This is not your typical “bad sleep” diary entry.

Oh, I have had bad sleep lately. Tons of it, in fact. Indeed, I may have set some sort of personal record for the most consecutive bad sleep sessions in a row, or highest percentage of time spend in bad sleep in a twenty four hour period, or something like that.

And there will be the retelling of weird dreams. Lots of them, and all very very weird. My mind releases some very strange smoke when it’s busy burning with the backlog of my sacrifices, and breathing these vapors makes me as dizzy and incoherent as any Oracle at Delphi.

The difference this time is that I am not complaining about this bad sleep. Sure, I feel like crap, dehydrated and disoriented and disjointed and discombobulated (love that word), but then again, I knew that I would when I initiated this whole thing.

See, this time, I brought it on deliberately, and welcomed it in. I have offered it no resistance. I am letting it run its course and do what it needs to do. I suspect that I am not done yet, in fact, and will go through some more after I am done writing this today.

I knew what I was doing last night when I knew whatever caffeine was still in my system from the previous night’s Denny was fading, and I was beginning to crash down from that high, and I deliberately took two melatonin pills in order to increase my downward momentum. I knew the inevitable result would be a crash that scrambled my metaphorical marbles all over the places and that I would some time in gett them back into their loosely knit bag.

But I did it anyhow, because I had gone three days without satisfying sleep, just the really shallow and unsatisfying kind that leaves you feeling more or less exactly the same as when you laid down, and I decided it was time to trigger the avalanche myself, make it happen instead of letting it blindside me and make me all depressed, and thus take control of the situation and ride it out in style.

And that is what I have done. I accepted that I would sleep a lot, and dismissed thoughts of “lost time” or sleep “stealing my life away”. Most days I don’t do anything useful besides my daily blog entry anyhow, so as long as I have done that, honestly, who cares about the rest? Oh no, I played fewer Flash games than usual. Surely now, the economy will crumble.

And at least this deep dark sleep does me some good. Usually, once the cycle is complete, I feel a lot better for a while. I have let the spooks out of my head and can enjoy some relative calm for a while. Not as many ghosts clogging up the stairwell of the ramshackle run down mansion of my mind.

Too bad they inevitably build up once more. Working on that, though, with therapy and such. Got to hold less in and that means letting more out. Funny how that works out.

Highlights of the crazy kaleidoscope carnival of my cerebrum over the last little while include :

• A sequence in which I was trapped in a record store while a demented and demonic DJ made me run circles through extremely realistic illusions of extremely gross things like raw sewage and cat puke (the illusions were about ankle deep on what had been a carpeted floor beforehand) as part of some horrible radio contest from hell, and I was not even sure there was a prize
• Another bit when I was taking, of all things, ballet lessons with a female friend, in truth just because I wanted to do what she was doing (I am silly like that), but telling myself that I was doing it so I could learn to be more graceful and less clumsy. Which would also be a good thing. When I told that to the instructor (under the guise of “I suppose you are wondering why a guy like me is taking ballet lessons”) my friend asked me “Is that a gay thing?” rather bluntly. I didn’t really have an answer for her. Sort of, but I don’t think of it that way? Kinda? Whatever.
• Then, after the lesson ended, my friend and I both had to run for the bus, which was pulling out as we emerged, and it slowed down and stopped for her, but then pulled away immediately, despite my screaming “Stop! Stop!” at the top of my lungs like a lunatic. Typical. Even in my dreams, buses suck.
• So now I am stranded in an entirely unfamiliar neighborhood, and before too long, two teenage rednecks with shotguns walk along, and before they even notice me, I know they are going to try to kill me, just for fun, you know. So then I am eluding these maniacs, and being very calm about it, like it was just average bullying and not attempted murder. I am casually dodging their bullets, first on foot and then on bicycle, till I got to a 7-11 type store, where I immediately tell the first person I see “Excuse me, but those two gentlemen are trying to kill me. ” And I call the cops.
• Then, as I am eluding my potential murderers in the 7-11, I notice a guy in a cop’s uniform. When he notices me noticing him, he immediately, via dream magic, tried to disguise himself as an employee of the store. But it was no use, I was on to him, and he said “Sorry, I can’t help… turns out I am just not, not very good at this. People, don’t vote for me again!”. Luckily, in this store, they have very cool stainless steel shotguns of justice, and this leads to me completely getting the drop on my oppressors but then I can’t get the gun to fire. It’s like the trigger won’t pull all the way. This happens to me a lot in dreams… I don’t know if it is because I deep down don’t want to kill anyone, or whether it is some weird deep Freudian impotence thing, or what.

And that is just a small sampling of what bits of strange dreaming survived the fires of my mind in order to remain on my consciousness.

So burn away, the sacrificial funeral brazier of my mind. It all has to go, everything that is clogging up my mind and holding me back and weighing me down. You are not burning anything I need and in return, you clear space in my mind to be me. I am tired of being a hoarder of the mind. Let it all burn.

May my fire rage deep into the night, and make me free.

It is about time I talked about money here in my diary, or specifically my lack of it.

I am not adjusting well to the radical drop in disposable income I have experienced in this new year. For those of you who do not remember what I am pretty sure I wrote about in here before, my rent went from $300 to $380 in the new year, a net loss of eighty dollars a month.

That would be a blow even to an employed person, but I have an income of around $670 per month, and so this financial setback represents a loss of slightly under twelve percent of my income, or twenty one percent of my disposable income.

And when you are living on as little as I am, you feel every one of those percentage points like someone is carving them out of your flesh with a dull and ragged knife.

Normally, I don’t like talking about money. I like to think of myself as creative and resourceful enough to find a way to enjoy myself and keep bopping along regardless of how much money I have in my pocket. After all, I survived many years with no income at all, so anything has to be better than that, right?

Wrong. Sure, I survived, but I was very depressed. And I was mooching off others to survive, and that was a massive black hole of negative self esteem right there.

At least now, I am not mooching off the people close to me. I am mooching off the taxpayers of British Columbia in general. For me, that is big progress, and it’s how I have been living for the last twelve years or so.

But back to my emotional state and how it ties to my financial estate. The truth is, the money in my wallet has an enormous impact on my emotional state, and I am really beginning to feel that now.

I had one month’s grace, because I had money left over from Xmas gifts plus a GST/HST refund check to protect me from the gallows cold. But all that is gone now, and all I have between me and the wolves at the door is this thin plywood plinth with a picture of a castle gate stuck to it.

And the truth is, deep down where I really live, under my happy-go-lucky pretensions, I am someone with deep deep need for material security. I need money in order to feel secure, to feel safe, to feel like I hve some kind of protection from the cold harsh world. I need money to have access to the big and small pleasures that keep people sane and that tell them they are good dogs because they are being rewarded.

Being depressed is bad enough. Being depressed and poor is a terrible double whammy.

In fact, I honestly wonder how much of my depression comes from my poverty. It seems entirely plausible to me that if I just had a better income, even just a minimum wage income, I would be a much happier and less anxious and depressed person.

Too bad the depression makes it impossible for me to work. It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch 22.

I mean, it is not like I have a lot of prospects for improving my income before the depression goes.

They say you can work from home, but everything I have seen along those lines smells strongly of being a total scam. The working from home dream is an attractive one, but it is for telecommuting professionals, not fat beached whales like myself.

In theory, that is what the writing is about, a way for me to make money on my own and try to dig my way out of this deep dark cold pit that I call home.

And perhaps eventually it will do so. I am not counting myself out. But at the rate at which I am progressing now, I am not going to get anywhere with that any time soon. I am still far too prone to let the days go by and watch my life drip away while I do nothing to improve it. It is a rare day when I can summon the energy and momentum and focus and most of all the confidence to actually face the world long enough to make a furtive attempt to advance myself as a writer before scuttling back into my cave.

Sure, it’s cold, and dark, and poisonous, and killing me, but hey, it’s home.

Perhaps I should put the high artistic ideals to the side for now, and when I have trouble finding the motivation to go find places to submit my work or looking for writing contests to enter, I should just unleash my basically greedy nature and just think about the money.

After all, lots of prominent, well respected, now official part of the pantheon of literary immortals type writers have written, at least at first, exclusively with money on their minds. History is full of great writers who starting writing not because they felt the delicate stirrings of the breath of of their muse tickling their talent buds, but because they had failed at a lot of real world things and this was a last ditch attempt to get money for the rent.

And I am a flexible and creative enough person to think that I could take any set of requirements and make something good. Even if I took to writing Harlequin romances, mine would be better than the average, because I would meet all their arcane requirements and still write a more satisfying and interesting tale than the average hack.

So maybe the real lesson I should take from all I have discussed tonight is that I should give up on finding my deep down ambition and instead learn to rely on my much more reliable and long standing greed. Money money money! I wannit.

I hope this is not the first step to becoming a conservative.