Alrighty then, I wasn't going to either make this video or post it, but my return to Beethoven (and music in general), no doubt due to the death of Bohdan and other profound losses, I found myself just talking to the camera. Who else is there? There is no one I can be completely honest with.
It's I guess bizarre to resort to this, but how can it hurt me? I hear such horror stories about the internet every day, and of course YouTube has harassed, censored and tried everything to rip down my harmless, supposedly fun and lighthearted hobby channel over the past 12 years or so. They take down things that are utterly harmless, issue dire warnings about comments I have made that are "bullying", "abusive" "harassing" and "threatening" towards public figures I will never meet (and how can I hurt them? They are public figures, and so long as I am civil, which I am for the most part. they are putting themselves under scrutiny. And I see videos which rip into these same people with every profanity you can imagine, and they are allowed to stand.)
They tell me over and over again that I have "violated community standards" - most recently, for a video I made when I found a large wild mushroom in my yard and did a closer look at it - with NO references whatsoever to ANYTHING to do with ANY drug! It was just a mushroom and I found it interesting. Any child could have watched it. But no. YouTube told me that I was, literally, using my channel to sell drugs. I contested it, and they said that after "careful review", my video did indeed violate all of YouTube's standards of decency and would soon be terminated if I didn't stop doing things like that. Selling drugs. On my channel. There were not even any joking references to "magic mushrooms" or anything of the sort.
So why do I continue?
I guess I have to ask myself. I watched this video several times, then decided I WILL post it, as it's not excessively gloomy and it really does share my deepest thoughts and revelations right now. Whether it's hopeful or not, well, hope may be too much to ask for in this darkening world.
I even posted it on Facebook, which is an exercise in utter futility, and NO ONE actually watches it. Not one. I can't even get into how this dynamic has played out for my entire life. If I get into that, I truly won't wake up in the morning.
So I want to keep waking up, make no mistake, but I feel I am dodging depression the way I had to dodge cancer (this time).
So what will the next year bring? Another year.
We'll see. I hope.
