Yup. Here we are again, with me just spilling my filthy guts onto the virtual page and poking them about with a stick looking for dog knows what.

I am beginning to wonder if the real issue is not that I have somehow lost all desire to write more creative and ambitious things, but that I am slowly but surely becoming addicted to the quantum of catharsis this daily regurgitation brings me.

Which means I really need to unbend the old habit-forming process and allow that I should write one of these a day in addition to whatever else happens to pop into my head and hang around long enough for me to write it down before disappearing back into the soup.

It certainly seems like a time for restructuring. This thousand words a day thing is good for keeping the habit going, and I certainly can’t imagine life without writing every day any more. What would the point be? Writing something every day is my entire purpose in life at this point, as sad as that may be. Even relatively low value writing like these navel probing diary entries is way better than not writing at all.

If something happened and I couldn’t write, I would go nuts. And really nuts, not just boring old depression which never makes the headlines unless you kill yourself.

I am talking the kind of nuts where the phrase “for his own safety and the safety of others” comes up a lot and people are afraid to make sudden moves around you.

Still pondering the idea of going into “just write all the time” mode. It really did seem to make me a happier and calmer person back in November when I was doing NaNoWriMo. There is a lot to be said for discharging all my mental charge every day. Less juice to power the bad thoughts.

I could return to my idea of having an online humour magazine. That could certainly absorb a lot of my mental energy because there would always be a need for more content. An online comedy magazine is not the sort of thing that you do and then it’s done.

It’s also something that could absorb a fair fraction of the zillions of ideas I come up with per minute, especially if I keep the idea of “robust flexibility” in mind and don’t get too bogged down with overly specific ideas of what is or is not appropriate content.

If it’s funny, it goes in. Everything else is just pigeonholing bullshit of no real value.

Of course, not all my ideas are funny or can be made funny. I have a lot of serious thoughts too, and dark and bitter thoughts, and other forms of unfunny thought.

Although, if I take the example of one of my heroes, Terry Pratchett (he got incredibly rich writing funny genre fiction with surprising depth and meaning, how awesome is that?), then I can probably find a way to work even the dark and serious stuff into comedy somehow.

It just takes longer.

Right now, the main thing keeping me from launching an online humour magazine (apart from the usual ennui, diffidence, and inertia) is my inability to come up with a decent name for one.

I could go with “The Naked Eye” again, which was the name I came up with for a fake news “The Onion” type site. That is still a possibility, especially since the actual The Onion has become a paywall having, constant nagging, greedy corporate crapfest. That leaves the whole “online fake news” market wide open.

But somehow, I don’t feel like going there yet, at least until I have exhausted my capacity for thinking up something newer and fresher. It’s a good name for a fake news site, but not so great for a more general comedy site. So, maybe, maybe not.

Another possibility is that I could start a huge, sprawling, epic online novel, with hyperlinks and multiple points of view and all kinds of tripped out wacky “hypernovel” stuff. That would certainly be the sort of thing that could absorb anything I can think up, except maybe for long form think pieces, and it might be a lot of fun to write and construct and whatnot. Not totally sure anyone would want to read it, though.

Who knows, some people might find it fun to get lost in something like a Pynchon novel crossed with the weirdest Choose Your Own Adventure ever.

Of course, I could just start another damned book. You know, the normal kind, with a beginning middle and end. I know, sounds crazy, but it might be just so crazy that it is really really crazy!

And that, in turn, would involved finally finishing at least the first edit of the first novel.

I was afraid I would have that problem. My inability to go backward really hinders the whole editing thing. Once I finish something, I don’t want to look at it again. It’s on to pastures anew. And that is hardly an attitude that will get me anywhere, unless I learn to write first drafts that are so spectacularly awesome that editors don’t mind that they are rough around the edges.

Oh, apropos of nothing, funny story from my last therapy session.

We were discussing possibilities for my branching out socially, and the idea of a movie discussion group came up. And my therapist said “But you could go to a movie group and find out that everyone there thinks your opinions are stupid. ”

And I chuckled to myself and had to admit “You know, that doesn’t sound that bad. I like to argue. ”

And it’s true. It would not exactly be the warm and accepting social experience that would help me catch up on the socialization I missed out on as a child, I admit. But I really do enjoy a good spirited argument, and it would honestly not be the first time I defended my positions against a whole room full of angry people.

That happened to me a lot when I was in my early 20’s. Dunno why…..

Well, once more, a dream has had enough of an impact on me that, despite my recent reluctance to do the whole dream journaling thing, I feel compelled to put the damn thing down into the words in order to help process all the weirdness and wonder of it all.

In fact, part of what is compelling me to write about this in the trusty ol diary here is that my brain pulled a hell of a trick by giving me two, two, two dreams in one, and that is just so god damned fucked up that I feel I have to immortalize it somehow.

So let’s start with Dream One, shall we?

In Dream One, I lost my tongue. Literally. I didn’t suddenly find myself unable to speak, or just suffer a bout of uncharacteristic inarticulacy, my actual tongue came out of my mouth and was there in my hand.

I am not sure what came before that in the dream. I feel like something must have, because I refuse to believe that one’s tongue comes out even in a dream completely without context. Call me old-fashioned, but that is how I was brought up, and it’s how I am today.

But anyhow, yup, reached into my mouth because my tongue felt funny, and just popped the sucker right out. Didn’t hurt at all, just a slight tearing sensation and a sort of pop and there I was, with my tongue in my hand, making horrible tongueless person noises of surprise and dismay.

As one might expect, I suppose.

And yet, as often happens in my dreams, I was not nearly as upset as one might suppose. One would think I would have been at the “screaming in inarticulate horror, crapping your pants, then passing out” level of emotional disturbance, or at least the “cursing the air blue while frantically dialing 911 before crapping your pants and passing out” level, but my reaction in the dream was more like “oh wow, this is definitely going to create some problems with dining, and what will the neighbours think?” kind of reaction.

In fact, the big emotion that came with this horrible occurrence was not horror but shame. I felt like I had done something really stupid and shameful^[1], and had this incredible urge to go hide my shame from the world.

So I skulked about (I seemed to be in a sort of run-down neighborhood on a sunny hot summer day) and found this little shed attached to an old beat up gas station, and decided to hide in there.

What all I did in there, with my still quite alive and responsive tongue in my hand and, for the moment, total privacy, I shall not relate. Use your imagination.

But whilst distracted, there had been a knocking on the flimy door of the shed, and then, suddenly, there was two cops standing there. Uh oh!

Comically (in retrospect) I respond by trying to stuff my tongue back into my mouth and swallow it, sure that this would make it just click back into place. I even recall thinking, in the dream, “this will work, I have done it once before!”. I was like a stoner caught with weed, trying to swallow the evidence.

I think it must have worked, actually, even though by this time my tongue had grown to be at least a yard long (hi, ladies!), because next I remember, I am in the cop car, doing my best to sell the cops on the story that my tongue had just spontaneously come off (?), and they seem to be going along with it. They take me to the hospital, where I fall asleep on a bed in a private room.

(Admissions is way faster in the dream realm.)

So I actually fell asleep in a dream. Then, I wake up, and naturally think “Phew, that tongue thing was really weird, thank goodness it was all just a dream and I am back to reality now. ”

But I’m not, I am in another fucking dream! But because I am dreaming, I don’t know that. So I am thinking “Riiight, this is how things really are!” when I realize I can’t see anything. Just darkness, no matter how I turn my head.

So I start to panic and yell “Mom, I can’t see! Mom, I can’t see!”. While I am doing this, my vision goes from black to solid golden orange to blue and then suddenly my eyes focus and I can see like normal.

“Oh…. never mind. ”

And even though it looks nothing like the house I grew up in, somehow, I come to the conclusion that I am back in my childhood home. I say to someone “How come we’re back in the 135?” (135 Belmont Street) and they reply “Drugs, man!” and giggle in a crazy kind of way.

I think said person might have been my brother. I hope not, because he was scary.

Also of note : there is about a foot of warm water everywhere. Why? Because dreams.

So I conclude, somehow, that we are here because they found drugs in the home, and we are helping the police to find them all. So I start to wander around, and I notice this driftwood nicknack on a shelf, and I immediately get the feeling that there’s something wrong with the pattern of the wood in one part of it.

I press down on that part, and sure enough, it’s a secret button, and a drawer pops out, and there’s a bunch of metal syringes and bags of white crystals.

And I ask “Hey, is there someplace we are keeping this stuff?” then start to brag about how I immediately knew there was something wrong with that driftwood thing.

And that is all I remember.

Hopefully it is all gone from my head now.

That was a nice trip to mild relevancy yesterday, wasn’t it? I posted some links, commnted on them, talked about things that had nothing to do with me and myself and I, and created something that kind of looked like true value added content if you squinted a little and stayed upwind.

Well, so much for that, because here I am, once more trying to wring some words out of a sleep soaked, waterlogged, screwed up, distorted, smoldering brain and all you nice people who read these words are going to have to suffer through it.

I am so, so sorry.

not remembering anything from my dreams, although I am pretty sure there was a lot of freaky weird stuff in there. But the process of waking up and clearing the cobwebs from one’s mind often clears out those traces of dreams in the process, and my my is currently free of any specific recollections.

I guess they were in the cobwebs somewhere. Ick.

Been doing more experimenting with staying awake for longer periods to see if this results in longer periods of sleep. So far, this has proved to be the case, although the effects are modest. I think the limiting factor continues to be my bladder. Having to get up to pee because of all the water I drink throws the whole “sleeping eight hours in a row” plan off, as I seem to be incapable of just going right back to sleep afterwards.

Why? That is a damned good question. I know that I often wake up somewhat anxious from the effects of sleep and dreaming and whatnot, and so I think it’s quite possible that I can’t go back to sleep because I am actually afraid to go back to sleep, and I have to do something to distract myself while that anxious fear slowly ebbs away. I don’t usually think about this consciously (that’s what the distraction part is all about, right? but looking back on my memories of how I feel during those times, it is clear a deep anxiety is present.

The need to eat every six hours plays a small part in there too. After all, the conflict between “sleep for eight hours” and “eat every six” is obvious. And my ritual of watching something from Netflix while I eat, usually at least a half hour of watching, makes meals take more of my time than absolutely necessary, I suppose. If I didn’t do that, eating would probably take ten minutes or so, not including prep time.

But that’s a minor factor, and the Netflix viewing is one of my all important little pleasures that I would not give up easily. The small pleasures of life keep one grounded and remind the simple animal inside our brains that they are Good Dogs. Little go of any of your pleasures for anything other than a very very good reason, and you will be signing the death warrant for your sense of well being. And even if you have that very good reason, it is still imperative that you do not remove a pleasure from your life without having a replacement in mind, lined up and ready to go.

It will not be the same as the pleasure you are removing, but it still will fill the gap until you grow out of the pleasure you are forsaking and into the new one.

On the personal news front, spent most of my Xmas gift card goodness and now I have the fun of having the next two or three weeks in which all these things I have bought coming in via courier and/or the regular mail.

While the little kid inside of my wants all my presents NOW NOW NOW, for the most part, it is nice to have the pleasure of anticipation to make the fun of Xmas last into most of January.

So far, I have two pairs of jeans, a slow cooker, two Wii games, and a kitchen timer. I still have $20 or so to spend of the Amazcon.ca gift card, and I still have not heard or received anything from my sister Catherine. So the process is not quite done yet. But it’s very close.

I will probably spend that last bit of amazon cash on books. I have been enjoying reading some of the books I got as presents this year, especially A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett (yay, more of the Wee Free Men and Tiffany Aching!), and it’s rekindled my lust for fresh reading material and hence new horizons.

There is only so long you can read your existing collection of books, no matter how large, before you begin to crave something fresh that you have never, ever read before. Something crisp and new (to you), without any of your skin oils preserved in its pages from all that page-turning.

PArt of me wishes I had thought of more practical, useful things than more games for the Wii to spend on, but I just could not think of much of anything besides the jeans and so on.

Every time I thought of something, it turned out to be too expensive, or the store I was shopping at didn’t have it, or they had it but not with the features I wanted, or some other such bullshit. So I end up once more wasting more of my life on video games.

I am going to seriously consider ending my Gameaccess.ca account soon. As much as I love renting Wii games via mail, it is $20/month I cannot afford to spend with my rent going up eighty bucks a month on my next cheque.

I will keep the Netflix, though. Eight dollars a month is not much to pay for all the entertainment and enlightenment and pleasure I get from it.

If I could also find a way to cash my monthly cheque in a way that does not cost me 21 dollars each time, I would be halfway towards compensating for the increase, anyhow.

Having less money is going to be really fucking depressing.

In an effort to forestall me ending up writing yet another dishwater dull diary datum, I have decided to share some links with you instead.

As content goes, it’s not a heck of a lot better, but at least it’s different.

First off, we have this adorable news story that is making the rounds because it has just the tiniest whiff of the magical to it.

A Swedish farmer lost her wedding ring sixteen years ago, and had completely given up on finding it. In fact, she had nearly forgotten about it.

But recently it turned up, and in the most unlikely of places : wrapped around a carrot from her garden.

That is where the magic comes in. Not in the plain facts of the story, those are easily explained by science. The family theorizes that the ring ended up going falling into the sink after being set aside while the farmer, Lena Paahlsson, did some Christmas baking.

It then got mixed in with table scraps and thrown into the compost heap. Compost heap becomes compost, gets put on the carrots-to-be, and sinks into the soil a bit. And a carrot grows right into it.

No, the magic doesn’t come from that. It comes from that one mind blowing moment when she saw the wedding ring she had almost completely forgotten wrapped around a carrot from her garden.

The sense of overwhelming awe and surprise must have been truly magical for her.

And to think, she nearly threw the carrot out for being too small!

Next up in clip world, we have this little gem. Warning, it’s a tad twitchy. And I highly recommend muting the obnoxious generic world music soundtrack.

What makes this video different from all the other time-lapse travel videos I have seen is the composition and editing. He made sure to get himself dead center in the frame of all sixty or so of the one second clips specifically so that he could edit them together into a visually striking montage like this one.

Admittedly, it’s also a little grating. The eye is not quite designed for a whole lot of highly visually different clips with a single unifying element to focus on despite the noise and at the rate of a clip a second. So it’s a bit of a workout for the ol’ corneas.

Still, it’s quite the artifact this guy has created, and it looks like he had a heck of a good time traveling the world, too, so I felt I just had to share his little memento with you.

If I were to travel the world, I would find a really ugly Christmas sweater and take pictures or clips of myself wearing it in the most incongruous places I could possibly find, just for the irony.

Like, wearing it at the Pyramids of Giza, in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, on a raft at deep sea, standing on the roof of some random factory somewhere in Japan, and so on.

And when possible, I would be holding a cup of eggnog and looking a little drunk while I gestured towards the camera with it in a lame “cheers to you, Mister Camera!” post.

Next up, here is a blast of a nasty story from the past : police in Japan have finally caught one of the last three remaining outlaw members of killer cult Aum Shinrikyu, the cult that carried out a sarin gas attack on a Japanese subway car, killing thirteen people at the behest of their leader, Shoko Asahara.

On a personal level, I find it to be brain tingling weirdness that I should happen to have this story come across the transom via Twitter to me today of all days, because it was only this morning that I thought about the whole Aum Shinrikyu incident for the first time in many, many years.

Funny how that happens, isn’t it?

I had been thinking about it because I was trying to remember when I first started seriously thinking about the pathology of cult leaders of all stripes, whether they lead some rec room cult without enough members to make up a baseball team or they are the tinpot dictators lording it over millions of people.

Specifically, I was pondering how the same sort of characteristics that lead someone to become a cult leader in the first place, namely the kind of combination of unstable but demanding ego and emotional intelligence it takes to have the charisma necessary to attract followers and dominate them psychologically leads, predictably, to how they inevitably become paranoid and obsessed with ideas of betrayal and apocalypse.

When the cult leaders start out, having any followers at all is enough to satisfy their incomplete sense of self. A lot of these people are, quite frankly, losers before they get into the cult biz, people who have had very little success in the world, often due to a highly immature personality, and so when they hit upon a way to have people not only respect them but worship and adore them, that is enough to satisfy them for a while.

But the ego is unstable and hence needs larger and larger amounts of reassurance in order to remain strong, which means the cult has to expand constantly, and sooner or later, it reaches its limit. It can expand no further. So the leader has to face the truth, once more, of the great majority of humanity who does not worship and adore him and how, no matter how much he gratifies his ego with the cult, someday he will die and the world will move on and forget him.

So, being fundamentally immature and unstable, they begin to obsess about the dreaded outside world and the “other” that now looms large in their mind. They become convinced that outside forces are conspiring to come take their beautiful new world away from them, and often this is when the pogroms begin.

Eventually, this mutates into the vision of the Apocalypse, where the intolerable outside world will meet the horrible, bloody, violent end that it so richly deserve for being scary and big and refusing to become an extension of the leader’s ego like it was supposed to do.

It’s all kind of sad, when you think about it.

Well, here it is, the last hours of 2011 here in the Pacific Time Zone, and time for me to immortalize my thoughts about the year going past and ponder the year to come.

After all, everyone else is doing it.

Before I really get into it, I should note, purely for posterity’s broad and richly detailed canvas, that in keeping with how I spent most of my time in 2011, I am writing this all alone in front of my computer while feeling really shitty after some very unpleasant sleep.

But don’t worry, I won’t let it affect mt stupid fucking objectivity.

Now, back to the year. It fucking sucked.

From the global perspective, these are definitely the “interesting times” of the Chinese curse. The number of weather related disasters climbs every year, and yet, the political will to do anything substantial about it is nonexistent. The world is in the hands of selfish, short-sighted, corrupt children who prefer to just leave their corporate owners in charge as long as they continue to live a fancy Capital City lifestyle, far away from the people they are supposed to represent. And all it takes for the powers that be to keep them in line is a pat on the head and reassurance that they are one of the elite, not one one of the peons.

“Upward mobility” is the biggest enemy of democracy.

On the plus side, revolutions are sprouting up all over. People are rising up and demanding at least the level of figurative democracy we enjoy here in the modern world. The results are often bloody and terrible, as the people in power do not want to share it with the people they have power over… the dream of power without accountability continues to come true for far too many people in the world. And while revolutions are times of war, death, and terror, they are also how modern nations are born. And so I welcome all the efforts in the world to pull your nation and your people into the modern era.

But revolution is also always a sign that things have gotten really bad. Witness Occupy Wall Street, and the corrupt power structure’s predictable violent counter-response. The gap between the people in power and the people being governed continues to rise, as does discontent with the situation. We are told things are getting better in the global economy, and yet people are simply not feeling it, let alone seeing it. The hostility and contempt the One Percent feel for those of us in the Ninety Nine grows more evident and virulent day by day. They have ceased to be intelligently evil by keeping a low profile and making no moves to remind the global population of their power and influences. They clearly feel like they do not even share the same world with us peons. They do not even feel allegiance to the nation of their birth. They do whatever the hell they want and we are expected to just take it.

Meanwhile, the middle class feels itself erosion, with a lot of people feeling like their middle class status is by no means guaranteed in the future no matter what they do. Historically speaking, this is when revolution happens : when the middle class losing faith that as long as they do what they are told and obey the rules, they will be okay. Then when that faith is shattered, people start looking for bricks to throw. You will never find a more dangerous and dedicated revolutionary than the person who used to be a straight arrow lawful person who sacrificed their own individuality for the promise of safety, security, and the approval of society, that warm feeling that they are Good People, like Good Dogs… and then had it all taken away by a cruel and indifferent society that turned out not to be as fair or meritocratic as they thought.

These are the people who will be ready to do whatever it takes to make the world the place they were promised it would be. They can do no else.

So I have no idea what is coming in 2012, but given that by cracking down with such absurdly obvious malice on Occupy, the Powers that Be have rejected peaceful protest as a means of effecting change. The next step is to escalate. The hippies of the sixties did not start with fighting cops and planting bombs and taking hostages. It was the hostility and brutality of the Establishment that drove them to it.

And it will take something like that do change things now, I think. I loathe violence and vastly prefer peaceful, civilized solutions. And I am certainly not calling for violence, not yet. But the people are going to have to becoming willing to upset the applecart and get far more confrontational about their tactics. Disrupt order, force the enemy to engage, stay in people’s faces until they listen and understand.

Otherwise, everything goes down the crapper.

On a personal level, fuck 2011. It was just another year of drift and decay for yours truly. I have spent another year treading water and not fighting the tides, let alone the winds. I am happy and proud that I did NaNoWriMo (and kicked its ass… 50K words in 25 days), and in the last month, I have made more progress towards my goal of writing for a living than I have ever done before. That is a very good thing, and I should praise myself for that and hold onto it as a good thing.

But I still feel very lonely, abandoned, and adrift. Perhaps this is Holiday Depression talking, but I am really sick of my stupid life. I need to change things, make a big break, find some renewal and revivification and vitality in mt life. I am so tired of this stupid fucking bedroom.

So in the New Year, my resolution, such as it is, is to find a new life.

I’m done with this one.