“Miss Take”; Horrorpops
let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.
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A couple of months ago I tried, and failed, to upload a couple of videos to YouTube. For some reason I got it in my head it was because of the format my little movies are in… mostly .mov files. But last night I actually took time to look at the YT FAQs and it turns out I’m slightly retarded. So I uploaded two short videos of the storm we had last week…
From Main Street… that building at the end is a mural.
I’ve been using YouTube for what it was originally intended, as a place to secretly deposit copyrighted material. Anytime I find a YouTube I want to keep, but know is going to be deleted once it’s found by someone like Viacom or Universal Music Group, I use Real Player to make a copy in Flash. Then I upload to one of my YouTube accounts and link to it from there.
It totally sucks, I know, but there’s this thing called… actually I can’t remember what it’s called but basically I can quote from copyrighted material as long as it’s for a story… and, for the most part, the YouTube’s I use on Salted are picked, kind of, specifically for the Post they appear on… you know, for the most part, as quotes. Just like the written poems and outtakes from Grand Theft Auto I use… like when Two Star Cop asks Carl: “You want some nightstick?!?” Classic.
Actually… with the thirty-six hours of music I grabbed a couple of months ago from bit Torrent, these YouTubes and the idea for No Post Days which I totally ripped off from Anita Marie, I wouldn’t be surprised if Interpol was getting ready to knock on my door.
Technically I’ve only uploaded six copyrighted things but one of them’s from Mad TV and I can’t see anyone really caring about that. Anyway… I’ll be posting more of my own video stuff from here on so consider this a warning. No, there will be no videos of me looking into the camera and describing my day — I just saw a video post from a Recovery Blog where the blogger was thanking her readers for sending her cash. tah-ACK-eeee. Yes, there will Totally be a lot of shaking camera techniques.
So, just a quick question for anyone willing to answer (all the cool kids do it):
How do you feel about downloading songs or “stuff” from the Interweb?
“Oh Come All Ye Faithful”; Twisted Sister
Let me know if the YouTube’s missing…
“Despite a commonly held myth that the Christmas season has the highest suicide rate of all the seasons, studies have proven that across North America, suicide rates are actually lower at that time of year. Studies suggest that while the holidays can bring up some very difficult emotions, they also tend to evoke feelings of familial bonds and these feelings may act as a buffer against suicide.” The Canadian Mental Health Association
“Maybe it’s the added emphasis the people in our lives place on making sure we Manic Depressives are not alone over the holidays, or maybe it’s because we search out people because we feel as though the holidays are a danger to us, but there are no spikes in North America for suicides over the Christmas Season. In fact this time of year is one of the safer periods for Manic Depressives.
“This particular season, however, remains one of the worst times for common depression. The daylight is mostly gone; there are happy people all around us who appear to be having a much easier time coping with their lives than we are, and; every hour of every day advertising reminds us we are all too broke to properly show our love to our family and friends.
“While our disease creates depressions which are absolutely random, Manic Depressives are not immune to the Christmas Blues. It’s just very difficult for us to distinguish the difference between real emotion and the disease. It’s even harder to gauge what our response to a real emotional depression should be. Because we get hit so often by the same hard emotions over time our responses become almost automatic (“I can feel the wave coming on, I should just stay in bed and not move”). Then when we experience a common depression we completely surrender before we realize we only feel depressed because NBC has pre-empted The Office. If Pavlov wanted to observe conditioned behaviour he could have used Manic Depressives.” Something I wrote here on Salted last Christmas
This Christmas shit really eats into our lifestyles… at least it has always eaten into mine. This is just about the time of year when the Vitamin D I stored up over the summer runs out. The only time I’ve seen sunshine in the past four weeks has been diffused through two snow storms, one Blizzard and a 45-minute trip to and from the dentist yesterday afternoon… and of course when I’m playing Grand Theft Auto.
I am so messed up it actually hurt to get dressed today, and during dinner with Mom my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I am getting some Vitamin D through the three Litres of milk I drink nearly everyday and the multivitamin I take every morning, so I know I’m better off physically than most people…
I have been depressed over the past couple of weeks and I do think it’s weather and seasonally driven. But I’ve also been considering something else… when we’re at the point in our Recovery where we’re not dreaming about our suicide, is it possible we’ve kept the feeling even while tossing the idea?
All of the time we’ve spent dreaming and fantasizing and planning our suicides, all of that time never believing we had a future to worry about or plan for… what if all of that is still there, what if all of that has conditioned our behaviour to the point where the behaviour is still there even though we’re not having the suicidal thoughts anymore…
It’s like I’ve exchanged “I think I’ll kill myself” for “There’s no point making plans beyond next month because I’ll probably be dead or the world will explode.” I still have the same innate sense of nihilism, it has just become Passive. I’m not a threat to myself, I’ll probably not kill myself, but now I’m waiting… I won’t shoot myself but I probably won’t get out of the way of the bullet you just fired.
What kept me alive while unmedicated wasn’t a sense of optimism because there was no faith in a better tomorrow, it was either “I just don’t have the energy to kill myself today” or “what’s the point in killing myself Now?” To move past any of my suicide fantasies I was never thinking “boy, what about those grandkids?” I was mostly thinking “I don’t think I have enough pills to do it right” or “fuck, what if I end up in a coma?” or “I’d rather not have my brother be the first one to find my body.” But mostly it was “there’s just no point in killing myself Today”… the implication being “there’ll probably be a better reason later anyway.”
So I did that every day for eighteen years — give or take. This is kind of what I was getting at a couple of posts ago… the Stockholm Syndrome, where the disease is the SLA and we’re Patty Hearst. When you’re a part of a cult the Cult Leader beats on you daily, either physically or emotionally, until you believe what they believe. Well the Manic Depression, left untreated, beats on Us every day… until we believe what it tells us, until we’re left exhausted and with a view of the world that’s perverted and wrong.
“If Pavlov wanted to observe conditioned behaviour he could have used Manic Depressives.”
But now it’s Christmas and then New Year’s and both are times for thinking about Future Shit and planning events like Christmas dinners and New Year’s parties… it has actually gotten to the point where I’ve stopped lying about it (“Oh, well, I might do this or that or the Other thing”), when someone asks me what I’ve got planned for Blah Day I either change the topic or ask about their plans.
I will be with my parents and at least one brother and one sister and my girlfriend this Holiday Season, and I will enjoy all of their company Very much and I will participate and not be a Dark Presence in the corner… anyway, this was supposed to be about Christmas but turned into something else or something more…
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas An Ice Age… 1pm December 16, 2007 — Photo by Me.
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“My Favourite Game”; The Cardigans
Let me know if the YouTube’s missing…
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Fifty centimetres of snow dropped on my Little Village yesterday. Depending on who you ask, or which metric to Imperial measurement conversion site you use, that’s about 22 inches of snow. The wind was gusting up to 130km/h which is around 80mph. My neighbour is one of the dudes who drive the big snow removal machines, and he told me some of the more country-like roads around here had mile long drifts of ten feet of snow. Of course most roads here are country roads…
My roof did not cave in, the power never even flickered, the Cubans and their Soviet masters didn’t invade and I didn’t run out of Diet Pepsi… but, more importantly, I remembered how much I love snow.
I fucking love snow. Really. Honestly. I fucking Love snow. I spent a couple of hours walking around during the “Weather Event” in snow up to my knees and sometimes higher… the snow was mostly ‘falling’ horizontally, actually it wasn’t so much snow as little stinging balls of hate. There’s this bizarre Urban Myth about the Inuit having seven-bazillion words for Snow, and how much richer their language is for having such precision. But it’s absolute bullshit. Those languages (there are several) have the same basic number of words for snow as there are in English. Every thing else are adjectives.
Heavy snow, wet snow, packed snow, fluffy snow… I love them all. But what I couldn’t understand was why the forecasters and Weather People seemed to almost deliberately refuse to use the B Word… no one called this thing a Blizzard. I kept hearing “Monster Storm” and “Severe Weather Event” and even “Extreme Snowfall”, but until tonight when the CBC finally used it there was no mention of a Blizzard.
In Case Of An Ice Age, Find A Canadian… 3pm December 16, 2007 — Photo by Me.
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It’s entirely possible that it has been so long since we had a Really Good Blizzard around here the Weather People forgot about the word. We’ve had a couple of Green Christmases in a row, last January my step-father and I were building a porch under a bright and warm Spring-like day. I was actually very comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt. After that it got really cold and there was some snow, but nothing major. If you can still use the bottom three stairs on your porch it’s not a Real Snowfall.
I figure “Extreme Weather Event” comes from three sources: ratings; the week long anticipation of a Storm making its way from the Central United States north to Central and Eastern Canada, and; people have a tendency to forget which country they’re in… most of the people I saw interviewed and doing the interviewing for this story came from Toronto. Now, Toronto can get cold in the winter. But I lived there for six years or so and I think I stepped outside twice. Torontonians do not go outside in the Winter. They live in their cars, taxi’s, subways, underground walkways and Clubs.
At least the ones who are on TV warning us about this thing called a “Weather Event” which may, quite possibly, kill everyone it touches.
Canadian Weather below the 60th parallel runs from 40C to -40C (105F to -40F), I can survive the pluses but it’s the minus part I really like. You can’t dress for heat and humidity. The colder it gets the thicker the sweater you pull out of the trunk. So far this Season has been great for snow even though Winter doesn’t officially start for another couple of days… two weeks ago we received 30+cm of snow and now this. We only get Blizzards once every few years though… it’s a shame.
So… I survived the Blizzard Of 07. I’m thinking about getting T-shirts made up.
“Tuer l’idole”; Les Breastfeeders
Let me know if the YouTube’s missing…
I’m flipping between the classic “Requiem for a Heavyweight“, starring Jackie Gleason, Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rooney on TVO, and the Weather Channel so I can watch “The Storm Of The Decade” make its way North. Right now it’s still south of the Canada-America border, but the winds are Starting To Blow in Toronto. The last snowfall guesstimate for the region I’m in (400 miles north of Toronto) is calling for 40-60cm… that’s about two feet of snow in one shot. Police and government-types are asking people to store food in case the power is out for an extended time. There are two Pacific Ocean systems which effect weather in North America, they come around once every few years. One is El Nino and the other is La Niña. El brings the heat to Canada, La brings the Snow and cold. This is a LaLa Year.
Back in 1998 a Storm of Epic Proportions hit this region… called “The Ice Storm“, over a period of eighty hours twice the normal annual amount of precipitation was dumped on Southern Quebec, Eastern Ontario (basically between Ottawa and Montreal) and bits and pieces of New England and New Brunswick. It came in waves of freezing rain, rain, sleet, ice pellets and snow. Almost 900,000 homes in Quebec and another 100,000 in Ontario lost power, and over 100,000 had to rely on shelters… while a couple of million people were without electricity for up to six weeks. Most people had power within ten days, but here in Rural Land some of us went a lot longer. A friend of mine went the full six weeks.
Twenty-five people were killed and tens of thousands of farm animals died… mostly cows which couldn’t be milked. It also left the entire electricity infrastructure of this region laying on the ground. It was a multi-billion dollar cleanup. So… I’m not entirely impressed by what the mostly Toronto-based media keep referring to as “The [most recent] Storm Of The Decade.” It seems to be mostly a media feeding frenzy fed by the amount of time it’s taking for the fucking thing to actually hit Canada… the storm has been beating the shit out of the Central United States, in fact they’ve had their own Ice Storm which has left millions out of power across four States.
But… But, there is a really good chance I will lose power for a couple of days. Or maybe not. There’s a flat roof on this very old building so maybe my ceiling will collapse… or, maybe not. Or maybe Cuba, backed by the Soviet Military, will take this opportunity to finally invade my strategically important Little Village and I, along with a few other survivalists, will be forced into the woods where we will lead an armed counterinsurgency over several years until the United Nations can finally get its shit together and allow a group of nations to come and fight with us… Wolverines!
However it goes down I might be without power for a few minutes, a few days or until a force made up of the armed forces of Norway, Guatemala and Wales — Canada’s natural allies — are able to take back what Cuba has possibly taken.
Wish us Luck. If “Requiem” is the last movie I watch before I’m forced to walk the Snowy Wastes in search of an Internet connection, it’s a great way to go out… awesome movie. Actually, due to an almost complete lack of insulation in this building I can feel the wind picking up… damn, it’s getting really cold and I’m just realizing I have, maybe, a days worth of Diet Pepsi left. If this thing goes long I may not survive… if I don’t make it back raffle off my Avatar and donate the proceeds to the Free Eastern Ontario From Cuba Fund.
“Knights Of Cydonia”; Muse
Flaming Energy Ball… let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.
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I am so freaking hungry right now… it’s almost 6pm and I’ve been dicking around on Other Peoples blogs all day. I took a run through my blogroll and found some people who have given up blogging, who have for various reasons either paused or vacated their blogs… thankfully no deletes, however. I did it mostly because Dame Wiggy has taken hers private, but also because it has been awhile since I’ve checked out the blogs in my blogroll. No doubt about it, it’s always weird to take a stroll through someone else’s conversations.
So then I spent an hour tapping the “Next” Arrow to see some random WordPress blogs… and, I’m not sure if this is done on purpose, but I ran through thirty or more blogs in a row with no or very few comments on them. Once I noticed it started getting depressing, then weird. Then I was going to make a list of them, like put their URL’s together in a post and maybe either move some traffic to their sites or show them some way of using tags and categories to find other bloggers with a similar interest and maybe they could connect and find out they both like Anime or Bob Dylan or firetrucks or purple silicon dildos and they could stay up later and later writing longer and longer and more intricate emails about people and places and things they have always found exciting and moving and worth sharing only with someone special who could turn a phrase in exactly the right way and write exactly the right thing at just the perfect moment and then they could share photos and images of themselves taken in moments of exasperation and triumph and then maybe show each other photos of themselves in ecstasy with their eyes desperate and longing and maybe a touch embarrassed then they could plan a meeting because their city is so close to their city and an open air cafe could be chosen and travel plans made and planes boarded and luggage found and when they meet their hands touch and there’s a spark and they date and love and they come together for years and years and years… but then I remembered how hungry I am and really, who needs that fucking responsibility?
So while I’m in the kitchen digging through dirty socks (don’t ask) trying to find enough change to buy a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter… and 4L of Diet Aspartame, my question for anyone willing to answer on this No Post Day is…
Who was the first person to ever comment on your blog*, and are they still taking part in your blog?
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*Hint: check your Comments Page… and if you don’t have a blog, do you still take part in the blog you first commented on?
“How I Could Just Kill A Man“; Cypress Hill
Let me know if the YouTube’s missing…
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Lies are, mostly, ridiculous. And yet I’m pretty sure I’ve lied on multiple occasions to everyone I’ve known for more than an hour… if I include exaggerations and misdirection, which are both definitely types of lies but also dramatic tools I use as a writer. Even without including those tools I have lied a lot. I have a complicated family history… going back generations or just to the last generation or just my own life, it’s a complicated and long and convoluted story. So, when asked about it, I lie. Mostly by omission, but quite often I’ll tell someone the Where’s and maybe even the When’s, but after that… not so much.
Lying is a tool, mostly one of survival, I learned a long time ago. One of my first experiences in my New School after we escaped the Cult we were in was crying at the lunch table and when someone asked “what the fuck’s with the new kid?” I told them “my father died yesterday.”… which was a lie. But I can remember not knowing, really, what the fuck was going on. There I was, in grade three, surrounded by newbies, and the tears just started pouring out… in public, in the middle of the lunch room. So I needed something which could justify the tears and the only thing I could think of was “my father died yesterday.”
I didn’t know, as I was growing up, what the fuck happened. There was no one around to explain my childhood to me, and I certainly couldn’t relate my experiences to the farmers’ children I was then surrounded by… so I made shit up. I surrounded myself with an ever-changing mythology… from grade to grade I wasn’t quite an entirely new person, but over a few grades the story changed almost completely as I learnt more about myself from the adults willing to share their stories, and also as the old stories could no longer pass as real because the people I was telling them to — the kids in my grade — grew up and could better recognize the Bullshit I was selling.
For the most part, as I grew up, I always felt lost in a group unless I had a better story… it wasn’t like I was running around telling people outlandish and unbelievable stories, it was more like “you have an ATV at home? Well I’ve got one as well… you want to see it? Love to show it to you, but it’s at my grandfather’s farm.” They weren’t Fundamental Lies, they weren’t Foundation Lies, they were basically “I’d like to fit in now” lies.
Definitely not malicious or meant to hurt anyone, mostly they’re either protective or somehow status orientated…
But still lies. And a lot of them… and they’ve had a weird way of following me. Just a couple of weeks ago my mother asked me to tell a friend of hers about an adventure I had while working eighteen-years ago as a fishing and hunting guide in Northern Ontario…
I was eighteen when I moved north to work. I’ll get into those eight months later. When I came back I had three or four solid Adventure Stories — I’m not even sure how this one got started in my head because there’s not a shred of truth to it. It might actually be a Camp Legend someone brought up over some hash oil… “we were out on a calm but hot day, one of my guests had his hand in the water and WHAM, a twenty pound Northern Pike chomped on his little finger. Dude screams out, waves his hand around like a maniac, and the fish takes his finger off at the top knuckle.”
Inhale and bow and accept applause. There’s more to my version — trip to the hospital, his finger in an ice bucket, blah blah… but that’s the base.
Weirdly enough I’ve never written them down in any of my journals. I’ve started to on a few occasions, but I always erased or deleted or scratched it out. I’ve always tried to keep my journals free of Bullshit, but I figure it’s about time to admit the lies I’ve told are as important to who I am as the truths…
It’s not that I only need a place to tell the truth or be as honest as I possibly can be, it’s that I also need a place where I can admit to having lied and maybe work on an apology or an admission from there. I think the act of writing them out on Salted might be as important as keeping track of the things which have actually happened in my life…
"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style." ~Maya Angelou
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...salted lithium. 