e title isn’t warning enough, ladies, then listen to this :

This blog entry will delve deeply into my gender issues and society’s. I will be walking on some very touchy ground and there’s a real risk that I will trample on some very delicate sensibilities in the process.

Just know that I am only seeking the truth as I see it, and that any opinion I have that pisses you off is only that… an opinion.

In particular, I will be delving into the minefield that is the relationship between women and gay men. We seem like allies but there’s a lot of anger and resentment going unaddressed and thus unresolved.

So brace yourself… we’re going deep.

Now that the self-aggrandizing and probably unnecessary caveats are over, we can dig into the issue.

It starts, as everything in my life does lately, with Skyrim.

As patient readers know, I have been using Skyrim and its adult oriented modding community to make my little version of Skyrim into a sort of sexual playground wherein I can, through my character, have all kinds of fun.

Seriously. If you’re into it, it’s out there. Even that. Hell, even THAT, and that’s not even legal. But it’s virtual reality,. baby….

You can do whatever (and whomever) you like.

As I have sexplored ^[1], I have found that I am not as homosexual as I thought I was. ^[2]. I am actually a lot closer to bisexual than I would have thought before I had this rather marvelously horny and fun world to use as my sexual canvas.

I find myself quite capable of being attracted to the female virtual people, and often liase with them. It still doesn’t have the power and raw energy of my gay side, but I have been surprised and pleased at how it is coming along.

No pun intended.

In retrospect, it makes sense. ^[3] I have never been repulsed by women, certain odor issues aside. I am not the sort of fag to recoil at the mere mention of women. I do not live in fear of the sight of a vagina. I have always thought tits and pussy were very nice. Vaginas in particular I find have a real charm to them.

Some of them are even downright cute. Your mileage may vary, of course.

To me, those gynopphobic attitudes in some gay men have always seemed highly immature to me. It’s just the “girls are gross” attitude of the homosocial phase of social development carried on far, far pasts its due date.

There’s a big difference between not wanting to fuck them and hating them, boys, and only the first one is justifiable.

Sadly, though, this happy thought of increasing bisexuality ^[4] came with a deadly tag because I found myself thinking “Well, if I am attracted to their bodies and pussies and such in virtual reality but not in true reality, clearly the problem is with women themselves and not their plumbing and such. ”

Not a happy thought for a staunch feminist liberal type fag like me at all. I’ve never though of myself as being part of the deep reservoir of anti-woman hate that lies beneath the surface of the collective consciousness of gay men. ^[4]

But clearly I am not innocent in this issue. I have to ask myself why I have, in a sexual and romantic sense, always completely ignored women.

Why would I, or any other gay man, have that attitude?

And the brutal truth is that it’s because we have a choice.

Straight dudes do not. No matter how much they might hate women, they still have to deal with them for love and sex. They are born needing it. Women have it. And it can seem to some like they are determined to make men suffer as much as possible in order for them to get it.

Gay men, as currently defined, don’t have to put up with that shit at all. We have another entire gender (our own) to get our sex from, and I think that leads a lot of gay guys to just go with what’s easier.

Add in the social stigma homosexuality in men has carried for a long time, and you create the need to form one’s identity around one’s sexual orientation and the (subconscious) decision becomes even easier.

Basically. a gay man lives in a world in which it is only ever up to men, not women, to control when sex happens.

Straight guys would love that. It would make life so much easier for them.

So I have to wonder if I ever was truly homosexual, and indeed, to wonder if homosexuality as we define it today even exists.

Perhaps we fags are not born gay so much as we are born with various factors making male male attraction an option – like, say, a weakening of same-sex aversion responses coupled with various sociological factors that cause us to view women as not an option and so we go for the next most stimulating thing – our fellow men.

That would jibe with my thinking concerning homosexuality being as much of a social construct as heterosexuality and bisexuality being our natural state.

A natural state I am pleased to find myself moving towards. I have long considered bisexuality to be a spiritually superior state of being to any form of monosexuality.

But if there is one thing you take away from reading this, let it be this :

There’s no such thing as gay or straight.

There’s just people who have the option of not having to deal with the opposite gender for sex and love, and those who, for whatever reason, do not.

I truly believe that if society did not force us to choose, most people would be at least somewhat bisexual in orientation.

Because baby… we’re just born that way!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I get so sick and tired of myself sometimes.

I suppose that’s a side effect of developing one’s inner parent as a step in getting over one’s abandonment issues. Now that I have an inner parent of sorts, it gets exasperated by my inner child all the goddamned time.

Right now, the annoyance is at how whiny my inner child is being about having to leave the apartment today in order to go to the drug store and pick up some pills.

The drug store that is one block away. If it was any closer, I’d be living there.

I have to do it because I am out of Paxil. The last time I went there for a refill on pills, they didn’t have enough Paxil on hand to fill the order so they could only give me half of the prescribed amount.

The pharmacist offered so deliver the rest personally when he got it, but I airily declared that he needn’t bother as I would just come and get the rest when I needed it.

“It will give me an excuse to get out of the house. ” I added.

Well now I need it, and so I have to put up with a whiny lazy inner child who dpesn’t want to have to wake up fully and put on pants.

If it was up to him, I would skip the whole thing and stay home and end up having to go an entire weekend sans Paxil because I was too lazy to walk one block and pick it up/

That kind of thing used to happen a lot in my life. I would make “decisions” like that all the time, and think nothing of it. It was self-destructively self-indulgent and when I look back on it now, it boggles the mind.

Especially because through the whole thing, I would retain a kind f blithely innocent pose, as if there was nothing I could do about it and the fact that I even had to think about it was some kind of grave injustice and an indictment of life in general and my so-called life in particular.

God, what a pathetic attitude towards life.

Life takes effort, especially if you want to be happy. The oral-retentive fantasy of a life where everything just comes to you without you having to do a thing is a fool’s paradise, a decadent nightmare that would cause spiritual death were it to occur.

You have to strive. Not because there is some kind of abstract virtue in struggle and strife. Fuck that shit.

You have to strive and try and stretch your capacities because that’s the only way to be happy. You have a certain amount of energy for effort and if it is not spent, the system gets backed up and the energy turns inward and destroys you.

It would be a highly ironic hell for that fantasy to be fulfilled so that everything the dreamer can think of is easily at hand and yet they are dying on the inside and all the richest of the world amount to nothing but a golden noose choking the life out of them.

Something to watch out for in the unlikely event that I become successful. I can easily image falling into that particular hole. Spend all day indulging myself until I am more depressed than I ever was when I was poor because now there is “no reason” for me to be so goddamned miserable.

We suffer so much due to our lack of spiritual education. We should be teaching the kids that when they get tired of material indulgence and the trappings of “success”, there is a way out, and that way out is to take it to the next level and seek not pleasure or contentment or pacification but fulfillment.

Or, looked at from a different angle, meaning. They amount to the same thing.

It’s oddly ironic that I can think and write stuff like that and yet still be the guy who has trouble motivating himself to walk one block to pick up the most important medication he takes. It makes me think of a bit from Alice in Wonderland that’s always stuck with me (for some reason) where the narrator says she always gave herself very good advice but very seldom followed it.

When my mother read that part to me when I was a wee sprog, I instantly identified with it without having a clue as to why.

And it’s still true. I can give myself (and others)  top notch advice filled with wisdom, consideration,. empathy. and the passionate desire to help,. and yet, in my case…

Nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Clearly, I need more than good advice. I need impetus to follow it. To make the changes needed and see them through. Changes I know damned well are the smart thing to do, and yet I do nothing because the advice (both the dispensing and the receiving of) has helped enough that the problem no longer seems that important.

It’s a profoundly ignorant position, and I hate to think of myself as the sort of person who is unable to improve his lot in life because he is too week and lazy to do the things he knows will make his life better.

I generally don’t approve of such people.

But I get it. Change is very scary, especially when the bad chemicals in your head make you feel like you are just barely keeping your head above water as it is and any change could bring the whole trembling and fragile house of cards a-tumbling down.

And then you’d really be crazy.

But there is no such thing as change without change. If you want a better life, that in and of itself is a desire for change and that means you have to be open to change, or declare yourself perfectly happy in your current life.

And be honest with yourself : if you declare that, you are also very clearly saying that the benefits of the necessary change do not justify the effort and will it would take to make that change.

In other words, it’s just not worth it to you.

That will put things in perspective for you. And in case that’s not enough, imagine a person winning the lottery but deciding that the effort it would take to turn in the winning ticket and collect their millions make it “just not worth it”.

You don’t want to be like that person, do you?

Of course not.

So change your life already!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I turn up my nose at absolutely everything I am qualified for.

And this amuses the heck out of me. It’s hilarious that I have become so proud and full of myself in such a short time.

Doing five scripts a week will do that to a fella, I suppose. Especially when he has carte blanche to write it however he likes. Even though I’m working for a business so small you need a microscope to see it and the pay is even smaller, simply by writing those scripts and developing my voice and style in the process has done wonders for my self-esteem and  confidence and I feel more ready to do whatever than ever before.

The problem is, regular work has made me lazy and unambitious. So any job opportunity would have to be pretty damn amazing just to overcome my inertia. I have my gig, such as it is.

And I keep lazily moving the goalposts. At one point, I was planning to look for extra work after 30 scripts. Then 45 came and went. Now it’s 60.

I will reach 60 by the end of August. What then?

Forget trying to break into the industry. I sure did. All of that went out the window when I landed my current gig.

It was just too perfect for me. Something I could do for a couple of hours a day, with weekends off.  And nothing to force me out of my comfort zone.

Sometimes. things being too comfortable can be deadly. In the long term.

So during this vacation of mine, I am going to do my best to shake off the lethargy and at least poke around a little. Who knows, I might find something better than my current gig, and have to big Prasad adieu.

Heck, the new job might pay as much as $20 a script! What giddy heights such naked wealth would take me.

I would feel disloyal if I didn’t at least give Prasad 60 scripts before parting company, though. And who knows, by the time he animates all of them, I might be free again.

Assuming there is something out there for me, of course.

I certainly feel qualified to tackle any sort of script writing work. And some other sorts of creative writing type work if the pay is right.

I no longer feel that “I’ll write anything! Just give me a chance!” fervor that I felt fresh out of VFS. I don’t know if that’s just because I have grown soft and jaded or because summer has a way of beating all the ambition out of me and making me feel lazy and languid and self-indulgent.

All I want to do is have fun, god dammit. To feel free. Free to go out into the world and drink in its pleasures and find the joy in life.

Instead, I still feel trapped in my tiny existence. Getting paid work has helped, but what I really need is some kind of radical breakthrough in therapy to reduce my burden of social anxiety to a point where I feel that special kind of freedom.

I still feel like I am not even allowed outside. Like just by being out there in the world, I am risking someone pointing me out like the people in that “you are not of the body” episode of the original Star Trek.

They’d point me out and say “What are you doing out here? You don’t belong here! How dare you step outside your cage, you disgusting beast! GO BACK NOW!”.

And the sad thing is, I’d be glad for the attention. And glad that someone care enough about me to yell at me.

I’m not used to that kind of validation.

That got dark real quick.

Realistically, I can’t see me making any radical improvements in my readiness to take on the real world any time soon. Not without some other thing to jump-start my ambition. My life is quite nice right now.

That kind of saps the will to change.

But I do want more out of life. I want to write for something that gets produced on a regular basis and with a minimum level of production values and professionalism. Something where I can be confident that I can write whatever I like and it will get done.

Something where I can at least earn minimum wage. And support myself.

Basically, my long term goal is to achieve the life of a kid just out of college. Which I am… sorta kinda not really.

Maybe when September rolls around and the air gets cooler and I start getting that “back to school” feeling, I will get my ambition back. will square my shoulders, push my cap forward at a jaunty yet determined angle, and set about making something of myself and maybe even finally getting the sort of Hollywood life I have always dreamed of for myself.

But none of that movie star bullshit.

No, I would want to be a highly paid and in-demand television writer who everyone wants to write for their new show and I get to pick and choose the projects that I think look promising and fun to work on.

And to eventually be able to create and produce my own shows and build a brand that means top notch quality just like my hero Walt Disney did.

Top notch quality, superb production, excellent writing, and at the heart of it all, a warm and giving heart that looks to shine some sunshine into people’s lives and make them feel better about themselves and the world.

To reach out and touch all those lonely people who feel like they are on the outside looking in, and invite them in, and tell them that there is nothing wrong with them and that they deserve love too.

If I am lucky, I will also make them feel like they have it.

That’s my highest ambition. To do what Disney did. To make things that have just a little bit of magic in them, the kind that fills you with wonder,. delight, and affection.

This life can be pretty damned hard, especially for us misfits.

I want to make it a little easier for them, and me, and everyone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Damn I love that song. Madonna at her finest.

I’ve been pondering my particular form of articulacy lately, and how it informs how I have lived my life.

In particular, I have been considering what I am calling my Awaiting Input mode. This is a passive listening mode I enter when I don’t understand what is going on and I am waiting for someone to explain things to me.

This mode made sense when I was a kid. Three older siblings plus Mom and Dad meant I basically had five parents and in general, there was always someone around to explain things to me, or at the very least whom I could ask.

Being the nerdy family that we were, everyone was happy to share knowledge with me. I mean, what nerd doesn’t love playing teacher to a receptive and respectful audience?

So far so good. But this lead me to expect a level of articulacy from the world that was wildly unrealistic. Luckily, I developed some very strong deductive capacities and thus got pretty good at figuring things out on my own.

But that Awaiting Input mode never left me, and there was always a second mode to it which was to demand someone explain things to me when I got confused or overwhelming. Maybe demand isn’t the right word….

Whine until I got it. Hey, when you’re the lastborn, whining in a legitimate survival strategy, and one of the only forms of power you have.

The thing is, outside the cozy intellectual environs of my family, this is not going to work. Most people are not articulate enough, nor do they understand me well enough, to be able to answer my questions.

There’s also the question of IQ. The average person isn’t smart enough for the questions either. That’s why my questions (and observations and so on) have so often led to that blank stare moment that makes me feel so brutally disconnected and embarrassed and like I am a gross bizarre alien.

I try so hard to relate. But it’s a case of different worlds.

From their point of view, my questions et al are so outside of their consciousness that they just can’t make the leap. It’s not just that they don’t know the answer to the question or don’t understand what I am talking about.

It’s far worse than that. In truth, they do not understand anything that would lead to such a question or thought. It’s so far outside their existence that it might as well be coming from an alien. One that knows the English language but lacks theory of mind.

That alien would be me.

And that sorta segues into my next point, because my whining for clarity response is basically one of anger mixed with panic, and that leads to feeling like the world owes me an explanation.

Not consciously, of course. On a conscious level, the thought is laughably absurd. But on a deep level, I am still waiting for someone to explain things to me.

And that causes me to get angry when people can’t articulate their thoughts. It’s unenlightened to the extreme, and doesn’t jive well with my egalitarian views of a pluralistic inclusive world where nobody is made to feel bad for their lack of one ability or another because we all have our own set of gifts and ways to contribute.

The thing is, I have never had a problem putting my thoughts into words. It’s always been simplicity itself for me, more or less. The words are there, I just have to say them. There’s been moments when I couldn’t figure out how to get across what I was trying to get across^[1], but they are rare and generally involve such high level and nuanced thoughts that it’s entirely possible nobody has ever put them into words in the entire history of the spoken word.

I might be letting my ego run away with me there,. But hey. It’s possible.

And because I have always had this articulacy, the lazy monkey in me can’t understand why other people don’t just spit it out already.

I mean, the words are right there. All you have to do is say them. Right?

But that’s an ignorant and intellectually lazy falsehood based on a very poor theory of mind. The words are not simply there to be spoken for most people. They actually have to think about how to say what they are trying to say. And if, in order to say it, they have to travel to some bizarre and distant intellectual territory because I have dragged them there, then they are going to have an even harder time.

Their lives are smaller and simpler than mine. Sometimes I envy them for that. My inability to be content without answers is something that I see as a useful byproduct of an unhealthy mind that never feels entirely safe and therefore must constantly be on the move, exploring, hunting, defending, like an army awaiting attack.

Oh, it’s coming. Believe me.

And I respect that everyone is different and I firmly believe that it is I who is exceptional and not they who are deficient. I’m an outlier. They are not.

But it still makes it very hard for me to relate to average people because my mind balks at the very notion of so limited a view of the world, and refuses to imagine it.

And when I try to force it, I get that queasy, dizzy feeling I always get when I contemplate taking a superior role to others. It makes me acutely uncomfortable, which is why it has been so hard for me to truly accept the truth of the enormity of my intellect relative to the average human.

Because if I truly accepted it, I would also have to accept responsibility for it.

Because if there’s one thing every Spider-man fan knows, it’s that with great power comes great responsibility.

And I don’t know if I can handle that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Going to attempt to cover different things that are on my mind tonight.

I will try to keep it within the usual 1K words, but I might go over.

Let us begin.

I. The fever has broken

I think I am now recovering from the fever dream that is or was my new hobby.

For those of you fresh to the subject, said hobby was downloading and installing adult-oriented modifications to a video game called Skyrim from many years back.

For a while, I pursued this like a madman. It was all I wanted to do. I neglected every other aspect of life, including basic things like eating.

I am not at liberty to explain exactly what I was pursuing so feverishly. Let me just say this : there are aspects of my sexual being that I could express there that it would be very bad idea to discuss here, on a website where the URL is my full name.

But I have done all that now. I now know that I can “have” those things whenever I like, and so the rush to acquire them while I could.

When you stumble upon a way to have what you thought you could never have, it can drive you crazy with the need to get it at all costs.

But once you get them… reality can return.

So I have removed most of the sex-related modifications from the game. Not permanently…. I can get them back whenever I please.

But I have found that I am a lot more interested in playing the actual game now than using it as a sexual wonderland. I am bored with the sexual aspect of it and hence I want to shelve it for now.

After all, I have three expansions for the original game that I haven’t even touched yet. I’ve been too busy with the sexual side of things.

And it’s a damned good game.  Even without the sex.

I think I will actually play it for a while.

II. Our goddamned chemicals

Been struggling with the chemical reality of human existence today.

It goes something like this :

I am mentally ill because there’s a problem with the chemicals in my head. I don’t have enough of the right chemicals and I have too much of the wrong chemicals. And even when my braon does have the right chemicals, it does the wrong things with them. That means that I am broken and the rules for others don’r work for me because of this malfunction. My brain is just plain bad at chemicals.

I take drugs that attempt to fix these broken chemicals by tricking my stumbling fool of a brain into producing more of the good chemicals and holding on to the good chemicals it already has. So really, my antidepressants are chemicals I add to my blood chemicals so that when they combine with my brain chemicals my brain makes the right chemicals and in the right amounts.

And these chemicals help a lot. But the bad chemicals are only a symptom of a deeper chemical issue that has to do with my brain reacting to psychological trauma by producing lots of the chemicals that make me numb. It produces so much of these numbing chemicals that it makes me sick. Sick from the bad chemicals.

So I feel listless and tired and sad and like I am all alone in the world because that’s how I feel.  I am so numb fromt he bad chemicals that I can’t feel the love that is in my life, so I conclude there is none.

And this is subjectively true.But only true in the sense that when you are blindfolded, the world disappears. You know that everything is still out there. But you can’t see it.

And I know people love me and care about me, even though I can’t feel it. And I won’t be able to feel it until the psychological injuries heal.

All because of a bunch of stupid fucking chemicals.

III. The State of the Chemicals Address. 

Right now, my chemicals have me feeling lost and disconnected and hence very, very alone. I feel like I am floating motionless in the icy void of space with no propulsion system and only minimal life support and no way to contact anyone for help.

Well, no way besides this blog, anyhow.

I feel very tired. Sleepy. Even though I have already slept for most of today. Seem like I have not caught up yet.

Not until my medium-term memory is empty will I be able to relax.

I wish I could just dump the damn things content to a file and forget about it. Start over again. Clear the backlog via brute force and ignorance and start over with a clean slate and a dogged determination to keep on top of things this time.

Right now I feel like I am in that long dark canal I have written about before. There I sit in my narrow gondola only slightly smaller than the dark walls of this never ending chamber. I slide forward smoothly and silently, the lighting dim almost to the point of not being able to see. But no, that would cause panic. So it is merely soothingly dim.

It engenders a deep sense of hushed reverence, as if disturbing it would be blasphemy. Like the silence in one of those churches older than any Christianity we’d recognize as such, places where the worries of the world can be left behind as in deference which does not diminish, we pray, and hence come into contact with our higher selves.

It’s an introvert’s paradise, really. As low stimulation as it can be without setting off that certain biological panic that comes from insufficient environmental stimulation. Someplace I find myself when, perhaps, I need some time away from it all so I can flush my buffers, gently but firmly put reality on the shelf, and slip away into the darkness of the night’s swift sweet slumber,.

I need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, sorry about not bloggijng yesterday. Sleep happened.

And that worries me.

I got so wrapped in trying to make this epic mod for Skyrim FUCKING WORK that I almost forgot that I had not blogged today and still needed to do so.

And that would be crossing a line I dare not cross. Not now.

See, now that I will not be writing episodes of Uno for a while, the blog is all I have that is holding me together. That’s been its role for a long long time. No matter how bad it got, I had something productive (and therapeutic) to do with my time every day.

if I let that slip while pursuing my exciting (and frustrating, and challenging) new hobby, I will lose all sense of structure and my center will not hold.

And then I will go crazy,. I know this because that’s what almost happened recently. By any definition, entering a state in which you stop eating and sleeping because you are so rapt in pursuing a hobby is a form of insanity.

After all,. it meets two of the classic criterion :

a. It took over my life and made me lose interest in the world, and
b. It made me a risk to myself or others. Mostly myself, although I suppose that if, wjhen I was at my lowest point, someone had tried to get between me and my computer, I might have tried to brain them with my bottle of Febreze.

So until I settle on another daily activity which can absorb my excess creative energies, I must hew to this work of mine like a guilty Protestant.

What bug me is the irony of my situation. I had gotten my balance back. I did my blogging and my episodes and the rest of the time I messed about with Skyrim and it’s wonderful world of unfettered perversion.

And my lord, is there a lot of it.

Anyhow, so I was fighting back to a point of stability and even getting really into writing my episodes. I had talked myself through the inertial resistance to doing things other than Skyrim jiggery pokery and realized that I was really enjoying the writing. I was really starting to feel my power as a writer and I was stretching my wings and bringing things to a whole new level.

So why resist that?

But then, and this is where the irony sinks its teeth into my flesh, but then an objectively very nice thing happens and the whole thing comes a-tumbling down again.

That objectively nice thing is, of course, the my boss Prasad put me on paid vacation. Most people would absolutely love that. And I tried to have the normal reaction to that. And I managed to do so…. for around a day.

But the truth is, I would rather be working. I’m better off working. I am saner when I am working,. I have grown used to having a genuinely productive thing that I get paid to do in my life. I am going to miss it for the next two weeks or so.

It reminds me strongly of how too many days off in a row made me depressed when I was going to VFS.

Two days was fine. Three made me enter the bottom of the yellow alert zone. Any more than that and my odds of ending up depressed went up logarithmically. .

And it was because I didn’t know what to do with myself. The hours stretched ahead of me like a death sentence except without the happy ending. With depression blocking my energies, they built up inside, and with nowhere to go, they venting inward.

And that’s a bad thing. It rips me up inside.

My problem now is different in that I definitely have something that can absorb all the energy I want to put into it. My new hobby. The endless pursuit of Skyrim boinking. So my energies are not being blocked. They are, in fact, being expressed at an unprecedented rate and on a deeper level than ever before.

However, the form of their expression is not good for my sanity. In a strange way, it’s a relief that addiction has finally found me.

I have dodged it so long by conveniently and cleverly not having a life.

But nothing could have prepared me for this arena of endeavour that could suck up enormous amounts of drive and energy and be challenging to my cleverness and resourcefulness and creative problem solving skills.

And it has the most addictive thing in the world for someone like me : moreso than any video game, it rewards effort.

When effort yields rewards in some form of direct proportion – even if the conversation rate is pretty lousy – you get way, way more effort.

That’s why entrepreneurs work so hard. And why wage slaves don’t. The ideal model is a modest fix salary and a robust reward system based, at least in part, on the value the employee actually generates.

What a novel idea.

Now where was I. It’s hard to stay on subject when you mind naturally flollows the connections between things instead of the things themselves.

Everything branches out!

Oh right. Reward for effort. I have not known a lot of that in my life. Not in so direct and reliable a form. Often this has been because the things that are expected of me do not take very much effort on my part,.

And I have only recently grown to the point where I even realize that I can look for more rewarding things, let alone do them.

I have a strange combination of extraordinary mental powers and cowardice. Like I explore with my mind but that’s it. Anything outside my comfort zone – especially anything requiring an increase in stimulation levels do to unfamiliarity – and I freeze up and run away.

I’m like Descartes trying to deduce the entire world from his bed.

And I hate Descartes.

I think he was cogito ergo dum.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m on vacation right now. Paid vacation. And I will continue to be on vacation until the 12th of next month.

Let me explain.

I was contacted by my cool boss Prasad today, and he told me that since our voice actor Ryan has gone on vacation, I might as well do so as well.

That’s no big deal. It’s summer. Vacations happen. Or so I am told^[1]  .I would have understood it if that had meant no scripts and no money from Prasad until then.

The big deal is that Prasad is going to pay me anyway, exactly as if I was still doing a script per weekday for him.

Is he a cool guy, or what?

So I am officially en vacance. It’s a strange feeling. Kinda cool, but also a tad disorienting. I know that I will miss the world unless I find something else to do that demands as much effort and focus as those scripts.

And I’d been having so much fun writing them lately.

So whatever I do, it will have to be just as fun. That means writing comedy. Perhaps I will use this time to try and write the Great Canadian Comedy Novel.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing in the style of such hilarious Brits as Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. But I have never been able to get started.

Starting the writing is always the hardest part for me. Kinda of like how your car’s engine uses a lot of power just to get moving, or how when you are pushing something that has wheels on it, you have to push hard to get going.

Once I have a satisfactory starting point, the rest of the story tends to fall into place. It’s like that classic crystallization experiment from school science fairs. The one where the student supersaturates some water by heating the water up and melting a lot of sugar into it when it’s hot, then letting it cool.

The cold water is now in a supersaturated state. There’s way more sugar in it than could normally be dissolved into it. In a sense, the extra sugar “wants” to precipitate out of the liquid, but it can’t, because there’s nothing for the sugar to crystallize around. ^[2]

Enter the Small Length of Rough String… OF SCIENCE!

You dip the string into the supersaturated water, and sugar crystals immediately begin to form around it because the rough surface of the string has tons of places for the crystals to get their thing on.

Congratulations, you’ve official done some neato sciencing, and what’s more, you now know how to make rock candy.

Anyhow. Where was I? And how did I get here? Oh right, ideas crystallizing.

So if I had a good starting point for my comedic science fiction and/or fantasy novel, the rest would flow naturally from there. That’s how it works for me.

When I was at VFS, we were taught that in writing, events need to follow one another in a logical sequence that never leaves the audience wondering “How did we get here”? or worse, “WTF is happening and why should I care? “.

And I remember thinking, there’s another way of writing?

But I suppose there is, because I could easily imagine someone writing a lot of terrific scenes but skimping out on the connections between those great scenes, and that would destroy the narrative structure entirely.

For me, it has to make sense in a logical sequence because that’s how I write. One thing leading to another. That also happens to be how reality works too, which is why it’s so important to get it write.

But I would never claim that I have never broken the chain of causality in my writing. It’s just that when I do it, it’s because I don’t realize that what makes sense to me doesn’t always make sense to anyone else.

And that would be fine were I James Joyce. But I want to entertain people, and that means my inner audience must remain at least somewhat objective.

And even for a hardcore truth seeker like me, that can be painful.

Another challenge will be to keep the tone light. My most successful attempt to write something like Pratchett or Adams, my attempt at Pratchett type fantasy, started off with a very funny scene in exactly the right tone but rapidly devolved into stuff about death and ghosts and tortured romance and all kinds of dark shit.

What can I say, I got issue.

And it’s not like a funny novel can’t “go there”. Pratchett’s stuff proves that you can. People think of his novels as being light and fluffy and warm, and for the most part they are. But he’s also had scenes where a pregnant woman is beaten by her drunk abusive husband so bad that the baby dies.

So it’s not like I couldn’t get away with some dark shit in a funny novel. The best comedy, in fact, holds your hand as it takes you through dark and scary stuff, using the comedy as a kind of anesthetic, and thus makes the world a less scary place for people by confronting the scary parts of our lives and leaving them with the feeling that those things aren’t nearly as scary now.

Because they have been there.

The problem I had with the novel in question was that I realized almost halfway through that it had stopped being funny at all a long time ago.

It had become a serious novel, and that is not at all what I set out to write.

So if I decide to write this novel, I will be doing to while constantly reminding myself that it has to stay funny most of the time.

Then again, I might do something completely different.

Like look for better paying work on Upwork.

I have a career to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Patient readers know of what I speak when I talk about The Jagoff.

It’s the part of myself that convinces me to do stupid, lazy, shortsighted, immediate gratification leading to long term consequences type things by saying that it’s no big deal, no stress, just relax, surely you can put if off a little longer, and so forth and so on.

And that’s how I have traditionally seen it : as the devil on my shoulder that talks me into doing things that are not in my long term interest at all.

And of course, when things blow up in my face and I find that I have, once more, fucked up largely and not only hurt others but thoroughly humiliated myself,  he is nowhere to be seen and I am kicking myself – savagely – for listening to him yet again.

But after an interesting if mildly frustrating discussion with friends last night where I tried (and failed)  to convey to them the folly of the point of view that sees acting on impulse as the enemy (as opposed to acting on them poorly), it’s occurred to me that I have been far too hard on the Jagoff.

After all, he’s only trying to make me happy.

And if I am being honest, he’s been my greatest ally because he has been there in my darkest hours trying to keep me amused and distracted so that I don’t get too sad.

In that sense, he’s the wellspring of my comedic talents. He’s the voice that led me to my love of comedy and my desire to understand all there is about it. If I am, in any sense, a jester and a clown, it’s because that is what that part of me had done for me.

So he’s been the one looking out for me when nobody else would. Kind of the fun uncle whose job it was to keep me entertained that I never had.

Nobody gave a damn whether I was happy or not. How could they?

They had no idea how miserable I was as a kid.

And to be fair, neither did I. Like all kids, I did what I thought was expected of me. I went to school, got excellent marks, came home, retreated to my room, and spent my time with my beloved distractions of comics, books, and video games.

And, later on, porn.  Thanks, internet!

So it’s unfair to only associate the Jagoff with the bad results. That’s a clear cut case of selection bias. Most of the time, he’s been my only friend, and while his brand of comfort often leads me down the wrong path, he always means well.

He’s just not that good with the long term thinking.

And as for my own salvation, he might just lead me there if I let him. He’s more or less the voice of my id., inasmuch as the the id can have a voice, and while mindlessly doing what your emotions are telling you to do is obviously a bad idea, never doing what your impulses are telling you is almost as bad.

For one thing, they will get tired of being ignored and force you to listen to them one way or another. Like the man who doesn’t even remember stealing the loaf of bread when he was starving because his id simply took over and got things done.

Or all those people say their infidelity “just happened”, because their unmet need got so strong that it also took over.

This is why I think the only true path to inner peace and harmony with the universe is to satiate one’s desires.

It is only when a man has a full belly and empty balls that he can truly be patient, wise, and a good citizen.

I’m sure Plato said something like that at one point.

To the ego-dominated mind, acting on impulse can only lead to disaster. Again, this is selection bias at work. You don’t notice all the times when acting on impulse worked out just fine. Why? Because nothing unusual or noteworthy happened.

But when things go cattywampus, the ego-biased mind immediately blames it on letting the id decide something. We kick ourselves (savagely) and say things like “If I’d only thought about it for two fucking seconds.,… “.

But that’s not how life works. We can’t spend two seconds on every single decision we make. Life happens too fast for that. We have no choice but to make a lot of decisions quickly and in realtime and so to blame ourselves (and worse, our ids) for not thinking things through is absurd and unjustified.

Life is not a chess game, where there is always plenty of time to contemplate our next move. Decisions have to be made quickly, and only the fast circuit of the brain can do that. And the fast circuit is, as the name implies, very fast, but it’s not nearly as smart as the slow circuit of the brain.

So yeah. If you’d thought about it for two seconds, you would have made a better choice. No doubt about it.

But that was never going to happen. Ever.

It’s going to take me a long time to process this.

So all those mistakes you kick yourself over? You literally made the best decision you could at the time. Sure, in retrospect, the slow circuit of your brain can easily see what the right decision for the best outcome was, but it wasn’t there.

The quick circuit was. And it did what it could.

I’m not saying that there is no situation in which pausing for a few moments would be a bad idea. People make rash decisions unnecessarily all the time. The world could use more thoughtful pauses.

But by the same token, there are times when pausing to think things over would be a very bad idea.

The ideal solution, then, is to build a smarter fast circuit. And you do that by trusting it over and over again and evaluating the results.

Luckily, life forces you to do that anyway.

All you have to do is open your mind to the idea that sometimes, it’s right.

Then it will all fall into place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m in a very irritating state right now.

I am sleepy, yet I can’t actually get to sleep. Call it daytime insomnia. Given the vampire’s hours I keep these days, it would be highly appropriate.

Normally, when I feel like this, I just take a nap. But something or other is keeping me from being able to relax enough.

Maybe something is bugging me and I’m not aware of it.

I can’t think of any worries I might have. My life is pretty sweet right now. I have around as much work as I can handle. It brings me a little extra income, which is very nice. Recently my boss, Prasad, thanked me for my patience in continuing to write the scripts even though I hadn’t heard from him in a while. And he swears he’s had three episodes animated and will upload them real soon now.

That would be nice.

But the thing is, I am actually enjoying the work. For the most part. I mean, work’s work and there will always be times when you have to do it even though you don’t feel like it at all. But for the most part, I am getting a hell of a lot more out of it than money.

I’m getting a ton of highly valuable experience. My writing skill and confidence grows with every script, and at five scripts a weak, that’s really something. As I develop, I find myself using the instrument that is animation in a more strong and inventive fashion.

I have even, spontaneously, started writing cutaways. And that’s magical. And not just because that’s what the big boys like Seth Macfarlane do.

It’s because I write to pagecount/time, and cutaways fill that space quite easily, even with my trying to get them across in as few words as possible.

Tat’s because I have realized that we were told in Writing for Animation class that the animators don’t want us doing their jobs for them by visualizing in the script. They want us writers to tell us, in detail, what happens, but how it looks and how it’s actually is execute is their job.

I probably shouldn’t be using an inline markup system I pulled out of my ass in order to figure out how to write this stuff in order to tell them where the punchline is and where the visuals go and when they should go there.

But as a comedy writer, I feel like I have to control the timing of the gags. I can’t do that without pointing the animators at the right parts.

I realize that this is one of those control/trust issues I have. I should just trust that they know what they are doing and will not butcher my script with their own ideas.

Unless they’re funny. People are free to make it funnier. It has to be funnier to me, but I am always open to making things better. The play’s the thing… the show.

If other people’s ideas can make the show better, then I will take ther advice and I will thank them for it and I will use their ideas and it will still be only my name on the script.

After all, for the most part, people just wanted to contribute. They want to feel like they are doing their part to further the group objective. They want to feel lijke what they think and say matters.. They want to feel like a part of something.

I would be happy to give them that.

Compared to that, matters of who gets credit for what pales in comparison.  Myself, I am scrupulous about such things. Mostly, that is due to my own moral code.

But it’s also because, on a purely selfish level, taking credit for someone else’s work is gross to me. My work flows from myself into the world as a living, organic part of me.

Other people’s work is not part of that, and hence foreign and alien to me.

The only solution is to make sure everyone gets full credit for their ideas and thus make it very clear where their body of work ends and mine begins.

God, it sucks to be this sleepy. It must be the heat that’s doing it. Just pounding the life out of me, like it does. I am trying to stay hydrated, but it’s tough.

Mainly because the heat is making me too lazy to get up and get more water.

Summer is like that, at least for a fat old tubbalard like me.

I wonder if I will make it to the beach this summer. Odds are against it. There’s too much social anxiety in the way. Plus, I have never been to a beach all alone. It’s always been with friends and/or family and/or neighbours.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

I’ve never even been in the ocean without there being someone around to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t drown.

I’m not sure if being on the beach by myself would make me feel really lonely or really free. Probably both, and in that order. I know that I would not be able to stop myself from looking around at all the happy families (and all the normal ones too) having fun in the sun, relaxed, taking the close bond they have with one another for granted because it has always been there.

And that would give me that deep feeling of being locked out of life, able to watch it but not to be a part of it. The sad boy alone at night looking into the window of a house where everything seems warm and happy and loving.

I wish I’d known what that meant back then. I wish I’d realized that I had a problem and it was up to me to solve it. That how I lived – lonely and isolated and miserable – was not normal and something should be done about it.

But like I would do for the rest of my life, I did nothing about it, and just kept on trudging forward because I was too timid to ask for help.

And I am still that way at 44.

But I am getting better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

An amazing thing happened today.

I actually slept for eight hours.

In a row, even.

I went to bed around 6 am, and woke up just before 2 pm . That NEVER happens. Even with the aid of my sleeping pills, I never get more than 5 hours of sleep.

And the fact is, I am still sleepy. If it wasn’t for needing to eat, I might have gone right back to sleep after I took a leak at that point.

Drat those pesky concerns like actually wanting to do something with my day and the sure and swift knowledge that going to sleep when you haven’t eaten in  10 hours is a Very Bad Thing if you are a type 2 diabetic like me.,

And here I am a couple hours later. Normally, I would tough it out and not sleep until I had finished what I had started.

But I was so sleepy that not only did I keep falling asleep for a few seconds, I started to slide out of my chair when ti happened, and so I figured I had better get some damned sleep before I hurt myself.

That brings the total hours I have slept today up to ten, which pleases me. I’m proud of it. It feels like I accomplished something.

That’s how low the bar is for me, dear readers. Sleeping a lot is now victory.

I think I am past the worst of the fever-dream that was/is my Skyrim modding obsession,. I am still enjoying it quite a bit, but I don’t feel as driven to do it as I did.

Turns out the secret was to finally masturbate to completion. Who knew.

I feel pretty weird about the whole thing, to be honest. I am pretty sure I will look back on this odd period of my life as something that feels like it happened to someone else. Someone who I know intimately, but who isn’t really me.

Kind of like how, in dreams, I am very rarely actually myself, Michael John Bertrand, the dude what is typing at you right now, who grew up in Summerside and went to Three Oaks Senior High (go, the TOSH Whatevers!), and has friends and siblings and such.

And yet, it’s still me. The core me, the thing that is me, the true self. My core self. The me that is left over if you subtract all the normal things we use to identify ourselves.

The person I would be if I had no idea who I was.

One of the things that struck me about V, the protagonist in the movie V for Vendetta, is that he emerged from the burning wreckage of some secret government facility with total amnesia. Had no idea what or who he was. Tabula rasa.

And the weird thing is…. I envy him. Because he got to decide who he was from that point on. He could construct an identity entirely consistent with his true self and thus become a highly actualized individual.

What enormous freedom that represented. To be free of all arbitrary contexts such as personal history and accidents of birth, and be free to develop oneself unhindered by the accumulated refuse of life.

I realize how bizarre that sounds. It makes me sound like some kind of chilly alien sociopath. Well, I am certifiably insane, and have the medications to prove it. I often talk about the profound coldness within me in this space, but so far I have mostly kept its manifestations to myself. This is one of them.

In fact, the degree to which I identify with V frightens me. The fact that he (spoiler alert) does that whole fucked up thing of keeping the true protagonist, the girl, hostage and making her think she had been captured by the evil government and torturing her until she finally breaks and screams she’s not afraid any more – and the fact that he did it because she said she wanted to be free of her fear – makes total sense to me.

I’m not saying it was a good thing to do or that it was justified or anything. V is a monster in many ways. She was right to get super pissed at him.

But it is exactly the sort of thing I would do if something happened to me that made me lose my mind to an unprecedented degree. I would do it out of love, knowing the person would hate me for it, I’d be willing to make that sacrifice if that’s what it took to free them from their pain.

As you can see in the movie. that’s not exactly how it turned out. He might have extinguished her fears but it’s hard to say she was better off for it.

I also identify with his total rage at the horrible goddamned government and greatly admire the tenacity, intelligence, creativity, and above all tightly focused drive I would feel the same way about a government like that – we all would – but I doubt I would be able to turn that rage into action so effectively.

I’d want to do so. Like him, I would plot and scheme to destroy the system. I could do little else. I would feel, like Adrian Veidt did in that other Alan Moore story Watchmen, that I was quite possibly the only person who could do it, but definitely that I had to try.

And probably die in the process. But it would be the only way I could live with myself. I am well aware of the power that comes with my particular form of intelligence. The INTJ power to plot, scheme, maneuver, and execute a long term plan with many factors and moving parts and unbounded variables.

It’s the power of strategy, and if you have it and you know it – and you have a conscience and feel an deep and abiding need to live consistent to it – then you have no choice but to fight back however you can.

You know you can.

So you must.

That’s just how it works with me.

Now if only my life had as clear and unmistakable a group of villains as V does.

Then you’d really see some shit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.