I’ve been having one of my sleepy days.

Makes sense. I am long overdue. And after spending five days fairly ill, I am no doubt in need of some serious mental rejuvenation time.

Of course, it doesn’t feel like mental rejuvenation at the time. Far from it! It feels like my mind is filled with soft electric sand, and every time I sleep, some of the sand drains out…. but only after it fills up in the first place.

Right now, I am willing to just let the sand have its way and catch up on sleep. If it keeps up, I will get irritated with it and start to fight it, forcing myself to move around and be active and shake the sand out of my skull.

Man, when I get hold of a metaphor, I just don’t let go.

Sleepy or no, I am definitely willing to say that I am no longer in the grips of last week’s death spore. I still have some “liquid goo” rattling around in my lungs and a touch of dryness in my throat, but I feel fine, my appetite is back to normal, and I am properly salinated.

I am so glad that shit’s over. Like I said when still in the antiviral trenches, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, and that applies to your health more than anything else.

So while I would hesitate to call myself “healthy” now, I will say that it wonderful to be back to the far more pleasant level of being ill to which I have become accustomed in recent years.

One little thing brightening my day : I managed to talk Amazon Canada into giving me my money back for Amazon Prime.

It started when I finally got around to looking up the benefits of Amazon Prime. That meant first figuring out which Amazon I had bought said Prime on.

Turned out, it was Amazon Canada. So I fuck around on Google trying to find out what all I get from Prime on Amazon Canada, and it turns out some dude wrote an entire Kindle book about it.

Wow, there are so many it takes a whole book to explain them all, I thought.

But no. I found the information elsewhere and it’s not even a pamphlet’s worth. Pretty much all you get is free 2-day shipping and a deal on 1-day shipping.

Whoopty fucking do.

When I saw that, I instantly made my mind up that it was SO NOT WORTH the $88 it had cost me, and I was determined to get my moola back.

So I wrote a heart-string tugging letter to Amazon about having been sick (true) and financial times being hard for me (true, but not exactly new) and how I knew they had my money now and didn’t have to give it back, but I would really appreciate all or at least some of the money back anyhow.

There may have been some gilding of the truth in there. Trust me, it was a masterpiece of pathos.

Couple hours later, I get an email saying my Prime membership has been canceled and I should be getting the money credited back to my card within 2 to 3 business days.

SCORE! I still can’t believe I pulled it off. I figured that absentminded people like me were the natural prey of free trial gambits like the Amazon Prime one, and there was no way they would give me a penny back. Or if they did, it would be in the form of “store credit”, so to speak.

But nope. I’m getting my $$$ back. Squee! I not only managed to correct one of my recent stupids, I did it in a way that makes me feel smart. DOUBLE SCORE!

So things are looking up for me. I am recovering from getting knocked almost all the way down by that illness, and pretty soon I will be officially on the rise again and ready to go hunting for some writing courses to take.

It helps that tomorrow is every cripple’s favorite time of the month, Check Day. I plan on going on my own to get it cashed, as otherwise I would end up having to it after therapy on Thursday, or wait till Friday night in hopes we would be going out to eat, and fuck that noise.

It will do wonders for my mood to not have an empty wallet. I have like maybe a couple bux to my name at the moment, and that never feels good.

Sure, intellectually I know that I am not, in the grand financial scheme of things, broke. Check tomorrow, Amazon payback, etc.

But being broke is psychologically damaging on a level inaccessible to mere reason. I have “winter is coming” white people genes in my DNA strand and that means I need to have a reserve of resources available at all times in order to feel safe.

I recognize that this is exactly how financial hoarding (oldschool : miser) happens. I can completely imagine myself being the kind of person who can never have enough money because they use money as security against a cold cruel world, which works for a while, but when the real monster lies within your soul, no amount of money can keep it out.

There, I just wrote the plot for an entire CBC-bait novel about a middle aged rich white dude’s existential crisis.

So my plan is to find a place, financially speaking, where I am comfortable. A place where I can have a nice, easy, pleasant life without a lot of worry or hassle on my part.

I have thought for a while now that a glorious place for any artist to be in is the one where you are so financially secure that someone could offer you a billion dollars to sell out, and you could still say no.

Then watch the look on their faces when “more money” stops working and they realize they actually have to DEAL with you, not just “make a deal” with you.

That’s all from me for today folks. I will talk to you again tomorrow.

One aspect of modern life in the modern world that puzzles and intrigues me is this burden of intentions that we all carry around for us.

Let me explain. While chatting with my sister earlier this month, she mentioned some small thing she had been meaning to do for a long time, and it suddenly hit me that this is not a rare thing. It is, in fact, a nearly universal aspect of modern life. People walk around with enormous lists of things they plan to do some day, when they get around to it, when they have the time, and then feel guilty for not doing them.

Thus, this phenomenon insures that all us modern naked beach apes carry a burden of guilt for intentions unfulfilled, regardless of how realistic said intentions were or even whether they are something you really, truly want.

A severe but not entirely invalid line of argument could be made that if you wanted to do these things bad enough, you would have done them by now, and the fact that you haven’t means that you likely never will and you would be a lot better off just forgetting about the whole thing and ridding yourself of a lot of unproductive and thus entirely unnecessary guilt.

And yet, we never do that. We hold on to these intentions and their resulting burden of sadness and guilt, and so one has to wonder why.

What is it we are getting out of this internal list? It must be something precious for us to be willing to endure the costs.

I think what we get is hope. Despite the fact that when we think of these little tasks, we risk feeling bad for not having done them yet, we really enjoy the idea that we will do all these things “some day”. It is the miracle of the undefined future, where terms like “some day”, “eventually”, and “when I feel like it” can be used to bypass many layers of reason and prudence and allow us to believe that we will do damned near anything…. some day.

For small things, this is harmless. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things if you never get back to knitting Afghan blankets if you otherwise have a happy and fulfilling life. If thinking that makes you happy, then it is probably a net good to believe it, whether it’s realistic or not.

But some kinds of hope are toxic, and if the feeling that you will do certain things “some day” keeps you from doing them in the present and that in turn keeps you in an unhappy or unfulfilling life, you might just be better off deciding, right now, whether you are going to do it, or give up and move on.

One thing I have noticed about the things people have on their little lists is that they nearly always involve either virtue or self-actualization. They are the things that people think they ought to do, and possibly even the sort of thing that people thing people like themselves DO do, but which involve a certain amount of sacrifice of our precious, precious off time and so we never actually do them.

So whether it’s volunteering down at the homeless shelter (virtue) or finally taking that last French course you need to get your minor (self-actualization), this burdensome list is usually filled with the sort of things we feel we ought to do, and it is just easier to imagine we will do them some day than it is to actually do them, and so they get added to the list.

And adding things to that list is so easy, isn’t it? It’s easy and it feels good and you never even think about how long the list is already or, heaven forbid, how realistic it is that you will do whatever it is your adding.

As for prioritizing the list so you can tackle the most important ones first?

Forget about it.

So the list gets longer and longer and longer, and as it does, a very specific kind of sadness begins to accumulate. Because no matter what sort of deal you have made somewhere in your mind about hope and fun, not doing the happen golden life-affirming things you keep meaning to do is damned depressing.

Some part of you is like the kid whose Dad always promises to go play catch with them “next time, Champ. Next time for sure!”.

Sooner or later, that part of you realizes it’s never going to happen, and the constant disappointment of the dream turns it sour, and now the item on your list is not a source of joy, but only of guilt and self-recrimination.

And yet, you can’t delete it off the list either, because that would mean admitting that you were never going to do it.

And that would mean killing the dream.

As I always say in these things, I am by no means exempting myself from this phenomena. I have a lot of dreamy ideas about things I could do “some day”, and these dreams, unrealistic as they may seem to someone else, have been a great comfort to me through a lot of years of emotional isolation.

I don’t think I could ever give them up. Not unless one of them came true. But I could never, I think, settle down to live an utterly mundane life of selling car insurance and going to BBQs and talking about RRSPs.

I have the seeds of greatness within me. I have known it since I was a child. There is a part of me that is a mighty wizard and that makes me the sort of person who can really leave a mark on the world.

And some day, god damn it, that is what I am going to do. I am going to use this magnificent mangled mind of mine to shiny a mighty big light into the world, and where the light falls, miracles and wonders shall occur.

And that’s a dream well worth the burden.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, folks.