Fingers

People forget how important their fingers are. My digits are my main source of income next to my voice. I forget this when I chop up vegetables or attempt to work on my car. I have dainty white collar criminal fingers that need to be moisturized and kept in gloves. It’s not joke!

Even small paper cuts in the wrong places can cause havoc to my word count. Right now I have a bandage over one of my finger tips and I can’t use the gestures properly on my trackpad. It’s devastating but I endure.

I can’t imagine losing a finger let alone my hands. How would I play a video game? I’m not using an accessibility controller, I’ll have to give up gaming and watch movies all day and then worry about losing my eyesight.

What dread.

Brain Fire

Some days I hit my limit and my anxiety boils over into anger.

It sucks but I try to contain myself until it passes but shit gets old as the years go by.

Breathing exercises and posture correction is my current go-to distractions when bad feels creep.

It’s tempting to shut down early in the evening in an attempt to fast forward the day or even consuming some mindless media. I guess I’m trying to work back in doing creative things.

I always I want to be doing more but it’s hard enough pushing myself to do something–anything.

This is something. Typing up my daily blog entry. Hopefully it’s enough to ward of the guilt for being sad brains lazy. Deep down it is because I know it’s something, it’s enough, and I love myself–keep going.

Amazon Prime Day

Happy Amazon Prime Day to you and your kin.

It’s all drop shipped crap. The only things worth buying are Amazon branded products cause they can afford the loss and the quality is assured. I started to buy my athletic clothing from Amazon Essentials cause I stopped caring about labels and trying to justify my Prime subscription.

That’s not bad.

The real win today was getting two chores done. I finally recycled the giant Toshiba CRT to make room in the garage to fit my car. Tomorrow I can comfortably restore the headlights covered in shade and that will be another lingering task I want to accomplish this week.

Thus will conclude Amazon Prime Day. I’ll check in tomorrow to report progress.

Driving

How are you supposed to drive? I try to be fast and safe. I go fast to maintain gaps between cars so I’m far away from any variables which are the drivers which makes it safe. Some people cruise at the speed limit and I get that for long hauls and you are tired, in a car with many distractions, and you are trying to stretch the petrol/battery.

Alas, I still gotta go fast and get there. I don’t mean excess the speed limit though. Just fast and efficient.

Parking lots are a lot of energy though. You gotta check all around the car for people or other vehicles. I know modern vehicles have all the sensors and cameras but I like to spin my head around 360 like Beetlejuice. That’s why stretches in the morning are important.

Blogging

I always wanted to look up the history of online journals becoming monetized. How the website counter couldn’t be trusted and third-party code snippets were inserted into your html body to keep track. Banner campaigns and ads popped-up on your favourite writers’ feeds. When Google started Adsense it was a big deal and a lot of people got rich when the databases of most valuable meta-tags by ad dollar were available to everyone.

You would sit there in an afternoon searching which adwords yielded the most banner ad revenue then write mad-libs articles and video content about it. I assume that is what AI is doing now or at least that will close the loop and bring on prosumer singularity. It can also be used for political utility such as multinational colonization but that makes me tired just thinking about it.

I like writing as a meditative artform. I guess we strive for some sort of therapeutic release of catharsis from both production and consumption of media.

It’s honestly pretty fun too.

Creating is fun.

Overthinking

Get the lead out. Even if it’s cheesy and lame because that doesn’t matter. What matters is you try and keep going and stick to it until something comes out that you are proud of. Keep going and never stop even after you gave up. You know you can’t get away so stick to your dreams and keep going.

Media inspirations but there is a level of consumption some can handle before they feel compelled to create.

The only media I’ve been consuming lately are video games and right now seems to be a golden era of good stuff. Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy XVI, and now Dave the Diver has captured my attention. I’m not sure if I will leave the house this summer because more games are coming. Specially affordable smaller titles like Jagged Alliance 3. Oh momma!

The Internet

Some of us geriatric millennials remember the days of squinting and rubbing our eyes in front of a giant CRT screen and clacking away at a keyboard that calloused your fingertips. In those days, the Internet meant something.

The awful process of tying up the phone line and dialing up your ISP to wretched noises emanating from the nether regions of your giant grey and beige box. You paid for Internet by the minute to load up a webpage in hopes to read new text.

People would type in URLs or search them on Yahoo! bookmarking them for later. Some pages had creative use of colour or photos that would slowly load but worth it because it was something new from far away.

It was inspiring. You wanted to learn HTML and basic tags to make your own webpage just to prove to yourself you can do it. You can host your own page on Geocities or Angelfire and people can discover your personality, hopes, dreams, and desires. A little place that you mattered and your voice was heard as many times as you refresh your page counter.

That was the little kick some of us got but then the Internet got faster and computers became more accessible. Why would anyone learn a programming language, pay for hosting, and promote their webpage when a platform can take care of everything so you just focus on providing the content.

The Matrix is a concept appropriated from a science fiction film that was released at the end of the World Wide Web. In 1999, I had no chest hair and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. Now I have white chest hair and a RTX 4090. Time is a prison you cannot escape.

And We’re Back!

I just got access back to this website and updated all the themes and plugins. I still got a bunch of cleaning up to do to try to make it faster but I’m glad to be back on the keyboard typing nonsense.

I’m getting back into writing in hopes that it will help with all my other creative pursists and part of “getting back” will be writing for at least an hour each day. Part of this hour of power will be writing a post here. I’m trying to tap into my LiveJournal days where I was happy to plop infront of the computer and spew out a big stream of conscious block of text as an outlet for all the voices swimming around inside my head.

That’s about it. Let’s see what happens. Godspeed.

My Uncle Left Behind

Being born as part of the Iranian diaspora cased by the 1979 revolution means there’s a lot of family I have never met nor, unfortunately, will never have a chance to meet.

One is my uncle Nooraldin Ostadi from my mother’s side. I know little of my uncle outside of this photograph and a few stories from my mother. Apparently, when my uncle was 4 years old he fell 12 meters off the roof on top of a stray dog which broke his fall and saved his life. The dog did not survive. Besides a few scratches and bruises, he was ok but they attributed his aberrant behaviour to head drama.

Uncle Nooraldin had a rough life growing up as an indigenous and religious minority in rural Iran. He would always get into trouble with the local bullies, teachers, and law enforcement. In his early twenties, he was detained by Iranian police for simply gawking at an aristocratic, Muslim man’s daughter. It’s legend that during his detention for his heinous non crime he kept calling out to the officers to let him use the washroom and when he was denied he pissed under the station’s beautiful Persian carpet at a failed attempt to hide his relief from the authorities. This resulted in many lashes.

I asked my other uncle who would be Nooraldin’s younger and only brother about his final encounter with Nooraldin. It was before my family was getting ready to leave Iran by train from Taft to the airport in Tehran. My uncle said Nooraldin was living in a relative’s orchard tending his pet goat and cats. My uncle gave him some money and took him into town where Nooraldin spent all of it on feed for his animals and a box of cigarettes. My uncle said his final goodbye to his older brother before him and the rest of my family left for a better life in Canada.

I always sensed a deep sadness whenever Daei (Farsi for uncle) Nooraldin was brought up. God rest his soul. My uncle Nooraldin was left behind.

My father was the last to see him in 1999 which was a few months before his death. My father described him as still joking, laughing, and swearing a lot when he visited him in Yazd. Nooraldin showed my father his swollen foot and asked him to go into town to buy some sort of medicine or spirit called Camel Thorn. He then kindly asked my father to buy him some cigarettes.

Daei Nooraldin holding a pick axe in front of my mother's family home in Taft, Yazd (Iran.)

Daei Nooraldin holding a pick axe in front of my mother’s family home in Taft, Yazd (Iran.)

YouTube Self-Help Rabbit Hole

I’m doing it all. Nofap, Intermitted fasting, and cold showers. I just watched a bunch of videos that the algorithm fed me and now I’m part of a cult of redditers that are determined to break out of the millennial curse. And honestly, all this shit is what religions of many cultures practiced anyways–so what the hey!

I’m on my second week and feel full of energy. Could be a placebo but who cares!? I’m doing something, folks. This is getting personal and embarrassing but I figure I will have to delete this blog or make it private once I force myself to professionally do what I actually want to do in life: comedy.

Then I’ll most likely transform this website into a boring business card type thing with a demo reel, tour dates, bio, and contact page. That’s right, folks! Archive this shit while you can so you can sell it to TMZ. Ha!