Sorry to interrupt the Phone Guys marathon, but I really ought to be posting something here, I suppose.

I am in the midst of a twenty year low, as far as my mental health is concerned. Twenty years exceeds the age of this website, so if we take the Book Of PDR as the record of my adult life, I am at my all-time low.

I feel like anyone who happens to read this can see the many ways our society is being ruined by those with power and whose only concern is remaining powerful. Obviously that is a big part of the problem for me. I wish I could do anything about that, but I don’t see how. People who function in society more successfully than I do would probably say something like “if you’re upset about things you can’t change, just focus on what you can.” And that sounds like solid advice, but I have lost faith that I can change anything.

I don’t have the mental energy to get through my weekly obligations and have energy left for the things I want to do in life. And that only causes a feedback loop because back in 2012 or whenever I quit a job I hated with the intent to go back to school and find my path to a more creative career. Now, thirteen years later, I seem further from that creative career than I was then. My life now consists of trying to pay off a student loan for a degree I did not manage to get and trying to pay for a vehicle I only have because I need it for the job I have to pay off the student loans and the car I have for the job. And, of course, rent for an apartment where I have no choice, but if I go anywhere else I’m paying far more. I’m trapped in a cycle. And, as I get older, that distance from what I want to be doing and what I am doing makes me lose more and more sleep which just makes me more and more tired as I continue the cycle.

And I want it on the record, I have a three day weekend! It may not fall on the days I’ve repeatedly asked for, but it’s still three days off work every week. Most people don’t have that and most people seem to get by just fine, so I’m left assuming that I’m just broken in some important way. I don’t understand how other people get by. At least one friend of mine said it is alcohol that helps those people, but even if I wanted to start drinking (now would be a better time than ever before, I suppose) I also don’t understand how people can afford things like alcohol or cigarettes or the other addictive mollifiers that are so popular. I don’t understand how people manage to be people in general. Whatever training people got to get through life, I did not get. Or, as I said, I’m just broken.

Every week, creative stuff has to be the lowest priority on my schedule. There’s work. There’s fucking sleep. Anything else has to be crammed in the available slots. If I visit my friends or my family, that’s most of an evening gone, so I can’t do my creative projects. Especially when I visit my niblings. They may be the most important people I know, but it is simply exhausting for me to spend an evening with them. As a result my options are to NOT visit my friends and family, which isn’t a real option, or to do that instead of working on my stuff and then have a little resentment that I spent that time with loved ones. And even this was easier when I had my weekends falling on actual weekends…

Or suppose I want to relax by reading a book or watching a movie or, heaven forbid, playing a computer game. These are the things that actually make me feel less exhausted. But they still take time. If I spent a day playing a cool mystery game (like The Roottrees Are Dead, to name one I did during this depressive period) I come out of it feeling great, energized, ready to work on something of my own. I want to take that energy and channel it into something, but before I know it, my time off is over and that energy gets to be channelled into my job instead. So I resent playing games, or watching movies, or reading, because they aren’t what I want to do either.

I come to resent time spent cooking. I resent time spent cleaning. I resent time spent going for a nice walk or catching up on the news (okay, maybe that one I’d resent either way). Anything I have to do that isn’t being creative, I come to resent. And since all of that has to be prioritized above creativity, I wind up resenting everything I do. I have to do all that stuff and maybe by the end of the week I have one new page written, one new page for a colouring book, one more small whatever and then at the end of a few months like that I notice the year is almost over and I have ten pages of writing and three pages of a colouring book, and that isn’t enough. It’s not worth the exhaustion.

So these last few months, I’ve just given up. I don’t even work on that one page a week anymore. All my biggest project ideas are now revealed as pipe dreams. I still idly tinker on things, I don’t think I’d be physically able to stop that, but whatever it will take for me to get back to working on the things I want to work on is something I can not currently fathom.

Maybe I need someone to explain the secret of how humans live or maybe I need an end to fascism. Who can say?

Youtube recently recommended to me a video about a monstrous figure that wears a hat and haunts people. Apparently the Hat Man is a known variation of the Shadow Person folklore that has cropped up, According to Wikipedia, there have been reports of him since at least the “late 2000s”. But what the video reminded me of is that I basically invented that guy myself in 2014.

The Hatwearer, I called him. Hat-wearing guy who haunts people, and in my version, kills them. I was just trying to create something evocative of the Creepypasta stories I was learning about around that era and thought he was generic enough to work. Obviously the big difference between my Hatwearer and this Hat Man fellow is that my one isn’t a shadow person. He has corporeality going on and everything. Detailed features, messed up though they are by our human standards. But the basics are similar enough that it made me think.

I’ve never had a sleep paralysis event, and I have never had a need to take Benadryl. Those, Wikipedia says, are the main sources of seeing the Hat Man. I guess I just tapped into the zeitgeist and trod some mental territory that was already well-trodden. I can only apologize for being unoriginal.

Anyway, I didn’t mention it at the time, because I hoped I’d do it some day, but my intended use for the Hatwearer was for him to appear in a specific story. I had, in those days, hoped I’d be able to get stories about the Hateful King made, and it was my intention to have the King just casually kill off that particular demon with ease, to show how powerful he could be. It’s more than a decade later and I’ve made no progress on any Hateful King stories, so I guess that story can now be told here. In this form. Consider this hackneyed demon to have been slain.

I used to occasionally check Google for strange sentences to see if anyone had ever said them on the Internet, and if not, put them in a post. Well, if I thought Google was unreliable in 2022, when last I did this, it’s downright anti-reliable now.

But I assume I can still populate my website with some fresh sentences even if I can’t check to be sure. I just need to make the sentences overly specific and complex and the odds are they will be new!

• “The wisest hamster in the bucket is still a hamster in a bucket.”
• “If you think about it, there’s no hair on the sun.”
• “Hey everybody, it’s new haircut day and that means we can all download our new haircuts.”
• “That coyote knows that the other coyotes think he’s an idiot.”
• “Hey Alvin, should we go taste the parking lot before it gets away?”
• “The national dish of Italy is a plate of grated potato dyed to resemble whoever is the current mayor of Palermo.”
• “The difference between a king and a peasant is how many racecars they’ve kissed.”
• “The dog with fleas is capable of running faster than the dog without fleas, because of all the extra legs.”
• “Sometimes the best way to fly to the doctor’s office is with a doctor copter.”
• “I want to ride the slime all the way through time!”
• “Baseball is the only sport in which the base is made of balls.”
• “If the internet has sentences on it, they were probably put there by Satan to trick people into believing that the Internet exists.”

A few days ago, the last of my “Adam: The Beekeeper Chronicles” chapters went live. That means 100 chapters, each exactly 100 words long, can now be found in its own section of the site. They tell the story of three of the characters from Secret Government Robots as they figure out what the next part of their lives will be.

With those Chronicles now concluded, those characters don’t have an ongoing home for the first time since SecGov began back in 2010. That doesn’t mean their stories are over. I fully intend to touch in on them again, hopefully even before the year is over, but there is no ongoing outlet for their tales currently planned. We, like those characters, will just have to wait and see what’s next.

A few years back I did a post full of sentences that, according to search engine searching, did not exist on the Internet until I bravely created them. I’m doing it again! More sentences!

Go!:

• “We need more rocketship movies.”
• “Tomorrow is just later today if you don’t sleep.”
• “I could probably make it rain if I wanted.”
• “What’s your favourite type of chain link fence?”
• “The stealth bomber was invented by ninjas.”
• “I burned down my castle for the insurance money.”
• “The light is always greener on the other side of the tunnel.”
• “Most operas don’t end with a car chase.”
• “Grapes can be your best friend, if you let them.”
• “The devil knows how to build a rowboat.”
• “I’m falling in love with this luggage.”
• “The internet has more sentences on it.”

There! I’ve added to the wealth of humanity’s knowledge!