Decided to tell the world the entire reason conservatism exists and the function it plays for its believers and what we, on the left, need to do about it today.

And you’re welcome.

Quick version : conservatism exists to hide the fact that they don’t really understand what is going on from stupid people.

Not stupid in a scientific sense. These are people of normal intellect who handle everyday life with their work and their family and their hobbies just fine.

It is only on the top layer of reality, the layer where politics operates, where they are stupid. That’s the layer that deals with things outside our daily lives and our quotidian needs. It’s the layer where abstract knowledge resides and where, by and large, errors have no immediate impact on our lives.

Believing your car can run on mayonnaise instead of gasoline might, at the very least, make you late for work.

But thinking the world is flat will, at worst, make you look stupid and weird to your co-workers when you bring it up in the lunchroom.

And because of this lack of consequence, people are free to believe whatever it is that makes them the happiest. Whatever suits their needs. Sure, reality is part of the mix too, at the very least as part of one’s common sense understanding of how the world works, but on that top abstract layer, there is a LOT of wiggle room.

Politics is where that layer meets reality. Thinking the world is flat has no consequences until you vote in the Flat Earth party who vows to spend a trillion dollars either “proving” the world is flat or flattening it.

The Trump era is where the truth of all this comes crashing down on all of us. Millions of people all over the world are learning the bitter truth that politics actually matter. That it matters whether the people and the policies they vote for or in make sense, match their morality, are based on reality, and are actually going to be good for them and their families and their interests.

It must be a harsh awakening for these people and I am sure the reason that these right wing lunatics still have a shrinking minority of people as supporters is that some people will be so wedded to the false reality of the right wing ideosphere that even dire personal consequences can’t get them to pull their fingers out of their ears and start listening to reason.

But for the others who are waking up from the honey scented dreams of right wing reality to the heavy hangover of wondering what the hell happened and how they ended up here and why they thought all those crazy, terrible things were true.

The truth, that they believed them because they seemed better than the real world and they liked living in a fantasy land where everything was simple and easy and they never had to think about anything and it was the liberals who couldn’t face “the real world”.

I should mention that the left wing has some equally reality averse types. The difference is that we have managed to resist letting them get the upper hand.

Plus we skew heavily towards the intellectual and belief in abstract things like truth over, for instance, social conformity and ideological comfort.

And our pervasive fear that someone will think we’re stupid and/or not nice.

In my heart of hearts, I don’t have an ideology. I just have my own understanding of reality and apply my own morality to it.

As it happens, by the world’s standards, that makes me left wing. So that is the label I choose to wear.

But to quote Jon Stewart, “I’m anti-bullshit, what does that make me?”.

There needs to be a third way. A new axis. Better labels.

Until then, I’m a free agent.

More after the break.

---

My Bluesky ban

Relax, it was only a 24 hour ban.

But I am still miffed about it.

I was very surprised yesterday to find I had been banned from Bluesky. So surprised that at first I assumed it was the person whose message I was commenting up who had been banned, not me.

I mean, I don’t know them, and I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, but so am I.

But no, it was me. And I was, of course, quite shocked and for a little while I just sort of floundered around clicking this and that on the Bluesky website as if that would make them realized they had made a terrible mistake in reinstate me, or maybe I would stumble on some kind of workaround they hadn’t thought of.

What can I say, I was reeling.

Eventually, it occurred to me that they had probably emailed me about it, so I checked my email and there it was :

A Bluesky account you control (@fruvous73.bsky.social) posted:

Agreed. Mitch the Bitch should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell.

This post violates our Community Guidelines regarding violent or threatening speech. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

•⁠ ⁠Threats of violence or physical harm: This includes threats or encouragement of violence against individuals, groups, institutions, or the general public.

•⁠ ⁠Incitement of self-harm or suicide: Content that encourages self-harm or suicide.

•⁠ ⁠Wishes of harm: Expressions of a desire for harm directed at a specific person or group.

bluesky, being dicks

Bolding and underlining and italics mine, obviously.

The underlined rule is the one I broke, and I can’t very well argue that I was not wishing harm on a specific person, so I am not going to bother objecting to my ban.

I broke the rules, I did the time.

In my Gen X defense, I was only referencing this scene from Ace Ventura :

And, needless to say, my deep and abiding hate for Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell.

Haven’t forgotten how you enabled today’s mishigas, Mitch!

I hope Satan turns the spit slowly.

(Don’t worry. This blog is privately hosted. )

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out there’s more than one way.

You can be alone because there’s nobody around. You can be alone in a crowd because you don’t know anybody. You can be alone because everyone you know has moved on and you’re still here,wondering what the hell happened.

Or you can be alone like this :

It’s being alone because the damage in your head made you withdraw from the world so deeply that nobody can get close to you without having to someone bridge that protective gap between you and others and cross all that damn Midnight Tundra.

That airless void between me and others is the exact thickness of the walls I put up around myself when I was being raped. That’s when I withdrew from reality and became a person who only deals with the absolute minimum amount of the real world he can get away with and not get run over.

That’s when my world became books and video games and TV.

And those walls I put up to escape crippled me in ways that were not immediately obvious. They made it hard for anyone to get close to me and for me to get close with them, and I think that had a deadly effect on my social development because the people who did try to befriend or engage with me were met by a wall of invisible ice and me on the other side of it with no idea what the problem is.

Gee, how come I can’t connect with anybody? Why is it that when I interact with people, I always feel like they are expecting something from me that I don’t have and therefore cannot give them, no matter how much I want to? Why do I feel this horribly painful gap open up between me and normal people when I try to socialize?

Because your heart is under three miles of ice, kid. And that’s not good.

I wish I’d been able to get mad about stuff. I wish I had been able to recognize that I was being treated poorly, in school and at home, and gotten good and mad about it so that I could maybe get some fucking justice.

Even if I did not, in fact, get justice, it would at least have warmed up my frozen heart and led me in the direction of inspiration and action instead of just withdrawing deeper and deeper into myself in a vain attempt to escape the cold.

But the frost just kept following me. Because the only thing that defeats the frost is sunlight and I was getting further and further away from the light as I withdrew.

Like I said in the vid, I don’t know what to do about being so cut off from people. It’s easy to say, “Get closer to people and warm up!” but that’s a statement of intent, not a plan of action, and right now I don’t see a way forward.

And maybe that’s the problem. I am looking at things from a point of view of linear, contiguous logic – things “making sense” – and what I need is to take the needle off that record entirely so I can fit myself into a whole new groove, man.

This record is broken anyhow. That’s why it keeps playing the same thing over and over.

And the thing about expanding one’s true horizons is that you cannot see your destination from where you are right now.

All you can do is, like a child, go out there and explore.

But I’m scared.

More after the break.

---

Knife against skin

Don’t worry, all the cutting I am about to talk about is metaphorical.

One image that frequently pops into my poppin’ fresh brain to represent my current era of recovery is of myself with a scalpel pressed against the sort of Y-shaped juncture of blood vessels or nerves that is the stand in for the tenderest parts of my psyche, and my gingerly putting more pressure on the scalpel as I try to summon the nerve to just plunge the knife in and cut away the tumour already.

The problem is that the tumour, malignant though it may be, is still a part of me and so cutting it is going to really fucking hurt and my mind knows this and is making me keep putting it off like it’s a dentist appointment.

Think of it as a more visceral angle on the whole “leap of faith” thing I have talked about before. Only instead of learning to fly – to leave logic and reason behind in order to give myself permission to balance my emotions with whatever emotional input is needed – this more like, as I have also said before, performing surgery on myself.

But it’s not like I can get someone else to do it. This is one time in my life where just freaking out and giving up and running to someone competent (Joe) to do it for me is absolutely not an option.

I suppose Doctor Costin might be able to help if I could adequately explain the issue. But even with his intellectual and moral support, the scalpel will still be in my hand.

I suppose I will get around to it eventually. One of these days I will be lying in bed thinking about everything and nothing (I do that a lot) and my resolve will coalesce as will my frustration with myself and I will say to myself, “It is time. ”

It’s OK that Robert Guillaume did it, though.

Or who knows. Maybe this whole thing is yet another distracting schema cooked up by my diseased unconscious to keep me running in place while thing I am making progress until the day I finally drop fucking dead.

I have no idea.

And that means I have no choice but to more or less just… wing it. Improvise.

Oh well. I’ll just treat it as something new to adapt to.

Strangely enough, that makes it a lot less scary to me.

We shapeshifters are a strange breed indeed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or well, I can be a prick sometimes.

Case in point, this imaginary dialogue between me and one of the keener kids from one of the advanced classes I took in high school :

Me : No no, you see…. you are gifted. I am a genius. You are intelligent, driven, and ambitious. You focus, study hard, do everything right, and get good marks on the test. I, on the other hand, show up looking like I slept in my clothes and not even knowing there would be a test that day and get a higher grade than you. You see how that works? That’s why you are gifted, and I am a genius. Have a nice day.

me, just now

I guess that was more of a monologue. Oh well.

And the thing is, that whole monologue, minus the “have a nice day” at the end, just spontaneously sprang into my head like someone faxed it to my brain a few minutes ago, as I was sitting down at the computer.

And that’s not the kind of thing that occurs to someone who is entirely nice.

And that’s what made me realize that I can be, in certain situations, an absolute prick. If someone rankles or offends me, or is committing an injustice in my eyes, I can laser focus in on them on a mission to deliver absolute force.

To the point of going too far sometimes, although that hasn’t happened in a long time so I hope to God that means I am over it.

Then again, nobody has really seriously pissed me off lately either.

There’s just been little things like this^[Julian] :

Like I say in the vid, expressing anger is very difficult for me. I guess that comes part and parcel with being dead inside. Anger comes directly from the id and therefore my overly intellectualized mindscape suppresses and minimalizes it like it’s the weird, misshapen cousin they keep locked in the attic in a gothic novel.

Plus I have what I know to me an exaggerated sense of the power of my anger. I suppose that comes from how suppressed and concentrated it is. It honestly feels like if I open the floodgates I will go on some kind of spree, and it won’t be shopping.

Or that if I vent my anger with someone at them, they will just shrivel up and die like they’re a daisy in a blast furnace. Like my sheer force of personality and projecting empathy are so strong that no mere human can survive them.

But people get mad at each other all the time, and manage to survive it. I might be extremely gifted but I am not some kind of enraged demigod.

Not yet, anyway.

So I really have no reason to fear my own anger to the point where I am afraid to express it in my life in any way.

Hell, I don’t even get mad over the news any more. I am too cynically determined to not give the enemy that satisfaction and to instead respond to their evilness with an icy dagger sharpened by my razor sharp mind.

Which is kinda weird, come to think of it. But I am what I am.

Anyhow, I can tell myself all these smart and sensitive and inspiring things about not being afraid of my own anger any more till I am blue in the face, but if there isn’t a change at the deep emotional level, it will all come to nothing.

But I am too empathic to risk hurting the ones I love like my Dad used to do to us.

And therein lies my conundrum.

More after the break.

---

Once more round the post

What the hell, let’s chew on this old bone s’more.

I don’t wanna hurt anyone unintentionally. And I reserve hurting people intentionally for very specific circumstances and following my own set of rules.

But I can’t let my anger out without risking hurting someone or at the very least scaring the hell out of them. Or so I have always believed.

It’s entirely possible that I could let my grumpy and sarcastic side out of its little cage and let it roam free and everyone would be totally fine, no lasting damage done, and I would be a much saner and happier Fru.

But I don’t think so. I am trying hard to cut through the mass of self-reinforcing delusions in my head to get to observed and verifiable truth, and the truth is that nobody can actually handle the uncut unfiltered unrestrained me.

Were I emotionally normal, I would have presumably worked all this out when I was an angry and angsty teen and/or college student. I would have been angry and reactive and sarcastic and rebellious and a severe pain in the ass but I would have come to some sort of acceptable middle ground between inchoate rage and wanting to get alon with my fellow humans, and that would have been that.

But I am not normal, emotionally or otherwise. I am a bizarre stunted weirdo who is a living testament to differential development because I have a mind vastly more advanced than most peoples’ and everything else is downright vestigial.

I have this vision of myself as this vast megacomputer floating in space who just observes and records and analyzes things from around the galaxy but has no propulsion system and no will of its own.

And there’s nobody there to ask it questions, so it’s basically useless, despite all the powerful inherent in its analytical database.

For some reason, I imagine it as being shaped like a Toblerone, but with rounded edges, and covered in radar dishes, antennae, flashing lights, and other futuristic space ship kibble like that.

It’s a depressing picture, but painfully apt.

Dear universe : can someone give me a push?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[Julian]] Let me be clear, dear. I am not angry with you any more. It all worked out fine and I am over it. You are an amazing person, and I love you. Never forget it! [[Julian]]

I wonder if there’s a statistically significant increase in the probability of my making a morbid psychological deep dive video on the days where I have therapy.

All those emotions have to go somewhere, I guess.

This time they went here :

In this case, I let some of my feelings about being dead inside out and hopefully that will make room for the good stuff to get in.

One can only hope.

Like I said in the vid, I am trying to shock myself back into the world of the living. But I think the problem is that I am basically trying to start a fire on wet kindling.

My inner world is very numb and highly resistant to being ignited. I have had this toxic pattern of never acting on my emotions or impulses that my mind stupidly quashes even the slightest show of motivation or drive in order to maintain “control”.

Oh yeah, I am so in “control”. That’s why my life is going exactly how I want it to.

And it all happens so fast and at so deep a level that I can’t just catch it and stop it, CBT style. I am going to have to somehow condition myself to stop viewing my own motivation as a god damned enemy or danger and to take a nice deep breath and let the life force fill me up instead.

Breathe in the light and breathe out the dark, just like that yoga lady on TV said.

Wish I could remember her name, but I was like three at the time.

I do feel like I need some kind of deep purification. I would love to have the opportunity to have a good long soak in a hot tub.

One with a really good filter so it doesn’t get all clogged up with my toxins.

Heck, just a regular bath would do, but that’s not an option for someone with my disabilities. I could get into the tub easily enough but I can’t imagine how I would get back out again with how weak my legs are.

I keep imagining myself breaching like a whale and escaping the tub like I am Free Willy jumping out of his enclosure in that movie.

I think it was called “Last Tango In Paris”.

Otherwise, I think it would take some sort of winch to hoist me out of the water like I am a nice big catch of salmon being hauled on board a fisherman’s boat.

I would also love to spend some time in a sauna. Note, that’s sauna, NOT a steam room. My one time in a steam room damn near killed me.

No, a nice dry sauna. It recreates the same effect I get from lying on a towel on the sand on a beach. That lovely radiant heat just bakes the toxins out of me and clears out my pores and makes me feel all healthy and free.

Hey, look at me, expressing desire for things. Yay that.

But of course, it’s never been that I lacked desires, it’s that I have been too afraid to express those desires consciously.

That’s why I could/can only describe them as dreams – things I wish I had or could do. Those don’t come with a pressing need to make them come true.

They’re just nice thoughts, with maybe a bit of wistful sighing. But they don’t involve any kind of longing or feeling of incompleteness or even just really strong desire.

So maybe what I need is to give myself permission to dream harder. And bigger. Let myself really want some things.

And put up with how much that can hurt if the desire goes unfulfilled.

Worse things can happen. Trust me.

More after the break.

---

The work of life

The work of life seems slightly more onerous lately.

You know the stuff I am talking about. All the little things involved in being a live human being in modern society that are not, in and of themselves, enjoyable.

There’s no getting around them. Like I have said before, even Elon Musk has to brush his teeth and use the toilet and choose what to eat and so on.

That’s why it is so deadly to fall into the trap of treating all effort like it’s the enemy. If that goes too far, you are basically at war with being alive.

Like the ultimate luxury lifestyle is that of the paraplegic.

Anyhow, the work seems more like work lately, and I don’t think it’s because I’m sick or anything. I think it’s because I am feeding my id and it’s making me feel more cranky and lazy and self-indulgent.

Kind of like a teenager. Which tracks, I suppose.

Something that came up during therapy today is how my return to life will perforce require struggling with my less than noble emotions.

It’s easy to be high minded and “above it all” when you’re dead inside. Then you’re perfectly free to look down upon the masses from your Olympian perch and tut-tut them for all their crude, base behaviour.

But when you want to be alive instead, you have to actually struggle with things like anger, greed, selfishness, arrogance, and the rest of the Sins.

The big story is that coming back to life will mean sacrificing detachment and that’s not going to be easy for me because detaching is what I did to escape while I was being raped and it’s been my go to response for everything ever since.

That vast gulf between me and others is the moat of the castle I retreated into when something far worse than I could handle was happening, and if I want to live – and I do – I am going to have to lower the drawbridge and let people in… or walk out.

And that means letting people get close enough to touch me.

And that means calming down that psychotic little animal inside me so it won’t attack people when they get too close.

And this is all going to be one hell of a project.

But it’s not like I have anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got deep today.

I don’t recall how I got on to the subject of justice, but those are thoughts I have had for a long time and that I truly and specifically wanted to convey to the world, so regardless of how I got there, I am glad I did.

Also glad I didn’t go any deeper into the whole “nature isn’t fair” thing. I wrote a brutally, life-scarringly depressing short story about that a long time ago and I am still ashamed of it, but it was something I had to get out of my system.

I am not going to link it here, even though I know it’s in the deep archives of this blog and I could totally find it if I wanted to do so.

It’s evil. It’s poison. It’s the distillation of a lot of years of silent sadness and deep thoughts about nature, and if someone else had written it and I had read it, I would hate that person with the white hot passion of a thousand suns forever.

In my partial defense, I was crying my eyes out the whole time I was writing it. And for a while after I finished, too.

That’s probably why writing it was so cathartic.

I wonder if I have something else like that in me? I suppose that little story about the fox in the glen is a step in that direction. That naked allegory got out some of the feelings I have about the way that I live, at least.

But I know that I could get a hell of a lot deeper if I had the nerve. And if I came up with the right set of central metaphors for the whole thing.

In a weak way, I suppose talking about myself as a wizard in a tower is also a step in that direction. I didn’t use it in fiction or even develop it very much, so it doesn’t really count, but clearly something inside me is trying to express itself.

Maybe I need to trip balls on some strong hallucinogen so I can go on a psychedelic journey into the very depths of my spiritual existence and find there the solution to all my mental problems which the current rigid structure of my psyche denies me.

That could be fun.

More seriously, microdosing LSD or DMT or the like might actually do me some good. A lot of very interesting research on the therapeutic efficacy of low dose hallucinogens in the treatment of things like anxiety and depression is being done down in the States.

The idea is that a low dose of these drugs melts the mind’s walls just enough to allow your brain to fix itself without your mind getting in the way.

No need to climb inside your own belly button.

I would definitely be willing to try the low dose approach. I know that my mind is its own worst enemy and loosening things up a bit in there sounds like a good idea to me.

It could certainly help me recover from being way too rational and analytical for my wn good and maybe even help me to become more human again.

That sure would be nice.

I don’t think I would go the full Timothy Leary “mind astronaut” way though. I’m not a stupid hippie poking around in my brain in search of an interesting mental sensation. My naturally cautious nature balks at taking such a huge gamble with my sanity.

If I lose my marbles now, I might never get them back. And falling all the way into full bore insanity is one of my greatest fears.

So no, I am not going to go on any acid trips any time soon.

But maybe I would go on an acid “trip down to the 7-11 for a diet drink”.

More after the break.

---

If I were crazy

I mean all the way crazy, not just the “standard life crippling neurotic” kind of crazy I am currently in my third decade of.

I dunno how realistic my fear of losing contact with reality completely is. It seems most likely that it’s just something my depression uses to keep me from making progress.

Scientifically, if I was psychotic it would have shown up a long time ago, between the ages of 16 and 25 if not sooner.

And I have never “heard voices” except for the occasional half a syllable when I am falling asleep or have recently woken up.

And even then, that hasn’t happened in the last 20 years, so I am in the clear.

Just in time for me to be entering dementia territory, when my brain could fail me from the opposite direction. Yay.

Although I dunno. Maybe it would slow down my mind just enough that I can finally calm down and rest and get some decent sleep.

Silver linings and all that.

Anyhow, insanity. It’s probably not going to happen any time soon, anyhow, unless I have a stroke or something.

I’m such a cheerful sort, aren’t I?

So I can probably stop imagining that I am barely clinging to what little sanity I possess and the slightest perturbation could send me screaming into the void below.

Though I suppose that does add a certain dark romance to my daily struggles. Sure, it looks like I’m just a fat lump who plays video games, but on the inside, I’m a hard edged existential daredevil walking the razor’s edge of insanity every waking moment and a lot of the sleeping ones too.

I’ve been having “bad moments” lately. Moments where I feel alienated and panicky and haunted and hunted and confused.

I am learning to appreciate them. I think they are moments where my brain is trying to reconfigure itself into a saner shape and while they are very unpleasant, they are brief.

Maybe one of these times I will resist the urge to immediately slam my mind back into its accustomed shape and just sit with the experience instead.

Who knows, maybe I will even get some healing done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I actually remembered to record my vid du jour when I had some downtime before Wound Care instead of mindlessly playing games on my phone then having to come up with a vid when I got home.

This is the result :

Not exactly my most breathtakingly brilliant or soul searingly insightful work, but what the hell, sometimes I plumb my soul for gold and sometimes I just vlog.

What can I say, I am capable of anything and you can never tell what I will say.

To some people, I suppose, that makes me chaotic and unpredictable.

To me, it just makes me interesting.

You already know how my day has gone. Right now, I have come home from Wound Care, pooped, napped, then woken up around 5 pm to get this all rolling again.

It’s been a very busy day by my standards. I feel pretty tired and a bit sore like I always do on Tuesday. But in a pleasant way.

I feel like I have actually done something for a change, and that feels very good.

And it’s always gratifying to have hung out with Lynda and Judy and Lea and John without feeling alienated or alienating.

Turns out I can totally get along with normal people if my anxiety isn’t screaming in my ear and making it hard to think.

I wish I had Xanax back when I was at VFS. I am sure people would have loved me then and been happy to recommend me to jobs.

Oh well. The thing about the past is that it passed. It’s gone, over, finished. It is eternally immutable and can never be changed.

All my profs at VFS screwed me over and there’s nothing I can do about that.

I wonder if at least Rick Drew stood up for me. He seemed to like me.

Anyhow, the sun has started to go down and that means I am feeling sleepy in a strange, slightly spooky kind of way.

I think I may be starting to “sundown”. Actually, I think it’s been happening for a while and I only just became conscious of it.

And I know calling it “sundowning” is me being totally overwrought and histrionic. Actual sundowning only happens to people with dementia and I am nowhere near that yet.

I am, at most, becoming slightly more absentminded. And I am having the usual age related “senior moments” when something I am trying to think of just vanishes from my mind like a rather shitty magic trick.

I am no more demented than I have ever been. Mua ha ha ha ha.

I have just noticed this mood shift that occurs once twilight begins. I start to feel sort of cold and insular and withdrawn, and like all I want to do is sleep.

I think part of me wants to hibernate.

Well too bad! There’s stuff to do and fun to be had. I am trying hard to go in the opposite direction and become more awake and involved with life, not less.

I’m working on it.

I have only just gotten to a place where I don’t nap as much. I am in the process of breaking myself of the habit of seeking to “hide” from life in sleep whenever my incredibly low impact life becomes too much for me.

I don’t have to do that. If I fail to snooze as much, all that happens is that my body reaches a little deeper into my personal energy supply to keep me up, and I end up sleeping later on.

Ideally, I will get to the point where I sleep eight hours a night like a normal person, but I don’t see that happening real soon.

And some people think that a nap during the day is actually good for us, so there’s that.

And now, I will indeed nap as I have had a long (for me) day.

More after the break.

---

I took that nap

I took the above mentioned nap and yet, somehow, I am still sleepy.

And cold. Around 8:30 pm, this chill started creeping in on me and I have been feeling distinctly refrigerated ever since.

The most obvious explanation is, of course, that it’s cold in here. By 8:30 pm the sun was mostly down and so the temp dropped outside and this bedroom of mine is not quite thermally sealed, so the temp difference between inside and outside air sought some kind of equilibrium and that sucked some heat out of the room.

I know that’s a more scientifically elaborate explanation than necessary. I could have said “Cold out thar means cold in hyar” or the like.

But I enjoy doing the sciencing, so humour me.

If so, I may have to fire up that fan heater I got last Spring to keep me warm.

It’s a rather crude and inelegant solution but it works.

It could also be that the thermostat in this room has somehow ended up turned down again, in which case I will be very upset.

So I really hope it’s not that. I know that I set it to 27 C a couple weeks ago, as 25 C was not quite cutting it. And I will turn it up again if I have to.

But if I find it turned all the way down to nothing again, I will pitch a fit because I have made myself very very clear on the subject, that nobody is to touch my thermostat but me, ever, except by my explicit and immediate instruction.

I don’t wanna have to do that, so, here’s hoping.

Finding out I am cold because of someone else’s interference feels like such a betrayal.

And of course, I might be coming down with something. It could be that sort of chill. It did seem to come with a vague feeling of unwellness but nothing definitive.

So I will check the thermostat and see what’s up.

Then I will crawl under the covers and take yet another nap.

Maybe I really AM starting to hibernate.

In which case…. see you next Spring, I guess!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I rambled on about my strange and tragic life.

It’s a subject that has been on my mind a lot lately and so I thought it was time to express some of the emotions involved and see if that made me feel better.

And it did, actually. I feel better now. Yay catharsis. It’s good for me to get those negative emotions out from time to time in order to make room for healing.

So much of our mental anguish comes from all the unexpressed emotions we carry around with us.

I am striving to change that about myself. I know that a big part of my self-resurrection is going to have to be learning to actually deal with my emotions, including the really tricky and troubling ones like anger, instead of more or less consigning everything but that narrow band I previously found comfortable to the void of forgetting.

This will make life far more complicated. But also worth living.

It’s a tradeoff like everything else.

Turns out being a real little boy is quite complicated. I have often wondered about the really awkward conversations Geppetto had to have with Pinocchio right after he became an actual human boy.

Explaining the need to occasionally shit and piss and how to handle everything about it alone would be one heck of a conversation.

Anyhow, back to the topic at hand. Though I am glad I am thinking in comedic terms.

The image of myself as frozen in place haunts my mind a lot lately. I think my brain is trying to resolve the situation and to do so it has to keep returning to that disturbingly accurate image as it tries to melt that ice and get things flowing again.

Images of Spring spring to mind.

And of course, like I have been saying lately, this all revolves around my id and my very distant relationship with it.

The “decision” to sever said id when I retreated into myself to escape being raped turned me into an emotional cripple and every day I comprehend a little more of just how deeply scarred and contaminated that left me.

No wonder I was timid and shy. I had no driving force inside me any more!

Another, even more disturbingly accurate and harsh image haunting my mind is of myself having broken both legs (emotionally speaking) and never getting them treated at all so when the bones knit again, it was at crazy weird angles that made walking extremely painful and awkward and I have lived with being such a twisted and warped being ever since.

I told you it was harsh.

But it rings true for me on an emotional level. After all, being raped when I was four was a profound trauma for which I got absolutely no treatment because I didn’t even have the language to express what had happened to me to anyone, let alone having someone I could express it to.

Back then, in 1977, predators like the one who forever scarred me operated with relative impunity because of those exact factors. There was absolutely no awareness of child predation and so monsters like him could rape all the children he wanted, safe in the knowledge that the kid would be too freaked out and hurt by this horrible action from beyond their little world to say anything and even if they did tell somebody, nobody would have believed them and they would have been accused of “making up dirty stories” or the like.

People didn’t want to believe that something like that really happened.

Thank god we got over that, anyhow.

More after the break.

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On self indulgence

I am currently eating shawarma poutine from Shawarma 2 Go that I can’t really afford.

Last Friday’s grocery run was especially expensive ($75) due to running out of both microwave popcorn ($12) and margarine ($9) in the same week, plus I had to pay for my DoorDash Plus ($11/month for a reduction in DoorDash fees, saves me $$$ in the long run). so my usual $125/week of credit card money was already spent.

But whatever. I will probably just pay for my next $30 meal at Denny’s in cash and order shall be restored to the force.

The poutine was pretty good. I got it with shawarma lamb, of course, because if lamb is an option, I get lamb.

It just tastes so good. And beyond that it seems to satisfy something in me. Something that’s more than just hunger.

Maybe I am secretly the reincarnation of a Scottish werewolf.

I’ve had a few miniature dizzy spells today. Just a moment of imbalance, enough to make me think “whoa!” and need to regain my balance, but then, gone.

It felt like a circulation thing, as opposed to a sinus thing or head thing.

I really wonder about my circulation sometimes. I spend a lot of time sitting at this here computer o’ mine in the same basic position, and when I am not here I am lying in bed, and neither exactly encourage robust circulation of my vital humours.

I know I should move a lot more. I even know that I would probably feel a lot better if I did. After all, I always feel better after my exercises at the Kinsmen.

But I am still too “stuck” to get myself to exercise. My id is too detached. I have not yet found the key to feeling truly alive instead of feeling like a frozen zombie all the time.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, yet frozen like a block of ice when it comes to actually pursuing my own best interests, or anything at all really.

It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. With powers like mine, I should be living in a golden palace and not this dirty old wizard’s tower.

I should at the very least have a minimum wage existence.

But most of the time, most days, I just go through the same ol shit over and over again, unable to do anything more than follow the same old default script.

Where’s that handsome prince of mine again? He’s taking forever to get here.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As it relates to a recent viral TikTok video, as it was explained by the Dadvocate.

I haven’t watched the original video because it got taken down not only for being revenge porn but because you’re not allowed to show nudity on TikTok.

She should have posted it to their sister site, DickTok. Ha ha.

I do think it would be fun if there was a single site for women to share the unsolicited dick pics they get though.

Anonymously, of course, otherwise they would be as bad as DoorDash lady.

It could actually be of great scientific value as a basis for a wide analysis of the human penises of the world in all their splendiferous glory.

As well as advancing the accuracy of AI penises by leaps and bounds.

But enough silliness. (Aww. ) That was just a good test case for my thoughts on prejudice and how to test for it.

I don’t expect it to become a viral sensation like the Bechdel test because unlike said test, my test is primarily intended to be administered to oneself and that’s no fun.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how it could be applied to judging others, thought, which is always a more popular option.

You just have to doggedly ask the Bertrand test style question, “Well what if it was… ” and put the changed variable in there.

This will win you no friends, of course, because those who point out when other people are being bigoted are rarely thanked for their assistance.

Even if, or especially if, they are absolutely right.

Take it from one who knows.

That’s the thing about being a soothsayer and/or truth-sayer. You have to do it because you have a burning desire to put your truth into the world and try to make it win out over the perniciously self-serving lies in which people hide their general shittiness.

I mean, there were segregationists who would have insisted they weren’t racists.

And despite my general softening of my “veritas uber alles” pro-truth extremist attitudes at least as they apply to myself and my mental health, I will always been an outspoken firebrand when it comes to fighting selfish lies, petty cruelty, mass hypocrisy, and all other forms of public evil as I see it.

After all, technically, on paper, I am just a citizen sharing his opinion like everyone else.

I just happen to have a greater capacity for self-expression and insight than others. By like, a lot.

And while that arguably gives me an unfair advantage in, say, an argument with other people, it arguably means I have a greater responsibility to contribute to public discourse than the average citizen too.

I’m working on it.

I am great at the expressing part, it’s the getting people to listen part that is not within my current temperament or skillset.

Way in the back of my mind, I keep hoping that I’ll be like my old pal Nietzsche and toil away in utter obscurity until I get recognized as a genius by a small group of academics who eventually make me a household name.

And it’s possible. My stuff IS on the internet after all. I have followers on YouTube and TikTok and BlueSky. I could be discovered any minute now.

But it’s not bloody likely.

What I want to be able to do is climb to the higher metaphorical peak around and be able to shout my messages to the masses from up there.

With a loudspeaker, of course, otherwise nobody would be able to hear me.

Like many a visionary prophet before me, all I really want is for people to listen to me. Yes, it would be nice if my words actually convinced them and changed their minds – I am not speaking just to hear myself talk after all.

But the main thing is to deliver my message to as many ears as possible. After that, it’s up to the people whether they actually listen or not.

It’s a strange way to live, to be honest. I can grasp why prophets end up climbing up a mountain or fucking off into the desert or whatever.

Sometimes it’s better to be alone than to be ignored.

More after the break.

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On being alone

This should hurt.

I have realized that not wanting to feel resented or ignored or in the way is the main reason I took to spending all my time in my room when I was a child.

And that’s still what I do to this very day. Most of the time I am all alone right here in front of my computer in this dirty ol’ bedroom of mine.

I can’t imagine living any other way. The thought of being around people like all day makes me feel like I’m gonna break out in hives. I am very emotionally dependent on this state of solitude where I am experiencing what amounts to zero social stimulation (VR doesn’t count) and the fact that this leaves me incredibly lonely all the time is something I’m so accustomed to that I don’t consciously notice it and when I do, well, that’s one of the things that compulsively playing video games shields me from.

I wonder what would happen if I just sat there, alert but unstimulated, and let whatever emotions I’ve been hiding from come to the front of the class and say howdy.

Well, I know that for a while, I would just be catching up on my incomplete thoughts. That’s what happens when I am forced to wait in real life.

Until I got a phone. I guess that’s a thing of the past now.

And often that’s what I am doing when I am just lying in bed, or sitting on the edge of the bed, hovering somewhere between being awake and being asleep as my overstimulated mind catches up with the backlog.

I guess that’s the answer to the question, “what am I waiting for when I sit on the edge of the bed staring into space?”.

I’m waiting for my mind to catch up. To come back into sync instead of having different layers running at wildly divergent speeds. To regain some degree of focus.

That makes me feel better about how long it takes me to get out of bed sometimes.

I’ve got a lot of brain stuff to do!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

Case in point :

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

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

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

Wouldn’t that be pathetic.

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

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

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

But I was too “smart” for that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where would they even come from?

No wonder I am such a paradoxical creature.

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

Because he’s scared.

More after the break.

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On being dead

Or if not dead, then frozen.

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

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

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

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

You just feel numb.

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

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

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

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

So, ya know. The system works.

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

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

Good luck with that.

I have come to a terrible conclusion!

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

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

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

Speaking of which….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t care. I just want the money.

More after the break.

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Getting it together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I don’t really wanna.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.