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.

Last time I broached this subject, I got in a lot of trouble.

But in the off chance I do manage to summon a shitstorm again, I know what kind of things will happen from the previous time.

For instance, whole battalions of straw man arguments. It was amazing to see how many people ascribed entirely fictional comments to me because, presumably, it made it easier and more fun to dump their hate on me.

And it was hilarious how confused they got when I asked them to show them where I said what they just said I said.

Like their minds completely hallucinated the things they think I said then erased the evidence until I brought up that I had not, in fact, said anything remotely like that.

I found it most satisfying to trip them up with mere reality.

And, of course, carloads of guilt by association.

You must be ONE OF THEM!

Otherwise all these torches and pitchforks will just go to waste.

Because as we all know, it is literally impossible to express even the most basic level of human decency toward a group of people if you’re not part of that group.

I vividly recall telling people that they hate pedophiles because they’re allowed to hate pedophiles. It has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the children, any more than laws against interracial sex had anything to do with protecting white women from rape.

Society as a whole has pointed at the pedos and said, “Go ahead, dump unlimited amounts of the rage you’re too chickenshit to direct at irts actual cause on this, the latest designated target du jour. ”

And I literally had people declaring child molestation to be the greatest of all evils, worse, apparently, than genocide.

That’s how you know it’s societal scapegoating. People blow things way, way out of proportion because that’s what makes the hate the most satisfying.

So the scapegoat must be infinitely evil in order to justify an unlimited amount of rage dumping. Even if that is utter madness.

Heck, even reminding people that pedophiles are human beings pisses them off for that exact reason. It makes the hate less fun if they have to remember that they are directing their bile stream at real, live, living and breathing human beings who have basic human rights and a life and hobbies and stuff.

Never mind that nobody chooses to be a pedophile. Nobody chooses what they are into period. Just like everything else about our tastes, you don’t choose what you like, you just find out at some point.

At some point in our development as human beings, our minds take a snapshot of what sex is, and as far as we can tell, that’s what you are stuck with till the day you die.

Actually, it’s probably a series of snapshots, some pre-sexual, but you get the idea.

So yeah, those are the truths that got me in trouble. Understandably. The people who speak out against the lynch mob often get hanged with the same rope.

But that’s also how change happens. Enough people start to feel the prickling of their conscience when the outspoken one makes points they can’t ignore or dismiss that they either actively join the resistance or quietly decide to back them if it comes up.

It’s a politically unpalatable truth that the progress of the rights of minorities always depends on the conscience of the majority. It is by appealing to our shared values of equality, fairness, liberty, justice, and humanism that the majority can be swayed to cede their ill gotten power to the minority.

And there will always be those who fight like hell to keep that power both for the power’s own sake and to avoid having to face the guilt and shame of what they have done purely because society said they were allowed to do it.

That’s one of the many reasons that young people are the conscience of society.

They’ve never been part of the latest hate, and can oppose it uncompromised.

And generation after generation, the script repeats, and social progress is made, and we are dragged into the future.

It’s really quite beautiful.

More after the break.

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The other side of that

Unfortunately, a group can be so incredibly politically and socially toxic that almost nobody will be willing to stand up for them.

They are then at the mercy of anyone who wants someone they can denigrate, humiliate, scapegoat, or even torture and kill with impunity.

And all because people see them as less than human. They have been designated as evil and nobody will stand up for them because even if they can resist the social programming that says they are not human, standing up for them would absolutely destroy you socially and possibly even legally as you basically share their fate.

Ergo justice might be a long time coming. And when it comes, it will make martyrs of whoever is brave or foolish enough to join the cause at first. They will be made an example of to discourage the slightest hint of empathy for the damned group.

So odds are, they will be the very young. College age kids who have little to nothing to lose and are therefore still highly idealistic because they don’t have roots in the adult world to give them conflicted interests.

They might also be from a highly idealistic religious community. Social progress and religion go all the way back to Abolition, and despite the modern association of religion with social and political conservatism, historically Christianity has also been a wellspring of true spiritual humanism and greater compassion.

And like I have said before, as long as you’re a humanist, you are a brother or a sister to me. I don’t care if your humanism is secular or not.

What matter is whether or not you have the courage and greatness of spirit and wisdom to embrace the humanity in even the least and the most reviled of us.

And to therefore care with your full and open heart for them no matter what.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Otherwise known as “how to be seen”.

One thing that is not an option is to somehow gain the benefits of openness and vulnerability without becoming open and vulnerable.

That’s not possible. There’s just one route between our inner selves and the world and if you open it at all, you open in both ways.

And the only alternative is the hell of numbness, otherwise known as “turning the volume down on everything in order to escape the bad things”.

And then, as I have done, wondering why you feel so goddamn sad and lonely.

Because you’re starving, stupid. You have emotional anorexia and it’s making you refuse to eat rather than risk eating something that tastes bad.

And it’s shutting you off from the world as well. So you feel like you’re not even real, because that’s easier to take than feeling like it’s the world that isn’t real.

So you end up living a quietly miserable lifein a cold grey world all by yourself.

Welcome to my reality. But I am getting better. Feeling is slowly coming back to my long frozen mind and every day I not only reclaim more of my fear-frozen self from the forces of anti-life (efil?), the rate at which I do so increases a little bit.

Perhaps I will reach escape velocity some time soon, and be able to overcome the heavy pull of the void within enough to spark up my engines and GTFO of here.

Or maybe I will just keep living the same day over and over again with nothing really to show for them but my vids and my blog until the day of my tragically unimportant death.

You don’t understand. I could have been a contender.

Maybe that’s another kind of thinking I need to get rid of : thinking about all my wasted potential and what a tragedy it is that I have these massive gifts and yet I am stuck to the bottom of society’s shoe because of mental illness.

That’s all true, and legit, but maybe it’s still not a good way for me to be thinking. It wuld be one thing if I thought that those thoughts might lead to my somehow popping that enormous clog in my motivational system and liberating me, and I am not discounting the possibility of that working eventually, but in the meantime, I am repeatedly torturing myself in a way that I feel nullifies some of the progress it brings me.

I mean yeah, beating your head against a wall might break it some day, but only at the cost of leaving you a vegetable.

Far better is to learn to just stop hurting myself in the first place. And that means struggling with my eternal issue of how to vent my anger and other passionate emotions in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody.

Anybody who doesn’t deserve it, anyway.

It’s take it out on myself or put it into the world somehow. I would be far, far better off if I could find a way to burn off all my latent rage and excess mental energies, and I am working on it, but it’s going way too slow.

Hence my plan to try to use those energies to make myself happier and stronger. Redirect all available energies to the structural integrity field, Mister LaForge. If I can pull this off, it could elevate my life considerably.

It certainly will involve a lot of self-forgiveness. I need to dream up a way to look at my life that lets me find peace and contentment, not just distraction and entertainment.

I could do so much if I can just get out of my own way.

And maybe that’s what I am afraid of.

More after the break.

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Fear of change

I have written before that if we have a fixed sense of self – that you are the exact person you are right now – then personal change becoming impossible because any change in ourselves would mean we become a totally different person and to a human being, that is tantamount to death.

It is a side effect of the forces that stabilize our sense of self in the first place. WIthout those forces, we would be quite insane. We need to have some idea of who we are if we are to have any basis for acting in the world.

It all starts (and ends) with you.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that there has to also be room for growth and that means room for change. If the sense of self is too rigid and curtailed, growth turns inward (where else could it go?) and the organism becomes choked up and compressed as that rigid self gets denser and more twisted and unhealthy.

And how does the individual respond to this painful condition? Why, by making their sense of self even more rigid and incapable of change in an attempt to get things “under control”, of course.

Maybe you’d be better off just letting yourself fall apart for a while. Stop trying to keep everything down and keep everything in and let it all emerge however it needs to emerge and worry about cleaning it all up afterwards.

I’ve known for quite a long time that I am keeping something or other in. Something I am deeply ashamed of and therefore something I am terrified of ever having emerge into the light where others can see it.

I can’t tell you what it is. It has an obvious digestive analog, but I don’t know what exactly is in me that I feel the need to keep down.

I suppose if I knew, that would mean it had come out. It might well be something I am so deeply ashamed of that my deeper mind hides it even from my conscious mind.

Whatever it is, it lies at the heart of my conviction that I am some kind of impossibly awful wretched, disgusting, pathetic, revolting thing that should hide from the world rather than inflict myself upon it.

It certainly feels like it’s attached to my being raped when I was 4, but it’s clearly more than just the memory that it happened because I’ve been fully and consciously aware of it for decades now.

So maybe it’s the actual memories of being so horribly violated that sit like a virulently infected tumour deep within my soul pumping out toxic pollutants that make me feel like every cell of me is soaked in junkyard runoff.

That bastard who raped me left me feeling forever broken and violated and polluted and I bet he never ever gave it a second thought.

I hope he died in pain.

God knows I will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I tried not to make this a lecture or a rant.

You can tell me if I succeeded.

It bothers me more than it probably should when people eat nothing but garbage. It always hurts to see people make the same mistakes you have.

Especially when, like me, you’re at the end stage of that and therefore suffering the very predictable effects of eating all the wrong things such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, stents in my heart, and (arguably) depression.

So I kind of feel like the ghost of Jacob Marley from “A Christmas Carol”, screaming at people to change their wicked ways before they end up like me.

Of course, realistically, I know the chances of convincing anyway to change are very low. People tend to have their lives people around things like their pleasures and removing one of those pleasures upsets the entire structure of their lifestyles.

They will have to replace that reward signal somehow.

Which brings us to the matter of addiction. Brains are wired to seek the strongest sources of reward and things like junk food exploit that by being unnaturally rewarding and hence a source of fixation.

Nature did not plan for the advent of Doritos.

So when trying to improve their diets, people have to contend with the withdrawal symptoms of cravings for the old bad foods.

That’s why I advocate for my “additive” diet. Don’t deprive yourself of anything because that will just convince the stupid part of your animal brain that you’re starving and we are only as in control of ourselves as we are sated.

It’s like our animal brains have our big human sentient brains on a short leash and only lets them think they are in control if the big brain does a good job of feeding the smaller and much older one.

So when cravings go unmet, no matter how self-destructive they are, the degree to which we can control ourselves dips and we “cheat”.

The only solution is to deprive yourself of nothing. There will still be withdrawal when the adding of the good stuff leaves less room for the bad stuff, but it won’t be nearly as severe and will be way easier to handle.

I mean, you can’t “cheat” on a diet that doesn’t forbid anything, right?

As far as I can tell, there’s no system solution for bad nutrition. Not one we are likely to adopt, anyhow. The nutritional extremist in me dreams of things like banning refined sugar in manufactured goods so that companies are forced to switch to much safer artificial sweeteners, but there’s no way that would ever happen.

Big Sugar would shut that shit down HARD.

More realistically (kinda), if someone could invent the killer sugar substitute that would taste exactly like the real thing but be perfectly healthy, in theory that would give the products that use it a market advantage.

Then again, we already have Splenda. That’s even made from sugar, so Big Sugar wouldn’t even get cut out of the deal.

And I don’t see Splenda based chocolate bars flooding the market.

So I dunno. One of the hardest things to do in the world is to get people to change. Change is scary and hard, doing what you’ve always done is soothing and easy.

Says the guy who keeps living the same day over and over again because he can’t bring himself to change anything at all.

At least my days create things. Without this blog and my videos, my life would truly be pointless and I would be even more lost than I am now.

I want to get out of this holding pattern I am in. But I am in no hurry.

It’ll happen when it happens. Or not.

More after the break.

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Investing in myself

It’s not easy.

I am trying to learned to direct my overflowing mental energies into my own psyche and its health and stability, and so far it’s been rather painful.

A lot of deeply frostbitten and palsied parts of me have to wake up and thaw out still, and that’s a lot like slapping and shaking your hand after it has fallen asleep.

It’s something well worth doing because it will get you your hand back, but there’s a lot of that pins and needles feeling in your immediate future.

And I’ve had a large part of my psyche – possibly more than half of it – asleep for a very long time indeed.

The hardest part is and is going to be the attitude adjustment. Shifting to directing my energies into my own happiness and wellbeing on a much larger scale than before feels like I am trying to pop a cramp that has been there for almost 50 years.

My mind doesn’t want to go there.

Well too bad, brain, because you’re doing it anyway. Fuck it, it’s only pain. Pain sucks but it’s temporary and if you’re a lot healthier for the rest of your life afterwards, it’s hard to say that it wasn’t worth it.

So I am well beyond giving a shit about psychological pain. The fear still grips me, though that is slowly fading, but the pain doesn’t faze me at all.

If anything, in a perverse way it feels good because, like with my sleepy hand example, the pain signals something coming back to life and warming up, and that feels good even if it’s accompanied by pain.

So wake up, ye sleepers! Spring has come, the long winter night has ended, the sun is high in the sky, and it’s time to crawl out of your musty fusty burrows and shake the dust out of your fur so you can run out and play.

And I know the sunlight hurts your little eyes, but that will soon pass, and you will be amazed by all the beauty you can see now that you’re awake.

Isn’t that a lot better than hibernating your life away?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, the vid of the day :

Nothing in that vid that is entirely new to the readers of this blog, and my voice is a bit weird, but I still feel good about sharing those particular thoughts with the world in a place a tad more accessible than this here blog o’ mine.

I could have gone a lot further into the whole right wing intellectual degeneracy thing. What is so hard for us liberals to grasp is that these people do not think they can figure the world out for themselves and therefore they need to pick people they like to do it for them and just believe whatever those people tell them.

The crucial point is that they feel like they have no choice but to believe what they are told by their chosen articulators, and will go through whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to do so.

When these articulators are corrupt or incompetent (or both), the cumulative effect of said mental gymnastics is to make people stupider as their minds are bent and twisted in all kinds of unnatural ways until they lose all cohesion.

The more holes that emerge in their shared delusion due to it becoming so directly contrafactual, the more those holes have to be plugged with raw emotion, and that’s why they get so mad all the time.

Anger is a highly effective way to keep yourself from thinking. Our brains, left to their own devices, do their best to make sense of things, and if you are deeply emotionally invested in believing things that do not, in fact, make sense, you need to keep getting hot rage injections to keep yourself from figuring that out.

Hence their need to consume right wing media constantly.

A leader like Donald Trump is actually the worst thing for these people because he very efficiency and effectively wriggles his way on to their “trusted source” list and then betrays them and hurts them when they are not able to exercise the correct faculties in order to now reject him.

Once you are on that list, you have a free hand to reprogram their minds however you like. It takes a serious reality breach to shake them. They vehemently do not want to have to rationally examine everything people say. They do not feel like they are capable of doing that and having it produce anything but terror and confusion for them.

And they might be right. They might not be smart enough to do it.

That thought weighs heavy on my mind.

Trump is such a terrible leader that he is managing to lose them anyway because he keeps doing things that actively hurt them or that deeply offend them in ways that are hard for them to ignore even with Fox News’ help.

In fact, he does things even Fox News, with all its resources, can’t defend. All they can do is ignore them and distract their audience with other emotionally charged things.

Right now, Trump is turning the contrafactuality machine up yet another notch by insisting that Portland is some kind of “blood on the streets” social conservative wet nightmare full of left wing hordes determined to destroy America.

And it’s just not true. And anyone can tell it’s not true. Any Fox News viewer can drive to Portland themselves and see that it’s not true. It’s entirely fictional, and there is no ambiguity for its delusional nature to hide in.

In fact, it’s not even plausible. It just plain sounds crazy. And so even for his fans who go strictly by their surface impressions of things – their “gut” – it doesn’t hold water.

And that is driving his approval rating down to the lowest level of any President ever. And it’s quite unlikely to recover because that would require Trump to change how he is acting and for that he’d have to believe he had been wrong about something.

Still, he has shown at least an animal level awareness of danger in the past, so he might try to fix it.

But he’s far too senile and demented now to succeed.

More after the break.

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Letting the energy decide

That’s how I have been conceptualizing my attempts to get around my decision issues by letting my intuition choose.

So when I am wobbling with indecision, I just ask “the energy” – also known as my emotions – what to do and it “decides” .

These, then, are the baby steps I am taking towards developing my connection to my will and my emotions. I figure that whether I am letting my routine or my emotional sate “decide”, it’s still an arbitrary and unreasoned decision, so I might as well go with the one that at least does me some good.

I mean, what the hell, if I let the “energy” decide I at least might surprise myself by going off in an unexpected direction or even starting something new.

A big part of this process is a slow and painstaking process of learning not to resist my own motion. To stop, as I have put it before, “driving around with the parking brake on” and learn to accept that sometimes I am still and sometimes I am in motion and either way is just fine.

I have been emotionally dependent on stasis for far too long. I want to be alive, dammit, and living creatures move and breathe and love and grow and want and will and change. They don’t desperately try to stop the world around them out of a devilishly disastrous attempt to be “in control” and “safe”.

Fuck all that. I ain’t controlling jack shit. If I was, I wouldn’t have a laundry list of things I want to do but can’t make myself do. And there are a lot of things I’m not safe from at all and they’re all inside my head.

If I truly want to feel safe, I need to get stronger. Then I won’t feel so puny and pathetic and vulnerable all the time.

And if I want to be in control, I need to deal with my emotions.

And that means feeling and expressing them, and being fine with that.

Bringing myself back to life will be neither easy nor painless.

But it will be incredibly worth doing nonetheless.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or, to be more precise, effort. Life is effort. This cannot be avoided.

Nor would you want to.

I go into it further in today’s vid du jour.

You wouldn’t want an effort free life because that would mean doing literally nothing. You’d basically be a plant at that point. Specifically, a vegetable.

That’s the logical outcome of the pathology of toxic laziness. It has nothing to do with some abstract notion of virtue or whether or not you’re “pulling your own weight” and everything to do with whether you feel alive and present and happy.

This is one of those lessons that someone, like a parent or a teacher or other adult, probably tried to teach you at one point but were far too inarticulate to get it across.

Some of us have high interface demands. We can understand a hell of a lot if it’s explained to us or otherwise in an articulated form but we are not going to just “pick up on it” via social intuition or whatever.

In my case, I think it’s what Mister Thompkins, my elementary school phys ed teacher, was trying to explain to me one day but I was too much of a little smartass to listen.

I honestly think that we nerds could learn a thing or two from the jocks of the world and their simple, robust, enthusiastic approach to life.

Chronic, insidious, invidious laziness makes you act like you’re constantly trying to get to sleep. Like any form of physical arousal – yes, even that one – is the enemy.

In the case of depression, it’s not hard to see how one gets this way. It’s that god damned anhedonia. We need a certain amount of reward in order to function and when the numbness of depression blunts our ability to even experience reward and thus makes everything less rewarding, we naturally seek out the activities with the highest effort to reward ratio in an attempt to punch through that resistance.

And the modern world is full of what scientists called “supra-normal stimuli”, incredibly potent sources of reward signals that the reward-starved like myself quickly latch onto like a drowning person grabs on to some floating debris and become addicted to.

If only something could interrupt the anhedonia and make those ice sheets of cruelest numbness retreat, the whole thing would fall apart. Our personal ice age would end and we would be able to feel all the good things in life as they truly are.

But nobody has a pill to specifically target anhedonia yet, I suppose. My Paxil saved my life and my Wellbutrin helps me be awake and alert, but I still live on a icy cold planet far away from the Sun where its warmth can barely reach me at all.

And that’s how depression kills motivation. It’s hard to be motivated to do things when you know in your soul that you won’t find them rewarding. The basic calculus of life as an animal says that you seek the most rewarding stimuli around and with anhedonia draining the fun out of everything, the entire equation of what is “worth the effort” shifts and very few things qualify any more.

So when people with good intentions tell us “do this, do that, it will make you feel so much better”, they might even be right, but from our point of view, trying to imagine how much we’ll get out of the proposed activities, it seems almost impossible.

Whether it’s junk food or video games or risky sex, our addiction of choice provides so much reward for so little effort that anything else, even things that should be more than enough for anybody, cannot possibly compare.

That animal calculus is very clear : do the most rewarding thing.

Even if it’s killing us.

More after the break.

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Do you remember TV dinners?

Well I do, because I am eating one right now.

It’s the classic Salisbury Steak with mashed potatoes and corn and a brownie (which I shouldn’t eat, but will) for dessert.

I was looking through the frozen meals selections as I shopped Real Canadian Superstore online this week and I saw this TV dinner ^[1] there and it was only $5.

And what I was planning to get, one of those President’s Choice frozen entrees, was $5.55! Easy choice.

And it’s pretty good! They got the sauce for the Salisbury Steak right. A lot of places seem to confuse Salisbury Steak with meatloaf and use a tomato sauce, and you end up with something a lot more like a burger with fancy ketchup.

And that’s OK, but it’s not right.

And the mashed potatoes are good. They’re instant mashed potatoes, of course, which means they taste good but don’t have the texture and heft of the real thing, but I’ve had them plenty and they’re pretty good.

But what really has me bowled over is the corn. My word, is it good! It tastes like it just came off the cob! I dunno how they did it but if there’s a way I could get that on its own I would buy it in bulk.

Needless to say, I will be looking to try the other two meals in the product line, a fried chicken dinner and a turkey dinner.

Assuming that the price stays the same and doesn’t go up, those President’s Choice frozen entrees might just be out of a job.

And I must admit, talking about Salisbury Steak, mashed potatoes, corn, and a brownie gives me a most pleasantly old-fashioned feeling, like I’m eating at an old time boarding house or having Sunday dinner with the family.

Whilst I consider myself to be quite open-minded when it comes to food, I will admit that there are times when a good old-fashioned “normal” meal straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting really hits the spot.

Oh, the brownie was pretty good too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.