I think all these busy days full of medical appointment are starting to catch up with me.

But first, today’s vid.

Nothing in there that people haven’t heard from me before.

Still felt good to get it expressed, though.

Anyhow, today I had Wound Care in the morning. I told the nurse about the pain in my feet I’ve been experiencing lately. But like me, she couldn’t find anything on my feet to explain it, so we’re guessing the problem is my orthopedic shoes.

Which means another trip back to that sports medicine center in Vancouver to chat with my orthotics lady to see what is up.

Then in the afternoon it was back to West Coast Retina Consultants for the injection in my right eye to go with the one in my left eye from last week.

And yup. It hurt like a motherfucker. As usual.

And I realize that each injection is a little worse for me because I am losing my ability to not think about the very painful thing about to happen so I can’t keep myself from dreading it any more.

And that sucks. Bad enough that it has to happen. Dreading it does not help.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am doing this so that I don’t go blind. And the occasional moment of agonizing pain is totally worth it for that reason.

I swore REALLY LOUDLY this time.

Good to know that I am not so cold and numb inside that I am beyond spontaneous and unwilled cries of pain.

That would be creepier than fuck.

Stil, unwilled events are quite rare in my life, so they fascinate me. It’s so weird to have a clear memory of doing something without any attached intention.

Kind of eerie, in a way.

Anyhow, so that was a thing. I ran my recent bloody eye incident past the doctor just to see what he thinks and he concurred that it was no big deal.

I figured there was no harm in getting a second opinion from an eye specialist.

I first realized the appointments were catching up with me when I went to get up to go to the eye thing and every muscles in my body whined at me that it was tired and it wanted me to lay back down for a while.

Not for long, only a couple of fortnights.

Luckily the marathon is over. I have no appointments tomorrow, it being Canada day (yay!), so I will get to just stay the fuck home.

The fact that I am this sore from a week’s worth of appointments is actually kind of depressing. I’m not going to dwell on it but it’s sad to be this feeble.

Oh well, maybe that exercise thing with the old folks will help me build up my muscles so that I am somewhat less decrepit.

Imagine if I was actually remembering to do my physio exercises as well. Why I’d be Charles Atlas within a month.

It certainly confirms that I can’t do any kind of normal job. It is online work or nothing for me. Even if I worked in a storefront business and Julian dropped me off and picked me up from right in front of it, I would not be able to do it for very long.

And damn that’s depressing.

Makes that horrible vision of me immobile in a hospital bed, full of tubes and barely alive, dance in front of my face.

Or me being like Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair only without the astrophysics.

I just can’t handle the maths.

More after the break.

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On being strange

Oh right, that thing I made a video about.

Let’s set the mood, shall we?

It’s hard to truly put into words what the kind of alienation I experienced as a child does to an innocent child who didn’t ask to be a genius.

Because it’s not just the abuse and the bullying. It’s also the slow deep freeze of day after day after day of cold isolated loneliness seeping into my bones and turning my inner landscape to one as warm and welcoming as a glacier in January.

I feel like I still thawing out from all that.

And of course, I became dependent on all that cold. For “clarity”. So when people did try to reach me and make some kind of connection, I froze them out without knowing it and they went away feeling like they’d done something wrong.

They didn’t. The wrong thing was me.

So again, I wonder if anything could have gone different. It’s certainly possible to imagine my meeting some amazing adult who could have straightened me out by telling me what I was doing wrong, what I could do to make up for it, and who gave me a way to feel safe and included so that I could develop normally from that point on.

Such a person is imaginable but pretty damned unlikely. They would either needed to have had an intellect like mine, or enormous quantities of authority, warmth, force of personality, and sheer determination to be able to emotionally wrestle me to the ground and get my attention and force me to really listen.

So could things gone differently? Maybe. Could they have gone better? I don’t know.

They certainly could have gone worse. I dodged become autistic somehow. It must be because of the early childhood education I got from my babysitter Betty, who was by no means my intellectual equal but that didn’t matter because she was warm-hearted and tough and tender and wise and strong and I absolutely adored her.

She gave me a warm, safe light in the world and thus gave me a reason to stay in the world instead of wandering off into the endless corridors of my mind.

Too bad that had to go away. I really could have used her love during elementary school. I certainly wasn’t getting anything from my overworked mother.

And to be honest, if she’d found out about my being bullied, she would definitely stormed the school office and given them a piece of her mind.

She was kind. But fierce.

That’s still the kind of person I admire today.

And who knows, if I ever get my head together, maybe I can be like her one day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More or less. Here’s the vid :

If Trump’s Big Bad Bill goes through, people are going to be out for blood. The cuts to Medicaid alone are going to literally kill people (much like the USAID cuts already have overseas) and party politics aren’t going to mean jack shit if you kill Grandma.

Time for death panels!

Obviously, I’d rather it didn’t come to that. Something like the French Revolution, while colorful and exciting, would not be the ideal solution.

The best outcome now can only come if that Bloated Bastard Bill is resoundingly defeated because the Republican herd finally wises up and realizes their constituents are going to burn them at the stake if that thing goes through and decides that now is when they have to, as a group, stand up to Trump and push back.

They have to do it as a group, or at least a bloc, because clearly none of them have the courage to do it on their own.

So much for the party of “mavericks”.

My next video might just be a really nasty polemic aimed at “libertarians”.

If enough Repubs wise up and gang together to, along with the democrats, kill this fucking thing with fire, those Repubs will go down in history as heroes and suddenly the entire Internet (apart from Trump loyalists) will love them.

And as I have noted before, it wouldn’t take a lot of them. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate are not that big. A small gang of defectors is all it would take.

How about it, Republicans? Are you ready to answer your nation’s call and be the hero America needs, or would you rather stay a coward because you’re happy being scared of a weakling like Dumb Donnie?

This WILL be on the test.

Finally decided on a game to try, It’s Atlyss. The furry action RPG that was all the rage last year and that has glowing reviews from both critics and gamers.

So far, I am very unimpressed.

I made my little character (a cute lil demon sort of thing) and entered the game and got the initial “go to these places” quest and then immediately got a “go kill X number of monster Y” quest and I hate that kind of thing.

Talk about uninspiring. I wanted a quest and all I got was a quota. It’s hard to feel like I am battling the forces of evil when the quests don’t even have a plot. Strike one.

And there’s basically no tutorial. A couple of screens to tell you what the controls are, and that’s it. No instructions on how to get to the quest areas, it just plonks you down so you can “explore”.

But I hate learning things by trial and error. My generally nervous and high strung temperament doesn’t allow it. I need to know the basics BEFORE I go looking for adventure and excitement. Strike two.

So I dunno if it will last. I may end up returning it. I’ve played it for around 40 minutes so it has around 79 minutes to impress me before I send it back.

Honestly, it’s only the glowing reviews that keep me from returning it right away. I am willing to consider that maybe there is something I don’t “get” about it yet, something that makes it more than a low rent generic MMO, and I just haven’t gotten far enough in the game to experience the magic of it all yet.

But I am not hopeful. Games like what I’ve seen so far are insanely popular with a LOT of people and so this might just not be the game for me.

If so, well, there’s tons of other possible choices in the Steam Summer Sale.

I will keep you posted.

More after the break.

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What the fudge?

So, I had a blood sugar meltdown at Denny’s.

Even though I’ve eaten perfectly normally today. And I have not expended any more effort than usual. So why this happened is a total mystery to me.

I was feeling a slight flutter as I moved from the car to our usual spot in Denny’s, but I didn’t think much of it. Those little vibrations are pretty common for me.

But once I was seated things started sliding downhill pretty fast. Before long, I was feeling nauseous and had a headache that felt like someone had driven a nail into the middle of my forehead and I was sweating and I had this ominous empty feeling all around my core.

And I know what that means. It ain’t good.

Luckily, this was a meltdown, not a crash. A crash is what happens if I don’t heed the warning of a meltdown and get some damned food into me fast.

However, being in a very compromised state, I did not have the presence of mind to ask for help. Logically, I should have said, “I need carbs RIGHT NOW.”

Instead, I just say there in “keeping it together” mode until my food arrived, contributing less than usual to the conversational flow but still more or less present.

It’s worse than futile to berate myself over poor decisions made while in such a state. I did the best I could. And I made it through okay.

Just to be sure, I wanted to get something sugary on the way home but I was having trouble thinking of what I would ask Joe or Julian to get me from 7-11 because like… what would be something sweet but not like… fatally so?

But then Julian suggested a vanilla cone from McD’s, and that was perfect! Ice cream is one of the safer indulgences for me because the dairy keeps the sugar from being absorbed too fast and a nice plain vanilla soft serve cone is good because there’s nothing there EXCEPT ice cream.

The same could not be said for any ice cream treat from 7-11.

And it’s cheap. $2.30. And it really hit the spot.

I am still hungry, however. So I might just make myself a snack at around midnight even though I don’t usually do that on Sundays.

Eating has remarkably high stakes when you’re diabetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m rather proud of that little joke.

Here it is again as a title :

Yeah, another “Fruvous talks” video. Ho hum.

Actually, though, that might be about to end. I am working up the decisiveness to give the good folks at Descript $35 (!) for a month of their low tier service so I can not only continue to edit video by editing the transcript, but access their potentially enormously game changing “adding images and clips to your video” feature which would instantly boost my content into something vaguely professional looking.

That’s the sort of thing that would get me to promote my content more.

The thing is, my kind of talky talk content is the norm over on TikTok. So to be honest, over there, my excuse of too poor production values to promote doesn’t hold water.

But I barely have a concept on how to promote a YouTube channel. I have less thanno idea how one promotes one’s TikTok.

I just make the best content I can and hope that is enough.

Which sounds desperately naïve of me, I know. I am not claiming to have faith that it will all work out okay some day like in some “rise to fame” biography.

“All Johnny knew how to do was whack himself in the nuts with a spatula, but damn if he wasn’t the best nutwhacker on the West Coast. Luckily for him, one day a scout from Testicular Torture magazine happened by… ”

It’s just all I can do for now.

Promotion has always been the Achilles heel of sensitive artist types like myself. That’s why agents exist. Rarely do the skillsets for artistic creation and self-promotion overlap.

At least I am at the point where I consider at least some of my content worth people’s time. So that barrier, lack of belief in my own work, is at least partially down.

I want to do one hell of a lot better, but it will take time for me to get there, and in the meantime, I’m making some halfways decent stuff.

A small victory on the gaming front : I am tentatively optimistic that between me lowering my graphics setting to their lowest possible level and the recent deluge of updates to the game, I have solved the crashing problem with that game Rogue Trader and I can finally play it again.

Which is a little awkward in the middle of my search for a game to replace Elex. Turns out the game I was looking for was right here all along!

Steam has its Summer Sale going and that means there are some outrageously good deals on games I want and I have $30 saved up in my Steam Wallet so I am very tempted to go on a very uncharacteristic shopping spree.

But I know better. The last thing I need is self-induced option paralysis from having too many games active at once. That’s why I usually only have two or maybe three games on the go at one time.

It’s so weird being me. I have such abstruse needs.

I will probably buy one (1) game from the sale, like Palworld or Atlyss, and see how much I like it, and if it’s a keeper, that will be it.

If not, I move on.

Of course, what I really want is that new power supply. But I am doing the mature thing and spending that money on potential artistic avenues like Descript instead.

Things that might, in some far flung future, lead to me actually earning money.

Or at least making some truly kick ass content.

I’d settle for that if I had to.

More after the break.

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That big ego thing

Guess it’s time to take another stab at this one.

Let’s start at the ground floor : I’ve always been extremely gifted and yet I have never had very much self-esteem.

Somehow the two things never connected. I’ve always taken being academically brilliant for granted because it has always been there. From that very first day of them testing me for kindergarten, school consisted, in my subjective experience, of adults asking me to do things I found incredibly easy to do.

And that’s never changed. Things never got much harder for me. They became more work when I had to write essays and such but that just made them better exercise for my mind, it didn’t make them any harder.

Anyhow, blah blah blah. I keep going on about my amazingness precisely because I am trying to wrap my head around it and integrate it into my self-image and keep it from being devoured by my inner darkness again.

Heck, it took me many years to get over the idea that my gifts somehow “don’t count”. That all they did was make my clinging to the bottom rung of society all the more pathetic and unjustified. That all they meant was that I was once more “wasting my potential” on a nearly Biblical scale.

And I mean, yeah. That.

But not ONLY that.

That was the anhedonia insanity talking. It was filtering out all possible good parts of a complex and in many ways astounding thing leaving only the bad.

And now I work hard at getting over that.

Lately I keep imagining my potential ego as a balloon to be filled with hot air from the flames deep inside me.

A literally inflated ego. Ba dump bump.

I keep trying to filled that hot air balloon to get it to float and carry me up to someplace stable and confident and sane, and it keeps not working. It goes right back out again.

But I am getting closer and closer, I can tell. Each time, it holds a little bit more air and for a little bit longer. I can feel it tugging me upwards sometimes and it feels pretty good.

Some day, between adding left and jettisoning dead weight, I will actually achieve liftoff, and then who knows where I’ll end up?

Should be quite the adventure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more I find myself contemplating just leaving the ums and ahs and stutters and y’knows in my videos and just posting them raw.

After all, that’s what the internet likes, right? Raw, uncut, unfiltered opinions that they already agree with.

I can do that.

Anyhow, I am contemplating the raw life again because of how much work went into editing this video and I still ended up leaving a whole bunch of verbal dross in.

I just ran out of energy to keep editing.

Here it is :

Then again, if I stammer that much, maybe my videos would be terrible raw. Maybe the sweat equity I put into editing these things is the price I pay for being able to do everything in one take, with just me talking.

I mean, what else am I going to do? Write a script? Rehearse? DO MORE THEN ONE TAKE? Now you’re just talking crazy.

Still, I am slowly building up my videos to look a little more professional. I am adding my “like and subscribe” bit to the end, plus I usually have a little blooper for after, and this time I even had a very brief opening slate.

Still not decided on that. I think I’ll need something less… crude.

And I will probably make a short end credits sequence too. I will do what I can to restrain my urge to put every funny credit idea I’ve had over the years into it.

I will save those for when I make things that are a tad longer.

I am currently pretty tired because not only did I have Wound Care and the lab to deal with today, my good friend Ross Archer called me out of the blue and we had a nice chat about politics as he traveled through Nevada.

And that was very nice. I loved hearing from him and we had a great talk. We talked for a little over an hour and I loved every minute of it.

It’s so nice to talk with people, like Ross and my friends, who can actually understand my thoughts and ideas when I express them.

Coming from a small town like I do, I did not grow up with that luxury. I was way, way beyond most people there.

Even my family could only follow me so far before getting utterly lost.

I guess having a vlog and a blog is my solution to that problem. I can express myself without worrying about being understood. And I do so as honestly and as well as I know how every single day.

And I want more of that. More outlet for all the stuff whirling around in my head like a dictionary in a tornado. More ways to express my ambitions to make something truly special and new and extraordinary. More production value in my works.

Some vague sort of chance of making money.

Though honestly, for me, the audience is more important. I would rather have a million followers and no money than 10,000 followers and a nice paycheck.

I want to be heard, I want to be listened to, I want to transmit my knowledge and understanding and unique point of view to the world in the hopes of contributing to people’s understanding of the world and playing a part in public discourse.

It’s hard to see from the ground level but arguing with strangers online does serve a purpose. Public discussion is how a society thinks about itself. And the truly excellent commenters add value to that discourse.

And I want to be one of them.

That seems doable to me.

More after the break.

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Another Friday night

OK. Deep breaths. Repeat my mantra : the fact that it feels like time is going faster is an illusion. I am still getting just as many minutes in a day as ever. I can relax about time.

I have to talk myself down that way from time to time because the feeling of acceleration can really freak me out sometimes.

I remember it starting in my late 30s. Back then, it was less about time and more about every day being the same, but I would get this horrible feeling like all my days were collapsing into one never-ending meta-day that I was doomed to repeat forever like a very dull version of Groundhog Day.

And that freaked me the fuck out. It made me feel trapped and oppressed by the sheer weight of it all and made me feel claustrophobic. Claustrophobic about time.

And that’s very not good.

Luckily that went away with age. I think I just learned to deal with it both by not letting the panic set in and by subtly shifting how I remember things from my life so that the ways days differed were emphasized.

But that made way for this new kind of time panic. Like right now. It’s Friday night. And to my aging brain, it feels like the previous Friday night was like… two days ago.

And I know a lot of things happened in the previous week. I can remember them all. And if I couldn’t I could just watch the videos I made.

So these two kinds of memory are in conflict with one another. Clearly the malfunction lies in how I “feel” time. The fact that it feels like the previous Friday was two days ago has to be an illusion because I have a whole week’s worth of memories.

Heck, I have a week’s worth of blog entries as well.

So clearly I need a way to recalibrate how I “feel” time. Perhaps the secret is to try to take in more information from my environment in order to give my mind a greater variety and density of things to remember.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to do more different things with my days. Including one-off non-repeating things that can act as anchors in time.

So basically, I need to get a life already.

So what else is new?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So this is what swam to the top of the tank when called today.

I think it turned out pretty good for something I improvised.

But then again, that’s one of my many strange superpowers, isn’t it? The ability to improvise my way through a speech that almost sounds rehearsed.

I feel like it must be related to my ability to get an A on a test without even studying. Some part of me has this uncanny mental agility when it comes to knitting the parachute after jumping out of the plane.

So to speak.

And that is so not the person I thought I was going to be. I thought I was going to be the Taurus ideal : a sane, sober, practical person who plans things out carefully, including contingencies, and then executes said plans firmly but flexibly.

Instead, I do things by the seat of my pants.

Which is the total opposite of that.

And yet, somehow, it works for me.

I know that I could never be a devil may care rake who never sweats over the practical things in life. I sweat plenty.

I will always be the kind of person who can’t rest until he knows those material things are taken care of.

But as patient readers know, I have been struggling to fit what I am actually like into that picture and have been forced to deal with the fact that some of us can’t live like that.

No matter how much we might want to.

Instead I have a deep need to be spontaneous and fresh and that is fundamentally incompatible with drawn out detailed planning.

Or much planning at all, really.

And yet, again, I somehow get away with it. I make it work. I start a video with only a vague idea of what I want to talk about and get my thoughts out without, ironically, putting much thought to it at all.

And like a lot of writers, sometimes I don’t even know what I think until I write or talk about it. It’s like writing is how I perform the Jungian magic of taking the unconscious and making it conscious, thus articulating it so that the rational conscious mind can examine it and test it out and integrate it into the greater mind.

As a gifted communicator, it is my great fortune to be able to articulate what I am doing in a way that might just help other people by articulating their thoughts for them.

A lot of people need help with this level of articulation, and that’s where people like me come in, if we’re lucky.

I keep returning to the idea of taking my videos to the next level by tapping into the great orator inside me and making big stirring inspirational speeches.

Or at least trying to.

As patient readers know, my personal history contains tantalizing hints that I might just be a truly mesmerizing orator.

If so, then I really “should” be using that gift to aid the side of the angels. But I guess I have always been kind of afraid of that kind of power and the free-flowing state of mind I have to be in to access that oratory prowess.

In that mode, I truly don’t know what I will say, and that scares me to death because I might say something that gets me canceled like a bad check.

I suppose I could take the whole, “I said what I said, so fuck you” stance of the true rebel. Tell everyone that I speak from the heart and that isn’t always pretty. Make snide remarks about hurting people’s precious little feelings.

Nah. I could be an outrageous pundit but not in quite that way. I would definitely be taking a lot of unique and controversial stances, and really challenge the status quo, but I would never want to be “that angry guy”.

I want to be the guy the media always goes to because my take on things is always fresh and new and different and really gets people talking.

Yeah. That’s the life for me.

But first I have to get the fuck out of my own way.

Isn’t that the eternal struggle?

More after the break.

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A nice quiet day

That’s what today has been compared to the previous three days.

All I had today was Therapy Thursday. I recounted my week so far to my therapist Doctor Costin, then rambled on like I usually do, unspooling various thoughts of a psychological variety in whatever order they occurred to me.

As you can see by today’s video, shot directly after getting off the phone with the good doctor, one of the things we discussed (well, I discoursed) was my thoughts on clarity and its pitfalls.

I am glad that I have now had the thought, “what’s so bad about not being able to think clearly?” so that my subconscious mind can chew on that bone for a while.

Which means I might write about it again if I make some progress.

I’ll try to keep you posted.

Right now I am thinking mostly about the coldness of it all. How I have kept my interior world so god damned fucking cold (Midnight Tundra) at least partially in order to maintain this god damned “clarity” like my mind is a lens made of ice that can only be perfectly clear if it’s incredibly cold.

Well fuck that. Geez. I’ve been cold and clear for a long assed time now and it’s left me broken and bizarre in a hostile wasteland without vital force for too long.

Fuck cold and clear. I am willing to give warm and confused a try.

Because like I keep saying, coping with the world that way must be possible because as far as I can tell, it’s how like 75 percent of the world gets by.

One of the perks of having godlike intelligence is it allows you to mentally misfire in ways mere mortals could not even comprehend.

So my quest, or at least part of it, is to learn how to deal with the world on a less “logical” basis. Less thinky, more feely.

And that means tunneling down into the hot living core of my being so that its heat can thaw me out and make me real again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had SUCH a week!

And it ain’t over yet.

Here’s the vid.

Right now I feel pretty sore. All that squishing and squeezing, plus my unusually high activity level over the past three days, has left me achy and cranky.

It’s a good thing I am alone right now because I might snap at someone if they got on my nerves right now.

And that would not be acceptable. Not coming from me.

For one thing, I know that with my sniper’s wit, a casual cranky comment from me could really hurt somebody.

For another thing, I place a lot of value on self control. As patient readers know, my late father, Larry, was an angry, impatient. short tempered man and I will forever hate his memory for his inability, and/or unwillingness, to restrain his anger so that he did not end up hurting his wife and children.

Would that have been too much to ask? Apparently so.

And I know that having made it this far without turning into him is no guarantee that it will never happen. I can feel that anger and impatience within me. There are times when it’s like having a pack of barking dogs in my head and the easiest thing in the world would be to set them loose.

But I will never do that.

Or at least not until I am rich and famous and spoiled.

Because unlike good ol Larry, I have the empathy to feel my effect on others and that means that to hurt others is to hurt myself.

Luckily, that also means that to make others happy is to make me happy. So that’s the kind of thing I try to focus on.

I really should try to get back to doing standup.

Still, as patient readers also know, this leaves me with vast oceans of unexpressed anger that no doubt wreaks havoc on my mental health.

So let’s quickly go through my usual bullshit on this subject :

1. I have a lot of untapped rage
2. It’s very bad for me
3. I would be a lot better off if I found a way to express it
4. But expressing it means maybe hurting others
5. That is completely unacceptable to me
6. I need a non-destructive outlet for my latent furor.
7. But that involves dealing with my anger and all that anger scares me and makes me feel like if I open the door to it even a tiny bit, I will go all Mister Hyde
8. So I guess I will just keep suppressing it forever

That gets the basic idea across.

And it’s not like I can’t think of healthy outlets. Sex could be one of them, if body and mind cooperated. Getting into political discussions online could also provide some way to vent my bile. Or I could buy an old mattress and beat the stuffing out of it.

But those are just more pearls on my ever so long string of things I could do and probably should do but don’t, and I have to live with that.

What I can’t afford to do is drive myself crazy by trying to brute force my way through the problem because that only creates enormous tension within me as my mind attempts to force a jammed mechanism.

Much better to go the opposite direction and try to relax the whole system so that the jam just falls right out on its own.

If you catch my drift. And by drift I mean metaphor.

This is a lesson I have been trying to learn for a long time now. A deep part of me wants to be active and activated and be able to, at long last, harness my unprocessed id energies and get them working in my own best interests.

As opposed to having them all jammed up inside me and causing me pain.

I just have to find a solution that is right for me.

All these “shoulda/woulda” scenarios are just ideas that did not fit and therefore were not executed by me.

If I want to do more things than I need to find way more things that I not only could do and should do but WOULD do.

And that requires knowing myself a lot better.

More after the break.

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Late addition : Here’s blood in your eye!

So I happened to glance in the mirror as I washed my hands earlier today and boggled because there was something in my left eye.

Literally. As in, inside the eyeball.

Turned out to be a triangle shaped patch of BLOOD, with the point of the triangle pointing at the center of my pupil.

This alarmed me.

So being me, I then sat down to play video games while I thought the whole thing over. Basically, I needed time to talk myself into doing what I had to do.

Which was go to the ER. Blood in your eyeball is not the sort of thing one ignores, even if one is as lazy and reluctant to do that as I am.

Because the ER sucks.

And boy did it suck tonight. I was there for FIVE AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS before a doctor finally saw me, gave me like a ten second exam, and told me it was no big deal so I should just go home.

YOU COULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT HOURS AGO.

I had a couple of books with me, so it wasn’t a total drag. And I am sort of quantum proud (both proud and not proud in superposition) of the fact that at around the three hour mark I marched up to the triage window and told them how pissed off I was.

After which the nurse I bitched at came out and talked to me. It was… civil. He explained to me that they only had one “eye room” and so I had to wait for it.

I call shenanigans. What, one person was monopolizing the one “eye room” for all of those hours? Plus I had been in that “eye room” before (when virtually the same thing happened) and apart from one piece of equipment (which is ON WHEELS), there is nothing particularly specialized to eye work in there.

Doctor Cheng could have seen me in the waiting room and saved us all a lot of time.

Oh well, it’s over now. Next time I will check out the new Urgent Care over on Shellbridge. According to an old fella I talked to in the waiting room, when he went there there was nobody in the waiting room and he was seen right away.

Well that explains why the one on 3 Road is still absolutely slammed and there’s no point in going there after 10 am because they’re already booked up for the day.

Clearly people don’t know about the new one at all yet.

Really wish I had done that instead.

Oh well, next time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Patient readers know what this is all about.

I got another needle in the eye today.

And that includes the hair on my head, not just the hair on my face. I should give myself my usual crudely effective (ish) self haircut so I can optimize head loss for the summer.

Invention idea : heat sinks for your head.

Look, I didn’t say it was a good idea.

I wish I could just radiate my excess heat back into my environment in the occasional soft burst of light.

That’d be a conversation starter.

Been pondering wackiness lately. You know, zaniness. The urge to be weird and surprising and funny and mentally stimulating in an energetic and surprising way.

It can be a form of redirected anger.

At least in me it can. There’s been a number of times in my life where instead of getting mad, I got weird. Started bouncing off the walls, metaphorically speaking, being all perky and funny but in a slightly scary way.

Scary to me, anyhow.

This suggests being weird can be a form of aggression. Emphasis on “can”. It usually isn’t, it’s usually just an oddball person being themselves, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t recognize that sometimes being weird and wild and kooky can be a way of low key messing with people’s minds while also advertising your weirdness to other weirdos who might want to join in.

I adore anyone I can be completely wacky with.

It’s one of the main reasons I love my buddy Maelkoth. We can be completely out of our minds with each other and deliberately try to throw the craziest, most messed up verbal curveballs at one another and love every moment of it.

Reminds me of hanging out with my brother Dave. I miss him.

What got me onto this wackiness kick was the feeling that I should be trying to invest my videos with that wild and wooly energy I brought to Drive Uno.

Admittedly, for Uno, I had someone animating my scripts, so I could be as crazy and random and Python-esque as I wanted to be with no consequences to me.

These days, until I finally bite the bullet and subscribe to one of these AI video generating sites, I will have to execute whatever I think of.

Which seriously limits my ambition level, to be honest.

I checked out Invideo yesterday. They claim they can straight from my script to finished video. And not just in the lame “explainer video” way.

Of course, they also want $35 USD per month, and that’s for the “so shitty it’s almost insulting” level plan.

They know what they have, dammit.

And there’s the fact that I also want to finally solve my power supply issues. And that’s not going to be cheap. Probably at least 80 bucks.

So I feel like it’s a real “choose your destiny” fork in the road kind of thing. I could choose video games, and buy the power supply, or I could spend that money on Invideo or LTX or Descript or something else that can help my actual creative output.

Clearly the latter is the smarter choice. Not being able to play the latest games is a bitch but this computer of mine can still play lots of things, so it’s not like I will go gameless.

Even though going gameless would, quite frankly, probably do me a lot of good in the long run. It would force me to find other things to do with all that energy.

But I don’t think I am ready for that yet.

I’m proud that I have added making a video every day to my routine and found more and better use for my energies that way.

Already, my videos are getting me more visibility than this silly ol’ blog of mine ever will.

But who knows, maybe I will get royally sick of video games some day and truly go on a hunt for more interesting things to do with my time.

Until then, baby steps.

More after the break.

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The game I might get

It’s this game with a very irritating name.

It’s called Atlyss and about a year ago it was absolutely red hot everywhere. Especially with furries, naturally, as it’s a heavily anthro animal oriented game, but surprisingly also with the wider gaming audience.

There were a lot of pro reviews along the lines of, “I didn’t expect to like this game at all but it’s actually, surprisingly, super fun. Also, I think I might be a furry now. ”

And it has a “overwhelmingly positive” score on Steam, which is the second highest rating, right after “universal acclaim”.

Shockingly, it has no Metascore on Metacritic. What D. Fuck? If it has enough reviews to have an “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam then surely there’s enough for there to be a Metascore for the damned thing.

Oh well, whatever.

I just wanted a more quantified measurement. Numbers soothe me.

Anyhow, all signs point to Atlyss being an excellent game. And yet, when I look at this trailer for it, all I can think of is “meh. “

‘Those are some pretty “old school” graphics, and that is not a selling point for me because I was around when those kinds of graphics were the new hotness and that, for me, means they will never look “retro”, just “old and busted”.

I hate to think I have become a total graphics snob. But when things look old and janky like that, I find it depressing.

Now it could easily be that if I get the thing and start playing it, I will love the Dickens out of it and the graphics won’t matter.

I’ve played graphically primitive games and enjoyed them before, after all.

But for now, I feel conflicted. All available data says it’s a great game and yet my impression of it from the trailers is very poor.

So I dunno.

But I need to find a new game because Elex mysteriously stopped working for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, for the pulse pounding excitement of me talking to my webcam.

So yeah. I have one fucked up leg.

There are no other symptoms that I can detect. That area doesn’t feel hot, there’s no discharge or lesions or ulcers, i don’t feel faint or out of breath, and so on.

And that’s a good sign but by no means a guarantee that there is not something further wrong with that area.

Knowing me, it’s entirely possible that a doctor or nurse will ask me about a symptom and I will be like, “Yes, in fact, I think I’ve been experiencing that for some time, now that you mention it. ”

My bizarre brain just filed it under “noise” and filtered it out till now.

I’m convinced that said filtering is a big part of intelligence and/or genius. The sorts of abstract and symbolic reasoning tasks favored by the modern Western definition of “intelligence” require you to tune out both the sensory world and your own emotions in order to listen to the inner voice of that section of your subconscious mind that handles that kind of thing.

Hence the correlation between intelligence and the thickness of that region of the brain responsible for suppressing emotion so that we can think clearly.

Speaking of thinking clearly…

Something I have been pondering lately is my own prioritization of mental clarity. Over the years I have invested considerable time, energy, and emotional capital trying to hold myself apart from what is going on so as to not be overwhelmed by emotions and stimulation, all so I can keep my precious “clarity”.

Hence the fear of overstimulation. If too much is going on I can’t think clearly and I might have to actually make a decision based on emotion.

And surely that could only ever end badly.

Or so my overly cerebral outlook seems to think.

But now I am heavily rethinking that. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be in the scrum of emotions and passions and impractical concerns with everyone else. Maybe maintaining an icy cold detachment from everything is actually extremely bad for the soul because it’s cutting me off from all that is warm and wholesome and good in the world, and all to be sure to see the “truth”.

Sure, I’m a broken down emotional wreck of a human who has never gotten within a country mile of adulthood and who can’t get his life moving because he’s too scared of everything to do anything, but hey, it’s all worth it to know I have the right answer!

Yeah. Maybe the absolute truth ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Maybe at times it’s positively antithetical to human happiness. Maybe my relentless, shark-like hunger for The Truth is a misguided attempt to force a chaotic world to make sense to me in a way I can accept.

Namely, a super cerebral way.

Maybe what I really need is to hunt down that truth shark and get it under control so I can live a more warmly human life and feel like I am a part of everything good and alive instead of feeling cold and dead all the time.

Of course I’m cold. I’ve been keeping myself in an arctic freeze just to keep the lens of my mind crystal clear.

For all the good that’s done me.

I think I’d rather know less of the truth and be more of a person instead of being the bizarre and otherworldly creature I am today.

So what if things become somewhat muddled?

On the whole, I’d rather be happy.

On the whole, I’d rather be alive.

More after the break.

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I don’t wanna be awake

Wah, wah, wah.

Because of the unusual addition of a doctor’s appointment to the day’s routine, I am more tired than usual.

Honestly, my whole routine has been thrown off, but whatever. I’m smart, I’m hip, I’m adaptable. I will survive.

I just need to catch the fuck up on sleep, that’s all.

I have another medical appointment tomorrow. In addition to the Wound Care I ususally have on Tuesdays, I have another appointment with my ophthalmologist, Doctor McKay.

Probably gonna get another needle in the eye. Joy. Oh well, beats blindness.

Depending on how I feel after, Julian might drop me off at the LifeLabs right around the corner from us so I can get that bloodwork done.

We will see. I might be in a grumpy mood after getting a needle to the eye and not really feel like dealing with that whole deal.

We’ll definitely be going to the LifeLabs around the corner and not the one over on 3 Road, though. The 3 Road one is cold and impersonal and always super crowded.

The one next to our pharmacy on the corner of Cook and Buswell, on the other hand, has a comfortably old and warm vibe.

And I am all about the vibes.

The only problem with the one around the corner is that it has pay parking. But that’s easily solved by Julian dropping me off then coming back to pick me up once they have taken my blood.

Watch out for those phlebotomists, they’re out for blood!

That would be a great name for a blood drive at Pride. Or some kind of mixer event for gay vampires and people who want to “donate”.

What? You just know that there’s fags out there who dream of a tall dark mysterious stranger who wants to suck their… blood.

It really is just a metaphor for sex, isn’t it?

If I don’t get the lab work done tomorrow I will get it done the next day, Wednesday. I am determined to get it done ASAP so I don’t forget all about it.

When you are chronically absentminded, you have to find ways to compensate if you hope to lead any sort of a life.

So until I have a personal assistant to remind me of stuff like that, I will have to strike while the iron is hot.

You can strike when it’s cold but all you’ll get is a loud clanging sound.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, am I tired.

Here’s what I made today :

I wish I had been able to do the whole lyrics on screen thing I usually do in order to give the video some kind of visual interest, but like I said, I ran out of gas.

To the point where taking a shower when I am done here seems like a big chore.

I put considerable time and energy into today’s doggerel and so it was all I could manage to make some sort of video for the song.

Perhaps tomorrow’s video project will be to make a better video for it. Something more befitting its potential as an anti-Trump viral hit.

Hey, it could happen.

There’s a neurotic little voice in my head that’s worried that without the lyrics on screen people might miss out on some of my hilarious lyrics.

Another reason to make a better vid for it when I have the energy.

I knew I was in trouble when I generated the song then glanced at the clock and it was 2:30 pm and I hadn’t even started the video yet.

Like I said, I think I am going to have to start making these things earlier in the day. Right now, doing a video at 2 pm when I will be blogging at 4:05 pm is starting to seem like I am not giving myself enough time.

Maybe I could do a rough version in the morning, at say 10 am, then polish things up as best as I can at 2 pm.

That sounds doable.

And it would give me more to do with my time than just wasting time with video games.

Maybe I really am growing up, because it increasingly feels like I play video games just to pass the time before I get to make stuff.

And that’s silly, right? Why not make stuff whenever I feel like it? It’s not like I am waiting for someone else to be ready or anything.

It all comes back to routine. My routine is the only structure in my life and I am increasingly aware of how desperately dependent on it I am.

I’ve never thought of myself as the kind of person who needs to do the same things and the same time and the same way every day, but I am, kinda.

Not to a Sheldon from Big Bang Theory extent but if something kept me from doing things on my usual schedule, I would find it very upsetting.

Here is my day so far :

8 am – Breakfast and hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries.
2 pm – Make a video
4:05 pm – Blogging part 1, plus eating lunch
8 pm – Blogging Part 2, plus eating supper
Midnight : hanging out with Julian watching Colbert on the PVR and having my snack

As you can see, it’s a frenetic, madcap existence that’s bound to put me in an early grave from living such a dissolute life.

Seriously though, there’s room there for more productive things to do. I mean, the whole stretch of time between midnight and noon is wide open. I could fit something or other in there, maybe to coincide with breakfast.

Or maybe I should keep that as a relaxed stress-free time to hang with all my fuzzy friends and not turn it into something that has to be “productive”.

I dunno. I’m new at this whole… doing things… thing.

I really do want to improve the quality of my videos. They still seems sloppy and halfassed to me now and I want to get to 3/4 assed at least.

It’s something I’ll have to think about.

More after the break.

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I used to think I couldn’t have Daddy issues because I had no relationship with my father any more.

Which is stupid right on the face of it.

The fact that at one point I froze my father out of my mind did nothing to change the underlying truth that every boy needs a father and for the most part I didn’t get one.

Oh, he was there, more’s the pity. We all lived in the shadow of his rage. He was a short-tempered, impatient, verbally abusive asshole who hilariously wondered why he didn’t have a closer relationship with his kids.

Because you weren’t safe to be around, ever, Larry.

Do the freaking math.

And because he wasn’t safe to be around, he didn’t really fill the job of father for me on an emotional level. I couldn’t go to him with problems. I couldn’t ask his advice. He never taught me or encouraged me to take (smart) risks. I certainly couldn’t share my deepest darkest secrets with him.

For most of my childhood I avoided him as much as I could. It was like living with some kind of fairy tale ogre. A particularly petulant one.

And now, yup, I am definitely attracted to older men, which is a bit rich coming from a 52 year old. I long for someone strong and competent and confident and calm who can take my hand and soothe my anxiety and gently lead me forward as he helps me sort through all my thoughts and feelings and guides me past the road blocks in my mind.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing I didn’t get from Larry.

And maybe that’s why I am so high strung and anxious and weak. I did not get vital infusions of positive male energy in my formative years and so I ended up being an overwrought hand-wringing “mama’s boy” type.

On the other hand, I could be really good for that “daddy figure” I described. I could be the soft, feminine, understanding, empathic feminine energy to go with his masculine energy and give him the comfort and gentleness he can’t give himself.

I could be his “mommy figure”.

In fact, I think I’d enjoy that a lot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, I’m starting to get used to never truly being happy with what I make.

Did another song. Here it is.

Like, I know there’s things I wanted to put into that song that never made it in. And I know there’s aspects of that metaphor that could be expanded on to better flesh out my feelings on the matter. And so forth and so on.

But I learn by doing, not by getting it perfect the first time. I can only tell myself that the next song will be better and so on ad infinitum until the day I die.

Would that be “ad mortem”?

Not that I think today’s song is terrible. Far from it. But as the creator, I can feel how much better it could be and it occupies my mind.

Eventually this “little dissatisfaction” will burrow itself deep into my subconscious and inform the inner workings of my petulant but brilliant muse and that will, in time, lead to making better songs.

It’s kind of amazing, really.

Today’s been okay so far. I enjoyed writing the lyrics to that sad lil song up there. I think I am slowly getting to the point where I can stick with things and fuss and fidget over them as I try to make them better.

You know, the way sane people make art.

I’m still pretty impatient. I want to blaze across the sky, not tinker and labor away in some subterranean atelier.

But I’m learning. And I am growing impatient with feeling embarrassed by what I make and its slipshod and sloppy half-assed nature.

I am tired of “getting away” with turning in first drafts. I know that I could do so much better and that I should stop resting on my enormous laurels and coasting on my ability to impress people and start turning out some seriously professional work.

I mean, most of the time I don’t even remember to stick my “like and subscribe” thing at the end of my videos. That’s got to end.

I should even start putting a link to my Patreon in the descriptions of my videos. And come up with some sort of reward tier thing.

Gah, it all seems so needy and pathetic. Self promotion is always hard to do but it’s especially hard when you are from a generation that hates promotion in general.

Look, like my shit or don’t. Whatever.

But I want money and that means getting the fuck over myself and doing the things other, way more successful YouTubers do to drum up support.

I could make merch, I suppose. Very snarky merch. T-shirts and coffee mugs and decorative wigwams with sarcastic, cynical slogans.

Or maybe a very obviously fictional T-shirt for my “band” (which doesn’t even have a name yet) with tour dates at like, the gates of Hell and Magical Pony Land and so on.

No idea what I’d call myself, and it’s not like I’d tour. I’m not even a real recording artist, I’m just some AI aware poet making songs with Riffusion for fun.

Still, it would be awesome if some actual band wanted to play one of my songs. Riffusion could be seen as the ultimate way for songwriters to demo their songs when they can’t sing or play an instrument.

I’ve Googled whether there’s a tool out there that will generation backing tracks based on existing vocals and the answer, astonishingly enough, seems to be “no”.

It’s so counterintuitive! AI can generate entire songs based on my lyrics but it can’t do the seemingly much simpler task of making music to go with my singing.

Oh well, I am sure someone is working on it. It could easily be something every aspiring singer is going to want, especially if it comes with vocal cleanup and autotune.

I mean, what the hell, the professionals use them!

More after the break.

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Life at the bottom

My mood is fairly “down” right now.

But like I told Joe recently, being “down” doesn’t necessarily mean feeling “bad”.

There are few assumptions engendered by modern society quite as harmful as the idea that we should be happy all the time and if we’re not happy, something is wrong.

Either with us, or with the world, or both.

And this assumption causes us to fight the natural downshift in our mood cycle and it is this futile fight that does us the most damage.

Smart, sane people just let their mood go up and down. They know, intuitively, from their life experience, that moods go up and down. Sometimes we’re “up”, and sometimes we’re “down”, just like sometimes we’re energetic and sometimes we’re tired.

In general, we in the West need to make peace with the cyclical.

The world turns. The sun rises and falls. Night become day, day becomes night. The seasons change as the Earth goes ’round the Sun. The Sun goes ’round the galaxy, and the galaxy dances with all the other galaxies in an endless dos-y-dos.

Even our very lives rise and fall and wax and wane, just like the Moon.

We live in circles but we think in arrows.

Especially me. I’m a future oriented pragmatist and that inherently means that I want to move from absolute position A to absolute position B via “progress”.

This is deeply fundamental to how I think. There has to be at least the possibility of improvement. I can’t imagine living in a world where everything returns to first position and the same things happen all over again.

But I recognize the cyclical nature of things. No matter how hard we try to travel in a straight and logical line, the best we can hope to do is go up the spiral staircase.

And you know what? That’s good enough for me. Straight lines are overrated. As long as we’re trending upwards, I can learn to accept the highs and lows.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.