Or rather, there it goes.

Meant to write something a little more substantial and meaningful today (and for that matter, earlier) but my usual bad weather is clouding my mind and making it hard for any of my thoughts to stay dry enough to write down, so I am afraid all you are going to get tonight is a rain-swollen stream of consciousness and whatever thoughts have managed to find shelter, or at least a leaf to cling to while they float downstream.

I am talking, of course, about my bad sleep, and incidentally, my tendency to really put a metaphor through its paces.

I knew this was coming. I had been “up” for too long lately for there not to be a period of the deep dark intense sleep to follow. This is not fatalism, merely a sense of how things balance out.

So before I took a nap this afternoon, I said to myself “Well… here comes the flood. ”

And came it did. I seem to have this kind of bad sleep most often when I am asleep in the late afternoon. Don’t know why. Perhaps it has something to do with being asleep when the sun goes down. Or maybe that is simply my natural sleep schedule, sleeping in the late afternoon. Hard to be sure.

So as you might expect, I am all tried, incoherent, confused, dehydrated, and vaguely depressed right now. This too shall pass, I know. It always does. It always feels like it will go on forever, but usually I spring back fairly rapidly from it, in the long view.

It’s just that life sort of sucks until I do, and the obviously corollary to “time flies when you are having fun” is “time drags when you are miserable”, and hence, these periods of ill weather in my brain seem like they last a lot longer than they do.

It is the inability to concentrate that bothers me the most. It makes it so hard to get anything done. Even writing a simple diary entry like this one takes a certain amount of focus and attention, and when I am all scrambled up like this, where I have to watch that I don’t fall asleep in the middle of a sentence…… wait, what was I talking about? Whatever.

Point is, these times suck.

Life wise, nothing really special going on. Feeling the financial pinch due to recent expense adjustments pretty hard, and that certainly does not help things. It is not like I was rolling in the green before the recent reckoning, and losing another eighty dollars a month is just about a death blow for me financially, but somehow, I keep moving on.

Phew, almost feel asleep at the keys again. This shit is getting really old really fast, and I am not even half way done this diary entry yet. Rarely has a thousand words seemed like so many to me. And all I ca do is just keep plugging along and sooner or later, the storm will pass.

Let me tell you about my tasty if strang soup experience last week.

(Audience : “Oh boy, tell us now! TELL US NOW!”)

Maybe the free coffee for people in the lineup was a bad idea. OK, I’m telling it, I’m telling it!

When I was doing my post therapy grocery shopping last Tuesday, I decided I would pick up three potatoes and an onion, and try out my crock pot again.

Recipes? Who needs recipes? Add stuff and water, turn on, come back when it’s soup.

SO I pick up what look to me to be three really big but otherwise normal potatoes, and take them home with me, thinking nothing of it.

But when I decide to cook my little recipe, I discover something. Specifically, I discover that the “big potatoes” I picked up have very firm orange flesh.

Yup, I had gotten me three sweet potatoes instead of the usual white or yellow potatoes that I was expecting. Now it all made sense. That is why they were so big and heavy,and that is why they were not in the usual part of the produce section, but in the smaller section with the specialty items.

That would be a great big duh from big ol inattentive me, that’s for sure. I just grabbed three of the first things that seemed vaguely potato like to me, and did not even read the sign that presumably would have told me this was not a normal potato.

I even recall thinking “Wow, they are making potatoes really big these days. Must be genetic modificaion or something like that. ”

Uh, nope, ya big dope. It’s not a normal potato at all!

And I have no experience with sweet potatoes. I have never eaten them except as yam fries. (Are yams the same thing as sweet potatoes, or what?

But I figured, what the heck, so I just went ahead as planned. And it turned out quite nicely! All that I put in there was chopped sweet potato and onion, plus Italian spice mix and garlic powder and a little sel de mer, and yet a few hours later, I had some very nice soup.

The broth had a surprisingly dark color, almost black, but what the heck. It tasted good, and that is the main job for all food. And all this without starting with a soup stock!

And speaking of soup stock, in what I thought was quite an inspired move, I took some of the leftover soup stock and used it as part of the base for a batch of rice in the rice cooker, thus transforming the rice into a rice pilaf of the previous day’s soup.

And that turned out pretty nice too.

So as a cook, I am pleased with myself.

And as a writer, I am pretty pleased with how these are the last couple dozen words of my daily dosage, and how very soon now, I will be able to go back to sleep.

Seeya later folks!

Got some entertainment based stuff to share with you today, including dirty secrets of television and film, a picture I think would make a great movie, and my pick for a movie to avoid.

Let’s start with that last one, shall we?

An Altered State

No, this is not about Altered States, which is a fairly cool movie, and a great cautionary tale about the perils of going after emotionally unavailable men. (Take heed, ladies. )

No, it’s about a movie called Altered, about a group of men who, fifteen years before the movie starts, were abducted by aliens, and what happens when they finally manage to capture one.

The problem is that this movie is actually quite good. Good acting, quite skillful use of a smallish budget and old fashioned but still solid dramatic tricks to drive the action forward and create suspense, tightly focused editing, and a great script…. almost.

I say “almost” because the ending of this movie completely fucking sucks.

It’s arbitrary, it’s nonsensical, it leaves massive amounts of plot completely unresolved, it relies on elements completely unrevealed until that point, and basically fails on every level I can think of in being a good ending for what has otherwise been a pretty good movie.

It really smacks of the studio forcing a traditional Hollywood happy ending on the film instead of the tragic or at least different ending they had intended.

And it pissed me off so bad that I just had to vent about it here, which is rare for me.

Dark Secrets of Television

Learned some things which disturbed me a little from this Cracked article about the secrets behind some beloved television shows.

Five out of six of the entries did not bother me. I already knew working on Alf was a nightmare, everyone knows what a petulant pervert Bob Barker was when hosting The Price Is Right, I was never a fan of Webster so I am not interested in its secrets, I loved Growing Pains but I already knew Kirk Camerson was an insufferably self-righteous prick (just didn’t know how early it had started), and it somehow does not surprise me that Martin Lawrence was a hot tempered rage machine during the shooting of his sitcom. It does surprised me he got a sitcom in the first place, granted.

No, the one that shocked me was Grace Under Fire. I loved that show, and stuck with it despite the fact that the show went through massive retooling every season and so it was hard to get too attached to a character. They might not be around next season.

At the time, I assumed that the reason the show changed so much was that the network weasels could not keep their greasy little fingers off it and in an effort to justify their existence kept messing around with it to make it “better”.

But no, it turns out that the reason the show kept changing was that Brett Butler, whom I quite liked both on the show and as a comedian, was a raging alcoholic whom nobody could stand to work with for long. The show had five seasons, and five producers. I don’t think even Roseanne Barr went through producers that fast.

Oh well, at least now I don’t feel as bad about her career going nowhere after the show.

Ronin of the Streets

If this was a movie poster, I would totally want to see said movie.

-Hobo Samurai- by =arvalis on deviantART

It is called Hobo Samurai and it really implies a whole story in a single image. The license plate armor, the wild beard, the plastic rings from a six pack of beer dangling from his belt, it all adds to the feeling of a whole narrative behind the image.

Actually, what it looks like the most is an illustration from a role playing game manual, describing how “hobo samurai” was a class you could take for your character, and what that would mean.

Sounds like a game I would like to play, or at least, read. The kind of game where Hobo With A Shotgun would fit right in.

Or heck, maybe even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

David O. Russell is a Horrible Person

One last story from Cracked and we will be done.

According to this article here, David O. Russell, director of such critic pleasing movies as Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, is also a short tempered abusive asshole of such Type A prickitude that he even had the temerity to bitch out Lily Tomlin.

For that alone, he deserves to get his ass kicked. I adore Lily Tomlin!

But this story has a happy ending. One involving amazing human being George Clooney no less!

During the production of Three Kings, he verbally and physically abused his crew members, at one point kicking a young extra on the ground while yelling at him. When George Clooney told Russell to cut it out, the director reacted like any mature 14-year-old would: by calling Clooney a pussy and daring him to throw a punch. Russell then lunged at Clooney and grabbed him by the throat — which proved to be a mistake. Clooney went nuts and proceeded to thoroughly kick the director’s ass.

Is that not awesome? Just when you think George Clooney cannot possibly get any more awesome, you learn something like this. He not only stood up against the director of the movie he was in when everyone else was too afraid, he did it to protect someone else, and then when Russell dared to attack him, gave him the serious beat down that he so obviously deserved.

Fucked had that coming a long, long time. The only thing that could have made it better is if at some point during the ass whupping, Clooney had shouted “And this is for Lily Tomlin, you asshole!” and then punched him squarely in the junk.

Well, that’s entertainment for today. Coming soon : weird products on the Internet!

Was tempted to write about some other stuff, but I think these post therapy diary entries have become an important part of the process, so I will put the other stuff off for today and to continue my journey deep, deep into my own navel.

Wow. It’s linty in here. And funky.

So in order to talk about what happened today in therapy, I will have to tell you all about the revelation I had over the weekend, because that was today’s jumping off point and I am still pretty mad about it so anything that furthers the process of getting it off my chest is a good thing.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I was quite horribly bullied in elementary school. Many times I had the entire school body chasing me around wanting to do bodily harm to me. I was regularly physically beaten and almost constantly verbally abused. There were the hardcore regular bullies, and then there were the eager spectators who were very very clearly not on my side. I spent most of my formative elementary school years terrified of my fellow students. I would do anything to avoid having to go outside for lunch and recess. I would fake sick. I would hide in the school. I would spend all the time I possibly could in the library.

(No wonder libraries and bookstores make me feel happy and safe.)

None of that caused anyone to wonder why I did it and maybe try to help me. Time and again, I would tell teachers what was happening to me, and ask for help. And again and again, they would do absolutely nothing about it. All they did was give me some half ass lameness like “they are just jealous of you” or “maybe you should try harder to get along with them” but never would they actually do a single thing that involved, you know, actually doing anything.

Certainly nothing that would involve them getting up from their desk.

Personally, I think that they secretly agreed with the bullies. I was weird and fat and way too smart for my own good. I deserved to be bullied. Maybe it would teach me not to be such a freak.

So the teachers most definitely knew that I was being bullied, as did the administrators. Heck, the janitors knew it. One time, I even heard one of them laugh while I was being beaten. Nice huh?

That is one half of the equation. My parents are the other half.

My parents, ever since I first brought it up when I was a depressed teenager, have always maintained that they had absolutely no idea that I was going through hell when I was in elementary school.

And I never questioned that. Seems plausible. I was the inconvenient child, the one who had not been planned, the one they actively encouraged to act as though he did not exist, and to do absolutely nothing to remind them he was there.

So obviously, this makes it easy for my to believe that they had no idea what was going on while I was in school. They barely noticed I was alive a lot of the time.

But last weekend, something occurred to me after all these years :

What about parent-teacher conferences?

My parents attended those religiously. That was one thing they were good for. I suspect my father’s fear of losing face in the community and my mother’s being a teach and thus being able to talk to them like an equal, are the deciding factors there. Certainly not little old me.

So it’s not exactly as if my parents and my teachers never talked to one another. This opens up two main possibilities, both of which are highly unpleasant :

A) My teachers, knowing full well that I was going through hell, still did not deem it important enough to bother mentioning to my parents. Perhaps they thought it might reflect badly on them (as it should have, when you think about it) and so they decided that there was no reason to bother mentioning it unless my parents brought it up first. After all, realistically speaking, what was in it for them? It could only get them in trouble. And really, what’s the fate of a weird fat pain in the ass kid worth compared to their comfortable life?

or B) My teachers did, indeed, tell my parents all about how I was being abused and how terrified I was most of the time and how basically horrible my life was, and my parents just shrugged and decided it was not worth making a fuss over and did nothing about it, and the teacher just shrugged too, and figured if my parents didn’t see it as a problem, neither did they. And then, years later when I asked about it, my parents either had forgotten all about it (because you know, they had more important things on their mind) or they lied to me and said they knew nothing about it when they damned well did.

You can see why I am mad. Seems like nobody back then even wanted to deal with me at all, so they just plain ignored me. Parents, siblings, teachers, school administrators, all of them were there and could have helped me, could have protected me, could have stopped the bullying.

They could have made me feel like I was not abandoned to the wolves.

Instead, I was an agoraphobic before I even hit puberty.

So the therapist and I talked about that, and how it all makes me feel, and things spun on from there. He suggests that I try to contact some of those teachers and confront them about it.

And I want to do it. But I am having trouble finding the information I need. I remember the teacher’s names, but only their last names, of course, so it makes them hard to look up.

And sadly, there seems to be no publicly viewable archive of teachers past for Parkside Elementary School in Prince Edward Island, so I don’t know how to look it up.

Suggestions are appreciated.

Yup. It’s another entry where I talk about bad sleep and dreams and shit. Sorry.

You know, sometimes having the sort of sleep that I do, namely heavy and intense and with an REM rate approaching infinity (and beyond), is like being some kind of junkie or alcoholic, but without the parts which are fun and feel good.

No, I just get the parts where you wake up feeling like shit like you are hungover and spend the next while stumbling around and moaning like a strung out zombie Nick Nolte and have to fight and claw your way back to the vague semblance of humanity just to get back to what passes for “normal”.

And you know what? “Normal” ain’t that great. Normal, in fact, largely sucks, although there are nice bits and it could be a lot worse.

I am not quite sure I can put today’s dreaming into linear narrative yet, although it was quite interesting and details, so perhaps I should make the attempt.

Earliest (I think) I remember, I was with a group of people who were fleeing a horrible evil catastrophe, like an invasion of some kind. It was night, it was dark, and there was a distinct feeling that we were fleeing something like an invading army, possibly of alien origin.

We were fleeing through an area of fairly close together small villages. At some point, we decided we would rest for the night. As often happens in my dreams, the line between media and reality is blurred, and so for me, it is like I am playing a completely immersive video game, where my mind is entirely absorbed into the reality of the situation, yet I am also aware that I am playing a video game.

At one point, I even say to someone “I hated this part when I played this game on my PC” to somebody who is presumably watching me play, and yet, I am completely in the situation. There is no “screen” or “display”, I am seeing this war stricken world as though I was really there. And yet, I felt the kind of detachment I feel when playing a video game, like my participation in its reality was strictly voluntary, strictly “pretend”, and I could leave whenever I liked.

Talk about virtual reality…. it was so virtual, it was all in my head. On a couple of levels.

Within the game, I was quite anxious and frightened. I had a simple pistol in one hand, and a infe in the other. I was worried I would have to fight and kill. I knew I was more than prepared to kill in order to protect the people I was with, but I was really hoping I would not have to do it.

We stopped in a village which seemed to all be smallish family homes, and it’s night so it’s kind of cold, but we are too tired to do anything but lay down on the ground and sleep.

I should mention that I felt a distinct disconnection from this people, as though I was with them and my fate was the same as theirs, but I was not one of them. I also felt that I was quite fond of these people as well.

So I go to sleep a little off from the rest of them (yup, another dream in which I sleep… how weird is that, huh?) and when I wake up, I can’t find the rest of my group. They are nowhere to be seen. So there I am, lost. Happens a lot to me in dreams.

So I start walking around the village. I noticed that the houses are in rows (no streets, just rows) the rows alternate in orientation between orienting north-south and east-west.

I also start to wonder why we don’t just use the houses for shelter. In the dream, I know they are all abandoned because of the war, so they are just sitting there, open, and we could use them, guilt free. I ponder that maybe the problem would be that if people were inside them at night, they would turn the lights on, and the village would be all lit up and the invaders would know there were survivors there and come kill us.

But surely we could just leave the lights out, right?

Eventually, I hear some noises and follow them to find my group in a pitched battle with the invaders. I know I shoot and kill some of them, but I cannot for the life of me remember what they look like past a vague impression of thuggish stormtrooper type soldiers that were definitely not human.

Then the video game thing really kicks it into high gear, because some kind of “boss” shows up and the battle turns into something a lot like fighting one of those awful multi-stage bosses where you have to defeat all of its various forms and perform a bunch of sudden crazy tasks to win.

There was part where the boss splits into many smaller creatures and you have to defeat them all, and a part where the boss turns into these three holograms to taunt us and demand our surrender, and there is another part, the most visually impressive, where it turns into a dirt shark… a creature that swims through the soil like it was water and all you can see of it when it does so is its single white fin sliding through the surface.

All this time, I am fighting it, and using the same sorts of logic that I would use in trying to defeat a difficult boss in a video game, of the “oh, I see, I am supposed to do this” type.

Near the end of the dream, things go even crazier as it becomes something like a crazy, deadly game show, with me doing weird tasks like trying to find the one little brick on a wall of bricks that opens the next part of the game. (I just pressed all of them, one by one. I suck at searching. )

The very last thing involved people having to catch something like a beach ball covered in glitter.

So in conclusion, I play way too many fucking video games.