Updated to WordPress 5.0 and now everything is WEIRD. Grr. 

Anyhow. Feeling less depressed lately but not actually better. 

I am feeling less depressed in that I am not feeling even half the ampount of numbness and despair that I was last week. That feeling that trying to motivate myself is like trying to fill a bucket with no bottom is still there but it’s way in the background right now. 

Which is good. Probably. 

But the lack of numbness means I have reverted to my second negative state, feeling angry, nihilistic, and frustrated. 

And it’s getting worse. For the last ten days or so, I have been experiencing the feeling like I am Louis Del Grande in Scanners and the pressure in my head is building until it explodes. 

Well, okay, not that bad. But the feeling of rising tension, anger, and anxiety is kind of like that. 

Hence the name of this post. I feel like I am angrily stalking around in my cage and the cage keeps getting smaller and smaller until I end up jumping up and down and screaming with the strong urge to fling poo. 

Or strangle somebody. Either/or. 

And I feel like it is all building to a fever pitch and at some point something dangerously explosive is going to happen, and I don’t want that thing to happen and I will do my best to release the pressure non-destructively, but I strongly suspect that this will not be enough and I am going to go nuclear on one level or another time soon. 

I can only hope that it will be the transcendental type explosion that propels me to a new level of being as the energies reach a critical level and force open the doors of my perceptions to allow for self-transformation. 

Render me molten. I need a new shape. 

The alternative is that I end up getting super mad at someone and/or something, and I reaaaaally don’t want that. I am not worried I will commit acts of physical violence any more – I have progress that far at least – but verbal violence is a distinct possibility and I don’t want to end up in another situation where I have a meltdown at FRED and end up wrecking a large part of the evening for everyone, including myself,  by getting super pissed about some minor thing and (even worse) being absolutely incapable of backing down or agreeing to disagree or anything like that because my flame and lit now and I won’t be sane until it burns all its fuel. 

That’s exactly the emotion pattern of an abuser like my father. Temporary rage induced insanity.  And I simply will not have it. I will fall on my sword rather than let that happen to me again. 

Aaaand the FRED Xmas part is this Sunday, so I had better get my act together well ahead of time. 

Every real life Xmas horror story starts with the fact that the holidays put people under unusual stress and that can have explosive results. 

So I will be going in ready for problems and with a light but firm grip on myself, knowing I am at risk for going off.

It’s the only way to guard against rage incidents. 

I feel lucky that I know this and am willing to take responsibility for it. 

That’s something my father never did. 

And now, comedy! 

I think that, this Xmas season, it is especially important for everyone in these divisive and divided times to remember the true meaning of Xmas and that is to celebrate the day that X was born. 

I had a bunch of riffs on that setup but I am too tired to remember them and I am not sure they were all that great to begin with. 

They were very mathy. 

Just got back from the weekly Paragon meeting. Not really in the mood to blog right now, to be honest. For some reason I feel kind of sick and what I really want to do is lay down and zero out. 

But I cannot rest until I have written my daily words,  so on I go. 

I feel sort of betrayed by the fact that I feel kind of ill right now because after I did the earlier portion of today’s blogging, I actually felt a lot better and was feeling almost sort of kind of semi-good for once. 

That’s a big improvement over feeling terrible sadness punctured by periods of unfocused rage. 

Hopefully my system will calm down and mellow out in the near future. I guess the burst of activity of gathering my 7-11 purchases, getting out of Felicity’s car, coming injside my apartment building, then taking the elevator to our floor and coming home was just oo much for my hothouse flower systems to take and now I am all aflutter. 

I had an interesting thought pop into my head earlier : that there is always so much at stake in my life. Even minor things like going and getting a glass of water involve so much emotion that it’s like I am walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls or something. 

And it’s not hard to see why. I have all this latent emotion floating around in my system that it ends up attaching itself to even the most mundane of activities and invests them with outsized importance just to get expressed. 

So what happens? I end up hiding from all that emotion as best as I can by doing as little as possible, which is the exact reason I have all that latent emotion hanging around in the first place. 

The obvious route out is to find healthy ways to express all that latent emotion.  Easier said that done, right? In order to do that, I would have to accept that my emotions might hit the sort of intensity on the way out that means I will not be able to remain in control of myself. 

I might even do things I will later regret in the heat of the moment. 

And words cannoy convey how much that prospect terrifies me. It’s like death but worse. It feels like that would destroy me. 

Even though I know it’s the sort of thing that happens to normal people all the time. To me, it still seems like the worst possible thing. 

And I don’t know what to do about that. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

Saturday is usually the “big day” of a convention. Everyone has arrived and checked in and (hopefully) gotten some sleep, so it’s time for the only truly full day of panels!

9:30 am (or so) : Savouring the memory of the previous night’s feast, I eagerly await what breakfast has in store for me in hospitality.

Not much, as it turns out. All we got was a huge pile of muffins at 8 am, and I got the very last one (lemon poppyseed, VERY good and not one seen a lot these days.)

Lesson learned. Sign says lunch will be served at 12:30 pm. I will be there.

10 am : Diversity in Science Fiction.  A not too bad panel. Nothing world rocking, but we had an interesting and stimulating discuss about including (gasp) non-white, non-male, non-neurotypical, non-able bodied, and/or non-heterosexual protagonists in science fiction and fantasy.

I am all for it, both for representation (which is SUPER IMPORTANT) and quite frankly for literary merit. I want to slip into the skin of someone who is not like me when I read. I want to see the world from a different point of view. I want to understand what it is like to be somebody else.

And on that level, I am sick to death of all the “normal” heroes.

To hell with yet another angsty Aryan.

Give me a black disabled autistic lesbian from Senegal, god damn it.

11 am : Alien Biology. Loved this panel because there were at least two or three actual scientists on the panel and they could give real answers to our questions.

It may not sound like much, but to me, that was a thrilling opportunity.

We ended talking mostly about whether there could be such a thing as a silicon based life form. Consensus is : no. Not a viable option.

Why? Because unlike that happy little slut carbon, silicon bond only weakly to itself, and so thqat makes it a piss poor substitute for carbon in the chain of life.

Carbon is up for a anything. It bonds with a lot of different things in a lot of different configuations, including itself.

So as far as we can tell, carbon is the only basis for life. But I hold out hope that there is some radically different formulation of the self-replicating pattern known as life out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

12 pm. Video Games as Art.  I went into this knowing I would only be there for half of it, as I had an appointment for lunch at Chez Nous at 12:30.

Of course, the whole thing about how the late Roger Ebert said video games are not art came up. I paid as little attention to it now as I did then. Ebert was of the pinball generation and didn’t know a damned thing about video games.

Clearly, he just said that to tweak the tiger’s tail and get a rise out of the Internet.

Regardless, the discussion helped advance my own thinking on the subject.I realized that the only difference between the rest of the world of art and a video game is interactivity. And if interactivity somehow negates something’s status as “art”, then by that logic, you can turn the Mona Lisa from art to non-art simply by installing a button that changes the lighting slightly.

That’s clearly absurd. As usual, the real issue is that the snobs in the world of art can’t help conflating saying something is art and saying it is good. And video games have zero snob appeal and are associated with nerds and are otherwise socially toxic to the sort of person who is keen to have people think they are “sophisticated’.

Let’s move on before I upset myself.

12:30 pm :  I arrived at Hospitality to find that lunch was served ages ago. Betrayed!

And the worst part is that I knew this was going to happen. I could feel it coming. It started as a small worry then rapidly grew into a dreaded certainty. Something deep in my bones told me it was coming, and lo and behold, it did.

And that made me angry because god dammit the sign said 12:30 pm but someone ignored that and served lunch early and that isn’t fair, god dammit.

However, there was still plenty of food left, so no harm done.

1 pm : Alien Languages.  Always a fun topic. We ended up discussing the possibility of a creature that communicated via radio signals.

It’s more plausible than you might think. The presenter showed us a picture of a crab-like creature that could create an electric spark between its claws. That spark could form the basis of what’s known as a spark-gap transmitter. That, in turn, could be used in some kind of Morse Code type system of langauge.

The amount of energy involved need not be huge as the system only has to reach as far as the human voice does in order to be on par with it. And creatures like electric eels can generate quite a bit of energy in their coils.

It’s an intriguing thought. Though personally, I would go for something cuter than crabs. Maybe some deer-like animal that generates the spark between its antlers.

2 pm : Nap break! I always sleep very poorly on my first night in a new place. So I did not sleep much Friday night. Hence my beed for downtime. I went up to the hotel room, set an alarm for 3 pm, and snoozed.

3 pm : The alarm goes off! Owe Em Gee, it’s time to go to the super important Podcasting 101 panel. I really want to get into podcasting and this panel will tell me how to do it! GO GO GO.

Meh. Nah. Back to sleep.

Not proud of that, but that’s the way the ball crumbles sometimes.

That’s enough for today. Tomorrow will come Part 2, starting with my journey to find out what the heck a Science Slam is and does it hurt.

These and many other answers to questions who never asked will be found in tomorrow’s blog entry, unless I get super sad and need to blog instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Con report time!

3 pm : Joe and I made it to the con.  The line for registration was relatively short. One complaint on my part : the ancient laptop I had to use in order to input all my registration info was too low for comfortable use by a mountainous fellow like myself, so the whole time I was inputting, I was in acute pain from having to crouch down.

This happens all the time when you are significantly taller than average. Sinks, counters, some chairs, some ceilings (erk), and various other things are set at too low a height and we end up having to squish down.

It’s not that big a deal, but it can be really annoying sometimes.

3:30 pm : After registration, I managed to catch the second half of a panel called Page 189,.  The premise was intriguing : one of the panelists would read page 189 of a book to the audience, and then ask the audience if they would read the rest of the book based on that one page.

Had a near-miss with a terrible faux pas. The very last page 189 they read out bored me to tears. It was entirely exposition about some primitive submarine’s physical and command structure, and that kind of thing is all noise and no signal to me. Yawn!

So when they asked us if we would read the book based on that page, I was all ready to say HELL NO. But I hesitated.

And it’s good that I did, because it turned out that the book in question was written by the very panelist who was reading it to us.

Yikles. Dodged a bullet there!

4 pm : After that, I went to a panel called Blake’s 7 and Bureaucratic Inertia. The basic idea was to have an open-ended discussion of all the day to day details of life as one of the nameless cogs in the massive machine of an evil fascist empire. This is a topic I find super interesting, so I was eager to participate.

One stimulating notion that emerged was the idea that Blake’s 7 depicts what life is like for everyone in Star Trek’s Federation who is NOT in Starfleet and assigned to high status positions on the flagship of the fleet.

Obviously, this does not fly logically at all, and I furthermore have to strenuously object to it on philosophical and ethical grounds.

But it did bring up an interesting question : seeing as the Federation is a post-scarcity society, what, exactly, do the non-Starfleet citizens of the Federation do all day?

My guess is that most of them have jobs of some sort, but possibly not ones we would recognize as such, but these jobs would be socially rewarding but far from necessary in order to survive.

In other words, you might get status, a sense of accomplishment, the recognition of your peers, and a place in society where you can do meaningful labour out of one of these jobs, but money would not be part of the equation at all.

It’s really not that important.

5 pm :  Nothing going on that held my interest, so I wandered over to Hospitality. There, my mind was blown by the fact that they were serving real hot food, including veggie pakora (delish), and OMG SO DAMNED GOOD Shepherd’s pie.

I am not kidding. It was the best Shepherd’s Pie I have ever had (sorry, Mom). The sauce was so rich and tasty. And I am not the only one who felt that way. Everyone who had it was talking about how good it was.

Excellent hot food in the Hospitality suite?

Now that’s what I call livin’.

6 pm : After a small amount of dithering, I ended up wandering in to Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary, a panel about the history of the Victorian ghost story, of which A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickers is the most famous.

It turns out that in England, it used to be a tradition that on Xmas eve, you would sit around the fire and tell ghost stories. That struck me and the panelists as something that hearkened to pagan Longest Night festivals based around the idea that the winter solstice was the night when the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead was at its thinnest.

How that got pushed all the way back to October 31 is beyond me.

7 pm : Enough frivolity, it was time for the very serious business of FOOD. First, Joe and Felicity and I tried Denny’s, but it was super busy.  So we ended up at our other usual restaurant, ABC Country Kitchen.

Good food, good company, and good conversation. That’s livin’ too.

After that, there was nothing interesting going on until….

11 pm : I went to a fun panel with a highly flawed premise, What, No Sex In The Future? The idea was something like, “why is there no sex in science fiction TV and movies?”, to which we all replied that there is lots, it’s just not explicit, it’s implied, like in the rest of mainstream media. If two people are shown in a passionate embrace in bed, then we cut to them waking up in the morning, we all know what happened in between.

And even that is not true any more now that there are shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld around. They abound with fuckin’.

Still, it was fun to talk about the future of sex. It made me realize that my main worry about a world where, whether via genetic modification or virtual reality, you can have any body you want and make whatever changes you want at any time is that I am pretty sure that would drive a lot of people insane.

Our bodies are our boundries and if they become protean, I am not at all sure that our minds will be able to take it.

So I am thinking that even in a future where the technology allows unlimited bodily modification, there would be a strong set of rules and/or taboos that would keep things from going further than the mind can handle.

Losing your mind that way is a terrifying prospect, when you think about it.

Might make the basis for a heck of a horror story.

I shall think upon it. In the meantime….

I will walk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

It’s been a while since I made you uncomfortable by talking candidly about something sexual, and tonight I plan to fix that.

Tonight’s jumping-off point : the penis. Specifically, the mysterious male urge to whip it out and give it a wiggle in highly inappropriate situations.

What got me onto the topic (besides being a pathetically horny gay man who thinks about cocks all the time{{1]}) was watching the latest #metoo takedown. that of CBS CEO Les Moonves, on the Colbert show.

Amogst this jizz monkey’s many crimes was listed the ol ‘sudden penis’ gambit, where he porker in question whips out their dingle dongle as a kind of fun surprise for the person they are, in theory, trying to woo and\or screw.

It might be via a bathrobe that ‘accidentally’ falls open, or a ‘hey could you get me that thing from the other room? Hey, look who came out to play when you were gone?” or even just flat out walking into their office naked and ready to go, but essentually it’s all the same deal : sudden out of contect penis popping up like it’s the Jack in the world’s most inappropriate jack-in-the-box.

And the thing is, this behaviour comes out in literally every sexual harassment case. Throw in the very modern practice of unsolicited dick pics and the extremely ancient practice of being a flasher ^[2] and it is clear that, somewhere in the male mind lurks some kind of genital display urge and it is only due to social programming that most of us dudes don’t do it.

Thank god for social programming, eh ladies? I mean, I’m a pathetically horny gay man who thinks about cocks all the time{{1]}, and even I don’t want them suddenly intruding into my life with all the subtlety of an elephant fart.

Now to me, there is clearly something juvenile going on. Infantile, even. It really seems like a childish thing to do, as if it comes from a child’s extremely simple idea of what love and sex is about.

That’s why you only see it in certain situations. Like a lot of regressive behaviours, it takes something going fairly wrong in the mind to bring it out, whether it’s the anonymity of cell phones, a sexual trauama in the past preventing healthy sexual expression, or the strange things that emerge when a person feels the rush of power over others and some primitive part of the brain tells them that means these people are here for sexing.

The most obvious question about this phenomenon is why? Why do the men do it? What do they hope to achieve by it?

That’s the most natural thing to wonder but it is the wrong question, and I think the flashers point the way (so to speak) here.

The act of suddenly asking people to shake hands with Flipper does not need a purpose. It clearly satisfies unto itself. That guy who sends unsolicited dick pics does not think he will meet the woman of his dreams (or creams) this way. All that is necessary is that the pic be seen. That’s satisfaction enough.

It is as if for the flasher or dick pitcher, this IS the sex they want. Someone saw their penis and that was all they needed.

In that sense. it’s like a very mild form of rape. The cock wiggler has their version of sex with you without your consent and in a way that you could not resist or deny.

I think that’s why it makes people feel violated. It is, in a sense, a forced intimacy, with all the baggage that implies.

The case of the powerful man is more complex because clearly, this guy DOES want real genital-kissing type sex with the person. And in that context. the action is socially insane. Nobody in their right mind could possibly think that whipping it out could ever lead to happy fun sexytimes with the person.

Again, something has to go seriously wrong in the mind for this age regressive response to even emerge.  In this case, it seems to me like the unclassified ungulate in question is trying to skip all the preliminaries and go right to the sex but in the most hopelessly pathetic way possible.

I bet if you asked the perpetrators themselves if they thought that a suddenly showing of My Fair Penis would lead to sex, they would say ‘Um, well… I guess not. ”

So maybe, like the other two forms of dickie danglers, they got what this odd urge wanted and so, in that sense, they actually DID go directly to the sex. It’s just the very sad and immature form of sex that the flashers and dick pickers get.

Evolutionarily, it makes no sense. And trust me, like any other student of Desmond Morris, I am really good at explaining things via evolutionary psychology.

So I am forced to go back to child psychology. It must be that, at some point in the early childhood development of every male human, there is a period where we discover our penis and the wonders it contains and we are super happy about it and amazed and excited about having such a thing and therefore get the urge to show it to someone just like we show people other things we’re excited about.

I don’t remember such a phase for myself, but that might be because it happens too early in development for memories to form for most men.

But I can imagine that, given the right circumstances, what with newly discovered sexual feelings in the air and the potential negative reactions to this amazing discovery, it is possible that a portion of the boy’s sexuality gets fixated there.

It’s a theory, at least. I am not happy with it, but it’s the best I have so far. Hopefully now that I have gotten these thoughts out of my head, new stronger thoughts will take their place and I will produce something more coherent.

And those are tonight’s thoughts on sudden penis syndrome.

And remember that, whether you agreed with them or not, I got what I wanted out of writing them when you read them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] And buttholes! Mmmm…. buttholes. [[1]]

(Gene Shalit voice)

The film is called Isle Of Dogs, and Isle Of IT!

Seriously, though, I love this movie. I was charmed and delighted from beginning to end. it really spoke to the animal lover in me because, despite my being way more of a cat person, I recognize that dogs, in general, are awesome.

A warning for fellow cat lovers, however : there is a small amount of indirect villification of cats in this movie. The actual villains are humans, but those humans are cat lovers.

Also, while this is a pretty kid-friendly movie, there are some parts that are quite dark and so it might not be suited for very young kids.

The “too young to see Bambi” demographic.

One more warning : .parts of the movie are in untranslated Japenese. But only in scenes where you can get the gist of what is happening from vocal tone and such.

That said, this is a movie that will make you smile. The script is warm and witty in the Wes Anderson way, where you are more amused than laughing out loud. The animation is absolutely gorgeous – granted, the dogs come across as really high quality toy dogs than real dogs, but that’s entirely in keeping with the visual style of the movie.

I mean, the people seem like dolls too. It all fits.

Most impressively, the movie manages to be genuinely heartwarming in a way that isn’t trite or manipulative. And the plot is original enough that I had no idea what would happen next the majority of the time, other than knowing that it will end well.

Because of course it will. I would accept no less from any movie in a kid-friendly genre.

The voice acting is superb. The dogs are both lovable and relatable, especially if you have been around dogs for any length of time. There are hundreds of little touches that show that the animators knew a lot about how dogs move and react, whether it’s something subtle like a slight twitch of an ear or something more substantial, like grasping how four footed creatures actually move through their environment.

It reminded me of how impressed I was by how Miyazaki animated toddlers in his movies. It takes real observation and sensitivity to understand that toddlers don’t move like older children or adults. They body proportions are different and they live in a world where everything is made for people far larger than them,.

Isle of Dogs understands dogs the same way.

All in all, Isle of Dogs is that rare movie that you can take a kid to – even if it’s just your inner child – and both of you will have a very good time and come away from it feeling warmer and happier and maybe just a little bit better about the world.

And when art  – in any form – can do that, you know you’ve found something special.

So if you’re a dog lover looking for a movie that seems to be made just for you, an animation fan looking for something with a little of that old fashioned magic in it, or just want to show off how well you understand Japanese, I hearily recommend this movie.

Yay, I reviewed something that was still in the theaters!

Why, that’s practically relevent!

Now I have another thing to reivew, namely the Indian restaurant I ordered from tonight for my Saturday Night Treat.

It’s called Ginger Indian Cuisine and I am displeased,due to the price.

See, I paid $14 for chicken vindaloo. And by itself that is not outrageous – that’s about what I would pay downtown.

But if I had ordered it downtown, it would have come with the usual Indian food trimmings – some naan bread, some cold rice, a scoop of kachumber or some other Indian salad – and therefore I would feel like I got a meal.

Instead, all I got was the curry. And it was quite good – but I don’t know if it was $13 good. And that’s not even including the delivery charge and tip.

Side note – I figured out how to not include any tip on my SkipTheDishes order so that I could tip my driver directly without having to worry about whether or not their employer is even going to pass the money along.

Fact is, some restauranteurs are bastards and would keep the tips themselves if they thought they could get away with it.

Oh, and every time I order through SkipTheDishes, I get this song stuck in my head :

What a great war song.

Anyhow, back to the review. The curry was great, especially when I had re-adjusted to the spiciness level.

Every time I have spicy food after not doing so for a long time , I go through the same old thing : I think I am ready for how hot it will be, and I never am.

It’s always a terrible shock. I figure that this is because I subconsciously expect it to be roughly as hot as the last spicy thing I ate.

But that is based on how spicy the food seemed at the end of the meal, when my taste buds have adjusted and/or been rendered numb from the shock.

It amounts to the same thing.

And that’s why it always comes as a shock. If I ate spicy cuisine more often, presumably I would retain both my resistance to it and the memory of how hot it is at the START.

But because I seldom have anything spicier than a cinnamon bun, it blindsides me.

Anyhoiw, back to the issue of value. I am finding that quite often I feel a little ripped off by my SkipTheDishes meals, and it’s because I am paying $20 – the price of a restaurant meal – for what amounts to fast food.

I will no doubt continue to do it – it’s way too much fun to have so many restaurants to choose from without having to leave the house – but I feel a tad clipped.

Such are the times we live in, I suppose. Especially in a rapidly densifying area like Richmond. I sure do miss free delivery.

But Richmond is worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They were in love, and they knew it.

The oddest of odd couple, the love between the human male and the cartoon bunny boy seemed to go on and on forever. As Bumper introduced Erik to his friends in the underground horny cartoon animal community, Bumper feel even deeper in love with him with every new animal that met Erik, because every single time, Erik said something hilarious, adorable, and utterly unique, and soon the two were fast friends.

Friends, of course, with benefits. LOTS of benefits. In fact, when word got around their ltitle community of a couple hundred naughty cartoon animals about Bumper’s delightful new boyfriend, it seemed like every single one of them wanted to benefit Erik and Bumper, and their social/sexual calendar (in Bumper’s community, they tended to be the same thing) was quite full of fun people to meet and things to do, and vice versa.

Erik, for his part, was convinced there was no way life could get better than this. He had the love of a bunny that, under the crusty exterior, was the sweetest, kindest, gentlest soul Erik had ever known. Capable and conscientous, Bumper was the perfect antidote to Erik’s lack of practical skills, and in return, Erik added a rich and vivid dimension to Bumper’s orderly and organized life, and the pure and glorious love Erik felt for the grumpy old bunny made Bumper feel both alive and worthy.

Both of them felt incredibly lucky to have found each other.

And they both were right.

Their love, to them, felt as easy and enjoyable as a good massage or a fine meal. Nothing ever seemed like worth when they were together.

Not even all the work it took to care for the refugees.

It had been a fat Mafioso from another fiction that had brought the news that the other fictions were cut off from one another and some of them had started to break down.

The rumour was that it had started in one fiction where the Primary had disappeared and thus the very stuff of that fiction began to fall apart. From there, it had spread by unknown means through the Now and into other fictions.

Erik and Bumper shared a look that said “That’s our fault, isn’t it? Uh oh. ”

The fat Mafioso had barely escaped into the Now before his native fiction collapsed in on itself like a pop-up book. He was very worried about his fiction’s Primary, who was a mob boss who called herself “Silky Sally”.

The fat Mafioso could not begin to imagine what would happen to a Primary if their fiction collapsed. The only thing he could think of was that she must have ended up in the long-theorized “outer zone” where all Primaries were assumed to have originated.

When the fat Mafioso had fled into the Now, he had done so blindly, with no destination in mind. But some instinct within him had caused him to seek the area of maximum stability, and that turned out to be the close vicinity of Erik.

Erik, being a Primary, held the local zone together with his thoughts and perceptions, and was therefore immune to the catastropy… and ignorant of it.

His piece said, the fat Mafioso, for lack of a better to do, got shot with a Tommy gun and bled contently over in a corner.

Bumper and Erik were alone.

<—————————————————————————————————————–>

Bumper pushed Eric’s hands away from his apprently irresistable fluffy bunny butt and said “I can’t do this. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you. If I had an ounce of decency I would go hide myself away in the deepest, darkest corner I could find so that nobody would ever have to be exposed to my wretched presence again. ”

“Would I be with you in your corner? ” said Erik.

“No, the entire point of what I am saying is that…. ” Bumper started to say, but then sighed and looked into Erik’s soft and trusting eyes. “Yes. Yes you would be. I can’t imagine going anywhere without taking you with me. You’re mine now, and I won’t ever let you go. And that’s the problem. ”

“I don’t understand. ” said Erik.

“Don’t you SEE? Haven’t you figured it OUT? ” sobbed Bumper. “This is ALL MY FAULT. I’m the one who stole you from your own fiction and started this whole thing going. I was the one responsible for you, and I let you and everyone down, and now I just can’t stand myself at all!”

Erik hugged Bumper gently and stroked his head. “Shh. It will be all right, by sweet rabbit, everything is going to be okay. I;m here, I love you, and we are going to make it through this thing together. OK? Now hold on tight to me and tell me why you think it was all your fault. As I recall, you didn’t abduct me from my Commander Erik life. I left because deep down I was bored and discontent. How can that be your fault?”

‘BECAUSE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BRING YOU BACK. ” Bumper shrieked in anguish,. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. The Now guide introduces the Primary to another fiction, they take a quick look around, and then it is back to the Primary’s home fiction before there’s even a hint of destabilization. ”

“Then why didn’t you…”

“Because I couldn’t let you go! ” said Bumper. “The thought of you going back to your fiction and my going back to mine and resuming our lives without one another put me in a blind panic and so I let myuself be completely sidetracked and distracted, and ignored the voice oin my head that kept insisting that I bring you back before something truly terrible happened. And now it HAS happened, and it’s too late to stop it now, and it’s all because a dumb old bunny had a boner for a boy and couldn’t control himself enough to do his very important job. ”

“And now, here’s this fat Mafioso showing up to tell me my worst nightmares have come true and I am going to Hell for what I have done. ” Bumper said miserably.

“My poor, poor bunny. ” said Erik, and hugged Bumper close, resting his chin atop the bunny boy’s head. At first, Bumper resisted, insisting he did not deserve it.

But it wasn’t long before Bumper melted into the embrace, and the two lovers spent a long silence in each other’s arms.

“Now. ” said Erik. “let’s take a look at the real situation, shall we? ”

“Okay…. ” said Bumper.

“Realistically speaking, you cannot be the first agent to fall in love with their client. ” said Erik. “You also can’t be the first to keep their client out past their due date, so to speak. Right? So it can’t be that all it takes is one mistake like yours to wreck the entire system or it never would have lasted week.You follow? ”

“I think so…. ” said Bumper, half-believing.

“So it clearly wasn’t something you did that caused the current problems. It must be something that goes far deeper. ” said Erik. “Someone or some thing is attacking the very foundations of the system, and the system is starting to crumble. ”

Bumper nodded. It really wasn’t my fault, he thought to himself. He felt relieved, but also a tiny bit disappointed. At least when he thought it was all his fault, he knew who to blame. Now he was at the mercy of forces beyond his control.

“Now according to the fat Mafioso.. how are you doing over there, by the way? ”

“Fine!” said the fat Mafioso cheerfully. He’s gotten bored of dying and was now stone-facedly counting a huge pile of cash.

“Glad to hear it. According to him, I’m a source of stability in the system. ” said Erik. “And that means more and more Fictionals are going to be drawn to me as things get worse. They will be frightened, disoriented, and many of them will have just lost everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. And you know what that adds up to?”

“A refugee crisis. ” said Bumper.

“Exactly!” said Erik. “And that means we have to get ready. We need to get every Fiction in this region together and train them to deal with the refugees. We’ll need places for the them to eat and sleep and poop and whatever. ”

“Mmm. ” said Bumper. “Whatever. ”

“And we will need someone to organize and coordinate all these efforts. ” said Erik. “Someone who is a born administrator to make sure everything runs smoothly. A person of great competence who can bear a great deal of responsibility on his fuzzy little shoulders without crumbling under the pressure. ”

“Fuzzy little… you mean me? You want me to run things? ” said Bumper.

“Who better? ” said Erik. “And I know you can do it. After all, if you can keep me organized, a massive refugee effort should be no problem! ”

Bumper grinned despite himself. “You have a point. ”

“See?” said Erik. “So what do you say? Shall we get to work?”

“Yes. ” said Bumper. “After. ”

“After what? ” said Eric.

Bumper replied by slipping both furry hand-paws into Eric’s pants and giving his lover’s penis and testicles a firm, loving caress.

“Oh, THAT! ” said Erik with a giggle.

After that, they were far too busy to talk.

<—————————————————————————————————————–>

And that’s how it went. With Bumper providing the organization and Erik providing the inspiration, by the time the trickle of refugees had turned into a flood, their organization could handle the influx without a problem.

They even had a program to help teach refugees to be aid workers so that the more refugees they received, the more workers their were to help them make the transition.

They were a motley group. Ninjas, bankers. hentai creatures. hardboiled detectives, cartoon animals, pirates, mothers with enormous broods of kids, fairyland creatures, dixieland loan sharks, and just about everything else you can imagine (and some you’d rather not) thronged around the center post that was Erik and his stabilizing influence, and before long, a carnival atmosphere spread through the camp, and it all started to feel like one big crazy family reunion/picnic/circus/convention/madhouse.

The disasters unfolding outside their patch of dirt were forgotten and everybody thanks the System that they were safe and stable and warm and amongst good people.

Bumper even managed to set aside an area where he and his friends (and the curious from other fictions) could get frisky with one another, and pretty soon, the Casa del Orgy (as some wag had named it) was the most popular part of whole madcap affair, and  drew in Fictionals for its air of unbridled release and innocent joy as much as it did for its sexual opportunities.

When in doubt, fuck. That was their motto. And it was one they adhered to with great passion and dedication.

Elsewhere, there were aid workers helping the traumatized and the fragile cope with what they had experienced and what they had seen.

Some of what they had been through was beyond any sane person’s nightmares. Some of them needed medical treatment. Some of them needed immediate psychological intervention to keep them from harming themselves and others. And some of them needed to be isolated from the rest because the trauma had so shattered their psyches that they were barely even sentient any more.

But there was one thing they all needed : to tell their story to someone who truly listened and who truly cared, and thus release the pain of the experiences by sharing their burdens with someone else.

Erik spent most of his time in this area. There was a lot he could do to help. Mostly, he talked with the Fictionals who felt like they were coming apart just like their fictions had, and got them to describe everything they could think of about themselves while he listened with his eyes closed, and did his best to image what was being described as vividly as possible.

That reinforced the reality of the Fictional in question, and did much to ease their mind.

And that’s how it went. Joy and sorrow, love and grief, connection and seperation, and all the other flavours of life’s experiences were happening side by side.

it should have beehn chaos.

It should have been bedlam.

It should have been a NIGHTMARE.

But somehow, they all got by anyhow.

Going through my Facebook posts and culling out the good bits.

“Hey, can I try some of your chloroform? ”
“Sure!” I said. “Knock yourself out.

Mixing levels of swearing. :
“Well boys, it looks like we’re just gosh darn fucked. ”
“I don’t GIVE a motherfucking darn!”
“Ow! Oh, I gosh darn hit my thumb with that darned hammer. Hurts like a motherfucker.”

Line without a script : “Wow, you really put the emo… in emoji!”

Some people learn to drink in college. Others learn NOT to drink in college.

Dear Voices.com :
What you ad says : “Hire Voice Over Talent”.
What you meant to say : Hire Voiceover Talent.
Your version makes it sound like you want people to hire people with great voices, not talented people.
It’s one word for a reason, people.

My next theatrical production will be called “The Punster : A Play On Words”

I’m not a depressed loner.
I’m an urban hermit.

Television has taught me that coming home early from work never ends well.

Me, at a ferry terminal : But Chris DeBurg told me not to pay till I get there!

Approximately how old will I have to be before I can justify being cranky?

I bet kinky librarians use the phrase “leather bound” a lot.

Father : Who sat the baby down on the cheque for the landlord?
Oscar, cocktail dangling : Looks like you… got a little behind on your rent.

I wonder who shows up when a collection agency doesn’t pay its bills.

1. Philbert and Yellow discover the clean underwear mystery
2. Philbert and Yellow come back to HQ to report about this new case. This involves Philbert, much to Yellow’s chargin, insisting upon stopping and saying hello in every single department,. and voila, world-building exposition.
3. The Director decides that the case has Paragon written all over it – ridiculous phemenon, obscure and banal subject matter. a genuine Fortean mystery that is just plain too stupid for anyh other agency to touch it. He sends the pair out to gather more information and/or underwear.
4. Out in the field, Philbert and Yellow interact in a humorous way as they intercut scenes of them getting pair after pair of clean underwear and noting the size,manufacturer, style, location, time, approximate level of soakage, unique characteristics if any, and of course, the results of a full psychomtric scan. Yellow can’t believe that this is what he is doing with his life.Philbert just shrugs cheerfully and gets on with the job.
5. Cut to the director looking at some large chart of some sort. Reverse angle reveals it to be a hug map of tghe city with clean pairs of men’s underwear pinned to it in various places and connected by various colors of yarn. He is staring at it with the fixed intensirty of a chess grandmaster scrutinizing the board. This culminates in Philbert walking in, taking one look, and saying “Oh cool, a double helix. ” The Director stares at him agape, then recomposes himself and says “Well of course it is. “
6. The Director tells P&Y that analysis of the phenomenon’s obvious double helical structure reveals that the entire phenomenon is centred around a tiny three-machine laundromat in the back of a seedy mom and pop convenience store in a run-down part of 5 road. They are handed a dossier, and the last thing we seen in the scene is Philbert saying to Yellow, “Wow this really must be serious. ” “What makes you say that?” “He gave us QUARTERS.”
7. Our intrepid duo head cautiously into the tiny laundromat. The middle dryer is running and making loud clunking and banging sounds like there’s a pair of boots in there, but when they open it…. there’s nothing in there! With some trepidation, they feed all the pairs of underwear into the dryer, feed it quarters, set it in motion, and stand back. At first. nothing unsual happens, But then suddenly, the dryer starts shaking and vibrating towards P&Y, backing them into a corner. Suddenly, the dryer stops, its door flings open, our heroes are bathed in kaleidoscopic light, then fade away.
8. They reappear in a small, eclectic-ly decorated room shot at a weird angle a la David Lynch. They are greeted by the Great and Majestic Ruler of the Land Beyond Time, who is a sock puppet. He informs them that they were chosen by the Gods of Cosmic Harmony to be the agents of a very important temporal adjustment and that from now until the end of time, they will be remembered as great heroes by the Inter-Cosmic Government.
9. The sock puppet says “And it all went smoothly thanks fo you guys remembering to turn the load size indicator to Large. ” “But we said it to small!” “YOU FOOLS! YOU’VE UNBALANCED THE LOAD!”. Alarms go off, flashing colored lights flash all over the place (or whatever cheap showy crap we can come up with).and there is an enormous white FLASH.
10. Next is a a montage of shots of various pairs of clean wet underwear landing in placeds where P&Y found them, accompanied by bits of dialogue distored by weird audio effects.
11. Finally, we fade from white to P&Y sitting in Philbert’s care, visibly shaken. Yellow asks Philbert, “Did… that really happen?” And philbert thinks for a few moments then says “Some of the time…. yes. “
12. The car drives off into the distance, and the last shot of it we see is the rear window… with a pair of wet male underpants stuck to it.

Not bad for a first try.

I kind of made a lot of it up myself as oppoosed to implementing the notes. I found myself incapable of processing the notes at all. I read two of the files and I was hopeleslly confused. It’s too much information for me to process into a single coherent story. I had no idea I couldn’t do that kind of thing until today.

And now, I have a problem, because what’s the point of Felicity taking the noytes if I’m not going to use them? I’m going to have to work out some way of handling the info load. Maybe take notes on the notes, but notes that I can put into a logical order that makes sense to me. That would help a lot.

But basically, I am relying on my partners in crime to tell me all the important plot details I forgot, which ones I got conflated, and which ones I misremembered entirely.

That’s the world of entertainment. Fuck your ego, get shit done. It was humbling to realize my limitations in this field but there is no sebnse dwelling on it when the problem can be solved via collaboration.

And the good kind, the kind that happens with sane, competent, responsible people working together with a common sense of purpose.

Not like group work. Fuck group work, too.

After I get feedback on all I did wrong, I will do a further expanded outline, The kind where detail everything that happens in the episode.

“Bob asks Margaret what she meant by that. She laughs him off and accuses hi of being deliberatelty obtuse. He get very angry, and punches a hole in the wall. Then he turns into the Hulk. ”

That kind of thing.

And then I will do the ep. I am looking forward to it, I have a lot of fun ideas. I might ends up skipping right to the writing, in fact… I know that’s not the way things are supposed to be done, but I’ve never been good at doing things the “right” way anyhow.

I get it done my way, and that will have to do,.

Time for me to rest my rain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.