Well, here’s my latest thang.

It isn’t the project I originally set out to do today, but that one fell victim to a very stupid flaw in the software I was using at the time, and so I have put it on the shelf for now.

Instead, I decided it would be fun to have a fake telephone conversation with sound clips from movies. I think it turned out rather well, honestly. I am not sure if it is funny to anyone but me, but hey, every artist has to please themselves first.

Plus it was fun to make believe that I have all these famous friends who call me up for advice, one of whom is entirely fictional. It would be kind of neat to be the non-famous friend of a bunch of famous people.

Someone who is not a star, and hence does not compete with or threaten them, as well as being someone who can keep a secret and be trusted to never betray their confidence and sell sleazy pics of them to the tabloids or whatever. Someone who can be their buddy, their friend, and their confidant.

Someone who is genuinely concerned for their welfare with no ulterior motives. I bet they could use someone like that.

Plus it was fun to make. So I might do it again, with a few technical refinements. I have some things I wanted to do but just did not have the energy for it. I wasted a bunch of energy trying to get the first thing to work, and that used up a lot of energy I could have used on the second thing.

Maybe, once I have let it lie fallow for a little while, I will go back into tonight’s video and fix up the things that I think need fixing, like balancing audio levels and slowing down the credits.

Still, it was hella fun to make. There might well be sequels. You never know with me.

After all, I did four editions of Don’t Say That.

Had a fairly pleasant day. One of those days where things go a lot better than you thought they would.

Had therapy in the morning, and on the way there, found out that Joe’s hours will change come next week and he will be working 7:30 am to 3 pm, and this is going to make him driving me to and from therapy rather tricky to say the least.

So my therapist and I spent a long time just trying to figure out the scheduling. The news of the change in hours for Joe surprised me, although it should not have, as this happens every summer.

But that sort of long term remembering things is a tad beyond me. I mean, I am an absentminded guy. I have enough trouble just remembering things that are happening this week, let alone next year.

Anyhow, we have things sorted for now. I will be making my own way to and from therapy next week, which will be an adventure, and then after that things get… complicated.

One good thing though : Joe will be on vacation for the first two weeks of August, so there should be no problem with drives then. We can even have the appointments in the afternoon if we like.

Other than that bit of administrivia, though, the morning went quite smoothly. I has to go to the welfare office to pick up my check, and I was anticipating long lines and enormous hassle and them telling me that now that I had given them the information they needed, only THEN would they MAIL me my check.

This has happened before.

But amazingly, especially for the day after Check Day, there was no line whatsoever at the office and the nice lady behind the counter just got my Social Insurance Number and handed me the check.

I felt so good about it that I filled out next month’s stub right then and there, and put it through the slot. So I am totally set for the next month. Keen gear!

And to top it all off, there was no line at Money Mart when I went to cash my check, either. All in all, it went super smooth, and I am extremely grateful for that.

That reminds me… I still have around thirty bucks sitting on my Amazon.ca account, waiting for me to figure out what I want to use it on.

I better use it before Amazon finds a way to take it away with service charges. Well, I suppose I could always just get more books. Books are always good.

I already got two Vonnegut books, Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle, via a different gift certificate from a different bookstore. Technically, I have read them before, but that was in junior high, so they will be almost new to me by now.

Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. There is such warmth and humanity to his books, despite his tendency to have truly awful things happen to people, that reading a Vonnegut book feels like spending time with an old friend to me.

Recently, I was pondering the difference between the authors you like and the authors you love. For instance, I like Asimov. I love his books. I envy his extraordinary deftness of prose and the way he treats ideas really expanded my mind as a child.

But I don’t love Asimov. I love Vonnegut, and Bradbury, and to a lesser extent Terry Pratchett. (Sorry, Terry.) I guess the difference is that Vonnegut and Bradbury both have great emotional depth to their stories and a real sense of humanity and understanding, and that is what makes the emotional connection I feel towards them so strong.

A lot of authors have entertained me, moved me, enlightened me, even stretched my mind into new and interesting shapes with their words.

But only a few writers have truly connected with me on a spiritual level.

And lo and behold, the books where they did are my favorite books of all time.

I hope to be that sort of author some day.