I really dislike my absentmindedness right now. More so than usual.

For one thing, it only occurred to me right now that I completely forgot to do a Tuesday Newsday. Not that big a deal, really. I try not to get too attached to that sort of thing, both because my absentmindedness virtually guarantees I am going to miss one now and then, and because I want to preserve this blog’s primary purpose as an instrument for expressing what is on my mind and in my heart at any moment, and therefore any sort of restrictive format concept like regular features are secondary to that goal.

I mean, what if I do not feel like doing a Newsday? What if I have something very personal and important that I feel I need to express instead?

Well, then, fuck the regular feature. My recovery, such as it is, is more important.

But the thing I am truly kicking myself in the ass over right now is that I managed to completely forget to make that phone call to make a doctor’s appointment that I talked about yesterday.

Told myself to do it a bunch of times, but between sleep and distractions, totally forgot. And I know there are a million and a half things you can do to keep yourself from forgetting important things.

That is part of the problem. There are too many ways to choose from. But more importantly, they all require you to remember to do something. Remember to jot it down, remember to put it on your calendar, remember to add it to you little alarm lock program… it all starts with remembering.

And that, you know, is my whole problem.

I truly think of absentmindedness as my primary weakness, my bete noire, my tragic flaw. And I have a terrible feeling that on some deep level, I have never overcome it because part of me does not want to get over it. Part of me, in fact, needs it in order to not be overcome by all that has happened to me… and all that has not.

So as much as I struggle with the fog of war that fills my mind and the sand that fills my eyes, I will never truly win, because they are the very things that anesthetize the sleeping horrors of my mind.

Every depressive is an addict, a user, a junkie. We are addicted to the things the depression brings, namely the cold fog that keeps our demons down, and the forgetting that this brings. And until we are ready to face what we flee, we can never be free.

You cannot have the lightning without the rain, the breeze without the storms, or the benefits of depression without the costs.

And the costs can be downright mortal. Either all at once, or over a lifetime without living.

So unchain your beasts. Thaw your monsters. Reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts you. Lean into the pain and drink and devour your fear. Experience it all, without limit or restraint. Bring on the flood.

And know that while you might lose all that you thought you were in the resulting monsoon, you will lose nothing of what you truly are and always were.

It is easy to live in fear of the worst kind of unknown, namely, not knowing who you are. There is nothing more frightening to the human mind than loss of identity. Preservation (or improvement) of identity inspires more acts both great and terrible than any mere religion or economic system.

But the truly powerful are those who can let go of all ideas of who and what they are in order to embrace a greater idea of themselves. Those who can accept change when said change is growth of self. A small and petty idea of who and what you are is more restrictive than any lack of resources or access, especially if the choices you make are to preserve that sense of yourself rather than have to face one second of that terrible doubt about your identity from embracing something larger and stronger and healthier.

That is why I try to remember (ha) that I am not a depressed person. I am a person who has been suffering from a disease called depression for a long time, but that disease is not who I am. It does not define me. I am actually a pretty awesome person with a lot going for me. Depression, no matter how hard it lasts, is just a thing that happened to me, temporary and meaningless as being wet from the rain.

After all, any of us might get caught in the rain and end up soaked clean through. That does not mean we are now Wet People until we dry off.

We are just regular, normal, healthy people who happen to be wet for a time.

Granted, for me it has been a long long time. Most of my adult life, in fact. And no doubt, that has had a deleterious effect on my identity growth.

Arguably, I really have no idea who I would be without the depression. I know who I would want to be, and who I think I could be, and of course, there is the version of me that I fear to be down to my core.

But I do not really know. I have no normal adult identity to return to once I am well. The disease took hold before I had a chance to grow one. So really, it is wide open for me.

But over the days and years of my recovery, I gain a stronger sense of the person I am, and the person I want to be. I unearth myself, and that feels really good to do, even if sometimes I find myself missing the warmth of the tomb.

But you can’t leave and stay at the same time, and I am determined to escape.

I just don’t know when.

It is getting downright arid around here. Mister Sandman, please stop already!

But I know why sleep has been kicking my ass today. As always, it’s the caffeine.

I had a liter of Diet Coke with my snack last night. I also took 2 Quetiapine. Result : was not sleepy right away, but once that caff wore off, it was Zonk City, USA for me.

I am really glad I did not go with my idea to take a third pill with breakfast, otherwise I probably would not have woken up until it was time to do tomorrow’s column.

I shudder to think of how low my blood sugar would be then.

So, not a lot to report about today. I know I had some intense and messed up dreams, but none are currently clinging to my consciousness looking to get out.

I know that at one point, I was competing to get a box of chocolates out of a bag with a black bear cub in a Santa hat.

I know. Whad dee fug, huh? Well that is how dreams go. They are beyond weird.

I mean, I dreamed I was on vacation with Mitt Romney and his family. And he kept wanting us to do dorky things like play board games, and he was trying so hard to make sure everyone had his idea of wholesome family fun, but all I could think about was how I do not belong with these people and how I would much rather be doing something cool.

And I mean, where the heck did that come from? I loathe Mitt Romney and his ilk. But I guess he comes across as so whitebread normal that he was cast in that role in my psychodrama. He was Mister Normal in my brain experiment in normal life.

And it obviously was not the real Mitty, because we were definitely not rocking a billionaire lifestyle. More like a successful small businessman lifestyle. I am pretty sure Mittens and his brood do not end up playing board games in a cheap cabin at some low end tourist trap resort.

If they did, maybe they would grasp something about people outside their little world.

I did get one thing done today, sort of. I called to get a doctor’s appointment, something I have been forgetting to do all month. I need my doctor to fill out of a shortish form for my disability review, and if I do not get said form in soon, I might have delays in this month’s check.

And seeing as I was supposed to get said form in before the first of the month, I am beginning to get a little bit on the worried side.

And the thing is, I called to get the appointment, but I did not get it. The receptions said she did not know if Doctor Chao was working on Thursday, which is when I want the appointment so I can go right after my therapy session and save Joe from having to make two trips on separate days.

This was an entirely unexpected response from her, and so I froze up for a bit, and she said she will know if I called back tomorrow morning, so I said I would do that.

So now I have to remember to do it all again tomorrow. And I have a feeling she will just say “Nope, he’s not working Thursday”, in which case I could have just made the appointment today. Bummer.

And that is irritating. Social anxiety makes the phone a bit of a tricky thing anyhow. It is hard for me to pick up the phone and call someone out of the blue. I always feel like I am interrupting them and irritating them and that they would rather not hear from me, even when it is a simple and functional phone call like calling to make an appointment.

And so, now I have to work up the nerve all over again tomorrow, and the results will likely be negative and even futile. Sigh.

Life sure sucks at the bottom of a major depression.

Getting close to the end of xxxholic. Netflix has 24 episodes and the next one I watch will be episode 22. That is the problem with these neatly 22 minute shows, it is just too darn easy to go through them fast at one or two per meal.

And I will really miss the show when I have watched it all. It is funny and charming and very wise. The way that Yuko deals with people’s problems appeals to me greatly. She goes right to the heart of the problem with the skill and power of a surgeon. People who come to her shop will get the help they need, and they will get it fast.

Whether or not they can handle it, that is another story. It is up to them. This is not the gentle cure. This is the swift, sure, and deep cure. This is someone asking you the questions you are afraid to ask yourself, and confronting you with the truths you hide from yourself with lies that make you miserable and keep you trapped.

This appeals to me enormously. Honestly, I wish she was my therapist. I am pushing 40 and I do not have time for a long and meandering cure. I want the truth of my condition. I want all my illusions shattered. I want to get the hell over myself as soon as possible, and I do not give a good godly damn how much it hurts. Pain is transitory. Growth is permanent.

And I want so badly to grow, it hurts. Hurts worse than any revelation might hurt, to be honest.

So go ahead, shatter my prison, break my shell, cleanse my wounds. Straighten me, ’cause I’m ready. Fuck everything that came before this. I am willing to do whatever it takes to be free.

Willing? Hell, I am downright eager.

And the truth is, I can’t do it on my own.

So where is Yuko when I need her?

I still feel like I am losing the war against sleep.

It might serve me to start keeping a sleep/dream journal though, just so I can keep track of exactly how much sleep I get, and have some venue for externalizing my dreams.

The thing about that is, dreams offer us a window into the inner workings of our mind. But we do not get the full benefit of that unless we take them from their origins in our deep subconscious minds all the way to the highest level of consciousness by writing them down and hence externalize them.

That way, we can both release the emotions involved, and raise these strange yet oddly meaningful episodes all the way to the very top of our consciousness so that they can be processed by our entire minds as they drift back down to the depths from which they came.

Boy, watching xxxholic has brought out the mystic in me. Or the psychologist. Or the spiritual counselor. Whatever you want to call it. It is all the same thing to me.

The only difference is the type of metaphors used, and how conscious the practitioner is that metaphors is all they are. Not mystic principles, not rules of magic, not ways of the spirit. Just useful metaphors for describing what, in the strictly scientific sense, are merely the workings of the human mind.

But from the point of view of any sort of counselor, who of course has to deal directly with the complex mixture of subject and objective reality that is the phenomenological landscape of the mind of another, scientific language is just another set of useful metaphors, effective with some, and worse than useless for others. And the true healer holds no pointless loyalties to one set of metaphors or another. They use whatever works best for each patient, whether it is the clinical language of science (which I prefer) or talk of souls, spirits, fairies, or The Other Side.

That is why I try to hold back my skeptic’s urge to get all pissed off at people who take people’s money for being their spiritual medium, life coach, or psychic friend. If it genuinely helps the person, who are we to judge what set of metaphors and beliefs form the key to the door of the person’s mind? Not everyone has a scientific mind and for many people, the metaphors of religion or mysticism, with their advantage of not needing to be processed by the conscious mind, make a heck of a lot more sense than all rational, sensible, logical thinking in the world.

And while I am a logical scientific type, to me, nothing is more important than helping people. I am a compassionate pragmatist with a deep and sincere desire to make life better for people, and from that point of view, whatever works is fine by me.

After all, who are we to say someone should not be happy because they sound their happiness the “wrong way”? What callous arrogance! What cruel hubris! What vile ignorance!

But back to that whole sleep thing. I suppose the tricky bit is that it often takes me a while to fall asleep, and it is not like I am likely to be able to look at the time and write it down the second before I actually go to sleep.

That is just not going to happen. So it would have to be, at best, a journal of when I lay down and when I wake up. A “time spent in bed” journal rather than strictly a sleep journal.

And I guess that would still give me some sort of sense of how much time I am spending asleep. I want to know just how much of my life I am wasting in bed.

The Quetiapine has been very useful in making sure I get some deep sleep every day. Taking two of them with my midnight snack ensures that, more or less, I will be asleep by 2 am or so. And I usually get, I think, four or five hours that way.

Then I get up, have breakfast, go back to bed, sleep till noon or so, eat lunch, then it is back to bed till around 4:30 PM, and that is when I feel I truly wake up.

And having a day that goes from 4:30 pm to 2 am kind of makes the days whizz by. According to that schedule, I am only truly up for less than ten hours, instead of the usual sixteen. Even if you add in a few meals, that still only brings it up to twelve hours or so. That is not a normal amount of time awake.

My life is slipping through my fingers, and I am not sure I have the strength to stop it. Part of me really likes having the duller parts of life slide away quickly. But that is a very limited way to think. All of life could be the “good parts” if I just put more effort into it.

But I feel like that part of me is still partly paralyzed. The deep cold numbness is not just an affliction but a defense, and waking up that part of me will always be painful before it is pleasant.

As I have said before, it is like when your foot falls asleep. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. Your foot is merely numb. But it feels very cold, and deeply and terribly wrong.

So you move your foot, knowing that doing so will make it start to actually hurt. Pins and needles, a hot flushing sensation, cramping… any are all of those are the price you are going to have to pay to get your foot back to normal.

And you might complain or swear or whatever, but you do it anyhow, because you know that this is the only way to get your foot back to normal and go back to using it like normal, too.

And that is more or less what recovery is all about. Shaking up things inside of you, waking them up, dealing with the pain and discomfort that brings, and knowing that it is all worth it because it is the only way to bring yourself back to life.

And maybe even get to be a happy, normal person some day.

But first, you have to…. WAKE UP.

Definitely feeling like Mister Sandman has me trapped in a desert of sleep sand today. I am still incredibly sleepy right now, and I slept at least teen hours already. Looks like it is one of those days.

It does not feel like it is just the after-effects of taking two Quetiapine, either. I can tell how that feels now, and this is not just that.

No, sadly, I think I am host to some kind of infection, the same one that took my friend Joe out of the action yesterday. For him, it started in his throat then moved up into the head.

And just today, I noticed I have a tickle in my throat and a bit of difficulty swallowing. Uh oh.

And now I definitely feel that dragged out and tired feeling you get when you are sick and your body is using up a lot of its energy and resources just fighting the infection.

And I feel kind of icky, too. That icky-sicky feeling where you feel all gross from sick sweat and fluid accumulating in places and so on. So I guess it is official : I am sick.

Hopefully, it will not last too long or get too bad. Joe says he feels a lot better today than he did yesterday, and so hopefully, it is a 24 hour bug, or thereabouts. It still sucks to be sick, of course, but I would rather it was over quick.

It is when the illness just hangs on and hangs on that it gets depressing.

I will likely go right back to bed when I am done writing this. We have plans to go see Felicity again tonight, and I am looking forward to that. But I might be too tired to go, which would suck big time. I will do my best to rest up a lot beforehand.

And hopefully have time to get fully cleaned up before we go. Oh well, Joe does not work tonight, tomorrow being a stat holiday (Canadian Thanksgiving, for you non Canadians) and therefore there is no hard and fast reason we have to get out the door at any particular time.

So even if I sleep too long, I will probably be able to beg Joe’s indulgence for a quick shower. I hate delaying things, but sometimes there is no way around it.

I will just have to take a nap and take my chances.

Speaking of going to visit Felicity, I am happy to go see her, but I will sure be glad when her parents are back this Friday, the 12th. I am never entirely comfortable at her parents’ place. And of course, when she is not housesitting, we hang out here at the apartment, and that is a much more comfortable for an agoraphobic like myself than going out to the Big Bad Outside World.

On the other hand, her parent’s place has her cat Nero in it, and I am always glad to see him. I love cats so much. He is a fraidy cat, so I do not exactly get unfettered access. Usually, Felicity has to go get him and bring him to us, and even then, he is usually eager to get away from all the strange people. (Trust me, kittums, I can relate. )

But sometimes I get to pet him and rub his chin and make him purr and tell him what a sweet kitty he is, and that makes me happy.

I miss having critters around so much. I would love to have a place of my own and a couple of cats wandering around being adorably feline. I am pretty sure I could resist the urge to be a “crazy cat person” and end up with a ton of cats. For one thing, their happiness would be paramount to me, and cramped kitties are not happy kitties.

Plus, I think I could refuse people who come around and say “We heard you like cats… these kittens don’t have a home!”. That is how it starts, you know. Someone knows you have a couple of cats, and shows up with kittens in a cardboard box, hoping you will not have the heart to turn them away.

And then, once you say yes once, word somehow gets around that you are a “cat person” and other people show up with their boxes of kittens, and you can’t say no to them all, and the next thing you know, you are buying those enormous bags of dry cat food and taking them back to your cat packed apartment and wading through ankle deep shed fur (and worse) in order to feed them, which feels increasingly less like an act of kindness and more like an act of appeasement lest one night they decide to eat you in your sleep.

So the secret is to never say yes to more cats in the first place. Eventually, word will get around that you are no easy target, and kitten pushers should look elsewhere.

Still, it would be nice to have some kitties to pet and cuddle up with and dote upon. It would be about the right amount of responsibility for me. Cats are fairly low maintenance. Keep the food and water bowls full and clean the kitty litter now and then, and kitties take care of everything else themselves.

And for that, you get a charming and affectionate little purrball who will be your companion for 15 years or more and who will add so much love and laugher and yes, even chaos to your life that it almost seems unfair that you should get so much for so little.

Oh well, some day I will have it together enough to live on my own again, and that will definitely involve a couple of kitties of my own. I have never had my own pets, so I look forward to that day.

I will even get to name them. So many possibilities.

Maybe I will name them after my meds. Here, little Quetiapine!

Eh, maybe not.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

Or what passes for a life around these parts, anyhow.

Saturday, as always, had been quite quiet. Last night, we kept Felicity company while she takes care of house and cat.

We hung out and watched videos and ate MacDonald’s. I had the ten McNugget meal. I do not know why, but there is something in the McNuggets which is very soothing to my digestion. I assume it is something in the spice mix, although other spicy foods do not necessarily have the same effect.

Chipotle, for instance, nearly freaking kills me now.

But I have had surprisingly tummy calming effects from spicy-ish foods before. Things like onions and green pepper have proven quite soothing to my sensitive systems before, even though other people find those kinds of things quite a digestive challenge.

My homebrew sinus cure is to make a toasted cheese sandwich loaded with onions and garlic. Tastes fantastic, clears out my sinuses, and soothes my digestion all at once.

As a matter of fact, I am about due for one of those. My allergies are always at their worst in the spring and in the fall. And it is definitely fall.

For the most part, I love Fall, especially early and middle fall, before it gets seriously cold. I love the cool yet sunny days (always my favorite kind), I love the crisp night air and brilliant skies full of stars and the smell of leaves and chestnuts and the coming of winter. I love how the leaves scoot down the street in the fall breezes, and how it is suddenly time for sweaters and fireplaces and hearty fare.

I like the Spring, too, for it brings a lot of good things as well. But I think I like the Fall just a little bit more. There it always a special, mystical feeling in the night air on a cold, clear autumn night. A feeling like something magical is happening just beneath the surface, in the shadows or in the air. A very Halloween kind of feeling.

And I love Halloween. It is the perfect holiday for people like me who love a good scare and who feel oddly close to the ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. Perhaps it is because some of us dwell so long in the dark and the cold that it begins to feel like home to us, and who therefore come across as kinda spooky to those who know only the light, and who banish all they cannot handle into the unknowing darkness, where the likes of me can find it and make it part of our own shadowy world.

And of course, this is where we get our strange powers and unusual perceptions, and this only increases the aura of dark power we seem to possess. But it is not really so dark and dangerous to us who live on this side of the mirror. To us, it is simply reality as it is, warts and all.

So really, Halloween, to someone like me, is that one night of the year when everyone is as weird as they are, or at least tries to me. Welcome to the show, folks. I will be your host, guide, and entertainer. Just watch what you touch, and remember, while you will all go home tomorrow, some of us live here.

And maybe, just maybe, one or two of you will decide to stay.

Otherwise, nothing much happening in this so called life of mine. Still floating along without a paddle, getting nowhere but closer to death. I am trying to be patient with myself and tell myself that I am still healing, still recovering from 20 years of depression, and that I can’t beat myself up for not doing things which might not be possible for me yet.

But it gets so frustrating. I want to be more than I am so badly, and I can feel the creative energies surging within me, seeking release. I know that I have the potential to be something truly amazing and really make my mark upon the world with my intellect, creativity, perceptions, and wackiness. But always, my fears keep me on a short stiff leash, and I can’t just reach out and grab all the things that seems so very close at hand.

It is tantalizing, frustrating, and depressing. I know that if I could just make peace with it, I would save myself a lot of fruitless heartache and stress and pain. There is no point in becoming angry with what you cannot yet do. In fact, it is probably directly counterproductive.

But emotions do not go away simply because you realize they are futile. So the frustration and anger will remain until I reach a point where I can truly let them go and head out into the world with my eyes, and my heart, wide open.

I can’t say when that will be, or what will happen then. I really want it to be before I hit 40, but the clock is running down on that pretty fast, so the odds seem pretty long. I know that unless I get some sort of something going, something that makes me feel I stand a chance of escaping my sad and pathetic little life, that 40th birthday is going to be pretty damned hard on me.

I may need to make sure I am not alone at all for a while before and after. Self-harm is a distinct possibility. It is not pleasant to think about, but part of dealing with mental illness is learning to see problems coming and plan ahead, instead of just letting life smash you down all the time because you refuse to take personal responsibility for your fate.

Similarly, I should start thinking about what I will be doing and where I will be for Xmas Eve this year. It is a very dangerous time for me, all alone while others are with their families. My family is a whole continent away. Not good.

Maybe this will be the year that I actually find an event to go to, and do that, instead of just staying home and being sad.

Or maybe it won’t.

Either is fine, really.

No big concepts or themes today, just a walk through the garden of my mind to see what’s in bloom.

Had therapy today. My therapist was half an hour late, which pisses me off. He says our next session will be half an hour longer to compensate next time. He is having dental issues, so I will allow it, I suppose.

Somehow, an extra long session does not seem like the right compensation. I don’t know why it seems wrong. It seems perfectly logical. I got half an hour less therapy today, so with an extra long session, things will balance out. I will get the same amount of therapy over time.

I suppose part of it is just doubts as to whether I will have enough to say for the extra half hour, which is a silly way to think of it. Therapy is not standup comedy (though standup comedy can, I have been told, be therapy). I don’t have to worry that I don’t have enough material to fill the time. It is not supposed to be a performance, although sometimes, I feel like I am always on stage.

But I think the real issue is that extra time does not, in and of itself, resolve the emotions I feel when he is late and I lose therapy time. It makes me feel unimportant and neglected and brushed aside. So I guess I better bring those feelings up with him when I see him next.

Oh look… cute animal stuff!

Oh, you say you don’t want to see cute animals now? Well tell HIM that.

Go ahead. Tell this face “no”.

That’s what I thought. Next up, cat versus popcorn.

Major LOL. Kitties are so high strung, or as Hobbes prefers to say, they have “lightninglike reflexes”.

And I can only imagine what the sudden popping of a popcorn kernel is like to a cat’s finely honed, motion based senses. Must be like a flash of lightning heading straight for you!

Also, that is a neato popcorn popper. I wonder if the advantage over the usual air pop machine is that you can use oil in it to get that “popped the hard way in a pot” flavour?

If so, I am so there. Popcorn popped in oil is so good. Horribly unhealthy, but gooood.

And because I always do things in threes (plus this is way too adorable not to share) , here’s one more cute animal clip, starring a baby wolf connecting with her roots.

Awwwwwww! That is so cute it is almost painful. First she is scared and runs to her puppy bed (awww!), then does the curious dog head tilt and ear perk thing a bunch of times (awwwwwwwwww!), then finally, her instincts kick in and we are treated to itty bitty wolf howlies (AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!).

I just want to cuddle her up. I wonder what is going through her fuzzy little head when she hears those strange noises that scare her and yet call to her too.

By the end of the video, she is probably thinking “What the heck did I just do?”.

Turning to news, I won’t talk about the Presidential debate last night because I did not watch it. Apparently Obama got his ass kicked, which is ludicrous, because Romney should be the easiest target ever by now. But Obama lacks killer instinct. He is too stereotypically liberal for his (and our) good.

Not that anything will likely change those poll numbers much. But still. There ain’t no justice.

My only hope is that this is all part of some carefully constructed Obama plan to make Romney overconfident in hopes he will make even more horrible gaffes and start telling the American people what he really thinks of them.

After all, Mittens has been more cautious lately, and we can’t have that.

Also in the news, hooray for our side : professional boxing has its first openly gay boxer.

His name is Orlando Cruz (wow, an openly gay boxer named a homonym for “cruise”…) and he is a featherweight from Puerto Rico. Admittedly, nobody pays much attention to anything but the heavyweights any more (don’t know why, those smaller guys are fast) and it is hard to strut your swag with “featherweight” attached to your name, but still. We are in there.

And now that the door is open, perhaps others higher up in the weight classes will come out.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if Mike Tyson came out as gay? You would be able to actually hear all the straight guy’s sphincters slamming shut in terror.

And speaking of terrible people, check out this new way to be a douchebag : lying about needing a wheelchair at the airport in order to cut through the security lineup.

See, airports err on the side of caution (and avoiding liability) when people show up and say they need a wheelchair to get around. You ask, you get.

And people in wheelchairs, understandably,skip the normal line entirely and go to a specially trained TSA agent who having very few people to take care of in a day) can get them through quite quickly.

So it was only a matter of time before someone put those two facts together along with apparently no shame whatsoever and decided that pretending to be handicapped was a wonderful way to skip the long security line and get on the plane before everyone else.

I understand the motivation. Being a fat man, I really do not like having to stand for a long period of time. The idea of being whisked along in a wheelchair instead appeals greatly to me.

But good lord, don’t these people have any scruples at all? The stewardesses have seen this practice so often on certain routes that they have a nickname for them : they call them “miracle flights”, because so many people need a wheelchair getting onto the plane, but don’t need them getting off!

Lordy lordy, I am HEALED.

That’s it for today, folks. Tomorrow : SCIENCE!

This is when things get really cool.

First panel of the day (I think… memories are beginning to fade. Better get this stuff blogged out ASAP) was a ton of fun called Greetings From Hollyweird. It was that most prized (to entertainment industry wannabe me) of things, a panel where people who work in the industry here in Hollywood North show up at the convention to answer questions from the paltry peons like myself.

Sadly, only three of the seven guests listed showed up, and none of them was a writer. That was what I really wanted, to talk to a Real Live Honest To Goodness Television Writer, and get some tips for getting into the business from them, or at least to hope some of their magical “industry insider” pixie dust rubs off on me.

Instead, it was two artists (one storyboard guy just starting out and one highly experienced illustrator) and an actor who has had small roles in a bunch of sci fi stuff.

Still, it was a good talk. I just enjoyed feeling closer to what I want as my eventual dream job : to be a full time writer for TV. And they had cool insider stories about what it is like to work in Hollywood North and do arts for the biz.

Rather handily, the one who was an actor (sorry, I would love to credit you, but I am terrible with names) is also a theater producer, and exhorted us to pick up a mini-flyer for his latest production at the panel’s end, which was the perfect bridge between my desire to talk to them and my social anxiety. I went up, picked up a flyer, and asked them if they knew anything about the writing end of the game.

They didn’t really know much, but I think they saw how nervous and eager I am, so they told me to write stuff, film it, and put it on the Internet.

Which is pretty much what I plan to do if I can ever get my video camera connected to the computer again.

Next I went to Hospitality, where I met my nemesis : a big jar of miniature peppermint patties.

Whatever resolve I had to not be a bad diabetic exploded into a million shreds because I am an utter slave to anything with mint and chocolate together. They are both awesome apart, but put them together and something marvelous happens in my brain and I cannot get enough.

So I was a bad, bad boy last weekend. I hope my pancreas can forgive me.

After that, it was on to the second best thing I do every year at the con, the Elron and Faned awards. For those who do not know, the Elrons are the oldest science fiction anti-awards in the world, given to only the worst and dimmest in the world. They are administered by R. Graeme Cameron, who delivers them with such marvelous dry wit (and to universally deserving targets) that is an absolute delight to attend the ceremony. It is a ray of elegant hilarity and this year was no different.

And then there were the Faned awards, which R. Graeme Cameron also does. They are awards he bestows upon the best in Canadian fanzine publishing, both to recognize quality and to encourage their continued existence in this increasingly digital era.

And I won one!

Believe me, I was as surprised as you are if not more so. I had absolutely no idea it was coming. He gave me the award for best “LOC hack”, which is fanzine slang for someone who writes LOCs (letters of comment) to one or more fanzines.

And apparently, he liked me LOCs to BCSFAzine so much, he thought I deserved an award. And he had such nice things to say about me that it makes me blush to think of them! He said mine was the kind of letter writing that elevated the whole LOC field.

I swear, I am incandescent in the infrared right now, I am so flushed. I had no idea I was so humble. I suppose I always figured I could handle that sort of thing with flair or at least composure. But it was so unexpected! I was completely flummoxed. And, of course, incredibly pleased.

But at the same time, part of me wanted to disappear into a crack in the floor. Everyone was looking at me all of a sudden! Ah, the perils of being shy by nature. But perhaps it was for the best. If I had been ready for it, I might have hammed it up and given people the wrong impression.

Instead, I blushed like a courtesan and hopefully came across as adorable.

After that major wonder whammy, I went to a panel called You’ll Get My Books When You Pry Them From My Cold, Dead Hands. You can figure out what that was about. We had a good talk about real books versus eBooks, and whether they will stop printing books in our lifetime. The consensus was that print on demand will always be there, and that there’s a lot to be said for eBooks, but those of us who grew up loving books will never let ours go.

That’s certainly true for me. I have no real desire to get an eBook reader. I love books beyond all reason. I find libraries and book stores inherently happy places. I am not just a lover of reading, I am a bibliophile. I cannot imagine life without a book at my bedside and hundreds of more on shelves.

I will get an eBook reader eventually, I am sure. But I will never let my books go. I heart them. As a lonely child, books were my only friends.

And you do not give up on friends just because something cooler comes along.

After that, I went to the Turkey Readings, which are, officially, the most fun I have all year. Briefly, the panelists read terrible sci fi and/or fantasy novels, and people can bid to stop the reading, and then others can bid to start it again.

While this is going on, volunteers from the audience act out the story, taking on the various roles. And being the ham I am, I volunteered a few time, and had a blast, and best of all, made the audience laugh.

And for a comedy nerd like me, that laughter is the best drug in the world.

After that, we went to dinner with some friends at a nearby Red Robin, and then it was back to Richmond to sleep in our own beds once more, and dream of next year.

And that was about it, really.

Tomorrow, I resume having to think about what to write again.

Tuesday Newsday will resume next week.

Saturday, I managed to get to more panels, but not nearly as many as I wanted. Why? That is a little complicated, but in a word : sleepiness.

I made the mistake of taking two Quetiapine when I went to bed at around 2 am, after leaving Kathleen’s excellent room party. It seemed like a smart idea at the time. I figured I would get to sleep and sleep for a long while then wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to attend a zillion panels. I would mostly be asleep during a time when there was no programming, and hence, my waking time would be synced up with the time when there was stuff to do. Perfect.

But no. I forgot that it takes between an hour and an hour and a half for the pills to kick in, and that ideally I should be active in that period for full effectiveness. Instead, I took the pills and went straight to bed without even doing any reading first, and that just does not work for me. The change is too abrupt from active to dormant, and I was in a strange bed and a strange place to boot.

The result was that it took a very long time for me to fall asleep at all, and when I did, it was not very good quality sleep. and overall, it was a pretty lousy night.

And when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed, get showered and get out to the con, I was so sleepy that I could barely remain upright, even after scoring a can of Diet Coke from a vending machine^[1].

So when at 11 am I managed to get to the So You Want To Be A Writer panel, I was a wreck. I had to rest my head against the (empty) chair in front of me just to keep from passing out. At the time I was paranoid that the panelist would think that I was being a total dick by pretending to be extremely bored, but that was just the sleepiness talking. They are experienced panelists, and have probably had some attendees in their audiences who were worse off than I was considering that I don’t even drink. They probably assumed I was hung over, if they noticed me at all. They certainly would not take it personally.

So, phew there.

It was a fun panel, or at least what little I remember of it was fun. Frankly, I was not exactly in the most retentive of frames of mind.

And so, despite my plans, I had to go back to our hotel room and get more sleep. This still pisses me off when I think about it. I will get over it eventually, I imagine. But for now, I am sort of angry at the universe for making me miss a big chunk of the day’s activities.

So I slept for two and a half hours, then went to Hospitality for more food, and then went to a hella fun panel called Justify The Science Flaw. The basic idea was that the panel brought up a lot of bad science from bad (and good) science fiction stories, and with the help of we the audience, tried to come up with some kind of way to explain them away. ^[2]

It turned out to be even more fun than that sounds, because we were all keenly aware of the absurdity of the exercise and especially of our explanations, so we were pretty much laughing the whole way through.

Sadly, I was not yet fully awake, so I do not remember most of the specifics. I remember us talking about an obscure moment from an obscure show, namely 20,00 Leagues Under The Sea : The Series.

The gist of it was that at one point, the Nautilus was under the Arctic ice when huge pieces of said ice began to fall down on it.

Um, ice floats, folks. Look in your cocktail glass. Life on Earth could not exist if solid water, namely ice, was not less dense than liquid water.

I forget our solution, but it involved a massive magnetic field magnetizing the ice, so it was not exactly plausible. Funny, though.

Then, sadly, I needed more naptime, so the next panel was at 6 pm, and it was another red hot science injection, in this case, it was The Discovery Of The Accelerating Universe.

Regular readers will know that astrophysics is one of my favorite drugs, and learning how they figured out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating involved a lot of it. So while I would rather have talked about the implications of the discovery rather than its history, it was still a crash course in astrophysics and I was once more left with a pleasantly glowing brain.

After that, a bunch of us nerds went to a sushi place called Tengeku, and I discovered that years of only eating Japanese food at all you can eat places had completely wrecked my ability to decide what I want from a standard menu.

Eventually I just got two orders of Kappa maki and a teriyaki donburi. The donburi was particularly good. A lot of places think that all you need to do to make a donburi is put the main ingredient on rice, but a proper donburi has layers of veggies and such as well. And the Tengeku people know this.

All that for around $15, too. Not bad!

After that, we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Had a blast at V-con 37 over the last weekend.

Joe and I got to the hotel (the Vancouver Guildford Sheraton). We got checked in ^[1] and went through registration. My badge was a very plain and functional one because I am apparently the scum of the Earth for not pre-registering. The pre-registered people got a very pretty badge. Same font tho, which is something, I guess.

Then I took a little while to rest in our room and acclimate before heading into the convention itself. Our room was fine, but not as fancy as some we have had in previous years. I particularly missed the full kitchen that our room had last year. That was marvelous. We brought a bunch of food from home, and were able to make our own toast and such. Made it feel a lot more like home. The room we had this year did not even have a microwave, and even more shocking, didn’t even have a minibar.

I have not seen a room without a minibar in at least a decade. Why would a hotel give up that opportunity to soak people who are too lazy to leave their room and are willing to pay $14 for a Tobelerone.

In fact, when you think of it, the minibar is just an extension of the same sort of thinking that lets hotel restaurants charge about $4 per item more than anywhere else. Sure, you could pay less… but then you would have to leave the comfy confines of the hotel. You would have to get your outside clothes on, and venture out into an unfamiliar place, and who knows what kind of food you will end up getting?

So you pay the extra money. And presumably, the minibar was invented by some genius who thought “Wait, if they will pay that much not to leave the hotel, imagine what crazy prices they will pay to not have to leave their hotel room!”.

Seems he was right! I mean, I have never taken anything out of a minibar because I am constitutionally incapable of paying that kind of markup. But a lot of people, especially those on expense accounts so it is not their money, probably clean that sucker out.

And speaking of hotel restaurants, Joe and I and a few other people had a meal there on Friday night. At first, we thought the place was way too expensive for us and that my theory that these place usually have a few reasonably priced low end items for the likes of us would prove not to be true.

But then the waitress, with admirable diplomacy, asked us if we would prefer something “lighter” and gave us the “bar menu”, where things that were merely ludicrously priced could be found.

I pulled a full gauche and got the burger and fries. And the burger, I must admit, was damned good. The fries were good too, but not exceptionally so. But the burger was almost as good as Boston Pizza’s very excellent prime rib burgers. So, pretty high marks.

After dinner, I took another little siesta in our hotel room, then I headed over 8 doors down to a room party that the inestimable Kathleen Moore was hosting, and I was having fun so ended up staying there for the rest of the evening. That’s the main reason I could never be much of a social butteryfly : when I am happy, I stay put. I only explore when I grow bored or unhappy. At parties, I usually just find a comfortable spot and stay there.

Not exactly power schmoozing.

I only ended up going to one panel on Friday, but it was an awesome one. It was entitled Thorium Reactors On Mars, and while it had very little to do with Mars, I didn’t care. I want Thorium reactors right here on Earth, right now!

And the talk was completely kickass. The presenter was funny and very knowledgeable about the subject, and basically gave us a light speed crash course on all the science and technology of nuclear reactors from the very first ones to the awesomeness of the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors ^[2] that are the blazing new hotness in the science of energy production today.

I really enjoyed the talk, although afterward I kind of felt like my brain was glowing red hot from all the knowledge. I am sure I did not truly absorb most of it. But it was a hell of a ride anyhow.

And I am totally stoked about the possibilities inherent in Thorium reactors. The efficiency alone would be spectacular. It would be a self-regulating reaction, Thorium is almost as abundant in the Earth’s crust as lead, it has only one isotope so there is no isotope separation process needed like there is with traditional nuclear reactors, the process does not make the kind of fuel needed for nuclear bombs, and the energy yield is enormous.

And those are just the benefits I can list off the top of my head. Hmmm, I guess I do retain some of it. Maybe not all the nuclear physics, but at least I recall the pitch reel.

Still, I wish I had the talk recorded to video. I would love to learn it all! But what I am most interested in now that I am totally sold on the idea is just exactly how much it would take to build one of these LFTR reactors, or better yet, to set up a factory that can produce them en masse.

This revolution can’t happen fast enough for me!