Tag: mental-health

2026

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It is dark. It is cold. And it is ass o’clock in the morning (I believe Webster’s defines ass o’clock as any time before 6am). It is also Saturday and I had a hankering to visit the old vanity blog and groggily peck out a life update. I was prompted to, after seeing this headline on boingboing.net: The internet isn’t just shortening your attention span — it’s dissolving your identity Whoa! My identity? Fuck me. It doesn’t even matter what’s in the article. You read a headline like that while lying in bed in the silent, ass o’clock darkness, how could I not go make a gremlin green Matcha tea, quietly creep to my office, blow the crystalline dust off this digital tome, and proclaim before my personal shrine, “I still have an identity! I can still generate my own words!”

So my last check-in was late November. To mark my first 2026 entry, let’s recall notable things since then.

We attended a December wedding in upstate NY. We definitely had a fun table at the reception. I danced, got drunk and had a great time. Later at the hotel in the wee hours (ass o’clock, if you will), I vomited four Guinness’s and the other lightly digested contents of my stomach onto the bathroom floor. We drove to Toronto and flew home the next day.

I bought a boat. Not a big fancy, expensive one. More like the Toyota Rav4 of boats. Ubiquitous, nice, boring but functional. A small 14 foot fishing boat and trailer. I am excited to take this out on little fishing adventures with friends and family. My dad was very excited after hearing I bought it. I’m hopeful we can have some good times on that boat. He is still in his early retirement years, and has been far too housebound. It’s tragic to live in Northwestern Ontario, and not enjoy the wildlife here. It’s one of the more unspoiled wild areas of the world.

Thanksgiving (in Illinois) and Christmas/New Year’s (in T.Bay) happened. Very smooth this year. It was as if all the ordinance had previously exploded, and we were just enjoying the rituals in a more low-key comfortable way. The Trump loving in-laws avoided all things political and Claw and I abided in a similar way. Xmas was also smaller and easy. We watched The Holdovers with my parents, aunt, and cousin. Perfect family Christmas movie (Likewise Bugonia was the perfect New Year’s Eve movie).

We’re currently in our yearly push to watch all the Oscar nominated films. Everything we’ve seen in the International category has been stellar. As like last year, there is more substance and quality in that category (and best Animated Film) than in the Best Picture category. I’m totally tempted to write a satisfying pretentious rant on this right now, but let’s keep some structure and discipline here. Life updates it is….

Did a bit of home improvement. We fleshed out house decorating with the purchase of a painting from my favourite sister-in-law. It’s a white tiger. We put it up in a very prominent location in our main room. I also put up a big beautiful owl painting (made by my talented, blood related, estranged, asshole sister). If I’m fair, it’s the best quality painting we have, but currently, I view her art kind of like something by Adolf Hitler or John Wayne Gacy – historically important, even if made by a monster. Complimenting these are some classic/classy water paintings made by my great grandmother. Did some other homeowner stuff. Replaced all the old thermostats, the sauna I had ordered 6 months ago finally was installed and wired up.

What else… after many months of abstinence, had a 10 day cannabis binge that I recently just came out of. Insomnia has always been my main THC withdrawal symptom. Probably has something to do with waking up at “ass” this morning.

I got into fancy tea and smoothies, Claw got into bread making. I’m still working on my chess game, still playing Magic the Gathering. Currently reading the Berserk manga on my Kindle. Started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 again, this time with hundreds of mods installed. Claw rolls her eyes at the mods that make the ladies of Faerûn more scantily clad and chesty, but I really appreciate that she lets me enjoy my video game cheesecake (even though she might tease me for it during breaks from reading or doing Duolingo on the couch).

Did some tinkering with offline AI models. There are open source LLMs and image generators that you can download and run locally if you have a good GPU. So I did that, and it was pretty fun to be able to generate text and images beyond the eyes of a corporate content nanny. Then the novelty wore off. There is an ickiness to AI. I was left with a disturbing foreboding feeling about the future. It’s hard to shake the notion that imperfect fleshy meat computers are an endangered species.

So, existential AI dread aside, really the state of the union is good. I can recognize that this is an enjoyable time of my life, maybe one of the best. I’m trying to maintain good physical health, find and enjoy the things that make me happy.

Coffee and Music…

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

….have always been my most reliable way to snap out of ennui. I can make ennui a noun right?

It’s unfortunate that like so many other forms of creativity in 2025, music quality has also plummeted. Probably for the same reasons that I wrote about in my last post (Picture me saying that as I push up my glasses, and hold an index finger in the air). I’ve heard or read people say things along the lines of, “Where did all the great bands go? Why does music suck now?”. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my interest in music steadily dwindled as smart phones proliferated. I would pinpoint the inflection point to be somewhere around 2008. You see it in my playlists. There’s all these 90s and early 2000s bangers and then the jams start to become few and far between. And I truly love listening to music. The receipts are here, it’s undeniably apparent in my old posts, how large a part music was in my life. But, holy fuck have I fallen off the bandwagon. The kid who wrote here twenty years ago (me) would be horrified. The extent of my knowledge regarding the 2025 music scene is pretty much (1) there is some sort of “Geese” album that people like. (2) Music from the Kpop Demon Hunters movie produced monster hits (3) Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard charts.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs.

When thinking about the state 2025 vs 1996, I feel sad that things have changed, but also fortunate that I got to experience my formative years during the 90s. I was born in 1979, just barely catching the tail end of Gen X. I wish I could convey to all the younger Millennials and Gen Z kids just how fantastic it was to be a teenager in the mid 90s. (I’m aware I’m in full Andy Rooney mode right now and I don’t care. And yes, it’s an intentionally old reference).

It’s not just nostalgia. Recently, I saw old footage on Youtube of kids in a high school from the nineties. The first thing that popped out was the dorky clothes. The second thing was how engaged everyone was with each other. No cell phones, just human interaction and complete presence. Joy everywhere. No devices, no screens. It was such a different world. Fucking unreal. These kids truly don’t know what they’ve lost. Back then, kids didn’t have their time and energy stolen by apps scientifically engineered and continuously tweaked to be as addictive as possible. Isolation is everywhere, optimism has evaporated, and focus is constantly stolen. Who is going to form a band under these conditions? It’s not surprising the proportion of solo artists is much greater today vs then. It takes effort, will, and social skills to get together and execute a collective vision to make cool as shit music.

(BTW I am bopping to closer by NIN as I write this. Look and marvel at how my acronyms span generations. The Xennial micro-generation can pull that shit off with ease).

Well… as evidenced by my title, I had aspirations on writing something about both music and coffee. Despite my intentions, it looks like I wrote another “get off my lawn/back in my day” post. I wanted to opine on how I’m back on coffee after a year and a half caffeine hiatus. I wanted to write about how significant that first black coffee was. How I saw through other dimensions and time. It got me moving and thinking. It really is a wonder drug. It’s a little harder to reign in tangential thinking, but even so I’m getting more shit done. I think I’m back on team coffee. I want the highs and lows instead of steady of energy…. at least for a while.

Smart Fog

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Something about that title seems obscene. It must be the unintentional letter adjacency to smut, fart, frog and fag. I was just trying to pick a title that describes the dysfunctional mental state most of society is in because of smart phones. It’s 2025 and we all live together in one big corporate smut fag.

I hate how I’m susceptible, having my time and motivation stolen. Addictive apps steal creativity and focus. Spend any significant amount of time with a social media algorithm and it’s going to bring you into the darkness and bind you. Oh, you liked that Youtube short? Here’s five more just like it, plus another ten videos of people reacting to it. Oh, you picked up your phone to research a DIY project on Reddit? While you are here, why don’t you check your sports subs, or look, here’s click-bait that you have no control over but be outraged. Let’s chase more empty calorie dopamine.

All of a sudden it’s noon, you’re still in your pajamas, and you haven’t done a single thing of value all morning with your finite free time.

If that’s the typical individual level experience, how is it at the macro level? Do you think society has the same level of focus and creativity as pre smartphone days? We are experiencing the death of daydreaming. How often in 2025 do we think without distraction? I’m 46 years old. I have seen the whole shitty change happen. I remember boredom. Standing in lines, waiting for something or someone with nothing to do, the best you could do was maybe listen to music on your iPod (or Walkman/Discman before that). You had the time and space to think and plan. To daydream and reflect.

What is going to break this dystopia? Because it feels like a death spiral.

Maybe writing in this empty blog can be part of my quiet rebellion. I will express myself here honestly and imperfectly. Fuck the algorithms. Fuck 2025 and the enshittification of everything. Owning your own time is a form of wealth, and I’m tired of people stealing from me.