Wasn’t last night’s article good? With all the thinking and complaining and something even approaching some kind of structure? Wasn’t that neato?

Well, don’t expect any of that crap tonight because I am sick and I feel like shit and I in no way shape or form have the energy to think that hard. I feel very old today, and I greatly resent it.

My chest cold has turned into a head cold, which I hope means it is on the way out and will exit via my scalp. (Is there such a thing as a hair cold? Of course not. Never mind. Forget I asked. )

But like I have said before, for me, the worst part of being sick is feeling sick. The symptoms I can handle. It’s the overall malaise and energy drain that gets me down and makes me feel both anxious and depressed.

Somewhere between anxiety and despair lies…. Depression.

So today has been quite bleh. I have not done much but sleep and eat and sweat gross sticky sick sweat. I appreciate that my body is trying to sweat out the virus, but why does it have to leave me feeling like a glazed donut? I showered really thoroughly last night, and an hour and a half later it was Crispy Kreme all over again.

Oh well. Soon this all will be over. Even though it feels like illness will stretch along forever, it doesn’t, and I imagine that by tomorrow or at the latest Friday I will be more or less over the whole thing and it will just be another chapter in the regular life of an irregular person.

I have never been known for my periodicity.

Oh right, more Vcon stories. Well let’s start at the end (bet ya didn’t see that coming) and talk about the Dead Dog Party.

No, that isn’t the absolutely worst political party ever. for those who don’t know, the Dead Dog Party is the traditional way to end a nerd convention. It is the time honored practice of taking all the leftovers from all the events and all the liquor that people left behind, add in whatever else people feel like contributing, and throw a great big blowout party as the official end to the whole shebang.

And I am quite proud of myself for planning to go to it, going to it, and hanging around for more than a token amount of time. I went there to drink and have fun, and I did. There were some bare patches where I had nobody to talk to and I felt lonely and isolated and seriously considered going back up to the hotel room to sleep for the night. But I hung in there, and the only reason I left was that I knew we had to check out before noon and so I had to get to sleep somewhere between 3 and 5 in the morning in order to leave time to pack up and GTFO of there.

Well, that is not entirely true. I left for another reason, a reason called “very stupid drunk guy who kept trying to participate in a conversation way, way over his head and/or sobriety level. ”

God I wanted him to shut the FUCK UP. Here I was having an extremely stimulating intellectual conversation with Chilam Artist (don’t laugh, that’s his legal name) and some Indian girl whose name I do not recall when this moron, clearly drunk as hell, starts trying to butt in to the conversation with inane, incoherent thoughts that make no sense. And there is Chilam and the Indian girl being good, polite, inclusive Canadians and treating him as an equal part while I simmered and smoked and desperately wanted to yell “Shut UP. You are drunk and stupid and clearly unqualified for this conversation. Go away and leave us alone!”.

Of course, mildly morally untethered by alcohol or not, I didn’t actually say that. I too am a polite Canadian. I just kept my mouth shut and stewed in my own juices.

But when it came time to leave, I picked a moment where I could see that look in the drunk asshole’s eyes that meant he was building up the energy to push through the veil of alcohol and make noises with his face parts, and I took that as a sign that it was time to hit the hay before I said something that someone, possibly even me, would regret.

And yup, I didst drink of the intoxicating liquors. That is a strict no-no for us diabetics, but sometimes in life, you just have to let loose and have fun. I drank, I ate sugary foods, I ate junk food, I had fun.

Basically, I partied. Not something I have ever been very good at because I am just too self-conscious and paranoid. Hard to let your hair down and paint the town reddish when you feel like there is constant social danger.

Also, I learned the hard way that I can become a very loudmouthed and mercurial drunk. If I had been DRUNK drunk and not just a little crispy around the edges, I would have told Stupid Drunk guy exactly what I thought of him, likely at a very high volume, and all kids of bad shit could have come from that.

But no, I partook of the fruit of the vine, but just to the point of feeling more relaxed. I missed the good liquor, though. I only discovered that we did, in fact, have apple juice AFTER the spiced rum ran out, dammit. They make a killer combination. And I sure as well wasn’t going to combine spiced rum with Coke Zero. That stuff already tastes funny.

And there was an empty bottle of Tullamore Dew, which was a shame, because while I do not know much about liquor, that one I recognize from the Callahan’s books by Spider Robinson. So I would have liked to try it just because of that.

And speaking of Spider, I had a brief unexpected encounter with him, and man does he look terrible. It was a real shock to the system for me because I have encountered him at previous conventions and he was this amazingly cool dude. Smart, funny, nice, good looking in a very “musician” way. Now he is skinny and frail and trembling and looks like he is two minutes from death.

I hope he gets better. I knew he had a heart attack last year, and of course life has been very hard for him since the death of his eternal love partner Jeanne, but somehow none of that seemed totally real to me till I saw him briefly at the convention.

Strength, hope, and courage, Spider. Don’t go away just yet.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

As usual, the Monday after the convention leaves me feeling like London after the Blitz.

There’s just something about conventions that really takes it out of you. It’s like life at a science fiction convention is just so much more rich and stimulating than the usual humdrum reality that it goes through a week’s worth of your physical and mental resources in just three days, and it takes a day or two to catch up again.

So the period between leaving the hotel this morning (only fifteen minutes before mandatory checkout at noon) and getting home seemed very long. I was ravenously hungry (so my blood sugar was low) and somewhat dehydrated, so I spent that interval in a mental state between waking life and sleep, playing tag with consciousness all the way.

Once I got home, I inhaled some food then went right to sleep, and didn’t wake up again till 4:30 pm. And honestly, I still could use another ten winks or so before I will feel fully human again.

One good thing, though, is that I have been too damned tired to feel any post-con depression. I am just glad to be back home where things are routine and predictable and I have food in the cupboards and the fridge and I can get a drink of water whenever I want and I can just fall apart and not worry about what to do next for a while.

Usually, after a convention, I feel a little sad because it’s all over now. It’s pretty much exactly like the feeling you get on Boxing Day when Christmas is officially over. You are glad it happened, but sad it’s over.

Not this time, at least, not yet.

I had a great con. Went to lots of panels, gorged myself on mental stimulation. If there is one thing where I have never been sated, it is my appetite for mentally stimulating conversation. I don’t think I am ever happier than when I am talking with intelligent, insightful, interested people. If I had my way, I would spend years just traveling the world to wherever there was a good chance of finding smart people who really care about ideas who love to talk to others of the same ilk.

Because that is totally my ilk. Thinkers and dreamers and visionaries. It’s quite the ilk.

Went to a panel on alien languages. All right, science fiction meets language, talk about perfect fodder for science fiction writers like myself. Sadly, the panel turned out to just be a fast paced lecture by this one dude and while a lot of of it was interesting (did you know there was a border collie named Chaser who knows over 1000 words?) and some of it did touch on the kind of deep discussion of the nature of language that I was looking for, it mostly seemed, in retrospect, to be one long excuse for the lecturer to tell us about the neato cool crab-like aliens who communicate by biological radio he had invented for his as yet unpublished debut novel.

Hmph. How lame. There was barely any discussion at all, and I have come to expect a certain amount of audience interaction in my panels. Despite my academic brilliance, I have never actually been that good at just sitting there and listening. The longer that goes on, the harder it gets for me to keep my mind from just tuning out the lecturer and retreating into that rich inner life us creative types are prone to having.

In school, I conquered this by sitting up front when I could (also helped with reading the blackboard) and, above all, asking questions. Being able to ask questions is mandatory for me. It is how I remain engaged.

Anyhow, that panel was okay but disappointing. I did another that was very interesting and even useful. It was called Live Slush Pile, and the idea is people anonymously submit the first page of unsold manuscripts to a panel of editors and publishers. Said first pages are read cold to the panel, and as they are read, the panel members raise their hand to vote to stop the reading and explain why they would have rejected the manuscript at that point.

Brutal, to be sure. There was some terrible shit in that slush pile and they were fairly blunt about what was wrong with it. One started with an expository lump. Can you imagine? Absolutely nothing had actually happened yet and we were getting the backstory of the main character.

Honestly, if I was on that panel, I would have been their Simon Cowell. I wouldn’t tell anyone they sucked or had no talent or anything like that, but I would say “That was terrible. ” and then tell them exactly why.

Sadly, I had nothing of mine that was suitable to submit. I would be more than willing to have my work mercilessly eviscerated if I learned something from it.

You don’t grow without admitting you are not perfect, after all.

What I did learn, though, is that people going through the slushpile are looking for a reason to reject your manuscript. It’s not that they are evil, it’s just that they have a lot of submissions to get through and the fastest way to do that is to judge your whole work by that precious first page.

So make that first page fucking awesome. One author’s first page got a sitting ovation from us all because it was totally gripping and made us all want to hear the second page, like, NOW.

There was only one little incident of me sort of copping out and spending time in our room napping when I could have been out doing panels, and I am proud of that. It’s much better than previous years. I am getting better and better at just pushing myself out there and leaving the social anxiety behind.

I have many more convention stories, but they will have to wait for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Therapy day, angst, blah.

I have been thinking about inner growth lately. I long for it. I am so very tired of being small and puny on the inside. I want to be big and strong and filled with vitality.

And I am growing up inside, albeit not as fast as my impatient soul would like. My therapist and I talked about how I am going to have to parent myself in order to grow, and give myself the involved and caring childhood I never had.

Part of me, a very primitive and childlike part, resists that idea purely out of spite. It thinks I am owed one childhood from somebody and if I finish raising myself, someone, my parents I guess, “got away with it”.

This is not exactly healthy thinking, and holding on to that attitude is a major growth blocker. So often it is this kind of think which gets in the way of healing. Unfinished arguments left hanging in the air for decades, even after one half of them is long dead and gone. I never thought of myself as that kind of person, but then again, who am I to blow against the wind?

Part of my recovery is the slow dissolution of any illusions I might have had of sainthood. I have had a pretense of being above petty human emotion for a long time, but I don’t believe in pretending not to be human (irony!) and so that bullshit has got to go. I am giving up being apart from humanity, inasmuch as that is possible at this stage in the game, and that means I can’t pretend to be above it all any more.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not abandoning my high ideals. I am just admitting to myself that there is a lot of other, less pleasant stuff in there too, and I am going to have to deal with it.

The path to spiritual perfect has always led right through the gutters and sewers of the soul. You do not become clean by merely pretending that you are. You have to get rid of all the ugly shit inside you first.

Yes, I am talking about taking a great big spiritual crap.

I’ve felt angry lately. Nothing in particular bothering me, just that part of the emotional digestion cycle I guess. Enough unexpressed anger and irritation built up in my system to boil up to the surface and be way, way too easy to access for comfort. I really feel like being snappish and snarky with people. I’m like a dog looking for someone to bite.

Clearly, the pro-social and responsible thing to do is to either stifle that shit (probably unhealthy in the long run) or find an appropriate target for it and express it in a constructive way.

To which a voice inside me says “Laaaaaaaame.” I will call this voice my inner teenager. As you all know, I didn’t really have an adolescence in anything but the strictly physical, biological sense. Lately though, I have been dreaming up what my teen years should have been like. Me all snarky with a huge ego and copping a major attitude. Sure, I would have been an asshole, but everyone is an asshole when they are a teenager, at least a little.

Trouble is, you can only get away with acting like a teenager when you are still a teenager. You have the solid support of your parents under you so you can experiment with attitude and such and see what fits you and what gets the results you want. People expect teenagers to be irritating and cut them some slack.

If I acted like that now, I would rapidly find myself friendless and alone, and I am too old to pretend that I don’t need anybody and I can do just fine on my own. I have been on my own before and it damn near destroyed my mind. I suppose if I had done it as a teen, I might have gotten some “bad boy” attention from the ladies (tough luck for them, I’m for the boys) and I guess I would have more or less gotten away with it with no friends to lose.

But now, it would just be sad.

Still, there is definitely a side of me that just wants to tell the whole world to go fuck itself. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone we know, fuck everyone we don’t know. Fuck the world.

Where does this come from? I think I just want to evict all the voices in my head. All the complications, considerations, worries, empathic dangers, and all the other noise blogging up my precious intellectual staging grounds. I am sick and tired of it being so loud in here, and I just want to push it all away so I can find some peace and quiet for once.

Obviously, that is way more about my own fucked up issues than it is about what the things I would be pushing away are actually doing. Nobody besides me knows, or even could know, about all the complicated stuff always whizzing about this skull of mine, so it makes no sense to try to hold the world accountable for not being able to read my mind.

I do wonder about other people sometimes, though. Clearly, there are a lot of people in the world who act on and/or express all or most of their emotions immediately. There is no buffer zone where they decide what to do. They just go with whatever their dominant emotion is at any moment.

And that seems like a terrible way to live to me. Rational choice is kind of important in life. I can’t imagine living life with the brakes off like that.

But sometimes I wonder if, despite how it seems to me, those people are actually happier overall because they express everything in realtime and are able to live in the moment instead of getting twisted around by overintellectualizing repressed emotions and withdrawing from the moment into intellectualism.

Who knows. Perhaps past a certain point of intelligence, you no longer have a choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was kind of fucked up.

Interior drama occurred today. That’s the drama that happens entirely inside my haunted head. It seems absurd that this is even still possible, but ghosts don’t die all at once.

They fade away.

In this case, I was thinking of asking Joe if he could drop me off at 7-11 on the way to work. That whole running start thing. No big deal, right? Wrong.

I got caught up in this struggle between doing it and not doing it. So many emotional factors ended up jumping into the fight that it was like a war on ten fronts in this skull of mine. My desire to get out of the house more and be more adventurous got ambushed by my remaining depressive insistence that motion is danger and stillness is safety (what I have called the anti-action bias before) and I (the real I, the thing that is me) got caught in the crossfire.

So I went back and forth and back and forth over and over again on whether to do it or not, all the while keenly aware of what a ridiculously tiny thing it was that was the subject of this titanic struggle. And that, of course, just made it worse. I totally get now why people with OCD say that knowing that their compulsions are irrational and pointless does not help at all, it only makes it worse.

After all, compulsions stem from an off-balance need to self-soothe with ritual or habit, and the worse you feel about what you are doing, the more you will need to self-soothe. The same thing happens with addictions, which, if you think about it, are just compulsions backed by a chemical imbalance we call “withdrawal”.

But anyhow, back to my day. Damn it’s easy for me to wander off into intellectualism.

I ended up not going. Of course, I feel sort of bad about that, like I had a chance to be cool and blew it. Make my life better, expand my comfort zone, all that jazz.

But then another voice pops up in my head saying that putting that much pressure on myself to do things like that is not the way to do it and is really a recipe for failure because the pressure just makes me flee. So if it is going to be a big huge pressure thing, I am better off backing off until I can deal with things in a more rational, positive manner.

But that still feels like I am fleeing when I should be staying in the game and staring the fear down. No matter how you slice it, the depression gets what it wants. Me not going anywhere, spending the afternoon burning brain cells on video games and online chat instead of doing anything productive.

On the other hand, I am saving all my money for Vcon, and the only thing really at stake was whether I would have Diet Coke to drink with my midnight snack tonight. So it honestly would not have been worth my time to go and I just would have ended up spending money I should not.

Oh, but I have done the math in my head and I have plenty of dough. The con will involve five or so meals…. that’s a hundred bucks. Registration will be something like 60 or 70 bucks. That leaves 30 or 40 bucks for the unexpected or the too good to miss, and I will still have like $180 left for the final two weeks of the month.

Plus I will be getting a GST cheque some time in early October. So I should be just fine either way.

And so forth and so on, for at least an hour and a half this afternoon. A monumental struggle of legendary scope, and all over the three or four bucks a 2L of Diet Coke would have cost me.

Oh well. It’s all over now and behind me. It’s tough seeing yourself go crazy like that, but that problem shrinks on a daily basis and soon enough will shrink out of sight.

Speaking of shrinks, I will finally be going back to therapy tomorrow. It has been three weeks since my last appointment (, Father) and I could really use a chat with him. There’s only so much I can do on my own.

Tomorrow is, of course, also the last day before the Vcon Experience begins. Before a convention, I always get the same sort of rush of feelings I get before I go on stage to perform. There’s excitement, fear, anticipation, a sense of wonder, a little reluctance, and an emotion I can only describe as THIS IS IT.

It’s quite the cocktail. Usually, it’s an emotion I can only handle in small doses. So I tend to only really think about what is coming for brief moments now and then.

That works to keep me from being completely overwhelmed, but it does make it difficult to truly plan ahead. I am sure it’s the main reason why I always end up leaving things behind that I totally need but just could not think of before I was at the convention. That kind of emotional overload reaction makes it hard to think clearly about a subject.

Oh well. No matter what, I will attend the convention, have a good time, feel a little sad when it ends, and move on.

Because Joe and Julian are volunteering at the con, we will be getting there earlier than usual. That is fine with me. I might still be a little sleepy around the edges, but at least I will miss fewer potential panels of interest.

And if I am just too pooped to cope, I can always take a nap in our hotel room.

And no huge pressure to go to every potentially cool panel or I am a terrible person for wasting an opportunity. Sure, I want to get in as much Vcon as I can. But letting that crazy pressure enter the occasional will only lead to further incidents like today’s inner drama, only more so.

And that, I do not need.

I will talk to all you nice people against tomorrow.