Not really in the mood to concentrate on one thing tonight, so I will just share bits n’ pieces.

Just had a skit idea : The Relationship Killer, a masked vigilante who shows up out of nowhere to euthanize relationships which have lingered on too long and for which there is no hope for survival.

He could also be called the Angel of Relationship Death.

He would dress like our classic image of Death, but with entirely incongruous hearts here and there, and tiny little black cherub wings. He would show up and people would be like… “No! This relationship still has a chance! It’s too young to die!”

And he would reply (in a deep sonorous voice but with NO SWEDISH ACCENT) with questions to prove to them that the relationship is dead, like “Do you think of each other as good people?” and “If you had to do it all over again… ”

At the end, they would accept his judgement, and he would ceremonially (but also in reality) cut the bond between the people, leaving them neutral strangers to one another and free to get on with their lives.

Damn I am clever.

Speaking of my awesomeness, I am really happy with that political polemic I wrote yesterday. I have never written words of fire with that intensity before.

In fact, part of me (the reserved Canadian part) is a little embarrassed by it, but most of me thinks it is pretty awesome. It’s not perfect, of course, but I came up with a lot of powerful language to get my point across, and if I ever want to be one of those people whose words shape the destiny of humanity (and I do), I will not get there with carefully balanced language that takes everyone’s feelings into account.

It will be by expressing my deeply held beliefs in words that match the power and depth of my convictions. That is a rare thing these days and I think it is something which is badly needed. It is a sign of the political times that a mid-level orator like Barack Obama can seem like a great speaker simply because he expresses ideas well.

But the real people who changed things, like my heroes Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, did so with words that were never focus-grouped for maximum impact or meant to appeal to the widest possible group of people.

They were words of blood and fire that inspired people to change based on both their emotional and their logical appeal. They are words that filled people with a belief in change that saw them through the hard times that come from trying to shake up the pyramids our oppressors squat atop.

It is impassioned articulacy that changes things. Words that stir them from their complacency and place before them a vision of a better world that they can believe in.

And it inspires the people to keep demanding change until they get it, no matter how long it takes.

(WARNING : The following passage contains content relating to the solitary sex life of a big fat hairy gay dude in his forties. Reader discretion is advised. Feel free to ignore this section, or fap to it, or whatever. )

So I finally bought a sex toy.

Nothing too exotic, just a big purple dildo with a handle that is sort of like anal beads. I haven’t tried it yet, in fact it is still in its packaging, but I am just happy I finally goddamned well did it.

I have come close to doing it many times, but was always defeated by a combination of cowardice, laziness, and most of all, crushing option paralysis because there are just so many possibilities.

Seriously. The sex toy industry is enormous. There are just so many toys to choose from! So this time, I just went to the anal sex section of the Amazon.ca sex toy department (bet you didn’t know they had one) and picked the first thing that seemed appealing and inexpensive.

I figure, if it doesn’t work out, I am only out $10, and it will make a fabulous conversation piece to whip out at dull parties. “You said I could bring my boyfriend, well here he is. I call him the Purple Peter Eater. ”

I did buy one sex toy previous to this one, but let’s just say it was not the right fit. This new toy is much better suited to the job and I have to admit I am really enjoying just looking at it and thinking of the possibilities. \

Didn’t order lube tho, duh. Oh well. I will be gentle with myself.

Speaking of both my sexual proclivities and ordering errors, another thing that arrived in the same package was a six foot USB extension cord that I have needed for like forever.

But get this : it turns out that what I ordered was male/female, when what I really needed was male/male!

The innuendo writes itself, doesn’t it? In the same box as my new purple friend was something that should have been male/male. That’s the sort of thing where a comedy writer like me just stands back and lets it stand on its own.

It take a master to realize when something is perfect on its own and any attempt to add to it would be pointless.

Oh emm gee, I just realized : what I need is a male to female converter.

Or female to male, but the other one sounds better.

Oh right… and the last thing in that box was this neato keen new toy.

Get this : it turns hard candy into cotton candy! And it works with sugar free hard candy (which is most of it these days) and therefore will make sugar free cotton candy that I can eat guilt free.

Not only that, because it works with any sort of hard candy, I can make cotton candy in any flavour that hard candy comes in, and that covers a wicked huge amount of ground.

Talk about the perfect toy for a diabetic fat boy! I will be making new flavours of cotton candy for months!

I just wish I had remember to buy myself some sugarless Werther’s Originals or the like when I was at Safeway earlier. Oh well, perhaps they included some with the machine.

I am off to play with my new toy.

Which one? I will leave that to your imagination.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Just watched the first episode of a kickass new Spider-Man series, Ultimate Spider-Man.

So far, I am loving it. The whole attitude of the show is very Spider-Man. There’s a lot of fourth-wall breaking, short soliloquies, flashbacks, and other devices reminiscent of movies like Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, all done in a breezy, high density style that might annoy some people and would be totally inappopriate for a more serious kind of hero.

Like, say, Spawn. It would be totally wrong for Spawn. But it fits my main man Spider-Man perfectly.

Besides, Spawn already had a series, and it was pretty good.

Anyhow, like I have said before, Spider-Man is my number one dude. No other super-hero comes even vaguely close. There was a time when I was a hormonally twisted teenage male where I would not have wanted to choose between him and Wolverine, but there was never really any doubt who I would rather hang out with or with whom I identified more.

It’s Webhead all the way.

And I am quite impressed with the show. As a tribute to its extraordinary powers of density, the episode was only 24 minutes long and yet I kept being amazed that it wasn’t over yet. They packed the content in so tight and yet so effortlessly that it made me feel like I had watched a whole hour’s worth of show in less than half an hour.

In a good way. A very good way.

They have made some modifications to the usual mythos. Nothing egregious, just little things like JJJ is now the CEO of the Daily Bugle Media Group instead of just the publisher of the Daily Bugle. This was totally necessary. Who gives a shit about newspapers any more? So it’s just a logical update.

Another update is that they took like 20 years off Aunt May, and now instead of being a sweet little old lady of a kind that sort of doesn’t exist any more, she is more like a modern super-mom in her Fabulous Fifties who works hard all day then goes out to yoga and bowling and whatever at night.

I always did wonder how Aunt May supported herself and Peter. I assumed it was money Uncle Ben left her from his converted rice empire after he died.

The one modification I am have trouble making is that Spidey is going to join SHEILD and lead a band of fellow super-teens. I am so totally not down with that. Spidey is just plain not a joiner. It is one of the things he and I have in common. Neither of us are keen on giving up our autonomy in order to be part of a group. We’d rather keep things simple and do our own thing, without putting ourselves in a situation where we have to do what we are told by some authority figure we have to trust.

And yeah, I know that’s not a pro-social or mature attitude. You can give me all the reason why people are better off working together and I will agree with every one of them. It is human nature to work together towards common goals and most of human progress has come from doing exactly that.

It’s just not for me. I am, in that sense, a loner. I don’t want to subsume my identity into a larger group identity. I am too temperamentally fond of my own autonomy to do that. I want to help, sure, and I can join in on a group effort in a short term sense and pitch in and not feel trapped.

But I don’t like group work and I don’t like hierarchies and I don’t like situations with a lot of rules. I’m a free spirit, like a lot of us creative types, and I travel the open road.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

So I have trouble with the idea of my main man Spidey joining SHIELD, let alone ending up leader of some group of surly teenagers. Granted, the show is not stupid, so he is doing it because he wants to be a better superhero and SHIELD can give him the tech and training to do that.

But I can’t see him accepting responsibility for a bunch of fellow super-teens. That is just so non-Spidey. I am willing to be convinced, of course. If the whole thing becomes more like a group of friends (amazing friends?) than some hardnosed SHIELD militaristic bullshit, then maybe I can accept it.

Otherwise…. my Spidey sense tingles just thinking about it.

I also watched a comedy special called Small Dork And Handsome starring comedian Myq Kaplan today.

Fun fact : his first name is pronounced “Mike”. Normally, I hate it when people have names that sound normal but are spelled weird, because honestly you are just making things more difficult for your kid when you do that and nobody is impressed by your half-assed attempt at individuality.

But in this case, I love it. It’s like it goes all the way through annoying, past ironic, and into something akin to adorable.

Anyhoo, the special was pretty good. A lot of his material is pretty good, but I don’t care for his delivery style, which is a sort of neurotic anti-timing that tends to make me miss the point of a joke until it’s already gone past, and then I have to go back and dog for it, and comedy should not be that much work.

But that’s just me, possibly being very old-fashioned. He is cute and charming and funny, so the little details don’t matter so much except to comedy nerds like me.

My favorite joke came not from him (supposedly) but some racist lady he met after a show on Sunset, in LA.

How do you find Will Smith in the snow?

(Don’t worry, it’s not a racist joke.)

You just look for the fresh prints!

See, now that is an adorable joke. It’s like something a very hip nine year old would write.

That’s it from me for the day. Talk to you tomorrow, you wonderful people, you!

Holy crap has my dream life been intense today.

I had one dream where I was moving out of the place I lived. I was glad we were moving because the room I had in this rather enormous house was literally a closet, and very cramped, and I was really tired of it.

In an interesting twist on one of the usual schema for my dream life, instead of looking for something, as we packed up to move I kept thinking of things we had forgotten to pack.

There was no danger in leaving things behind, I think. Actually my dream couldn’t seem to make up its mind on that. In some places, I was sure we had the whole day to come back and grab anything we missed, and in other parts I was positive that once we left, that was it, we would never see the place again, and so we better get everything.

Oh, and when I say “we”, I mean me and the other identity-free ambient people who were around me. I have a lot of those in my dreams. They are not even real people. They are more of a sense of their being people around in whatever roles my dream requires, like in this case, the people I shared the big house with.

At one point, it was my computer that I was worried about leaving behind. My computer is often in peril in my dreams, which strikes me as a little sad, though apropos for someone who lives like I do. Often these computers are nothing like my real computer and more like a hodgepodge of anachronistic bits and pieces, like a modern keyboard plugged into an old T100 terminal which then, for some reason, plugs into a TV to play old TRS-80 games.

My dream machine is quite the tinkerer, it seems.

Anyhow, I was worried that we would leave my computer behind, so I went to my room (imagine a walk-in closet, that’s what it was like” and started picking up the components. I was like, “Okay, I need my monitor… and the CPU tower… and oh, I have to grab the keyboard and mouse… “.

None of these are what you would call normal. The tower was a squat ugly matte black thing with a strange red light in the upper right corner of the face. The monitor was like something from the “the monitor and computer all in the same box” age of computer. The keyboard was black and had a strange translucent black plastic dust cover over the keys. And the mouse had a similar design, and was shaped kind of like a rat. (Mouse? Rat? Was my brain going for a stupid pun?)

Eventually I got my stuff together, and then the dream shifted to me actually taking advantage of all the chaos and material confusion to go around stealing things from the residents of the other rooms. I mostly stole candy, leading to one of those times when I think I have totally doomed myself by eating a lot of bad stuff and I am relieved to wake up and find it was just a dream and I am not gonna die of hypoglycemic shock.

It freaks me out a little how comfortable I was with theft in the dream. In the dream, it just seemed like fun and I felt entirely morally justified in doing it because of how little I got from life.

Heck, it felt downright magical, like… let’s see what I can find for myself in people’s rooms. What have they left for me? It’s strange to have memories of behaving unlike yourself, even if it was a dream.

That was one dream. After that, things started getting weird.

I was in an amphitheater of some sort, listening to some kind of speech, when I somehow became infected with an alien parasite that turned the fat in my lower right abdomen into a malevolent demonic yellow face.

I shittest thou not.

And I wasn’t particularly upset by it. It was more like, oh dear, this is a spot of trouble. Eventually, there were two such heads, plus another in red over my heart, and it was beginning to really attract attention. I began to feel very embarrassed about the whole thing, and was just starting to worry that the demons would get to something vital soon (besides my heart??) when two aliens, one who was more or less a Predator and another that was like the classic Grey if they were human sized and wearing a Men In Black type shirt (irony?), showed up and began fumigating the area.

I thought “Oh good, someone is on the case. I’m sure this will be cleared up in a minute. ” Apparently in the universe of that dream, this sort of thing happens all the time.

Sure enough, they got to me, there was a brief confusing period of fragmented memories of being taken to the kitchen of the cafeteria of the building and Having Things Done To Me, things I was glad not to remember, and then I was all better without even a scar on my abdomen.

The dream ended with me announcing to more Ambient People that I thought I had even lost weight from the whole idea. But I was quick to assure people that as a weight loss program, I would not recommend it.

That’s the dream that just amazes me now that I am awake. I don’t often have dreams like that, with something so utterly fantastical. My dreams tend to be more mundane than that. Even if the occasional bit is a little off, like the dream I had where getting to the other side of the mall required cutting through the steam tunnels underneath, for the most part the dreams are quite ordinary.

But very occasionally, I have the kind of messed up weird surreal dreams that I have always wanted to have and that other people seem to have.

I treasure those times. It’s so much more fun!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

Still having afternoons where I feel crappy and angry and frustrated and “I hate my life”. Everything I do seems stupid and pointless and I can’t remember why I do anything at all when it is all so worthless.

This blog is the only worthwhile thing I do, and that only keeps me busy for an hour or so a night. And yet that dreadful inner paralysis is keeping me from starting anything newer and more challenging.

I am increasingly convinced that I could put together a pretty hilarious skit comedy podcast. It would be the perfect way to do the skit com that I have always wanted to do without a whole lot of technical complications like sets and actors and lighting and stuff. All I need to be able to do is capture decent audio.

It doesn’t have to be super high resolution, as it will be mostly voice and voice is surprisingly undemanding on some levels. But it has to be clean, clear, and comprehensible, otherwise it will sound like ass and people will not want to hear it at all. let alone long enough to appreciate my brilliant writing.

But it still requires that leap from idea to action and my paralysis makes that a lot harder. Deep down, I am still a scared little animal who wants to hide all the time and doesn’t want to do anything that means it has to leave its burrow.

Even something as simple as just trying something new, alone, with nobody here to judge me if I fail and with no obligation to ever share the results with anyone, seems like it is fraught with unimaginable danger.

After all, it might not go well, and I might end up all confused and unable to keep the thread of what I am doing in mind and feel lost and panicky, and if it goes badly my inner demons will punish me hard enough without the need for anyone else.

I have realized recently that I am constantly feeling humiliated and ashamed of not just things I do wrong, but things I think I should be able to do better, and I am heavily weighed down by the constant feeling that whatever I am doing, I am doing it wrong, and it’s not good enough, and any second someone will come along and take it away from me and make me feel like a horrible person for even thinking that I might actually be able to do something.

It is that feeling that pushes my anxiety and feeling of exposure. Even when I am all alone, I feel like I am a stumbling idiot who does everything wrong and who should not bother even trying.

Whatever I do, it’s never enough.

That song pretty much summarizes how I feel

And it’s all internal. My therapist keeps slipping into thinking that “someone in my past must have said these things to you”, and he’s note entirely wrong. My sister Catherine told me I was useless when I was just a little clumsy kid with undiagnosed bad eyesight and a sincere desire to help but a tendency to not do so well at it, at least at first.

I am pretty sure that cut me quite deep. But what can you do? We were all children at the time.

But other things, like feeling like nobody wants me around or that I am a disgusting horrible thing, that is entirely internal. Nobody ever told me those things. They are just conclusions I reached on my own based on how I was treated.

Clearly, this does not quite fit my therapist’s internal script. He is used to patients who have been outright abused or grossly neglected or both, and the resulting journey being one where you get the patient to confront the people who told them those things (on some level) and tell them they were wrong.

The sort of neglect I experienced does not fit that script, exactly. He is right in saying that I should confront my family about how they treated me, but it’s not quite as simple as taking words they said and refuting them.

Last session, we also discussed that letter to my father that has been lurking in potentiality for a long time. I feel like I am closer to writing it than ever before. I no longer feel like I would explode with frothing rage if I even tried to open that particular can of worms. As I get better at integrating my anger/lust/passion/etc into the rest of my psyche, dealing with pools of latent rage from the past seems less dangerous. I no longer fear annihilation from it all.

But it will still be an emotionally wrenching thing to do, and not at all fun, so I keep putting it off. It would definitely do me a lot of good, but I still can’t imagine actually doing it yet.

It will probably have to wait for one of those times when I feel just awful. Those are often the times when I start new things or get things done, because whatever pain or discomfort will come from doing it seems tiny compared to how bad I already feel.

It is a perverse way of living, but it’s what I got.

Of course, I have no idea when any of this shit will actually happen. My frustration is clearly building towards some kind of crisis, some sort of emotional cloudburst to clear the air and calm me down, and hopefully that will provide either the energy or the clarity for me to make serious changes.

Until them, I am stuck in this stupid pointless life of mine where all I do is bide my time before the Reaper comes to take my fat unhealthy sedentary carcass off the scoreboard.

I want so much more for myself, and I know I am capable of wonderful things.

But they all require crossing that vast chasm between myself and real action.

And I just can’t seem to do that yet.

See you tomorrow, folks.

Just got finished watching a documentary called Dear Mister Watterson, about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes and the impact it has had on people’s lives and on the medium of cartooning, so it’s time for me to talk about it.

First off, don’t get too excited, like I did. Watterson does not appear in the film. I admit, I leaped to that conclusion based entirely on the fact that it was 100 minutes long and surely he had to appear in there somewhere, right?

But no, of course not. He is intensely reclusive and doesn’t talk to anybody. As a writer and an artist myself, I respect that decision, although as a fan and a human being, I find it intensely frustrating because we all want to worship our heroes in person or at least gaze upon them from afar.

Because he’s such a recluse, this is a rare sort of documentary : one about a person who does not appear in it. Berkely Breathed of Bloom County fame said that Watterson was the Sasquatch of cartooning. You might see a footprint here and there or other signs that he’s been through, but only two or three people have ever actually seen him.

An exaggeration, of course. I know from the documentary that he gave a speech at a cartoonists’ association dinner once, and presumably he did not do it Wizard of Oz style, so they got to see him at least.

But it gets the idea across.

Like I said, I respect his decision to not engage his public directly and to speak entirely through his work. I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t do the same if I am in his position some day. Part of me would always want to be friendly and engaged and to make beautiful moments for my fans in the way that only the famous and beloved can do.

But I am also extremely reclusive, and I don’t know which side would win. I sure as hell would not want total strangers knocking on my door wanting a piece of me. Fuck THAT noise. That would be completely unacceptable. I am not a spontaneously friendly person who is always ready to drop whatever he is doing to be with people.

I am, instead, a person who needs considerable recharge time after being “on”, and people would have to respect my boundaries as I have clearly and publicly defined them or I would become increasingly hard to deal with.

That is why I have always wondered if I would get a reputation as a curmudgeon or even as some sort of fan-eating ogre if I was ever lucky enough to be a famous writer. If the wrong things happened, people would see my dark side, and it can be pretty damned dark, especially to people who are used to my sunny side.

In my life as it is now, I have all the alone time I need, and interruptions are almost never a surprise, and so everybody sees my sunny side most of the time. And that is exactly how I like it. I don’t want to have to get all loud and pushy and sarcastic with people in order to maintain my boundaries, but at this point in my life, it seems highly possible that what others would find to be perfectly normal socialization would make me go all stormy.

I’m working on that.

Then again, I am feeling grumpy lately. I am still working on integrating the fiery side of my personality, with all the anger and passion and motivation, into the rest of my otherwise soggy muddy self, and that means getting in touch with my anger, and damned that makes things more complicated.

About Calvin and Hobbes itself : some of the people in the documentary had started reading it when they were Calvin’s age, and I am totally jealous of them. I did not discover C&H until my later teens, way after I was in Calvin’s age range, and so I could never have the same sort of relationship with it as someone who grew up with it.

Heck, the strip started in 1985, when I was already 12. Hard to imagine it being a product of the 80’s and 90’s, isn’t it? It just seems too innocent for such a jaded time.

But even if I had been the right age at the right time, I never really identified with Calvin very much. I was a quiet, serious, well-behaved kid for the most part, and I never lived in a world of my own imagination where I was Spaceman Spiff, or really played any sort of make-believe games like that.

I just read books and watched television and played video games.

I do wonder sometimes if I was an unnaturally boring kid. But I know that I was just too timid (and too practical and sensible, to my detriment) for that sort of thing.

I did wander around exploring my neighborhood sometimes, so I was not entirely dull. And once I had a bike, I would take trips to other parts of town, usually in search of video games other than the ones at my local arcade, but sometimes just to see what was there.

But as the years went on and the bullying came into the picture, I become increasingly agoraphobic, and the time I spent outside of the house got less and less.

The only way in which I ever identified with Calvin was those rare moments where he was just a little too smart for his own good or otherwise showed signs of having problems related to being a smart kid in a world not made for smart kids.

That is totally me. I always got good grades, because why not, it’s not hard, but I often knew more than I was supposed to for my age and gave people very mixed messages with my child’s body and adult’s mind.

Still a kid at heart, though, and that was hard for others to see.

Anyhow, talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Tonight’s entry titles brought to you by Cat Stevens.

Yeah yeah, I know he’s Yosef Islam now. Well fuck that. He’s Cat Stevens to me.

Orders an extra large pizza from Fresh Slice tonight. Boy, they are not kidding when they say extra large, the thing is huuuuge. So big that two slices filled me up just fine. The box with the rest of it in it is currently taking up 80 percent of the bottom shelf of our fridge.

So I got like, three more meals of quality pizza to go. It’s great to be able to get the kind of high quality pizza that I knew and loved in Portland, Oregon. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive than Domino’s or Little Caesar’s, but it’s worth it.

And it’s not like, crazy expensive. It cost me 25 dollars (30 with tip) for the bigass pizza and some cinnamon strips. Divide that by four, and it’s $7.50 a meal. Not too bad. When I get Chinese food, I pay roughly the same amount for two meals’ worth of food. And I never feel ripped off there.

It’s good to indulge yourself now and then. We need joy and hope and pleasure in our lives.

And in my case, physical pleasure also helps ground me in reality and help me to cope with that feeling of detachment and unreality that plagues me and makes me feel existentially insecure.

One small disappointment : they have pesto, but they treat it as a topping instead of what it is supposed to be, an alternative to the usual tomato or white sauce. So I can’t get a pesto pizza like I got in Portland. There has to be another sauce, white or red, underneath.

I can see why they do that, because as I learned the hard way in Portland, when you use pesto (which is just olive oil and Italian spices) as your base sauce, the toppings tend to slide around and will slide right off the pizza unless your driver drives very very carefully.

But still. Wah.

Saw an amazingly forgettable movie called Outlander recently. No, not the TV series coming out this year about a 1945 war nurse who ends up in 1743. Nor is it the anime series with the hunky male bear-type alien. (That is seriously all I remember about seeing the first episode. I know there was some sort of space princess come to Earth to abuse some hapless Earth dude, but mostly, it’s Outlanders = Sexy Bearish Alien. )

No, this is a 2008 movie starring Jim “Jesus” Caviezel as a generic American action hero type, in this case a space marine who crashlands his space ship in 907 AD (??) in Norway, accidentally bringing a monster called a Moorwen with him.

Note : He appears to be entirely human. Nothing alien about him. And yet, it’s 907 AD. So apparently, somewhere in space humans have interstellar travel while also being at a Viking tech level.

And yup, that makes absolutely no fucking sense. Goddamned time travel. The movie really should have called “Vikings Versus Aliens” because that is clearly what the elevator pitch was.

In fact, the movie telegraphed just how little it cared about being science fiction by having our space marine hero lose his cool space gun within minutes of crawling out of the crash, thus making sure there is absolutely no science fiction in the rest of the movie, give or take an admittedly well done CGI flashback sequence about how our hero’s people wiped out the Moorwen in order to steal their planet.

Science fictional content issues aside, the main overwhelming sin of the movie is its total lack of originality. Everything you see in it, you have seen in other movies. In fact, it reaches almost Avatar levels of derivitiveness.

The main character has practically no personality, either. Honestly, if it hadn’t been, in passing, a Viking period piece, I doubt it would have kept my attention long enough for me to finish it.

And speaking of things I don’t finish, let me tell you about A Fantastic Fear Of Everything.

Right off the bat, the movie disappointed me, because the description said it was about a man who, due to research into 19th century serial killers, has become completely paranoid and convinced that there are murderers and assassins lurking everywhere, just waiting for him to drop his guard so he can kill them.

Sounds interesting, right? Wrong. Because it turns out that the whole serial killer research is disposed of in the first ten minutes and the rest of the movie is just Simon Pegg being really scared in his brownstone and the “hilarious” hijinks that ensure from there.

That is literally it. The thing that made me give up on the movie entirely was the moment when he accidentally crazy-glues a butcher knife to his hand minutes before he has to go to a Very Important Meeting He Simply Cannot Miss.

At that point, I could see where the movie was going and I did not want to go there with it. It would just be more painful unfunny inane sitcom slapstick, and if I didn’t like it when Pegg was alone, I sure as hell wasn’t going to like it when it started involving other people.

Fuck THAT noise.

I should also add, though, in the interests of full disclosure, that my giving up on the damned thing half an hour in was also influenced by the fact that watching Simon Pegg being all crazy and freaked out all the time was triggering my own anxiety issues, and that is seriously the last fucking thing I need right now.

I have been in mental states similar to his character’s, although not quite as severe and without the murder based ideation, and I really don’t want to go there for an entirely worthless and unrewarding kind of comedy.

So two thumbs way down for me. Outlander sucked but at least it didn’t trigger my issues, except possibly my issues with unimaginative film scripts.

Well that’s what’s up with me today, folks.

How about you?

Talk to you tomorrow!

Listen up, America, because I am going to explain something to you that you are far too self-absorbed to see yourselves.

For all my forty one years, I have heard Americans wonder to themselves (and anyone else who will listen or who doesn’t move away fast enough) why such freedom-loving people end up with sneaky, nasty, secretive, and just plain anti-freedom governments.

The answer is simple. Their governments are like that because they are run by Americans.

Feel free to take a break, pop a brewski, let this idea settle for a bit.

We good? Cool.

To explain what I mean by that weird and very unpatriotic sounding statement, let us start with a basic American citizen. We will call him Bob, both because it’s a common enough name and because I love palindromes.

For five years now, Bob has been a low level paper pusher for the American Federal Government. (Fun fact : Did you know that every country has a federal government? Most Americans don’t. )

Bob has pushed paper reasonably well. Like any freedom-loving American, he doesn’t like to be told what to do and doesn’t like having to follow a lot of rules. So he makes fun of his bosses behind their backs and tries to get away with not following the rules whenever he can.

Some of you will have already seen where this is going by now.

Then Bob gets promoted. Suddenly, Bob is a boss, with twenty paper pushers working under him. He has responsibilities now. And he behaves differently. People who know him think that being in charge has changed Bob.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that being in power has not changed Bob enough.

He is still a freedom-loving guy who hates being told what to do and doesn’t like following the rules. He is still, fundamentally, a person who thinks they not only could but should be able to do whatever the hell they want without a bunch of people telling him it’s against some set of rules.

But now, those rules are the rules that restrict a boss. Rules like, say, a rule about how many hours you are allowed to make people work in a week, or rules that say how he can treat his female underlings, or rules that dictate how he earns bonuses.

So he looks for ways to evade those rules. Bob hasn’t changed… and that’s the problem.

Or take Randy the cop. When he is off duty, he is just a regular American who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like authority, and doesn’t like following a lot of rules.

And when he’s on duty…. he’s exactly the same. Only this time, those rules define a thing we call freedom.

That’s not how Randy sees it, of course. He’s still a myopic American who is way more concerned with his own right to do whatever he wants than anyone else’s. To the American mindset, there is no conflict between being a freedom loving American citizen and a cop who violates every letter of the Constitution because what is a Constitution but a bunch of rules?

And Americans don’t like rules. When they are thinking of their own precious snowflake selves, they like the idea of being protected from the mean ol gubmint by the Constitution.

But give them any kind of power, and suddenly that Constitution (and its necessary restrictions on what the police can do) is just another set of rules to evade, ignore, or defy.

And that goes all the way up. From the junior manager at your local McDonald’s to the President of the United States, at every level, you have people who do not want to have to play by the rules and who can’t understand that the same rules that protect them from those above them have to apply to them and those under them as well, even though that means you personally having your freedom curtailed.

The President, like any other American, doesn’t want to have to play by the rules. That might sound cool until you realize it applies equally to Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.

Americans talk a lot about freedom. But when you really look at it, they are talking mostly about their own personal freedom. Give them power, and it becomes the freedom to avoid accountability, ignore the rules meant to keep power in check, treat those under them exactly how they see fit, and to hell with all those pesky ‘rules’.

The fact is, freedom depends on rules. You are only as free to the degree that others are prevented or dissuaded from using power to take your freedom away. Rules are the only way to accomplish this. There has to be rules that restrict the strong from preying on the weak and from the powerful from becoming dictators over the powerless.

And what Americans don’t seem to get is that this applies to them, not just the other guy.

So that’s the answer to your Big American Mystery, folks. Americans have this bizarrely oppositional relationship with their governments because nobody wants to follow the rules, and Americans as a people tend to be too individualistic to grasp that one person’s freedom is another, more powerful person’s inconvenient rule.

In both cases, it is the fundamental nature of the American character at work. On both sides, the governing and the governed, you have passionate people who don’t want anyone to tell them what to do.

More mature, less radically individualistic countries understand that when everyone follows the rules, you get civilization. We are all working together to make that civilization happen. We accept restrictions on ourselves when we are in positions of power as the price to pay in order to have a free country.

The American character is unique in its inability to grasp this very simple point.

Well sure, all you other people should have to follow the rules. But surely that doesn’t apply to me, right? Rules are something that other people follow.

Well grow the fuck up, America. Because that is just not how it works.

I have a really deep desire to prove to the world how brilliant I am.

I have had this desire for such a long time that I have no idea when it started. It might have started the day I surprised my babysitter by suddenly grasping, all at once, how to read.

Oh neat, I might have thought. Being smart gets me socially rewarded!

Or maybe it was the experience of being an overbright kid in an elementary school just plain not equipped to help me that did it. I was always craving challenge. The schoolwork was far too easy to me for me to get any satisfaction out of it.

I wanted a real challenge, a cure for the boredom and lack of stimulation. And I was desperately emotionally dependent on my teachers, and so while I can see now that I might have seemed a little ungrateful too them when I innocent asked questions they couldn’t answer or pointed out something I thought they had got wrong, I still needed their approval and so I quite possibly wanted to shine for them and get social approval that way.

I don’t know though. This feels more primal than that.

The thing is, I have had this desire to prove to the world how fucking amazing I am for so long that it has just faded into the background of my consciousness. It’s a given, a constant. So I have never really taken a good look at it.

When I thought of it at all, I would usually deflect direct contemplation of this burning need by saying something flippant to myself (or occasionally, others) along the lines of “well intelligence is all I’ve got, so it better be worth something. ”

I realize now how stupid that is. It is totally not answering the question of why I feel this burning need to prove I am really mentally amazing. It’s just a glib deflection.

It’s strange. On the one hand, I want the world to tell me how amazingly brilliant I am. And yet, as I have said before, I have also downplayed the benefit of my intelligence all my life because frankly, it has done me a lot more harm than good.

It made me isolated and unable to understand my peers as a child. It meant I was deadly bored all of the time in school. It’s never won me an award or a scholarship or anything. Nobody in my life ever valued it and I stopped getting praised for it before I was even out of Grade 3.

So for a long long time, I viewed it as more of a problem than a solution. It was like a debilitating illness, except that those generate sympathy and all being super-smart ever did for me was make people hate me.

Jealousy and resentment really suck. Nobody should be hated for who they are, even if part of being who they are makes other people feel jealous or inadequate. That has never been my intention and it is not my fault. I have never deliberately flaunted my intelligence to make someone else feel bad. That is just not in my character. I want everyone to get along and be happy.

But some people just can’t stand the idea that someone has it better than them and there’s nothing they can do about it, I guess. How very petty and sad.

I don’t hate people for having what I do not. I’m not built for that kind of jealousy.

So anyhow, it is only recently that I have realized, on both a mental and emotional level, that this big brain of mind can actually be an asset and that other people have used theirs to their great benefit.

In fact, other people have had their extraordinariness recognized by those in the position to help and guide them, who assured them of its value and moved them into advanced classes which actually challenged them.

Now those people, I am jealous of. Insanely jealous. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all it ever got me was trouble and pain. For those lucky other people, it was their ticket to success. Where was my benefactor? Where were the people who would recognize and nurture my worth? Why did I end up never really valuing it until, like, this year?

Like Calvin said, I know life isn’t fair, but why isn’t it ever unfair in my favour?

Of course, the answer is, it was unfair in my favour for my whole childhood. The schoolwork that I found so unchallenging was a serious struggle for a lot of my schoolmates. They had to work really hard to learn the things I absorbed effortlessly. They had to study their brains out in order to pass the tests I finished in minutes. They had to worry about their grades, and I just plain took mine for granted.

Now I grasp how big an advantage that was, and I am glad for the problems I never had.

But I still feel the need to prove to the world how brilliantly shiny my mind is. I am positive that I could do it, given the chance, but of course, you don’t just get given chances.

You have to do at least some of the work yourself.

And I am through asking myself “how” to do it. There’s a million ways to do it. I know lots of them. The problem is a million miles away from being a lack of knowledge.

It’s more about a lack of resolve and a lack of courage. My pathologically cautious depressive mind wants to be assured of success before even starting something. It’s looking to get the reward before the effort, or at least, waiting for some sort of sign to tell me which way to go.

But that’s not how it works. You have to take risks. That is why it is so important to choose a path where you will be doing something you find intrinsically rewarding.

That way, work is play, and anything else you get out of it is a bonus.

I like writing comedy.

Maybe I should do that more.

Just finished watching a highly phallocentric documentary called Unhung Hero about one man’s journey to answer the whole “Does size matter?” question and to find, for himself, a method of male enhancement that really, really works.

This guy, poor Patrick Moote, got a very rough start on this journey when not only did he get turned down for marriage by a woman he truly loved, it happened on the “kiss cam” of a major sporting event for all of the fans to see, then got posted to YouTube for the entire world to see.

So yeah. He’s this poor guy. TRIGGER WARNING : Rejection.

Afterwards, she broke up with him, and one of the reasons she listed was his inadequate wang. Being a somewhat narcissistic and neurotic dude, that’s what he seized upon as the reason for all his problems.

Personally, I think she just freaked out at suddenly being put on the spot in an extremely emotionally manipulative way, possibly in a way that resonated with other attempts to manipulate her, and she lashed out with whatever she thought would hurt him the most. And obviously, she scored big time.

I mean, look at it from her point of view. Not only did he pull this big manipulative stunt on her, but in the fallout, people all over the world (the video got 10 million hits in four days) thought she was the coldest bitch in the world.

In her position, I would be super fucking pissed off too.

Anyhow, so this sends him on his journey all over the world to find out how other cultures view size and male enhancement. (It says something about the male mind that all you need to say is ‘male enhancement’ and we all know exactly what is being enhanced, and how. )

And he visits remote tribes in Papua New Guinea and sophisticated clinics in Korea and everywhere in between. All in search of a bigger fuckstick, even though early on, a noted urologist tells him his is “low average”.

A less neurotic person would take that as a sign that they were doing fine… not great, but fine. But of course, to the neurotic mind, “low average” means the same as “below average”, and “below average” equals “inadequate”.

I can relate. Not about dick size, because I could honestly not care less. That’s such a hopelessly superficial and unimportant aspect of a person that I can’t even take it seriously. To me, an obsession with dick size is just like an obsession with boob size. Constantly pursuing that which gives the strongest visual impression is the very definition of mindless decadence in my books.

It’s futile and it’s crass and it’s unbelievably gauche.

Then again, nobody has ever complained about mine. I am adequately equipped. Others have remarked about my girth being above average, and I assume they are right because I have trouble getting condoms that fit.

But I still can’t imagine caring very much about it. I am way more interested in what is going on between your ears than I am in what you have going on between your legs.

Size queens bore me.

Luckily, after a lot of travel, Patrick Moote ends up back in the USA, talking to the person most qualified to help him in the world : internationally famous advice columnist and universal force of awesomeness, Dan Savage.

And Dan, of course, tells him, in very polite and positive language, to get the heck over himself.

What I would have told him is “Look, this obsession with your equipment is clearly about a lot more than your penis. You feel inadequate in other ways, and you have focused on this one thing because it is something that seems fixable to you and has nothing to do with changing who you are as a person, which is a lot harder than just getting an operation. ”

That’s the sort of thing that fuels ninety percent of the cosmetic surgery industry, in my opinion. People deciding that this one superficial thing is the cause of all their problems, and that if only they could fix that, everything would be wonderful.

I have nothing against people getting their bodies modified to better please them. I just worry that, with the best of intentions, the cosmetic surgery industry is participating in a psychologically unhealthy process which will inevitably leave the person just as unhappy as before because they have not solved the real problem.

If your real problem is a bullet lodged near your heart, making the scar disappear won’t solve it.

Anyhow, I would tell Patrick that he has convinced himself that he is completely inadequate in the wedding tackle department. That no woman in the entire world would find his junk sufficient. That every single woman in the world will take one look at his penis and, regardless of any and all other compatibility factors, instantly and brutally reject him.

And of course, that is completely absurd. Women are not that shallow, except in the neurotic echo chambers of the minds of men. What matter is finding someone you like spending your time with. Everything else is complete and total bullshit.

I think both women and men get obsessed with the superficial things and imagine their preferred gender to be hopelessly shallow because it gives them an excuse to not even bother trying to meet other people and thus avoid all emotional risk.

I call that the “all grapes are sour” fallacy, or the pre-rejection bias. Convince yourself that absolutely everyone you desire would reject you, and you never have to face actual rejection.

It’s a close cousin to the “if you never try, you never fail” pathology. Convince yourself that all your efforts are destined to fail, and you never have to try. Problem solved!

As far as I can tell, there is only one piece of dating advice worth a damn, and that is “meet more people”.

That’s it. Every person you meet is a ticket for the merry monogamy lottery, and the more people you meet, the higher your odds of meeting someone you really, really like, and who likes you right back.

Everything else is secondary. Obviously, being well groomed and odor free and such counts, and learning to treat other human beings as equals helps a whole lot too, but the main thing is : meet lots of people.

But that’s the one thing that people (myself included) are unwilling to do.