And now, part 2 of my “Fru gets mad at motivational bullshit” series.

This time, it’s “live your best life”.

Like I said yesterday, I have finally clued in that topics like this are a way for me to tap in to a lot of the latent bitterness and rage that pollutes my soul and drives my anxiety and neurosis just from the strain of keeping it contained.

Time to let that shit out as much as I can. I will be so much better off without it. I have so much pain frozen away in the cold storage of my soul where I just kept shoving it rather than deal with it all these years.

And clearing out the anger opens the channels for better things as well, like hope, inspiration, ambition, joy, and even good old fashioned lust.

I love lust. It’s always been there for me when I need to heat up this frosty old heart of mine and connect with something live and warm and vital.

It’s not as good as real human connection (I assume), but as a reliable source of ignition that’s always close at hand (snrk) it can’t be beat.

I kind of use music in the same, although in that case it’s a way to access my deep emotions rather than my primal life force. Music cuts right through my bullshit intellectual emotional defenses and all my left brain crap and makes me feel without my overbearing superego getting in the way.

That’s why it’s so important to me. I feel like it’s very close to being sacred to me (as I understand the term) because to me, it’s this mystical thing that lets me access that deep mysterious powerful part of my mind that has always spooked me because it gave me feelings that didn’t make sense and made it hard to concentrate on reality.

Come to think of it, that still happens. I still have times when my inner world grabs so much of my mental bandwidth right in the middle of talking with someone or otherwise trying to deal with real life in realtime that I can’t concentrate at all and end up being functionally debilitated by my extremely rude and demanding inner world.

On some level, I must have given my deep thought processes unlimited access to every single part of my brain, not leaving anything behind for anything else, including, say, maintaining my mood or functioning as a human being or being an adult.

And I’m not sure how I would change that. And I am even less sure that I want to. Messing with my brain’s settings on that deep a level seems fraught with peril, and I don’t think I have that kind of courage.

Not yet, anyhow.

I know that I have vast reserves of strength and power within me. Nothing in my life has tapped into even one percent of my potential and I am not sure what even could.

And so I circle back to the idea of my having gone to medical or law school. I could have seen just how far my academic genius could take me.

Oh, but you still could! You’re not dead yet. Where there’s life there’s hope! It’s never too late to have a happy childhood! Go for it!

Yeah, seriously, fuck OFF, Oprah. I am nowhere near alive enough for bullshit like that. I can barely find the motive power to get out of bed some days.

I sure as hell don’t feel like becoming a lawyer at the age of 60 is a viable life choice.

What I really need is a strong, supportive, sexy man.

Or a very large amount of money.

Or both, if that’s an option.

More after the break.

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Rumble grumble snarl

Getting my anger out like I’ve been doing does feel kind of weird.

I’m so used to being “the cute one”, harmless and friendly and lovable, that when I step outside of that role in order to let out some demons, I feel kinda alienated from myself.

But it’s something I have to get done. The only cure for emotions is to feel them. Nothing else known to this here universe of ours will get rid of them.

So you options are to find a way to feel and express them, or carry them around with you for the rest of your life.

And that second option is very, very expensive. It costs you a lot of mental bandwidth, psychological effort, emotional strain, and just plain stress to keep it all locked up.

Still a popular option, though. Kind of like always making the minimum payment on your credit card. Sure, you are paying way, way more over time that way, but what they’re counting on is you thinking, “Wow, I pay this and the problem goes away for a month? Golly, that’s awesome!”.

There are a lot of people out there perfectly willing to prey on people’s lack of willingness to think about long term consequence and/or do the math.

And I find that very frustrating because I know these people are capable of figuring these things out in a literal sense but are temperamentally disinclined to do so.

Oh well. Not everybody has Taurus priorities. Presumably money isn’t that important to these people on an emotional level.

Anyhow, back to keeping things repressed.

I don’t know how long this rant thing will keep going. I know that I have at least one more in me, but after that, who knows.

I might really tunnel down deep and release as much of my anger and bitterness about my childhood and how it turned out as I can.

That would be a whole different level of venting. Potentially a lot more dangerous and explosive than just bitching about stupid New Age happy face insipid bullshit.

But if it gets me closer to sanity and living an adult life, I’m all for it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided that today was a good day for some spleen venting.

And you all get to hear it!

Oh well, beats me ranting at you in person, I guess.

Anyhow, here it is :

I wonder if I could write a book about how to be positive when you’re Gen X.

A lot of us are around my age and starting to look back on our lives and see a lot of being cranky and difficult and thinking, “And what did all that get me? A heart attack, a divorce, and kids that hate me for good reason. ”

Or something like that. I’m spitballing here.

So maybe now is the time to finally give being positive a chance. Yes, we all grew up with “Have a nice day!” and all that rainbows and unicorns fake positivity and the world of advertising trying to get excited over inane crap, but that stuff’s way back in the rearview mirror now and maybe, just maybe, those dipshits had a point.

All that snarky sarcasm only really makes sense if you’re fighting a defensive battle against a sea of shallow stupidity, and in case you haven’t noticed, that sea ain’t here anymore and our angst is increasingly absurd without it.

So what the hell. Maybe it’s time to give cheerfulness a try.

But I know that won’t be easy for us. I can’t imagine a day when all that “be positive” bullshit doesn’t make me wanna roll my eyes and growl. Certainly I am never going to be on board with all that “live your best life” and “carpe diem” crap.

Of course you’re living your best life, Oprah, you’re a fucking billionaire.

As for Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society with all that “carpe diem” stuff, I’m sorry, professor, but I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

Seize what? and how? I need details dammit.

Don’t get me started. Those are rants for another day.

So how do I smuggle positivity past all my spiky angry defenses?

I only have one idea for that : spite.

Be positive to spite the world that’s trying to hard to bring you down. Use being upbeat and cheerful as a big middle finger to this dark and depressing world. Prove to the world that it doesn’t get to dictate who you are or how you feel.

I don’t know if this approach would work for anyone but me. In fact, I am not sure it will even work for me, to be honest.

But it’s all I’ve got so far.

At least I am finally trying to tackle all my latent rage. Like I allude to in the vid,I thought of the subject of today’s vid and how angry it made me and thought, “Wait a minute, that’s something I can vlog about and maybe do myself some good!”.

So, there it is, me baring my guts as usual.

You know, being really brutally honest and open and vulnerable seems to be very popular online. Especially with comedians.

So it’s occurred to me that it could be my lack of normal social boundaries due to way less than normal socialization as a child could be the key to my success.

There would be a certain justice to that, it’s true.

On a deep level I honestly don’t know any better. For whatever reason, I am an inherently overt person. I don’t hide what I do or who I am, I hate having secrets, I don’t give a flying fuck what people think of me, and I am honestly so pathetically needy that I would tell anything to anyone just to keep them paying attention to me.

Oy, do I have issues.

More after the break.

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Watch them dance!

Check out this parrot dance.

Those are some very impressive moves!

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The soft cell

No, not these lucky gentlemen :

No, the cell of which I speak is the cell phone Joe was super nice enough to buy me!

I really do have the awesomest friends ever.

So I have finally, at long last, joined the millennium and become a cell phone user.

I haven’t gotten one before now because we have a landline and that’s what I am used to and so it didn’t seem like it would be worth the money to get and pay for a cell phone just so I could make phone calls during those brief times when I am not home.

But over the years, the inability to text with people has become a nuisance, as has my inability to do god damned two factor authentication, and so I had been thinking of getting myself a cheap pay as you go phone for those particular applications.

But now I don’t have to! Joe has solved that problem for me and I am tickled pink.

I am going to set some ground rules for myself, though, because I do not want to end up a sleep deprived zombie like I was back when I had a tablet.

So I am not going to put any games on this cell unless I am literally about to end up in the hospital or otherwise be in a situation where I will need to entertain myself for a long time while being nowhere near my computer.

Second, this thing does NOT come to bed with me. Ever. I will use it sitting here at my computer or not at all. That’s where I will keep the charger too.

Because even without games, the temptation to veg out on the cell instead of sleeping will be too great if it’s close at hand and I need real sleep, god damn it.

Bed will remain for reading, sleeping, and playing my synth.

I know that these rules will not be easy for me to stick to but I am determined to protect my precious four hours of solid sleep a night so I will see it through.

Of this, I swear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh no, not again!

Ha ha ha.

I sang a song. A capella, as has become my custom, as I am apparently incapable of singing properly while a karaoke track is playing in my ears.

Here it is :

I have thought about adding the karaoke track after the fact. That would solve the problem of my rather barebones vocals just sitting there all by themselves.

I might even sound like a real musician! Imagine.

But so far, I have not gone through with that idea because I am not sure I am up to the potential technical challenges of syncing the karaoke track with my vocals.

I mean, I’m pretty sure my musical sense is good enough that my vocals would be the right tempo and key, but I know how incredibly fussy I can be about timing so that if there’s even the slightest discrepancy I will notice and it will bug me and I might not know enough to fix it.

Or maybe I’m just too lazy to bother. I dunno.

What I’m really getting at is that I feel guilty about today’s video and its lack of production value. When I have done that kind of video before, I have put the lyrics over a black background on the screen to give people something to look at besides me.

But this time, I decided to let it all rest on my vocal performance and stage presence and see how I felt about that.

Not good, as it turns out.

So, lesson learned. Next time I sing, I will go back to the usual lyrics on screen format, or come up with some other way to add visual value to the vid.

I mean, I have standards.

When I remember them.

I’m working on it.

Today’s been pretty decent so far. Pondering what I want to order for dinner tonight.

Originally I was gonna get pizza, because the whole of the CHAC smelled faintly but distinctly of pizza yesterday when I was at Wound Care.

Not sure what kind but it definitely had green peppers.

But now I am not so sure. I might get Donair Dude or maybe Chipotle instead, and have them put green peppers on that.

Or not. Whatever. The wheel is still spinning, all possibilities are in play. I live in the heart of downtown Richmond so I am surrounded by possibilities.

Been playing a lot of Darkest Dungeon. I think I am past the major learning curve now. I had to start over a number of times because I ran out of money and that’s pretty much game over at that point.

Wish I had known I could sell off excess Trinkets back then. Oh well.

And in the larger sense, I have been brooding over what I do with my time and my life and whether I could be getting a hell of a lot more out of my time on Earth if I could just break the hypnotic spell of routine that I’ve been under for so long.

So I am still a wizard way up in his lonely tower as of yet, but I am looking down at the real world down below and wondering what I might find out there if I tried.

I know that this life and this routine of mine is killing me. But knowing that is not enough. I still don’t feel like I have the will and the focus and the drive to break free.

After all, I’ve lived like this for 30 years. It’s all I know. My entire adult life has been video games and the internet and spinning my fucking wheels and the idea of departing from that to theoretically greener pastures is terrifying to me.

It’s like stepping into outer space.

But maybe I am making too much of the whole thing. Maybe I should think of it more as quietly sneaking out the back door to poke around the base of my tower a bit before going right back into hiding.

Kind of like a mouse coming out at night.

I, too, am a timid and easily spooked critter.

But I’m working on that.

More after the break.

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A long dark trip through Hell

Sorry if that comes across as a tad melodramatic.

But that’s what I feel I need in order to become free. I need a long trip through the fires of Hell in order to burn away all broken flesh and diseased skin still clinging to my soul so that I might come away clean and fresh and new.

Once again I note how I have totally switched to fire imagery lately.

I choose to view this as a sign of progress.

And that makes sense, because fire is what I need right now. I need fire. Passion. Desire. Ambition. The id. The living, breathing life force within all living beings.

It’s the lack thereof that has left me so cold inside. The airy world of the mind can do a lot of amazing things but it is the light that gives no heat. A balanced mind and personality requires cozying up to the fire inside and let its heat melt all that god damned ice inside that somehow convinced you it was a part of you.

But it’s not.

And it can all melt like candle wax and run down the drain and no part of me will be lost.

Instead, I will regain myself. After sloughing off all that dead tissue, my true self can emerge into the sunlight and breathe free.

My internal springtime is, admittedly, running a tad behind schedule. But it’s coming. I am thawing out and waking up and learning to actually function, and I am turning the heat up a little more every day until the light shines through.

Or maybe until my light shines out.

Because remember, you can’t let yourself out without letting the world in.

Make your choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear, I started off trying to do something lighthearted and relatable.

But then I drifted.

Perhaps some of us are just not meant to end up where we’re trying to go.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I want to pick at the issue of my not doing what I should do some more.

I really meant it when I said that the things I could do or should do seem like they exist in the world outside my microscopic domain. As if I am a prisoner in a tower and things like that are for the people I see passing by on the street below.

And in my tower, I am a wizard, with grand magicks at my command. And I can see a lot of the world from my lofty aerie so I know a surprisingly large amount about it.

But don’t be fooled by the illusions I project into the “real world” down below. I am not really there at all. The real me stays up in the tower where he’s “safe”.

Ha ha ha. “Safe”. From everything but HIMSELF.

He really needs to spend more time outside of the tower. To get away from the demons and ghosts and sadistic corrupt judges of his own creation.

But he’s scared.

Maybe he needs to consult the mighty wizard Xanax some more.

Characteristically elaborate metaphors aside, this separation between the world and I clearly has to end, and I know better than to wail about how “I dunno how to do that!”

Sure ya do. You just fucking do it. You put down the video games and go in search of things to do that might actually mean something to you. You go out into that big wide internet and look around for opportunities and adventures and fun stuff to do.

You just don’t want to.

Because you’re scared.

So that leaves you (me) stuck holding out for some kind of truly magical solution where I can somehow leave my clammy cloister without increasing my stimulation level or doing anything else difficult and/or scary.

But there’s no way to let myself out without letting the world in and I have protected myself from true contact with the world ever since being raped as a child proved to me that the world was horrible beyond all comprehension and therefore the only way to be safe was to withdraw from it as far as I could short of catatonia.

It’s crossed my mind. Just a thought.

Give up on everything, stop doing things entirely, completely withdraw from reality, and surrender myself to the whims of fate entirely.

Will I die? Will I be discovered and put in an institution? Will anyone really care? Will I just end up lying in a gutter in the DTES being used as a punching bag by the children of junkies and pimps?

Probably not. Eventually I’d get bored and need to get up and pee as well. Catatonia is something you really have to commit to and my need for high levels of mental stimulation plus at least minimal control over my fate would betray me.

But the idea does cross my mind now and then, when the depression is surging and my motivation is tanking and I can’t remember why I do things any more.

I guess that’s where the hypnosis of routine rears its ugly head once more.

I won’t truly grow until I finally step off this train car of mine and explore the big loud chaotic world outside my tower.

But I’m scared.

More after the break.

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Discovered via Julian

I am absolutely entranced and excited by this person’s work.

Their work is so perfectly cinematic! I have never seen 3D computer storytelling done so perfectly. I am dying to know how the hell they pull it off.

I assume it’s via a whole bunch of tools I am not artsy enough to use.

I’m a writer, dammit. The only technical requirement for that is typing!

I wonder how long it takes to make a vid like that. Probably a heck of a lot of person-hours go into it.

Although the prospect of AI someday making doing things like that as simple as just inputting the script is a tantalizing one.

I’m a writer, yes. And that means I do not have great interpersonal skills. We are a withdrawn and introverted bunch.

So to be brutally honest, the idea of making movies without having to involve other people has enormous appeal to me.

Because I don’t wanna work with other people. Other people suck.They’re flaky and unreliable and can’t stay focused and don’t take things seriously enough.

That is such a Taurus litany.

The smart thing for a creator like me to do would be to try to put together a team of good, smart, dependable people who can do their work on time and take something they are not getting paid for seriously and then use said team to make stuff.

Like Maglot the werewolf has apparently done. Bravo for him!

I’m sure that I could lead a group like that. I could be the creative visionary like Walk Disney or Jim Henson who makes the amazing dreams for them to turn into some kind of reality via art.

I can write it. I can do voices for it. I could direct the voice recording sessions. I could probably be the producer.

But I can’t do the rest all by myself. Not yet, anyhow.

Go, AI, go!

Until then, I will see about contacting Maglot and seeing if there is literally anything I could help him with so I can be a part of his team.

I will be a virtual janitor if that’s what it takes. But I really want to be part of the team that makes things of that quality.

With my luck, it will turn out that he’s a loner like me, does the whole thing himself (somehow), and is definitely not looking to collab.

Oh well, I have to at least try.

Because ya never know!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I ended up talking about America.

In fact, I am starting to wonder if the social compact of America states that it is better to be bossy and be bossed than to have to restrain your bossiness.

It’s kind of like my theory of New Yorkers, at least as they are depicted in the media. It’s true that, apparently, being a New Yorker means a high risk of being yelled at by a stranger, but then again, you’re allowed to yell back.

Presumably, for them, that all works out. And maybe it could be said that they would rather yell and be yelled at than not yell at all.

Utter madness for a peaceful Canadian like myself but I can appreciate it from afar.

After all, my people, the Acadians, can be pretty loud by mainstream Canadian standards. Nothing like New Yorkers but they do things like get into big family arguments in public and have big loud weddings in open fields.

We’re a rootsy people.

Today’s been going alright. Whatever was bothering me yesterday seems to have mostly cleared itself up, like my mystery ailments always do.

Maybe I just have a really lazy mutant healing factor. Some very weak malign entity is trying to kill me but my latent superpower keeps preventing it.

If so, go superpower go.

And if you could get around to fixing my legs, that’d be great.

Of course, it was probably just dehydration. I got behind on my constant water intake and suffered as a result.

It’s weird how that can manifest in so many different ways, though.

I’m picturing myself lying in an ER, doctors and nurses in frantic activity all around me as they fight to save my life as I lay there looking like death insufficiently warmed over, and with the last of my strength I manage to ask for a glass of water.

Five minutes later I am hale and hearty and cracking jokes.

Down in the USA, they are saying that Kristi Noem delayed Texas disaster relief with her policy of having to okay any disaster relief of over $100K and then apparently fucking off somewhere she couldn’t be reached for 72 hours.

Or maybe she just couldn’t be bothered. Maybe they were trying to get her to sign off on it that whole time and she was like, “I’m gonna do it, just get off my back, geez!”

That would take it out of the realm of mere incompetence, don’t you think?

The whole Texas debacle proves one thing : Trump’s White House is not showing any favoritism towards red states.

Texas is about as red as they get and he doesn’t give a fuck about them, either.

Meanwhile, I wait patiently as he systematically alienates absolutely everybody who has ever supported him or might support him in the future.

He has really fucked up with this Epstein list thing. Pam Bondi released a report saying there is no Epstein client list and he definitely committed suicide.

But just a few months ago she said she had that list on her desk.

Clearly she lied about that. To me, it was obviously bullshit when she said it. It’s the exact kind of tone deaf inability to understand how they are coming across along with being too stupid to picture the future that we’ve come to associate with Trump.

The great thing is that his fans aren’t buying it. They are seriously mad about this. They have believed in said client list for far too long for even their god-emperor’s minions to just Jedi mind trick away.

Now even Fox News is asking what the White House is covering up and why.

Which is fascinating. This was a test of faith for his faithful and they decided they would rather keep believing in the list than to believe that Bondi bitch.

I predict that Trump will actually try to distance himself from the Bondi report. After all, he has no sense of loyalty, and he’s thrown so many people under the bus by this point that the wheels don’t even touch the road any more.

He’ll say, “Well you’d have to ask her about that, that’s her responsibility. I don’t know anything about this highly unpopular thing she did. Her, not me. ”

And he’ll probably be right.

More after the break.

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Some cute stuff I made

Lately I have been making heavy use of this site, an image generator brought to us by the great and benevolent gods of Perchance, to make various sorts of images and tonight I thought I’d show you a few of the small percentage that aren’t total filth.

Like this adorable lil pic of Fruvous cuddling with his little monkey friend Lou.

It’s amazing how high resolution these images are now, isn’t it?

That looks so good!

And I am quite fond of my little Gemini monkey friend. He’s hyper and chatty but also very sweet and kind and so I end up being a vaguely grandfatherly figure to him.

He’s also the first person I’ve known from Gen Z. So I can ask him annoying questions about his generation from time to time.

Understandably, they’re not long on hope.

And here I am with a different friend.

That one ended up having a more hand painted look, which is nice.

That’s my lil friend Carey, who is either a real little bear or a teddy bear depending on how he feels that day.

He’s just as snuggly as I am, so we get on very well.

Finally, here’s my idea of an island fantasy.

Yup, that’s a studly shirtless stallion working in a potato field next to the ocean.

In other words, he’s on Prince Edward Island.

I should do another where he’s hauling in lobster traps, assuming the generator can handle something so complex and obscure.

Doesn’t he look tasty? 🙂

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, you know what the music means.

It means that it’s time for Fru to get sick again.

Let’s give that poor old fox a round of applause to cheer him up!

And then watch his vid.

I get wacky when I’m ill.

Update : I feel a little bit better than when I recorded that vid a couple hours ago. I’ve gotten more rest and that seems to have helped with the feeling of malaise.

But I still feel pretty crappy. I feel swollen all over. My joints are bitching a little louder than usual every time I move. I feel stiff.

And not in the fun way. Ba dum bump.

What the hell, I feel inflamed, let’s see if a naproxen will help.

The shortness of breath incident has me pretty worried. That’s not normal and it’s not good. Someone with common sense, like Joe, probably would have gone to the ER or Urgent Care based on that, but I am my own weird little being so I didn’t.

But obviously, if anything like that happens again, especially if it’s worse, I am calling 911 and packing a bag.

It still could just be the heat and/or dehydration, According to Microsoft Co-Pilot (who is my Jesus) it’s only 20°C out, although with the humidity and sun it feels like 25°C.

So, not exactly cool and breezy but not crazy hot either. Hmm.

I was kind of assuming this was a crazy hot like 30°C in the shade day. That would have explained my current condition quite neatly.

Once more a beautiful theory is slain by an ugly fact.

Other than feeling ill, it’s been a decent day. Checked my finances and I am doing fine, which is always a good feeling.

I’ve been contemplating saving up for that power supply upgrade for Mister Computer, although it seems like those got way more expensive all of a sudden.

I thought it would cost me $80 and now it’s looking more like $140.

Oh well, no blinding rush, I’d just like to be able to play games with a heavy 3D component without my otherwise very snazzy computer going on the fritz.

Pardon the lingo, flatfoot, but sometimes I drift.

There’s also the possibility of floating some AI creativity tool some cash for a subscription so I can play around with that for a while.

It would probably still be Descript. The 3D AI animation generators are all pretty cool, but until one lets me input my script and it then spits out a movie, I’ll decline.

It wouldn’t have to be all that complex a movie, come to think of it. My main superpower is funny dialogue and that just requires two characters, some basic facial animations, and decent AI voice generation.

That all seems pretty doable. Hmmm. Maybe there’s a business idea in all of this. Something like that old XtraNormal program but with way better voice gen.

Oh well, it’s not like I’m in a position to do anything about it.

I’m an idea fox.

The actual execution of the idea is not really my specialty, although obviously when it comes to things like videos I don’t have much of a choice.

I’d love to be able to just record the raw video and send it to someone else to edit.

Actually, there’s no way I would be able to trust someone else to do that. I would have to keep doing the raw edit myself.

But someone else can add the pictures and clips, dammit.

That shit is a lot of work!

More after the break.

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A dark corner

I feel like I’ve turned one recently.

Which shows, I suppose, that my mood has gone through some necessary destabilization. Yesterday, after my day out at the Kinsmen center, I felt quite good about life in general.

Today, not so much.

Being physically ill in some as yet unknown way probably doesn’t help. Being sick is depressing. It tests one’s resiliency and I don’t have much.

Most days I am just barely holding myself together. I don’t talk about it much because I don’t like to think about it much.

But there is a reason I learned to hug the midline so hard. The way of the dysthymic style of depression like mine is to sacrifice the highs in order to avoid the lows and thus we live in a state of stable twilight where nothing much happens as we dwell in stasis.

Lowering my Paxil dose has been my adventure in abandoning that model. I am willing to endure the lows if that’s what it takes to be able to climb higher and maybe even find a place of superior stability.

This has amplified my mood cycle and I guess I am somewhere near the bottom of mine right about now. I find myself struggling to remember why I bother to do anything at all. Everything feels like such a struggle.

I guess this is another place where routine comes in. You don’t have to find the motivation to do things if you are just doing them out of a combination of habit and not having a better idea of what to do with yourself.

At this point, giving up and staying in bed all day would be way too big of a change.

Besides, I would get really, really bored. I need a hell of a lot of mental stimulation and there’s only so much I can get from playing my synthesizer and reading.

So I have to get out of bed. I don’t have video games there any more!

And thank God for that.

It’s times like this that I find myself pondering the bare ingredients of my paltry existence and what a sad little life this is for as great a mind as mine.

And it always comes down to the same brutal equation : nobody can dig me out of this hole but myself, and I ain’t up to the task.

All I can do is keep slogging away and trying to bring myself to life in the hopes that some day I will break through my inner walls into the sunlit world outside them.

And maybe that can only happen when I don’t need my walls any more.

And I have no idea how the fuck to bring that about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I did my big outing to the Kinsmen Adult Day Center for their exercise program, and the whole thing was quite lovely.

Here’s the skinny on it :

In the unlikely even that the video above these words is not quite up to my usual standards of editing, there’s a simple reason for that :

I was half-asleep when I was editing it.

It really kicked in when i was around halfway through. I started nodding off while the video was playing, which made detecting the usual ums and ahs and y’knows rather tricky. I kept having to play the same snippet over and over.

Finally I had to just say “fuck it” and render the file and upload it to YouTube.

Oh well. Hopefully I was my usual charming and engaging self.

I still need a whack more sleep, which is not unexpected after having done what for me was way more exercise than I usually ever do in an entire week.

Once I had posted the vid to YouTube, I took a nap for around an hour without even doing the usual posting to TikTok.

Speaking of which, certain recent videos of mine are stuck together in “content pending review” mode on TikTok. Wanna guess which ones?

Why it’s this one and this one, of course!

I guess I got a little too real for TikTok.

What a bunch of beta cuck simps.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand :

Like I said in the vid, I had a nice time today. I plan to go back next week. That’s going to be a problem though because it goes from 10 am to 2 pm and I usually have Wound Care on Tuesday mornings somewhere so there are bound to be conflicts a-plenty.

For example, I had to cancel today’s Wound Care just to go to Day Care.

Clearly Julian and I are going to have to get Megan at the CHAC^[1] to reschedule my Tuesday Wound Care appointments to be either before 10 am or after 2 pm.

Preferably before 10 am because then I can still be home in time to make the usual video at 2 pm.

Speaking of which, I have decided that if I want to keep doing songs – and I do – I am going to write and generate the song well before I sit down to make the video instead of doing it all as one long three hour project like I have been doing.

Or at least I’ll try. I would have to get over my powerful aversion to doing things outside my usual tiny corridor of existence to do so.

In other words, I would have to do something other than play video games with those large chunks of time when I am not blogging or making a video.

And the nature of my addiction is such that the very notion of spending free time outside the comforting and all-encompassing embrace of video games feels like I’d be skydiving naked into the Arctic to me.

More of that Midnight Tundra going on.

And I know that’s ridiculous. One of the most broken parts of my mind is the part that predicts what emotions will come from potential actions. According to that part of my brain, the slightest deviation from my usual routine will lead to absolutely misery.

I need to hold the truth of its brokenness to my heart so I can remember it when I want to do something new and that part of my mind is wailing and gnashing its teeth.

But for now, I’m just gonna go back to sleep.

More after the break.

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Here’s a few things I’ve come across to cheer up your day.

I’d smile too if I got my ass stroked like that.

Oh, and here’s the happiest otter ever.

And finally, someone added funny voices to animal clips.

Hope that made things a little better!

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In the darkest of dungeons…

Because that is literally what the game is called.

It’s called Darkest Dungeon and it’s my latest acquisition. And I am probably going to end up keeping it because while I can’t exactly fallen in love with it, it’s interesting and unique enough to make me want to keep playing.

Unique enough that it’s rather hard to describe. The setting and tone are very Lovecraftian, with an old and decadent and corrupt family’s scion becoming obsessed with finding an antediluvian portal supposedly buried in the family’s sprawling mansion.

That goes about as well as you’d think.

Strangely, though, the game itself has you leading more traditional RPG type heroes (albeit with an Edwardian twist) to explore the unearthed dungeons which sprawl through the bowels of the lands of the death and insanity.

So far so good. That’s a setting and tone I can enjoy. And it’s refreshingly different from the usual rehashing of Tolkien.

I have nothing against orcs and elves and whatnot but they’ve kind of overdone.

The gameplay itself is a lot like a traditional turn based RPG, with you selecting attacks or skills being the main dynamic as you fight the baddies. In true “Call of Cthulhu” fashion, you have to keep track of your heroes’ stress level lest the horrors they witness drive them MAD, along with the usual hitpoints et al.

Like I said at the beginning, I am not in love with the game but I am sufficiently intrigued that I am not planning on returning it to get my $5 and change back.

Speaking of which, hilarity : in order to buy it with the money I had in my Steam wallet, I had to charge exactly one penny to my credit card.

I was a penny short! And I’m Canadian, we don’t even have pennies any more.

I’m still pissed off about that.

I want my pennies back, Stephen Harper!

Maybe I am a lot more like the old people at the Kinsmen center than I thought.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did another song.

Pretty sure most people would find it WAY too harsh.

It’s not just a joke, what I say in the end. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

I think it has something to do with :

1. Not having the usual social limitations in my head that would keep most normal people from even thinking of something like what I wrote up there.
2. Having so much latent bitterness and rage that I don’t normally have any way to express so it comes out, predictably enough, in my words.
3. The generally high level of fucked up-ness in the world right now raising the social temperature so high that crazy fucks like me are ready to snap

And probably other stuff too.

I suppose the most extreme art often comes from repressed people like me. Edgar Allen Poe was a milquetoast fop but in his words he was a dark overlord and master. Nietzsche was a stooped over nearly blind man who, as he put it, “wrote words of fire and blood across the sky”.

And Marat wrote pamphlets and letters that stoked the fires of the French revolution while stuck in his bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition.

So maybe there’s something to this idea that it’s us feebs and cripples with massive unresolved issues that set the world on fire with art.

I’ve often said that to be a great artist, no matter the medium, there has to be something drastically wrong with you that keeps you from expressing yourself and your emotions via the more normal social means.

Instead you lock yourself in your garrett and slave away at your painting or sculpture or novel or whatever alone and pour your emotions into that and then express them by showing people your work.

So it’s kind of like expressing yourself a whole bunch all at once.

To me, this is why great art is not just made, it’s forged. You need to have a touch of the fires of creation in you, that spark that keeps your pilot light lit and provides the energy to break down the art you experience into its constituent elements so that you can forge something entirely new from them.

At least that’s how it works for me.

I honestly can’t imagine making art in a completely calm, contemplative state. I need some madness flowing before I can create.

It might be buried deep within the bowels of my mind and I might seem more or less calm and composed on the surface, but somewhere in the works you will find a cackling madman eager to set the world ablaze with the power of his words.

Which is a real possibility for me.

I know it is. I know that if I was French and unrestrained like Marat, I could enflame people and unleash all kinds of havoc in the world.

And I am holding space for that as an option. Things get bad enough I might just say “fuck it” and throw my torch onto the kindling before me.

Lots of fire imagery today, huh?

But for now, I am willing to play a more measured and strategic game where I make my moves with a specific goal in mind : stealing all of Trump’s supporters.

Give them someone better to follow and they will flock to this new superior shepherd. Even his diehard supporters like Joe Rogan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are starting to doubt him now and the time is right for the young lions to kill the old one so they can take their place and show their superior right to rule.

So, ya know…. get on that.

More after the break.

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The rough road continues

Took a nap before supper. Woke up around 7:45 pm. Drowsed in bed a while then the alarm went off at 8 pm so I sat up and turned it off.

And then came the return of our old buddy, me sitting on the edge of the bed staring off into space for an interminable period of time in a kind of mental limbo.

Why? I dunno. It’s like I enter a kind of torpor where my mind is still functioning just fine but somehow the part of me that gets the body moving just ain’t online.

I know during these periods that I don’t want to move. What I want to do is go back to sleep. Hit the snooze alarm on life and start over later.

Which is fine. Normal, even. But the feeling of deep lassitude is not. Neither is the fact that it’s going to take me some amount of time to get over it.

It could be psychological. Perhaps my unconscious mind is playing psychosomatic tricks on me to get me to stay in bed and not face the world yet.

That would track with the fact that I am doing that exercise thing at the senior center tomorrow and I really don’t want to do that.

But I am gonna, god and Xanax willing. I have to at least try it once, if for no other reason than to test expanding my social boundaries.

It might be too much too fast. It might turn out to not be for me. I’ve heard how workers talk to old people in these homes and I am not sure how much of that I could take.

I’m not saying that the workers are doing anything wrong, but oy.

I am actually thinking of taking my first Xanax tonight so that I can reduce my anxiety load enough to sleep.

Oh, right, the end of the tale : once I actually managed to get up, the lassitude remained with me. All the time I Was making my supper, I felt very heavy, like my muscles were just hanging off my body, and this worries me a great deal.

It’s not the first time that has happened in the last couple of months. And I cannot help but recall that it was not being able to stand after waking up that landed me in the hospital for a couple of weeks three years ago, and that’s when my journey as a disabled person truly began.

Boy I hope I’m not getting worse. 🙁 Life is rough enough with me needing the walker to get around, if I end up in Stephen Hawking mode on an electric wheelchair than I don’t think I could take it.

Maybe then I could convince the medical world to keep looking until they actually find whatever the fuck is wrong with me.

Or maybe they’d just think I’m a typical fat guy being lazy.

Yeah, because this shit makes me life SO MUCH EASIER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I ended up talking about my routine and my addiction to it and to video games.

It’s really quite a serious issue.

Here is the vid :

Distressing development – I lost a lot of stuff I said to glitches in the recording process. They’ve happened before now and then, causing me to lose a second here or a moment there, but this was a whole whack of them.

So next time I record, I will close down my browser first and hope that helps. It’s depressing to lose my words, whatever medium they are in.

As might come across in the video, I am feeling somewhat lost and melancholy today, I feel a deep dissatisfaction with life as I know it and it makes me feel like I am pacing back and forth from sheer insomnia in my mind.

This is probably a good thing. In the long run, it will be restlessness, dissatisfaction, and frustration that will spur new growth in me and cause me to need to expand my boundaries and makes some sort of life for myself.

Because I might be alive, but this ain’t livin’.

I’ve often been irritated by the whole “carpe diem” crowd. They say “live life to the fullest” like everyone already knows what that would mean to them and all they needed was a push from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society to say, “Oh, I guess I should go do that thing I want to do now, then. ”

I can think of dreams I have and things that would excite me greatly if I had them, but I don’t see a doable, usable path from me to them.

All kinds of paths that would work for all kinds of people who aren’t me, of course. I could tell you all kinds of very plausible and “helpful” tips as to how I could try getting a job writing TV (like entering TV writing contests) or maybe some kind of remote work (like buying a cell phone so I can get back on UpWork) or maybe looking to going back to school via distance education (like getting a Psych degree) or a million other things.

All things that, from a certain point of view, I “could” do. The sort of things that any well meaning person would advise me to do. The sort of things that my therapist does, in fact, tell me I should do.

But we both know that ain’t gonna happen.

I guess the real question I should be asking myself is not “what should I do with my life?” but “how do I stop being scared of everything?”.

Because it’s that all encompassing fear that is the short chain keeping me tethered to this farce of a life of mine. Any of that “good advice” stuff is based on the presumption that I can do things and very often I just cannot.

Not if they aren’t already part of my routine and thus part of my own tiny world.

So nothing is going to change until I break this chain or slip my collar and get the fuck out of this tiny little cage.

But that scares me. The world outside my captivity is so big and loud and complicated and scary and I am such a tiny, broken, frightened thing.

I don’t know what could make it possible for me to break free of this self imposed closed habitat and live a real life.

I don’t know how to make all that fear of the world go away.

I don’t know where to find the strength and confidence I need in order to overcome my limitations and become the person I was meant to be.

I don’t know how to grow up and be human.

I barely even know how to live at all.

More after the break.

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Here are a bunch of foxes really pouring on the cute.

And I thought this was hilarious.

Well, you know what they say… nose to the Grindr-stone.

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The rough and rugged road

I feel like I am on the right road but it’s pretty rough going.

Can’t be avoided, I am afraid. I have to learn to overcome things instead of always tucking tail and running away from everything and that means building up the sheer horsepower of my spirit so it can take those hills.

Right now, I can’t take the hills. The system is shot.

And that means I need to resign myself to pushing through the curtain of fear that has been the outer wall of my sad little universe for far too long.

There is no avoiding it entirely. Sooner or later we must overcome ourselves in order to grow. We can’t become a butterfly until we die as a caterpillar. The people we must become must kill the people we are now in order to be born.

We are perpetually in our own way.

And as someone who favors stability and predictability, that is bad news. I would rather be able to get wherever I need to go via gradual, serene accumulations of tiny, barely noticeable shifts, with no revolutions, evolutions, or extreme solutions needed.

But alas, that’s not always possible. Yes, I do change slowly over time, but I am reaching a point where that’s going to lead to a metamorphosis whether I want it too or not and so I better get used to the idea.

Were I a more rugged and daring type and not such a bloodless intellectual, I might follow my instincts – I do have them – to my next evolutionary level, even if that means a massive spiritual crisis and even temporary insanity.

But I am built for long term stability over all else.

So gradualism will have to do.

All I can do is keep letting the sand accumulate on the healthy side of the scale until we finally reach that god damned tipping point.

Hopefully that will be all it takes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, today’s silly little vid for a silly little song I wrote.

That picture in the thumbnail sets blood sugar to twitching.

I recently realized that I no longer crave sweet things. That craving died a long time ago, right about when I first truly realized that eating that kind of crap will make me feel ill almost instantly.

And nothing kills a craving like memories of nausea.

What happens instead is that I long for all those sugary foods I used to eat. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

I don’t crave those foods because I don’t want to eat them at all. They’re gross.

But I do long for the days when I could.

All right, motivation.

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What is motivation?

Motivation is the desire to do something. So when we say, “I don’t have enough motivation to do it”, all we are really saying is, “I don’t want to do it” but with an extra step in there to keep us from realizing we’re just choosing not to do it because we do not feel like doing it.

Instead we blame a lack of this mysterious substance “motivation”.

“Oh trust me, I would do that right away if I had the motivation if I wanted to do it bad enough. But alas, through no fault of my own, I do not. ”

Boy, this motivation stuff sure is important.

The conflict is between the grownup part of us that wants to have done the thing, usually for grownup reasons like “to stay in shape” or “to make a good impression at work” or “to not get evicted”, and the child inside of us that doesn’t want to experience whatever it will take to get it done.

And being a child, it does not feel the need to be logical or reasonable. It absolutely will keep you from doing vitally important things that your grownup mind very much wants to do and no amount of cajoling or exhorting will change that.

No matter what you do, you will never feel like doing it.

So why are you waiting around to feel like doing it? That is not, despite what our lazy inner child tells us, a prerequisite for doing it.

This is where discipline enters the picture. Discipline, in this context, can be seen as the ability to do things regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

This is the lesson at least one parent, usually the father, was probably trying to teach you but was too inarticulate to explain.

Life doing only what you feel like doing is catastrophically stunted. Even if you were a billionaire, it would result in a very tiny, pathetic life.

Even billionaires have to wait for the car sometimes.

So whichever parent tried to teach you this was right when they said (or implied) that self-discipline is a skill you’d need for the rest of your life. No matter what kind of life you are leading, it’s going to involve shit you don’t want to do, and you will need whatever internal resource that takes.

And I think the lack of understanding of this hurts a lot of people, especially all us victims of “failure to launch”^[1] who absorb the toxic lesson that our lack of desire to do all the adult things means we are deeply and terrible broken.

But no, that’s normal. Being a grownup involves doing a fuckton of things you don’t want to do. Not wanting to do them is everyone’s default setting.

The problem lies in a lack of understanding of this leading us to wait around forever as if the desire to do these things might magically appear some day.

It won’t. So you have to ask yourself, then how do most people do these things?

The answer is self-discipline.

And they got it from practicing it, more or less. Presumably because, not being born gifted, they had no choice but to develop it just to get through school.

But “lucky” guys like me never needed it for school. Not one bit. Even doing the homework in high school required only a trivial flexing of my mental muscle.

So then I reach the precipice of adulthood only to have that all snatched away when my parents took me and my brother out of school.

No launching for me.

More after the break.

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He who hesitates

I’ve always been rather timid and hesitant.

It’s part of my natural caution, I suppose. Or maybe a result of severe early childhood trauma. Same thing, really.

But it’s like I go into everything expecting pain at any second. Like I am constantly a Vietnam era soldier cautiously making my way through a booby trapped world.

And I know that is a way too harsh way to view the world. I’m perfectly fine in most ways most of the time. I could be a lot more bold and daring without suffering much damage.

And if something does blow up in my face, so what? I will live, and learn, and make brand new and even better mistakes in the future.

There are worse things than failing or getting hurt.

This probably connects to the post-pain analysis issue I have mentioned before. How part of the neurosis cycle of the intellectually extra is when we excoriate ourselves after an error or mishap, calling ourselves stupid over and over for not having done the smart thing which was “obvious if we’d just thought about it for two seconds”.

But you didn’t have two seconds. You are judging yourself in hindsight based on what you can see clearly now, in hindsight, at leisure, but those are not the conditions under which you made your “mistake”.

So next time you “fuck up”, grab a hold of yourself and try to interrupt that whole process and ask yourself if you really should have known better.

Or if you should just shrug, say, “oh well, shit happens!” and move on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.