it’s just plain freaky. The skin underneath the peeling looks exactly like the rest of my skin, maybe a little pinker, so it’s not like it’s some horrible skin eating crisis.

But it’s very much not normal, and that has me worried.

What on earth could cause something like this?

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More about my skin

so far, I have been operating on the hope/assumption that this skin peeling on my hands is a freakish, one off thing and that, therefore, once I peeled off this layer of dead skin, that would be it.

But now I am maybe seeing that the skin beneath the stuff I have peeled off has started to peel itself and that therefore this skin thing is just my new normal now.

In which case I may have to escalate from “I will make an appointment with Doctor Chao tomorrow” to “I guess I should (sigh) go to the ER or UC.”.

I dunno. It’s hard to know how much of a crisis this is. Harmlessly peeling skin does not exactly trigger panic but holy crap is this weird and I have so far not been able to find anything that might cause this online and so it’s freaking me out, man.

I tried to ask Microsoft Co-Pilot but it seems to be down, so I tried Google Gemini AI and it gave me fairly in depth answers and a bunch of possibilities but none of them seemed to cover it happening to all the skin on both hands.

I am not pushing the big red panic button just yet because I am not sure that I have been the same area twice yet. So I am trying to remember where I have peeled.

Even if it only needs to be removed once, it’s still a god damned weird thing to happen to a fella and I am going to want answers.

And that dipshit Doctor Chao better have them for me, at least eventually. If he gives me another answer that amounts to, “I dunno, whatever”, I’m going to scream.

In his face, more than likely.

I am so tired of his bullshit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There doesn’t need to be one, necessarily.

Something in us, however, drives us to need to feel like our efforts are bringing us close to some ultimate purpose or goal.

Myself, I would go way, way more nuts if I didn’t feel like I was somehow progressing, however unsteadily, towards the ultimate goal of a sane and functional me.

Surely being a hikikomori is not always a death sentence. It has to be possible for me to learn to launch at long last and not go crashing to the ground like a baby bird.

Or hell, at this point, even a spectacular failure would be better than this eternal treadmill of compulsive distraction and corrosive ennui.

Anyhow, I said a thing about some stuff.

The question in the video is one that ultimately helped me a great deal, which is why I am sharing it with the world. It made me realize that depression serves a function and that ultimately it is not the final boss of my mental illness but merely its top lackey.

It acts as a shield against the real world which I have been fleeing for my whole life. Between me and the world there is this negative zone of numbness and death and nullity and that’s not a coincidence.

It’s my primary defense against a scary and overstimulating and chaotic world that I have never learned how to handle, mostly due to my constant cowering behind that primary defense of mine.

And it’s a defense that doesn’t discriminate. It blocks out everything equally, leaving me in a constant state of emotional hypothermia and starvation because so very little of the love and life of the world can get through my veil of ice.

And we need that shit. Our souls die without it.

All that midnight tundra inside me that I like to talk about is just a side effect of this escutcheon of numbness of mine. It’s the reason I can’t feel the love I know is there from my family and my friends.

I think it’s also where the anhedonia comes from. You can’t find life to be particularly rewarding when you are too numb to feel pleasure or joy.

So pick your poison, because you will end up addicted to something that sends strong enough reward signals to make it through the ice.

Unrelatedly, I have been so god damned sleepy all day today. I fell asleep for a second (aka a microsleep) a bunch of times during exercise today at the Kinsmen. And a few times during lunch, too. It all makes me feel very, very old.

I am not nearly old enough to be a “constantly dozing off” old fart, am I?

Apparently I am. It’s quite annoying and a total drag. And I just drank a whole can of fully caffeinated diet cola and I am still sleepy as unregistered fuck.

99 words to go before I sleep. After this I am going to take a nice long nap until around 7:30 pm. On Thursday. Of next year.

Anyhow, back to depression. The true fear is direct exposure to the harsh and overwhelming world and the force field of rage and nihilism generated by the

And the way out, therefore, must be to reduce both the numbness and my dependency on it. I will need to learn to handle the world as it really exists, down on the ground with everybody else instead of locked away in my lonely garrett looking down at the world.

More after the break.

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My final liberation

It will come when I am no longer afraid of it, I guess.

Which would me that I am finally ready to actually face the world and deal with whatever happens instead of cowering in my cave hiding from everything and only experiencing the world through this computer o’ mine.

Ironically, due to my disability, my liberation will also have to be through this god damn computer, which complicates matters.

Because even on this computer, I am not very adventurous at all. I don’t push the boundaries of my cloistered existence much. Every now and then I develop the impulse and initiative to do something like try to get back on UpWork, but even then, if unexpected obstacles pop up, I am likely to just give up and get back on my hamster wheel and not even trying again for weeks.

Which is very weak of me, and that saddens me. My existence is tragic in a very non-dramatic way. I don’t suffer or weep or decry my existence or shake my fist at the sky and cry out, “Why me?”.

I just keep running in that hamster wheel. Seemingly fine, because my problems are not on the low levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I am fed and clothed and housed and entertained and warm and comfortable and safe.

Were I actually a pet, you’d say I was well cared for.

But I’m a person, and a rather extraordinary one at that, and so this caged life of mine is not enough. I need love and connection and purpose and a role in society and a use for all my incredible mental energies and everything else that people get from employment.

So I have to either land a job or invent one, and given what an oddball I am, the latter is far more likely than the former. I feel like making myself into a YouTube or TikTok personality is a real possibility but it won’t be easy for me to get there because I lack the sort of focus and drive that leads to success.

I just kind of do stuff. And like I have to keep telling myself, the stuff I do matters. People see my videos. They have an audience. I am not just shouting down a well any more. People experience the things I make.

I could make this stuff go viral if I just focus on it and give it a big push with my power of personality and maybe even find people who can help me promote myself well.

I don’t technically have to do everything myself.

Well, I do, but for purely psychosocial reasons, and I am working on those.

But I will need to get my poop in a group first, and maybe do some healing to key parts of my psyche so that I don’t fall apart quite so easily.

So, you know. Stuff to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Specifically, he knows that smart people don’t like him.

I talk about it here.

For a pathological narcissist to even admit that there are people who do not like them, and that therefore a negatively associated tag actually applies to them, is a big step.

I don’t actually think he’s going to have a Grinch moment where his heart grows three sizes and he starts joyfully giving all his money away, though if I was him, leaving it to my dipshit kids wouldn’t seem like an attractive idea either.

But honestly, any little crack in his narcissistic armor is noteworthy just for the insight it grants those of us following his pathology.

After all, you can’t spell “pathological liar” without….

Now on to my own little world. I took a rather difficult pee a little while ago and it has me worried about my waterworks.

My pee came out in his meandering little trickle and I had a very strong feeling of straining to get it out, to the point where it made me dizzy and nauseous and lightheaded and I had to sit down for ten minutes or so before getting my lunch from the kitchen because I was afraid I would faint and/or throw up.

Things have settled down now, but obviously I’m very concerned about this. Unless my next pee is normal, I am going to have to seriously consider another trip to Urgent Care because urinary blockage is no laughing matter. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might require emergency surgery if a catheter doesn’t do the trick.

And with me, it won’t. The last three times someone has tried to catheterize me, the tube has met some kind of blockage that kept it from making it to my bladder.

In fact, one time in the ER at Richmond Hospital, I had to scream at a nurse to keep her and her buddy from ramming the thing through.

I don’t know what was blocking the tube but I know that it was definitely a vital part of me and that stupid bitch could have killed me if she’d punctured it.

Obviously I am still pretty upset about that. I shouldn’t have to scream to save my own life from the butchery of supposed nurses.

But I digress.

My point is, the catheter likely still won’t be able to make it through. I am guess my completely untreated umbilical hernia is in the way and if that’s the case, they might have to skip straight to surgery.

And man, would that suck. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I don’t want to have to spend time in the hospital. Being in the hospital sucks.

Unlike Homer Simpson, I am not nearly oral retentive enough to enjoy being in the hospital lying in bed all god damned day.

I mean, I could do that right here at home if I wanted to. But luckily being so bereft of motive force that I can’t get out of bed has never been part of my depression.

Because I get bored. And I have a computer. So it’s an easy solve.

But who knows. Maybe without a computer I would be forced to go out into the world to find the high level of mental stimulation I need.

Or I would just stay home and go crazy. That would be a lot less work.

My disability forces me into this position of being terminally online. But I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not like I do nothing but play video games.

I make a video and I write in my blog every day. That’s productivity of a sort.

What I do matters!

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, and this happened.

Skin peeling off me like it’s about to be revealed that I’m an alien from V.

But for now I have mostly stopped peeling it off because it ended up giving me a small but quite painful cut on my palm and I have gotten most it off anyhow.

I found a similar patch on the other hand but it turned out to be a perfectly ordinary skin tag and not the final sign that I have, in fact, started to moult.

My life is so fucked up.

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Screaming into the wind

The wind, in case, being my depression.

The sheer amount that my mental illness simply negates out of existence, like it was never even real, is staggering. All these emotions and perceptions and motivations get instantly and ruthlessly devoured by the ravenous void inside.

I used to visualize said void as a black hole, but lately it’s seem more like a blank section of sky that devours all that enter it without so much as a tiny flash of light.

It’s just gone.

And I know that most of what powers it is internalized anger. It destroys all out of a pure distilled nihilistic rage that wants to destroy everything in the universe as a twisted kind of revenge against the pain of existence.

Look, reality, either you go, or I do.

This universe ain’t big enough for both of us.

Time for the obvious song reference.

There is definitely a very hungry, very angry monster inside of me that wants nothing more than to devour everything.

It’s the logical end product of all the rage I have inside me with no escape route. It’s the garbage dump monster that lives at the bottom of the deep dark shadowy pit where I dump all the troublesome emotions (which is most of them) and they become more and more concentrated and pure over time till they have no reason or justification or righteous target any more, they are the raw loathing of absolutely everything.

And obviously I know that the way to defeat this monster is to let out all the anger it contains but I have been grappling with that need for decades without getting anywhere with it. I’m still the same clogged up half-person that I have always been.

But maybe that’ll change. I wake up a little more each day. Maybe I will eventually shake off the funk of forty thousand years (give or take) and truly wake up to the world and be able to go out there and play with the other kids at long, long last.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went deep into the ol’ mental illness today.

I had no idea I even wanted to talk about this until the time came to make my video of the day and this stuff just kinda floated to the surface.

I am a very complicated dude.

Anyhow, here it is :

And now for the part where I use this blog to say the stuff I wish I’d said in the vid.

Like what my actual revelation was : it was that I may not want anything. At least, nothing I can actually get.

I mean, when I think about what I really want, it’s to get into a limo, be driven to a five star hotel, check into my penthouse suite, take a long luxurious nap on the no doubt incredibly comfortable and cozy bed, and then order me some room service and a small army of male sex workers to help me sow a hell of a lot of wild oats.

So ya know, I do have dreams.

But that’s easy. Dreams are easy when you know they’re impossible to achieve. With no possible pressure to actually do anything about them, you can dream all you like.

But when the question becomes what do you want to do, right now, then the executive function becomes involved and the infinite hallway of infinite doors shows up and crashes smack dab into my lack of desires or instincts to help me pick the door that has what I want behind it and so I am once more left stranded at the crossroads of life.

And somewhere up the sky
Waiting for me to learn to fly
Is a portal leading out of this lie
And I will get there, by and by

Lyrics to a song, perhaps? Perhaps.

But not today.

I suppose you can’t really learn to fly incrementally, just like you can’t jump across a chasm in stages. You either jump or you don’t.

And so it’s all still waiting for me to walk out of these chains that aren’t even real and stop living by the rules of my woefully incomplete logical understanding of the world and my place in it and its cause and effect, and just be happy for no reason at all.

That’s how it always should be. Happiness should be our default state. We should be happy unless we have a damn good reason not to be.

I think people from more Mediterranean cultures get this way better than we pale ghosts from the frozen North.

This requires faith, or something like it, though. There has to be a discontinuity in the logical chains of justification to allow for something to happen (like being happy) without there needing to be a reason for it to happen.

Because those reasons ain’t coming. Not until I make myself happy enough to go out there and find them.

There has to be some sort of internal well of happiness to draw from. I am not sure where those come from. Early indoctrination into faith seems plausible. After all, God’s love is infinite and eternal and forgives all, so it fits the bill at least in theory.

Unfortunately people get faith all tied up with dogma and superstition.

But that’s a topic for another day.

There is also the concept of simply granting yourself permission to be happy, which is admirable in its simplicity but like a lot of simple solutions, doesn’t work.

We are talking about hacking your fundamental table of values, after all, as well as your personal sense of cause and effect, and that can’t be done by fiat. That would destabilize the whole structure of your psyche.

That’s why religion, mysticism, and magick is wrapped up in rituals and symbols and incantations. It’s to keep that kind of monkeying with your settings limited to very specific conditions in order to preserve mental stability.

So now you know.

More after the break.

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I can be such a prick

I was just thinking about the debates I have had over free will in the past, and how much pleasure I derived from telling the people who don’t believe in free will that I thought they were dead wrong but they couldn’t get mad at me about it because according to them, I have no choice in the matter.

Mua ha ha. I get such a kick out of doing things like that. And I like that I enjoy that kind of thing so much. This is not, according to me, a character flaw.

But it’s not exactly nice, is it?

And I am, obviously, fine with that. Unlike some of my fellow lefties, I have no problem with people thinking I am mean or nasty or not at all nice if what they are basing it on is me acting on my beliefs to do what I think of as right.

Sometimes the right thing to do is not the nice thing to do. And I act on principle, not social approval, so I accept this as part of life.

And I have no problem with enjoying the downfall of those I dislike, assuming it is vaguely proportional and/or related to why I think they are scum.

Like, I don’t want to see Jordan Peterson run over by a bus or shot by an assassin, but if he suffered the logical consequence of a policy he himself espoused, I would enjoy his suffering very, very much.

So I am learning to accept that while I think of myself as a very sweet, warmhearted, empathic person who really truly cares about others, I am also a stone hearted prick perfect willing to grind someone’s face into their own hypocrisy like I am rubbing a dog’s nose in their own mess to teach them to behave.

To me, there’s no conflict. But I can see how to someone who is not me, it could seem very schizophrenic indeed.

What can I say, I am a glittering jewel with a million facets and it is impossible to take in all that I am with a single glance.

To some, I suppose, that might make me an alluring and captivating mystery.

Ick. I mean, whatever floats your boat, but I don’t want to be mysterious. I want to be known and understood.

That’s just… um… not gonna be easy.

Maybe I should start my own wiki… ooh, or train an AI assistant…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I talked about what is going on with Russia and its drones over Poland.

Executive summary : it’s no big deal.

I explain why here.

I will need to find a better method for sourcing video clips to go with my little talks than “gank them off YouTube” because YouTube video download sites have gone the way of YouTube mp3 sites and become extremely shady places full of virii et al.

Next time I will try Pixabay, at least for the more generic sort of things I might need, like a stock photo of Putin or a shot of drones in flight or whatnot.

You can get a lot of mileage out of stock footage if you know what you’re doing.

And surprisingly enough, I do.

I have fallen in love with the idea of making my talk pieces look more professional with pics and clips. I know that for TikTok, that’s not really necessary, but I want my stuff to be comparable to the work of the YouTubers I like, and they seem to manage to have something other than their faces on the screen at least some of the time.

Besides, with the right clips, I can feel like I am a serious news anchor delivering an editorial on the nightly news, and that idea pickles me tink.

Heck, I might even try to get some halfway respectable clothes and trim my beard way back so that I don’t seem so much like a vagrant.

I just want to be appealing enough to get people’s attention and get taken seriously. Just having my out-there opinions in video form is not enough.

I suppose I ought to be trying to piss people off with rage bait so that they will be doing my bidding when they share my video with all their friends so they can go, “Holy crap, can you believe what this asshole is saying?”.

And I certainly have opinions that could be very effective at that. Some of which would be way, way too spicy and possibly get me arrested or assassinated.

And I am not willing to die for them. Not yet, anyhow.

Give me a terminal diagnosis and I might change my mind.

But I would have to actually get people’s attention first. And I do seem to be accumulating followers on TikTok at least, although from what I have read and hurt, most of those are bots.

Just between you and me, I don’t really care if they’re bots. Whatever gets me closer to that magical 1K followers mark where I can start making money is fine by me.

Of course, if I was truly to take all this seriously, I would have to read books on how to promote yourself and follow all the best practices for wannabe video stars and do perky things like show up on all social media sites and be all charming and bright and Jesus Christ, I am bored just going through the list.

I may have to do things my own way. I am not averse to ideas on how to get people’s attention but I have learned the hard way that works for others often does not work for me and so I am stuck inventing my own way of doing things no matter what.

It’s hard work being an original but it’s not like I ever had a choice.

Oh, and speaking of self-promotion, I managed to create a gig on Fiverrrrr.

I highly doubt it will go anywhere but at least I did it and therefore I can say I am on the market, more or less.

I promise I can give you quality like you’ve never seen before faster than you think is possible and at a rate you won’t believe.

Is it just me, or does that paragraph sound like Trump?

What the hell, clearly it works!

More after the break.

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It came from Generation X!

There is a problem lurking on the horizon between me and my happy little world at the Kinsmen Adult Center.

You see, all the time I have been going there, I have had this nasty snarky voice in my head saying how lame and stupid it all is and how it can’t believe that this is what it’s come to in my life and rankling at the general patronizing tone of everything and basically shitting all over the entire experience on every level.

If it had its way, I would never go again, and I would deny even having heard of it.

I have, of course, been ignoring and suppressing this pissy little voice of mine. These are perfectly lovely people and I enjoy being able to socialize with them (with the help of Prince Xanax) and it’s doing wonders for my ability to relax socially in general.

And I assumed that my inner snotty Gen X teen would eventually get over itself and shut the fuck up and I would adjust.

But that’s not what is happening at all. I’m going in the opposite direction. Last time I was at Kinsmen, that voice was louder than ever and it took a lot of self-control and willpower to keep it from making me let loose with the snarkasm.

And now I am terrified that sooner or later, I won’t be able to hold it back, and I will end up unleashing an exploding firehose torrent of angry and bitter verbal abuse that hurts the feelings of some quite harmless senior care workers and volunteers and old folks and quite possibly alienate them all badly enough that I can’t go back.

Which is why I am writing about it tonight. This blog is my therapy, after all. I am hoping that by writing about the issue, I can release some of the pent up bile and maybe delay my inevitable meltdown for a little while longer.

I feel so god damned conflicted!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why do I do things like this to myself?

I know beforehand how much work doing a Lyrics On Screen (LOS) video for a song of mine is going to be, but I plunge headfirst into doing one now and then anyhow.

Oh well, it’s good to challenge myself now and then anyhow. Might help me teach myself not to be such a god damned wuss all the time.

They say we often have to “re-parent” ourselves, which has always seemed like an absurd idea to me, because if I had the sort of internal resources to pull that off. I wouldn’t need to do it.

It’s not like there’s a loving and competent parent just waiting in the green room of my mind for its cue to come on stage and take over.

But of particular difficulty for me is attempting to re-father myself. It’s too late, I am a lifelong wimp and coward and not much I can do will change that now.

Maybe the right husband could help me through it.

Anyhow, here’s the fruit of my labour :

I mean, I’m not two people. I’m one and a third people at best. I really don’t understand how someone is supposed to pick themselves up by their own shoulders.

Perhaps I am being too literal about the whole thing. Or too thorough in my imaginings.

I try to be nice to myself. I do my best to send love and acceptance and warm happy vibes down into the lowest levels of my soul to keep that shivering little panicky beast down there some life force to live on.

I want to rescue my little critter so bad. I want to hold him and stroke him and soothe him and calm him and give him a loving home and a place by the fire just like in those Fruvous stories I wrote so long ago.

I guess those stories were my attempt at a kind of rescue and I am positive that writing them did me a lot of good by opening up happier possibilities in my mind.

But unfortunately my mind has problems even an imagination as powerful as my own can’t solve. At some point real healing has to happen, and that’s going to mean dealing with a lot of stuff I don’t wanna have to deal with, and digging that up takes time.

The good news is that I feel like I am digging deeper than ever before these days. It means the going is pretty rough because of the amount of resistance I have to overcome just to do anything on this level, but every single spadeful of dirt yields a treasure trove of catharsis, so I am gonna keep plugging away at it.

I might not be able to re-parent myself yet, but I am getting pretty good at believing in my own outsized abilities and my ability to perform wonders and miracles.

I even manage to remember that most people would not have written a thousand words a day for 14 years and counting and made over 500 videos and that the fact that I have done something like that must count for something, even if I have a lot of trouble valuing these things myself.

I guess I have a whole lifetime of taking my amazing abilities for granted to get over. Most couple couldn’t have gotten through school, including university, without ever having to learn to study either.

I never learned to recognize the value of these things both because of the evil forces in my mind that negate any notion of self-worth in me as a threat to the existing order, and because nobody else ever seemed to value them either.

I guess I taught people that they were no big deal with my own attitude.

If only I could go back in time and convince my child self to start making a big deal about himself and his abilities and stop being such a pushover and start demanding to be treated as an equal at home and at school.

This is the point where my therapist would ask me what I can do with that energy now.

And I don’t know. It’s not like I have authorities to stand up to now. It’s just me all by myself in the frozen hellscape of my inner world.

All my bullies are in my head now and they’re so much harder to fight that way.

More after the break.

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That one couplet

In the song I sang today is this couplet :

“But I was a fool
Playing by the rules”

Winner takes it all, abba

…and that activates something in me. Some kind of freaky twisted primal rage makes me want to scream, “Because FUCK your rules! I don’t follow the rules… I make the rules you fools end up following without once ever looking up from chewing your cud to ask where the rules came from in the first place. Answer : people like ME. So it doesn’t matter if you follow the rules, break the rules, exploit the rules, bend the rules, or hide behind the rules, as long as you are following my rules, you’re in my world and playing my game, fools. ”

Look, I told you it was fucked up and twisted. That’s the side of me that comes closest to being some sort of cackling psycho. Kind of like the Joker plus Hannibal Lecter.

But unlike the Joker and the good Doctor Lecter, I take responsibility for the kind of contempt you can feel for ordinary people when you’re a genius like me and I don’t pretend it entitles to harm anybody.

And no matter what, I am a humanist. I love the humanity in people, in ALL people, and it really doesn’t matter to me if they are smart like me or not.

That might affect with whom I wish to converse but it does not limit anyone’s humanity.

And that’s all that really matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But then again, you already knew that, didn’t you?

Here’s the latest reason why :

I guess that’s what happens when I am talking, slightly nervous, and my hands aren’t busy typing or using the mouse.

Anyhow, so, yeah. Problem not solved, god dammit. Turns out my current power supply matches the specs that website’s power supply calculator gave me, and does so at a higher rating than the one I bought, so back to Amazon goes the new one.

Once more I must remind myself that while brilliant, and deep, I am not wise when it comes to actually living life and I might just be one of those people that has to learn where the walls are by crashing into them at speed.

What the hell. Might as well keep on trying.

What I really want to talk about today, though, is my learned helplessness. I touched upon in yesterday’s blog entry and afterwards decided that, given how hard it is for me to talk about it, I should talk about it.

Nobody ever said self-therapy was easy.

I know that I learned my helplessness at an early age. As the youngest of four, giving up and waiting for someone to come along and do it for me was a viable strategy.

After all, odds are that someone was going to come along and take it away from me and do it themselves without having the patience to teach me to do it so they didn’t have to do it for me any more anyway.

But obviously this does not teach a person rugged self-reliance. Like I have mentioned before, I had no competent father figure to teach me to persevere, surmount obstacles, overcome my own limitations, and take risks.

So the helplessness pattern persisted. And now I am 52 and there is still some deep and vital part of my mind that feels like my only chance for survival is, like I said yesterday, to remain appealingly helpless and clumsy so that some adult might come along and rescue me from myself.

Not gonna happen, obviously, but that part of my mind that thinks that way is pretty major and it remains stubbornly stuck in that mode.

And it’s a major obstacle to my quest to become a real live human adult, with a job and everything, just like everybody else.

There is a soothing fatalism to helplessness. After all, if there’s nothing you can do, then you don’t have to do anything. You can end up like me, brain the size of a planet but stuck playing stupid fucking video games all day because your brain is wired for anxiety like it’s booby-trapped trenches and even the tiniest toe tap into new, grownup type territory makes you panic like your ass is on fire.

It isn’t. I just checked.

I know I’m not truly helpless in any logical, sane way. I have enormous power in this mega-mind of mine and there’s all kinds of things I can do. I could be a total whiz at so many things if I could just get over myself and get out there.

Even if it has to be through screens.

But I am just so scared of everything. And far too accustomed to this super passive life of mine. And too weak of character to do much about it but keep doing like I do and occasionally poking my head out to look for some way out of this hole I am in that would actually work for me.

I guess the real problem is that with my mental health burdens, merely longing for true adulthood does not provide nearly enough motivation to overcome the intense friction and inertia that depression represents.

And I am still far too withdrawn into myself, and terrified of extending myself into the harsh hard vacuum that lies outside my teeny tiny realm.

It all makes me feel so…. helpless.

And I am shockingly okay with that.

More after the break.

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The opposite of withdrawal

Let’s call it “advancement”.

That’s what I lack. I only know how to withdraw further into myself. What advancement I do manage on my own tends to be extremely tenuous and hesitant and my little tentacles are ready to retract back into me like a measuring tape when you press the button at the slightest stimulus.

And then, odds are, you will not see them come out again for a very long time.

Hence my being such a timid creature overall. Any moves I make towards that big beautiful world out there are opposed by this overwhelming inward tide that screams at me that out there lies only doom and only in seclusion can there be safety.

And it’s wrong, of course. But it’s also very loud.

It’s like having a smoke detector that is way, way too sensitive.

Yeah, you know full well that there’s no fire.

But you still ain’t making any toast.

When I visualize my frightened self, a very very harsh imagine of some fragile fractured creature with the stumps of tentacles burned all the way down to the nub sticking out of it just sitting there, shivering in shock and pain, unable to do anything else.

God, that’s harsh and depressing. But that’s the image my mind gave me.

And it fits. I wish it didn’t, but it does.

That’s how being raped when I was 4 years old left me and then being ignored and resented by my family and bullied in school only shriveled my tentacles even further until I was, like I have said many times, a robot who went to school.

And that’s how I am right now, too. Just a terrified and shell-shocked creature hiding deep within myself with my back turns to the world because the world is pain and badness and all I know how to do is hide away from it.

And until I can convince my critter it’s okay to come out, that’s where I will stay.

But it feels good to get a lot of that bad stuff out on the page, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, due to my computer being weird, I recorded my video straight to TikTok with my phone instead of via my webcam on my PC like usual.

The following is the result :

It’s high time I mow my beard, I think. It’s reached a ludicrous level of shaggy bushiness and I look like the patriarch of some fucked up tiny religious sect that practices bigamy and incest up some mountain somewhere.

Anyhow, I think I come across pretty good given that it was just me talking into the camera on my phone. There’s one spot where I could have edited out a stumble before I put it up on the YouTube but I left it in because it adds authenticity.

And I’m lazy. That’s always a factor.

I am glad I have now tested the TikTok to YouTube pipeline. Luckily it was quite simple. There’s websites you can use to download stuff off of TikTok just like there’s ones to download off of YouTube.

I have also finally remembered that I can “favorite” stuff on the TikittyTok so I have been favorite-ing the really good stuff I see.

I mean, check this shit out!

Like I said in my comment, instant like and fave! I mean, it’s a cute animal singing an awesome metal song from the 90’s.

That’s so “me”!

And speaking of which, here’s a kickass Asian rocker chick shredding the fuck out of Master of Puppets on her violin.

Aw HELL yeah. She is freaking awesome. She even has a proper heavy metal facial expression. She’s so awesome that, gay as I am, I kinda want to fuck her.

A little. Not really. With me, attraction to women always ends when the clothes come off in my mind.

I love your beautiful soul and brilliant mind, dear, but um…. not the plumbing. Sorry.

I’m sure it’s a perfectly lovely vagina, but I am not, as of this moment, into that.

I always hold out hope that I will one day evolve into true full bisexuality. It would be more in line with my trans-materialist nature where, to me, people basically are who they are on the inside and the outside doesn’t really matter.

Which is remarkably mystical for a rational materialist like myself.

The difference is that I understand that the “truth” and power of a metaphor does not make it a physically real thing.

Hence my thoughts on God and love. Both are equally “real”.

Also, God is not love. Love is God. Remember that.

What else have I got… let me see…

Oh right, there’s this bit that I thought was utterly brilliant.

It really shows what you can do with just a camera and some friends if you have enough imagination and understanding of comedy.

It’s exactly the sort of fast paced, high density, hilarious content I want to make some day. Just get together with some fun folk and do silly shit like that.

Maybe when I am just a little bit saner.

I will have to confirm that links like those work in our Zoom meetings so I can share all this awesome stuff with my friends.

Oh, and I absolutely love this guy. Warning, it’s quite long, but totally worth it.

He’s cute and dorky and funny and I am totally in like with him. I want to cuddle him up like the adorable muppet he is and help him save animals.

Oh right. He loves animals too. Enough to want to build a shelter for them with his bare hands. And I totally get it.

My social issues make me do stuff all by myself too. At this point, I honestly can’t imagine collaborating on things with other people.

It would be so much slower and less certain and messy!

I might be able to handle it if it’s the sort of thing where I can do my part then just send it off to someone else to do their part and so on.

Collaboration without the need for cooperation, I suppose.

I am such a mess!

More after the break

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What starts with an X and ends with… an X?

I felt myself becoming anxious about Spuug^[1] coming over soon, so I took a Xanax.

And this is a good step for me. I was emotionally self-aware enough to feel the problem coming on and had the forethought to head it off at the pass, so to speak.

Good for me. This is how I will slowly learn not to stumble and fumble (and crumble) my way through life like I have no idea what I’m doing.

This “innocent waif” thing has gone on long enough. My survival does not have to rely on being appealingly helpless and clueless. I can and WILL get my shit together so I can feel good about myself and not have to rely on others so much.

I know that nobody is complaining about how much of a burden I am, but there is still such a thing as pride and pride begins when you can stand on your own two feet and face the world without fear or shame and find a place and a way you can contributing and start being a real live legit grownup at long long last.

Some day I will put all this heinous and pathetic bullshit behind me and become someone I can respect and the whole of my life up until then will disappear in the rear view mirror and I will finally be free.

Until then, all I can do is keep hacking away at the walls that bind me, trying to break on through to the other side… or maybe realize I’ve been out there all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And all I really want to do right now is take a nap.

Here is why :

With apologies to the ghost of Robert Frost :

But I have promises to keep
And words to write before I sleep
And words to write before I sleep

So I will have to just muddle on through like I always do.

I suppose if I was a more driven, focused, and disciplined person, I would not find myself muddling through and improvising quite so much.

But I would also be way more serious and way less fun and my boundless creativity would be smothered under all that structure, so fuck that.

Patient readers already know the story behind my lack of self-discipline. School was always so easy for me that I never even had to study, so I never had to develop any kind of grit or determination or the will to overcome myself to get by.

And there was certainly nobody in my life who cared enough to tell me to straighten up and fly right, for fuck’s sake, or I would end up just another hikikomori statistic, another brilliant little birdy who failed to fly when kicked out of the nest.

In that sense, there was no failure to launch. We launched just fine.

We just crashed immediately after.

Because something happened in our development that left us convinced that there was no way we’d survive in the outside world.

It doesn’t make any logical sense. We general possess the basic skills needed to make it in the world. Paying bills and rent is not all that complicated, after all.

Working a job is a whole thing, but it’s possible to survive without one, and what the hell, flipping burgers ain’t that hard either.

I wonder what role inadequate father figures play in our debility. In the classic gender based parenting setup, your mother is the one who cares for you, nurtures you, looks after you, and keeps you safe.

And the father is the one who is supposed to encourage you to take risks, learn from your mistakes, overcome your limitations, and strive.

You can see how such a balanced setup could lead to a well grounded, confident, secure young person who is ready to take on the world.

But if one of those roles is not adequately fulfilled, the child ends up highly neurotic.

Without a sufficient mother figure, the child never learns caution, restraint, nurturing, gentleness, and how to express love.

And without a proper father figure, the child grows up to be cowardly, timid, fearful, scared of the world, abd with zero confidence in their ability to take risks and survive let alone their ability to overcome their fears in order to grow strong and resilient.

And that sounds like us failure to launch types to me.

So often we are highly intelligent and creative yet we lack the sort of confidence and self-assuredness it takes to expand our boundaries, overcome our limitations, and go out and find our place in the world.

Instead we collapse in on ourselves due to a total lack of grit and internal structure and so we never graduate into pre-adulthood, let along becoming actual grownups.

Especially if, like me, you were removed from university halfway through and forced back into your childhood, essentially, by selfish Boomer parents.

I still haven’t gotten over that and it happened thirty years ago. Blaming my misfortunes on my parents is not very productive and indeed functions largely as a cheap excuse not to take responsibility for myself, but it’s all I have for now.

I want to get over it and move on with my life. But I can’t. The wound is too large and I am going to need to do some serious healing before this spindly soul of mine is ready to stand on its own.

Or I dunno. Maybe that’s just a bullshit excuse and all I really need to do is get the fuck over myself, grow a pair, and get on with it.

Guess we’ll never know.

More after the break.

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Gnawing on that limb

The fact that the best metaphor I can think of for what it feels like to go against the groove I am stuck in is a trapped animal having to gnaw off a limb to escape a trap is fucked up beyond belief even by my standards.

And I know that it’s the latest – and possibly the last – manifestation of the power of my mental illness to keep me in my place. It provides a deep primal form of resistance to action because now my insanity has highjacked the instincts that keep us from hurting our own bodies by telling us not to do things like bend our wrist too far or over-extend our elbow or the like.

They say that in order to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself, and I feel like that’s the crossroads I am at right now.

I have successfully penetrated to the very heart of my madness and now I have to work up the nerve to kill it even though I know it’s going to make it feel like that would be like killing myself, or worse, mutilating myself horribly and permanently.

I know that it’s an illusion of sorts. I say “of sorts” because sometimes what seems like an illusion is a representation in symbolic form of a true force or idea in the mind and in that sense it is “real”.

I think what is really going on may be that I am close to breaching the outer wall of my enclosure and hence the struggle between my desire to be free and my desire to be “safe” within these walls is reaching a fever pitch and the question of, “Do I really want to go out there?” will have to be answered in the firm affirmative some time soon.

After that, whatever happens, happens.

It’s not like I’m in control anyhow.

Don’t ask me, I just work here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I discussed my relationship with the waters of the world.

In other words, I talked about how I pee a lot.

Look, they can’t all be brilliant political analysis or mediocre original songs, okay?

Here it is :

I talk about whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write or record. That’s how I make sure I am never at a loss for what to write or talk about.

There’s always something there for me to capture and record. Sometimes it takes a non-trivial amount of pre-recording skullduggery to find it, but there’s always something floating around in the primodial soup of my fertile mind waiting to be born.

I truly have had those thoughts about the water cycle while peeing before. It annoys me how many people don’t know about the water cycle and therefore think stupid hippie thoughts about limited amount of fresh water, oh no.

IT FALLS FROM THE FUCKING SKY. It literally rains it. And the world is covered in oceans. Water is the second least limited resource on Earth, just behind silicon.

Which, for those who dunno, what most of the Earth’s crust is made of.

To me, science has always been kind of spiritual, or at least, it occupies some (but not all) of the space a religious or mystical spirituality would take in my mind.

Science can never fully replace religion because it can’t perform religion’s emotional tasks. It can totally provide you with a cosmology and understanding of the literal, non-personal ways the world works and it can even give you a sense of awe and wonder and being part of something much bigger than yourself.

I mean, you are life. You are that which reverses entropy. As far as we know, that makes you unique in the entire universe.

Though I hope we find out we’re wrong about that.

But science can’t comfort you when you lose a loved one. It can’t shore you up when you feel like you’re falling apart. It can’t give you someone to blame for your troubles and thank for your boons.

The fact that these emotional needs are neither rational or logical in no way obviates them or makes them disappear. They are a crucial part of what it means to be human, and all the evolutionary psychology in the world can’t change that.

And yet, there are millions of us hapless humans trying to pretend like those things don’t exist or don’t matter as we struggle through life and wonder why life seems so damned hard and the world seems so hostile and cold.

Because you’re not drawing on all the resources you need because those resources, as literal explanations of the world, are irrational and not “real”.

Well here are the opening words of my Gospel : God is as real as love is. Both exist only in the hearts, minds, and souls of human beings and are therefore not “real” in the way a chair or the planet Venus are real.

But we share that world where love exists. It might not be something you can point to in the world and say, “Look, there it is!”, but nobody would deny its reality.

God, as an idea, as a force, and as a mythological figure, can be the same. You can believe in an imaginary God, knowing you made Him up, and He can, at all times, be exactly what you need Him to be, and nobody can tell you different.

After all, He is your imaginary friend, and He works however you need Him to.

I am not sure if I can ever make that journey myself. I am too “practical”, too “pragmatic”, too “logical” to invest my emotions in something like that.

Maybe I will get there someday. I sure hope I do. I have been a wounded idealist suffering on the altar of “truth” and “logic” for far too long.

Maybe in order to heal, I need to stop being so god damned literal about everything.

Maybe I need to stop fighting it and finally admit that all that post hippie crap about the power of imagination might have actually had a point.

Maybe I have been starving at the feast this whole time.

Or maybe not.

More after the break.

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Still broken after all these years

Remember this song?

It’s become quite de rigeur in mental health circles then days in mental health circles to tell people like me that we are not broken, and I totally get why and I am sure being told that helps a lot of people, but for me that just ain’t gonna cut it.

Because if how I feel doesn’t qualify as broken, shoot me in the fucking head, because that means I can’t ever get better.

So this can’t be what normal feels like. It just can’t.

And I can feel how broken I am. I am intimately familiar with the ragged edges of my massive mental wounds. I can tell that parts of my mind just plain don’t work. I can feel them hanging there like paralyzed limbs in my mind.

And I can barely even conceive of what it would be like to be otherwise. I can only imagine it as a purely theoretical state, like imagining being able to fly, but
my brain breaks when I try to imagine it as as a day to day, moment to moment reality,

Still, I am doing what I can to get better. It’s difficult because of just how ingrained this rotten little rut of mine has become and how emotionally dependent I am on it and how impossible it feels to escape it.

But I will do it one day. One day I will finally be so sick of this bullshit that I am ready to gnaw my goddamned arm off to get out of this trap.

Until then, I will muddle through like always, all my phantom limbs intact.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.