In this case, the words in question being the ones in my head and the war being the battle for which ones get to make it out of my brain, through my fingers, and into the real world via this here bloggy type thing.

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow, between sitting down to write and actually putting words into my WordPress box, I went from “fairly sure I knew what was going to write today” to “head full of sparks and cannon balls and fizz”.

I blame the people on IRC for being such interesting and stimulating conversationalists.

So, instead of any of the relatively thought out ideas I had at some point in the last hours for articles or short stories, instead you get a regular old chatty blog entry about whatever the hell is lying around at the moment, like usual.

This is the equivalent to a parent declaring that if the kids can’t get along peacefully, then none of them get to go to the beach.

It is not necessarily right or even fair, but it gets the job done.

Why the hell am I craving Pirate cookies all of a sudden? Stupid childhood memories.

Well, let’s see what we’ve got in the Tickle Trunk today.

Here’s a pic Ebert posted that I absolutely love.

I dare you to imagine what the SECOND wittiest couple gets up to!

I love absolutely everything about that picture. The smiles on the faces of our lucky happy witty couple. The completely tastelessness of their little “joke”. The semi-submerged layer of atrocious racism, as if they are both saying “The joke is that it’s a white person being lynched! Ha ha ha ha ha, as if! We’re so nutty. ” The bad joke just hanging there in the air like a hanged man. “This is not how you get a well hung man, Betty! Ha ha ha!”. The depressing crappiness of the (I assume) basement they shot this picture in. I bet that is literally right outside the door of the school newspaper or the yearbook office, if they weren’t the same thing. And oh, those old-fashioned names!

It’s one of those rare images that manages to tell an entire sad but somehow charming story all at once. It implies so much more than it depicts. Talk about media density!

Oh crap. The local gang of kids was being even more rowdy and noisy than ever just five minutes ago, and I was speculating that school better happen to these kids soon, or they are going to go all Lord of the Flies out there.

But now there is naught but a deathly silence punctuated only by the occasional soft sound of small things creeping over grass.

Oh no…. I have waited too long. They have already gone feral. Right now, they are probably spit-roasting poor Piggy over a fire made from discarded mattresses they harvested from beside the dumpster while wearing crude garments made from the skins of the local raccoons and skunks and decorated with crow and seagull feathers.

Of course, there’s an outside chance that they just all went home because it’s dark out.

But me, I prefer to play the odds.

Let’s see. Oh, went to see a new therapist today, a Doctor Costin. Joe was nice enough to get up early to drive me to my 10 am appointment and then be there when I was done to drive me home. Luckily, the next appointment will be at 1 pm, much more compatible with his work schedule, which is 2:30 pm to 10:30 pm, Monday to Friday.

The session went great. He asked lots of questions about me, and got my vital statistics and personal info and whatnot. And he made demands of me, specifically to get my sleep into something approaching good shape and to start getting some exercise.

So far, breaking myself of the napping habit had not gone well, but I have only just started and bad habits are not broken with a simple decision to try. I sincerely don’t know what to do with myself if I don’t take names, which is a sad sad testament to how empty my life is.

I think I use sleep simply to fast-forward through life. As though I need it to pass any faster when my life is already half fucking over and I haven’t even DONE anything yet.

Exercise, meh. That’s going to be even harder than the sleep thing. I have been sedentary to the point of being practically sessile for so long that I don’t know any other life, and it’s hard to convince myself to move just for its own sake.

But I know it would help if I did. So I will work towards it. It’s always hardest at the start of personal change. It’s like trying to open a really heavy door. At first you push and push and it barely seems to be moving. But eventually, it opens.

So wish me luck on that. I am quite happy to have a therapist who challenges me. I need some sort of resistance and stimulation in my life. Some of the best things that ever happened to me have been because someone cared enough about me to confront me and kick me in the ass and make me snap the hell out of my inner fugue and deal with things.

I am far too good at tuning others in to my mellow, affable wavelength, when what I really need in the long term is some static.

Well, that’s enough jibba jibba for tonight, readerlings. Hopefully, tomorrow I will avoid overstimulation and be able to offer something a little more coherent.

Until then, tango chutney waffle cones.

Glory be, I actually wrote some fiction yesterday, and as is tradition when I have finally gotten ’round to writing some fiction, the next day’s entry is officially a completely free form, low stress, chatty bloggy thing.

Fiction is, after all, the hardest thing to write, at least for me. It takes the most of my creative energy and focus, and I am bone lazy, hence, I don’t write it that often, although I quite enjoyed writing it last night, so perhaps I will do it more in the future.

I have pondered starting some sort of fictional blog, something with a simple conceit of some sort that allows for a good deal of creative breadth while giving the whole thing a bit of structure. The blog of an intergalatic space administrator, a minor flunctionary who mostly just shuffles reports around. Reports he rather inappropiately tends to excerpt on his own personal blog.

You know, something along those lines.

And speaking of science fiction, here are possibly two of the most awesome examples of geek ink this side of Squornshellous Zeta.

Are they not the stuff that dreams are made from? You know, human flesh and metallic inks?

What I love most about them is how faithful they are to the traditional art style of tattoos. That’s what makes it magnificent. If it was done in the wrong style, people would immediately know it’s not a “normal” tattoo before even reading it or recognizing the pictures. They’d be ready.

This way, they have already accepted it as a tattoo before knowing it’s a geek tatt, and that, to me, makes it magnificent.

Geek pride, represent!

All in all, I am happy with how my writing is going lately. I feel like I am learning to focus more and more of my creative energy into my words, which has been my goal all along. I have an enormous energy potential in this brain of mine, but the trick has always been in getting it to strike when, where, and how I want it, without too much coming out all at once and frying the entire system.

I often imagine my mind as a vast complicated weather system, full of lightning licking and flickering between the clouds, with big pressure and temperature differentials and enormous amounts of polarization and diffusion, yet somehow, all the people on the ground ever see is fluffy clouds and rainbows and blue skies.

Except for the occasional bolt from the blue…..

But I want my mind to be more like a magnificent machine, more Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl and steampunk than anything based on science. A machine that whirrs and clanks and buzzes, with bells and lights and big red buttons, all to produce magic and wonder and joy beyond belief for everyone to share.

I want to dream some magnificent dreams, brand new ones, with spots on, that the world has never seen before, and that change everything just by being born. Dreams so bright and beautiful that you would think they would blind you, but instead, they simply painlessly burn the scales from your eyes and wash all the jadedness and scar tissue from your soul, and leave you in a bright new shiny clean wondrous world ready to be loved.

You know, just that.

And the thing is, it is possible. Words have made a difference, books have changed the world. Try to imagine a world in which Origin of Species or The Feminine Mystique or even Peyton Place had never been written.

Of course, the authors of said books actually wrote stuff, whole books even, and not just random rambling blog entries.

But I am getting there, I think. I am learning to express more and more of this latent creative potential in my little words. And that’s cool.

As you can see, in my own odd way, I am incredibly ambitious. It’s just the ambition of a dreamer, someone who wants to bring wonderful things to life and show them to the world so that the whole world can know joy and wonder and hope and the simple pleasure of being alive in a world with so much possibility.

And what the hell, while I am at it, bring myself to this wonderful new place too.

Is it possible to dream yourself free?

I sure hope so, because that might just be the only way I can get there.

See you all tomorrow, my beloved little clique of readers.

I truly love you all.

One May, a boy was born that nobody wanted.

He wasn’t planned, you see. There had been three, two girls then a boy, before him, all planned, all wanted, born one after the other so that they would all be as close in age as possible without being triplets.

They formed an ungainly but cohesive sibling unit, and no thought was given to adding to the family unit at all.

But then, four and half years after the last one was born, a surprise failure of a tubal ligation brought into their happy little world a little redheaded boy that, well, just didn’t fit, really.

Mother had already gone back to work after putting three little ones into the world and getting them to roughly school age, and she certainly wasn’t going to put her life on hold for a kid whom nobody had intended.

So our little redheaded tyke was raised by babysitters. Mostly, a very nice lady from the other side of the tracks (literally) named Betty, who had just the right mix of tenderness and toughness to raise an almost frighteningly bright but extremely sweet little redhead.

That rather nicely left everyone to get on with their own lives without having to give our boy any thought at all.

So they didn’t.

Still, he made friends with the girl next door and the girl across the street, and was a little sad when his whole family left every day for school and work, but they were not all that close, so it was okay.

And to be fair, his family never told him he wasn’t wanted, or that it was really inconvenient to have him around, or that they had been better off before him.

They just treated him that way.

He got the message, and tried to stay out of everyone’s say and make himself as small and easy to care for as possible. That was, he figured, his job in the family.

To try his best to just disappear.

Then school happened, and things got considerably worse. Turns out, being raised by a babysitter and a well-meaning but distracted family, and having had only girls as friends, had left him ill-equipped to deal with the rough and tumble of the schoolyard.

The kids at school behaved nothing like everyone he had known up until that point, in that they acted like normal children and not the products of a highly intellectual and individualistic family where people more or less did their own thing.

He couldn’t relate. Plus, he was somewhat sloppy in appearance (because nobody was there to make sure he looked OK before he walked alone to school) and arrived at school already reading and writing far above the other students.

So he couldn’t relate to them, or they to him, and he rapidly became the lowest on the totem pole for his whole school.

Even the retarded kids had friends, and laughed at him.

He was bullied constantly by other students, never had healthy friendships, and went through the school system ostracized and alone. But at least his parents had promised that he would have the same college education his sisters had already had, paid for by them.

Then college came. And for the first time in his life, he had healthy friendships with a group of other nerds who came to collectively refer to themselves as The Pit Crew, because they met and hung out in a small cafeteria known as The Pit.

For two glorious years, he was truly happy. He enjoyed his courses, he hung out with his nerdy friends, he had his first apartment, he lived the college life.

Then his parents decided they wanted to take early retirement and abruptly withdrew their funding, breaking their promise and suddenly throwing their unwanted child into limbo. He was forced to moved back to his high-unemployment small town, unable to return to school for two years or more because the student loan laws in his province made no provisions for parents who could easily afford to send their kids to college, but just didn’t feel like it.

Without himself as the anchor, The Pit Crew drifted apart. Once solid friendships simply dissolved without him.

And so he went back to being alone, and spending most of his time in his room, and sank deeper and deeper into depression that as of the writing of this article still claims him.

And as of this date, he is 38 years old.

Depression has no exit signs.

Well, kids, your weary old Uncle MJB isn’t feeling any better today, in fact, you might say he’s feeling more than a little poorly, and….

You know what? Fuck that. I feel like shit and I don’t give a fuck who knows it.

It’s gotten worse since yesterday. I still feel like all my joints desperately need direct lubrication, but now it’s spread to every other cell of my body. I feel like I am slowly roasting inside with a deep, intense, dark heat, like one of those smoldering swamp fires that burns under the peat moss for centuries, just waiting for that one extra dry summer to unleash the long delayed inferno.

And so, mood = bad. I feel angry and surly and bitter and vicious and violent and seething with the fire that does not cleanse.

And it only seems to be getting worse. Yay.

I have feared this sort of thing for a long time. The fear is that, at some point, all the anger and pain and frustration and rage that I have completely disowned and dispersed and “disappeared” for all these decades would reach some sort of critical mass and ignite, and from there, it would be impossible to go back. I would just become angrier and angrier and angrier until I was nothing but an incoherently bitter old crank who foamed at the mouth at the slightest provocation and who was impossible to be around.

You know, like George Carlin post his What Am I Doing In New Jersey? concert.

And I do not invoke one of my comedy idols (despite himself) lightly or flippantly here. I have suspected for a long time that his personality transformation from the hippy dippy observational comedian of the Seventies, with his material about how we use words and odd things we do to him, to his eventual status as a horrible bitter, misanthropic, venom spewing crank as being a case of someone who was too “mellow” to express his anger or concern for a long, long time, until old age and Reagan set it free, and from then on, it was goodbye mellow Doctor Hyde, hello hateful Mister Hyde.

And what bothers me most is not just the prospect of that happening to me, but the fact that I feel dangerously close to not giving a shit if it does any more.

What do you do when you carry a vast unregulated toxic nuclear dump of radioactive anger inside? Where is the Superfund to clean up this mess? It’s past the point where blame can be meaningfully assigned. Sure, it would have been a lot easier in the long term if all this stuff had been dealt with at the time. But that’s besides the point now. The only thing that matters now is, what the hell do we do with it?

I feel this poisonous free-floating hatefulness coursing through my veins and filling my mind with bilious fumes, making me feel like a caged animal who is more than willing to rip a huge piece of flesh off of the first person stupid enough to stick a limb within reach.

And I don’t know how to handle this. That’s the real problem. Angrier people, I suppose, learn how to deal with this kind of thing. But I am normally a mellow guy, although times like this make me realize just how much my usual friendliness is just so much artificial grass atop an abandoned nuclear silo.

They say that depression is just anger directed inward, and I have always intuitively sensed the wisdom of that. Taking out your anger on yourself might not be smart, but you never have to go looking for a victim and so you really can’t beat it for convenience.

And it’s true, then maybe the silver lining here might be that this recent decline in health both physical and mental will force me to find some way of expressing all this anger that I lock deep down inside, and that once I do, I will be a saner, healthier, better person.

The dump will be empty and I will no longer live in a haze of toxins and radiation while pretending everything is just fine.

Because some of us were never allowed to be anything but fine.

Some of us, in fact, are terrified that if we are anything but perfectly lovely and nice and pleasant and funny and fine, people will abandon us forever.

Hmmm. Guess next time, it will be time to bitch about my parents.

Bet you’re all looking forward to that!

( Today’s blog entry title is a reference to this awesome Fishbone song. )

There’s been sun outside today, but not a lot inside, as I have spent yet another day mostly asleep. I can’t get back on track with treating my sleep apnea soon enough.

I can’t even really imagine what a fully rested me is like, to be honest. I have been tired all the time for as long as I can remember.

Might just try being obnoxiously perky for a while, just to see what it’s like.

Oh, here’s a fun cat video for us feline aficionados.

Shows what you can do with a video camera, your computer’s microphone, a cat, a dog, and some editing software. And lots of imagination and fun.

The guy has done tons of these, presumably because being cat based, cute, and mildly funny, they are perfect YouTube fodder and get loads of hits.

Cats, of course, are the only thing as popular as porn on the Internet. And YouTube doesn’t allow porn^[1], so guess what?

Cats rule YouTube. And from there, the Internet! Mua ha ha!

Why is it so easy to imagine our cats as supervillains? (And so impossible to imagine out dogs as them?)

It’s nice and quiet in the ol’ apartmente tonight. Saturday is the evening that my roomies Joe and Julian (otherwise know as J&J, the Two J’s, J², or The Happy Couple) go to Joe’s parents’ place for a pleasant evening of supper and board games.

Right now, I imagine they are breaking in the tenth-anniversary edition of Carcassone that Joe bought his Dad for his birthday. Still haven’t tried that game, which given that it has been around for ten years, evidently, does make me feel more than a little late to the part. After all, everyone who tries it seems to get instantly hooked and want to play it again and again because it’s super fun.

It’s like the crack cocaine of board games. And here I am, still puffing on the ditch weed of solo video games.

Oh well, I am sure someone had made an online version I could play all my by lonesome self if I really wanted to experience it.

That, and Settlers of Catan. Chris Catan.

What else… oh, a rare non-embed video link from me, but the content justifies it : a super young looking Siskel and Ebert, in 1980, talk about the great performances the Oscars forgot from the 1970s.

I am completely in love with how cheesy that old opening to the show is. Shot on film, appropriately enough, and wow, what is with that crazy popcorn machine that whirls the popcorn out in big spirals? Never seen one like that before. Must be damn loud.

That’s certainly not the opening I remember, but I probably never even saw the show till I was a teenager at least, and in 1980 I was only seven years old.

So in regards to the performances, most of them, sadly, are from people I don’t know and movies I haven’t seen. So they were more educational than entertaining to me, if you catch my drift.

But I have certainly seen A Clockwork Orange, and I total agree with them on why the Oscars ignored Malcolm’s simply spectacular performance. In a movie so absolutely packed with vibrant and unstoppable imagery and dialogue, like a prismacolored nightmare projected directly onto your cerebrum, even an amazing performance like his is overshadowed by the sheer vivid madness of Kubrick’s movie.

Speaking of vivid, watched What Dreams May Come recently. Amazing art direction, and some good performances (Robin Williams is always great and Annabella Sciorra looks amazing and does a great job) but overall, the movie left me feeling very bleh about it.

It’s one of these movies that is all about the visuals. The movie has amazing art direction, and does marvelous things with not just color but colorfulness itself, that make it a feast for the eyes in every frame. It shimmers with life in that “realer than reality” way that dreams and visions can have, and by the end, you really do feel like you have been walking through other people’s dreams.

But not interesting people. Because, as hard as this movie tries for big, deep, broad, meaningful commentary about love and loss and hope, the story ultimate feels entirely secondary to the visual design, as though they just needed a deep-seeming plot to connect big visual set pieces. And as a writer and a very narrative biased person, I just can’t accept that there is any substitute for story. Certainly not pretty visuals.

So a seemingly rich feast turned out to be more empty calories. No matter how pretty the icing, you still need a cake there somewhere.

Guess that’s all for now. Later, kidderlings. 🙂