Herpy Thernksgerving Brotato Worshippers!

Figured I should write a thanksgiving entry because it’s like it’s kind of mind boggling how much I have to be thankful for these days. It’s after 1AM but I figured I’d stay up late tonight and bust this out. I wasted some time today playing Brotato. Not sure what’s wrong with me. Can hear my roommate downstairs playing it. Got a couple more friends into it.
It’s not good. Like crack.
But I did work on customd.app earlier today and last weekend I spent most of the weekend working on it and the coding has sucked me back in just like Brotato does. I’ve never had a coding project that has captured my interest for so long.
I upgraded it to Angular 18 and then had some cleanup like getting rid of all the deprecated navparams since Ionic doesn’t use them anymore and is moving toward the built in angular @Input decorator which I think is definitely a good thing to keep things consistent.
Anyway, got sidetracked there. I was thinking about my childhood and what I thought my life was going to be like and it’s just all turned out so much freaking better than I ever could have imagined.
It’s so strange. Maybe I was just really pessimistic as a kid. Or maybe I got super lucky in life.
Sometimes I play a run in Brotato, it’s like maybe one out of every 25 attempts, and something just clicks, and all your little skills compound on each other to where the game practically plays itself and you just can’t help but win. That’s what my life has felt like more and more every year that goes by–with the possible exception of the 2020 COVID lockdown. As a child I saw myself alone and depressed. I thought I’d be lucky if I had 500 channels to watch on TV and two or three friends to talk to. An apartment in the city seemed like a dream. I figured I’d be lucky if I had a job that didn’t make me want to kill myself.
Instead of the future I imagined, I have effectively millions of channels instead of 500 but I don’t even care because real life has shifted and captured my attention so much that I’d actually be better off without it.
I used to be so bored as a kid, just inundated every day, inescapable boredom, peppered with rare but terrifying bouts of violence and mild trauma. That was the whole way I looked at life. That’s how I thought the world was.
Was listening to that old Doors song that says “streets are uneven when you’re down.” and its so simple and childish the lyrics of that song, but it tells an emotional story that is so true, it’s like when you’re depressed and angry you don’t really see yourself as the problem, you see the streets as being uneven and women as being wicked.
When you go from being a super depressed person as I used to be to an overjoyed person as I am now, it often doesn’t feel like I’ve changed at all. It feels like the whole world has changed around me.
So there’s too many things that I’m thankful for for me to list, but I guess what I’m most thankful for is my ability to be thankful.
Cuz I remember what my brain worked like when I was younger and from the outside I probably seemed okay, mildly depressed but a decent guy, but I think back and think “Jesus, what was I thinking? How could I have such a negative view on things?”
No, the biggest thing that I’m thankful for is my ability to be successful. I’ve only just recently realized I genuinely have it. I have nothing to worry about except death. I was so worried about growing up to be a failure and now I realize that just can’t happen now.
Of course I hope I didn’t just jinx myself haha
I did have a dream the other day where I did something in the spur of the moment that was really sexually inappropriate and oh gosh I felt so guilty and humiliated and just filled with utter regret, wondering if people were going to cancel me or something and destroy my life.
There was a line in either the book or TV Little House on the Prairie where the dad says something like “once you start being successful, success becomes like a habit and you learn how to just keep doing it.”
And that’s totally true and since I’ve been listening to all these books about success I feel like I have a super power allowing me to shape my life to exactly what I want.
But at the same time, who was it, Warren Buffet or someone like that who said, “You take a lifetime to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy it.”
Maybe less.
But then, I don’t know either. In this culture with our next president being a rapist and whatnot. On one hand it feels like cancel culture is this huge awful unfair thing, but at the same time it feels like so many people do so many awful things and nobody seems to care. They just look the other way. And when someone does get cancelled, in the moment it feels like their life is over. Six month’s later, no one has a clue who they are anymore.
I wonder why I waited so long to just lay it all out like this and just write like it’s really me in here.
I guess I never knew how to do it. All in high school they insisted that writing must be tight and molded and carefully curated to exactly what you want.
But instead this feels raw, like for the first time my writing is truly getting to the heart of who I am, and it’s happening in much less time and with less stress than any writing I’ve done before.
In Jiu Jitsu class the other day the instructor said that we all need to learn the rules before we can start breaking the rules and that’s why we do things so scripted as beginners and then move to more free form stuff later on. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe that’s what I’m finally doing after all these years with my writing.
Self confidence is another one of those things where you don’t realize you’ve changed and you think it’s the world. When I was younger it all seemed like chaos and evil and terrifying but year over year it just made more and more sense and now it really feels like the world actually makes sense to me.
I don’t hear people say that very often. That the world makes sense to them. But it does to me.
That’s what self confidence feels like. I never really felt it before, not really for real, until the last few years. It feels like the world has changed shape into something that finally makes sense.
Even with Trump getting elected.
Like, I knew it was going to happen.
If I was God writing the story of the world there’s just no way I’d have him lose that election. That’s just not how stories work.
We’re driving toward some kind of climax.
Of course the story of our lives, of America and of The Human Race work a bit different than stories written on paper or portrayed in hollywood because they are not ongoing and essentially endless, but many of the concepts work the same.
We’re driving toward a climax, but it doesn’t need to be a violent one.
All of our stories these days seem to be centered around violence and killing the bad guys, but the ones that really stick with us and have meaning are the ones about people and how we interact… or new potential ways that we could interact. That’s how the story of America could be, like in Star Trek where you figure out a way in the end to work together and everyone can get what they want.
And I think we can do that in America.
Sometimes the most satisfying story climax is where the hero figures out how to maintain the peace.
Things keep getting more and more interesting, every year that goes by. Is it just me or is everyone experiencing this?
I thought you were supposed to settle down as you get older or was that just a suggestion?
I don’t know how to describe how thankful I am that my life did not follow the mold that I thought it would or that society said it should.