This afternoon was meh. I slept more than I should. Got somewhat depressed. But to my credit, when I felt myself getting really depressed, I got up and did some of my against the wall push-ups (push-outs, I guess) and some pacing. And they did help me feel better. I even started out counting my “laps” pacing but gave up and just did it till I stopped on my own, and that is a pretty big step for someone who usually wants to know when things will end before they even begin.

Trust the universe.

Still getting over that whole Dashy thing I talked about yesterday. It’s not easy. It’s a lot to process. I mean, it’s not like we were deeply madly passionately in love and three years into a five year mortgage on our dream house, but still, I had opened up somewhat to him, and that’s not an easy thing for me to do.

My usual mode (in online furry text interactions) is to be friendly, funny, silly, and cuddly… but still keep people at arm’s length. It’s a skill I learned over time when That Same Thing© kept happening to me. I decided that being a furry was fantastic but that it was for fun and play only, not for love. I might share a lot of things with the right people, but my heart would not be one of them. It would remain light and friendly and not at all serious, forever.

And that worked, more or less, for a real long time. But I am getting old now, and I am lonely. I have completely ignored the whole of human pair bonding for so long, figuring it had no place for me. After all, the tragically low self esteem depression brought told me that I was worthless and unlovable anyhow, that anyone unfortunate enough to be romantically involved with me would soon regret it as I could be nothing bot a toxic burden on them like a sick and messy pet.

Nowadays, I at least have enough self worth to believe that I would be an excellent husband to the right man. Someone who would appreciate the love and affection and understanding I can bring. I think with most people, I am so understanding and accommodating that I kind of disappear into the background.

On a fundamental level, that’s not fair. We all think we should be rewarded for our virtues. Being sweet and kind and understanding are all things most people would consider good, virtuous things.

But people only value what they feel they have earned, and I make it way too easy for people. So they don’t value me. And that is not something I can change. I can’t pretend to be harder to get than I am, it’s just not in my nature to be that phony. I have no patience for that kind of bullshit either.

So I guess I need somebody who can respect a passive, receptive man like myself. I think a lot of people like me, and think I am a great guy (which I am), and think I am smart and funny (ditto), but respect?

Maybe not so much.

And research shows that respect is the root of long term relationships. People can hate each other all they want and the pair bond remains intact. But once people lose respect for one another, the relationship starts to die.

Presumably, this applies to the stage before that as well. Someone might really like someone, think they are great people, miss them when they are not around, even think they are hella sexy…. but without respect, there is no romantic attraction.

“I don’t know, I’ve just never thought of you that way. ”

Yeah, I get that a lot.

I honestly don’t know how I could change that perception of me. I don’t know how to become more “respectable”.

In the concrete sense, I don’t have a lot of respectability assets. I have no job, no career, no accomplishments, no wife and kids, no respectability profile at all, really.

All I have is an amazing mind, loads of talent, and my winning personality. All of which is cool and all, but none of which is real. It’s all just potential. And it’s hard for people to truly respect potential.

Still, growing respect for myself will doubtlessly have some positive effect. I am still recovering from all that self-neglect and only barely developing the ability to perceive how I am seen by others. And more importantly, how I want to be seen.

My power to achieve a desired outcome on that level is as yet limited. I can’t afford the sorts of clothes I really want, although I get by with what I have now, more or less. If I was a little richer and a lot more socially confident, I would go to a tailor and get custom clothes made. That seems to be the only way to get clothes that properly fit a fat guy.

But appearances, and speaking purely in the terms of social perception, I’m a loser. That’s what the average person is going to think of a person my age who is not only unemployed and unemployable, but who has never even had a grown-up job or a relationship. From a social perception point of view, that is all highly toxic.

Add in my receptive and accommodating nature and my lack of hard preferences in a lot of things, and I am like a big, fluffy, colorful doormat. And nobody can respect that kind of thing.

I am just so formless and without structure. I mean, who the heck am I, really?

But some day, I will meet a fella that needs someone like me and we will complement each other perfectly and become far, far more than the sum of our parts.

I just have to keep putting my heart out there. Keep kissing frogs till I find my prince.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This one’s not going to be easy. basically, I lost in love.

Over the last month or so, I was in a online relationship (or so I thought) with a furry named Dashy. We would hang out on furry IRC, cuddling and chatting and etc via text, and he really seemed to be into me, and I was increasingly into him.

I’m shy, so for me, it takes longer.

And he was very sweet, and supportive, and cuddly, and told me how great I was, and I was all cute and snuggly and funny and fun for him, and everything seemed nice. It wasn’t really much more than dating (with benefits), but I thought we had connected.

He even invited me to his own little IRC channel, where I met some other nice gay male furries. It was keen. I was even having some “maybe in the future” type thoughts.

Then last night, he tells me that he and this other furry I won’t name because he’s very sweet (and young) are now considering themselves “mated” in the furry fandom, but he would still love to have virtual text sex with me, with said other fur watching approvingly even, and maybe I could even be part of his little harem of other fuck buddies as well.

Admittedly, he phrased that last bit differently.

Needless to say, this did not go over well with me, in fact, I got super fucking pissed and I let him know it. And he had no idea what a goddamned landmine he stepped on because for all my sweet and snuggly ways, I am a poisonous fucking bitch when I am aggrieved, and I raked him over the coals (emotionally speaking) with my outrage and my verbal skills.

So he got to find out what happens when you piss in my fire. I told him that I knew that he knew what he was giving up. I told him that I would still be his friend, but never more. That I would be there, but eternally out of reach. I told him that he had known the warmth of my hearth and he would never know it again.

In fact, it was me who broke off contact because I was feeling physically sick of him. He led me on. He never promised me anything, of course, but he acted like he was really into me and that maybe there was a future for us. And to his credit, he admitted that he had basically lied to me via action, and he did feel bad about it.

But I was not, and am still not, in a forgiving mood. Dashy got to see a side of me that very few people have ever seen, and I am not in the least ashamed of it. He deserved the full brunt of my shockingly potent ire (well, shocking unless you have known me a while) and if anything, I feel like he got off too easily. He trifled with my emotions and I deserve better.

Especially since, as the title of this blog entry suggests, this shit has happened to me before. Many times.

When I was far newer to the whole online furry thang (don’t ask me how long ago that was, the answer would depress me), this exact scenario happened to me over and over and over.

I would meet a guy, he would seem really into me and like he really enjoyed my company and appreciated all I had to offer, and it would really seem like things were going somewhere, and then one day, out of the blue, he’d tell me he found someone really wonderful and they were mated now, or that oh gee, did I forgot to mention that I am already in a committed relationship?

But I bet you and my current boyfriend would get along really great together and we can all be one big happy triangle!

Yeah bullshit. That’s your selfish “I can have everything” dream. Here in reality, I am not your fucking toy.

And the thing is, back when I was younger and more clueless and much worse at sticking up for myself, I not only feel for this, I fell for to the point of moving all the way from Prince Edward Island to the West Coast of the USA to be someones “add on mate”.

First to Portland, then to Silicon Valley, I uprooted my entire life and went to live with some guy whom I knew already had a boyfriend or mate or whatever. I am not sure what the hell I thought was going to happen. But both times it did NOT work out (for one thing, I couldn’t work legally) because as it turns out, you don’t end up with a neat little triangle, you end up with a Y, where one person has two boyfriends and the other two have half a boyfriend each.

So I learned my lesson (eventually) and mow I will not even go there for a heartbeat. I now know that when it comes to romance, I demand absolute monogamy. Sexual monogamy means nothing to me, but I need to be the only one in my man’s heart, because he will be the only one in mine. when it comes to romantic love, I do not share.

And if that means forcing someone to choose, so be it.

The insane thing is, because this sort of thing has happened to me a bunch before, I feel extremely aggrieved and indignant that it happened again. And kind of stupid too, like I should have seen it coming.

Oh well. There is just something about me that makes people like me but not actually want me, not for keeps anyhow. Maybe I am boring. Maybe I just seem like too much work. Maybe I am just too accommodating and easy to get along with and people just don’t value me as a result.

I’m still going to put my heart out there, though. I’m 41 and I want a Man of Life, dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I made a little bit of progress.

Specifically, today I recognized that I was becoming depressed in the afternoon, and deliberately got up and moved around some to try to shake it off.

It worked, more or less. It didn’t exactly fill me with coruscating torrents of everlasting joy, but it kept things from getting worse. Next time I will do a little more than what I did today, which was to get up from the bed, go get a glass of water, and then sit myself at the computer without permission to go back into my bed for at least half an hour.

It’s a baby step, but that’s one big baby.

Like I have said before, the idea that I can change my mood through action is weird to me, alien even. I have spent so long just treading water that it never occurred to me that I could swim. (More water imagery!)

And it’s more than just weird. It means taking responsibility for my mood in a way that is entirely new, and more than a little scary, to me. After all, if you accept that you can affect something, you automatically assume responsibility for it. The two things are not separable, as much as some people would like to think they are.

Power equals responsibility.

And a big big part of me does not want that responsibility and would actually prefer to go back to acting like there is nothing I can do against the swelling tides and riptide currents of my internal maelstrom. That part of me is so scared of taking an active part (and hence responsibility) in my own life that it is willing to dive deep into the pit of oblivion in order to escape it.

And the thing is, I don’t understand why. What it is about having the power to change my own mood that scares the hell out of me? Why is that part of me so scared of responsibility that it actually prefers depression?

And what does that say about the nature of my depression?

Well it certainly indicates that my depression, as awful as it has been on literally every level of my life, is an escape mechanism. A way to avoid having to deal with the world and accept responsibility for myself. This is not truly a shock and runs concurrent with my previous theorizing, but it really underlines the nature of the problem.

See how my language becomes all precise and science-formal when I talk about really deep stuff? Intellectualize much?

Anyhow, the fundamental question of why I fear responsibility remains. When I try to examine the subject (not easy, girt with fear as it is), the concept of “attachment” springs to mind. Responsibility ties you down, limits you, weighs you down. A deep part of my fundamental emotional nature equates freedom of motion with safety and limitations as traps.

And traps, of course, as DANGER.

But that doesn’t really explain an aversion to self-responsibility. It’s not like taking responsibility for a home or a task at work or being the treasurer of your local polo club. It makes no sense to fear being tied down to yourself.

And yet, in a way, it does. If I take full responsibility for myself, that actually comes with a whole lot of new, scary things and a fair bt of change in my life. I would have to stop fucking around and grow up and actually take charge of my life and where it goes instead of that eternal drifting in the mist that has been my life for twenty years.

And deep down, there’s a part of me that, it shames me to admit, just does not want to grow up.

Maybe it has something to do with my incomplete childhood. My inner child still feels abandoned and unfinished and broken, and refuses to grow up any further until it gets what it feels it needs, like the love, affection, attention, acceptance, and validation it never got in my actual childhood.

And maybe that is not negotiable. Maybe love is a vitamin and without it you just don’t grow right. You have to either find it in the world or somehow provide it for yourself, like plants manufacturing their own food from sunlight and water.

And my inner child feels really ripped off by life, and thinks that even having to go find it or make it myself is a grave injustice, and Someone owes it all that it has not gotten for life, and it is perfectly willing to hold out for that, like a child holding their breath till they turn blue.

Well I’m forty one years old, and clearly, I ain’t gonna get it. At least, it’s not going to show up on its own. So I have to ask myself what stubbornness and being “right” (ha!) are worth, and if I can give up my hunger strike and go out into the world and get something to eat.

The only person I can rely on to be that caregiver that I need so badly is me. I am going to have to accept a duality that normally I would avoid, namely of being child and parent at the same time.

I loathe binaries, but sometimes you have to separate things for a while in order to be able to recombine them into a greater unity. Maybe it takes being two people to learn to be one whole one.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

I want to love my inner child. And my inner child wants the love. But I guess that inner child wants the love to come from somewhere else, and feels like if it has to come from within, it’s worthless.

I don’t know. It’s all a very complicated game of emotional chess to play with myself.

I should probably make note of all this in regards to bringing it up with my therapist next session. Seems important.

Anyhow, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow, that makes this shit sound important.

Just got back from therapy and shopping (but not shopping therapy). Good gravy was the local PriceSmart packed. And it’s been like that since Xmas. I think it has become the common hub for all the apartment blocks going up around here (like the one I am sitting in right now) and that’s straining it to its limits.

And mine. My anxiety was peaking into the red zone due to the population pressure. I am not eager to return. It’s the closest one to us, and it’s more or less on the way back from therapy, but oy. I can’t hack that kind of crowding. That’s why I had to stop going to furry meetups. They got too crowded and my anxiety buried the needle and I ended up spending all my time squished into a corner of the balcony where I knew there could only ever been a person on one side of me.

And even then, I would get super anxious when there was more then a couple other people on the balcony. God, mental illness sucks. Part of me was having a great time, and really enjoying the success of this thing I put together (namely the local furry community). But my craziness had the upper hand.

In therapy today, I told my therapist about how it seemed like there was this vast lake of anxiety within me lurking just below the surface of my emotions, and no matter how calm I think I feel, it can come bubbling up to the surface at any moment.

It’s that anxiety that drives my self-destructive need to escape all the time. It’s what powers this freak-out panic reaction to even the smallest of things. It’s like this vast reservoir of carbonated liquid at high pressure, and the only way to keep it from releasing all the anxiety gas dissolved in it is to stay very, very still.

And that’s no way to lead your life.

So the problem becomes, basically, how do I drain the lake? How do I get rid of the fucking bubbles? How do I get rid of this massive static charge of anxiety so I can lead something like a normal life.

Well, as normal a life as a weirdo like me can ever have. Maybe a better term would be a “happy, healthy life”. The kind of life I want to live. Whole, sane, strong, happy, secure, filled with warmth and joy and humanity.

Another thing we talked about in therapy is my using my deep well of untapped rage to power my recovery. Being a liberal intellectual type, my therapist could not quite stand to ever wholeheartedly endorse anger. Anger is scary and unpleasant and makes people do bad things! It’s the opposite of the happy fluffy sunshine flavoured world a lot of liberals try to live in.

I wonder if that’s why they come across as so shrill? They often are very, very, angry about things that they really should be angry about, but they can’t quite express it as rage, only outrage, and that’s not the same thing.

What liberals, and me personally, need is the punk rock primal id anarchist impulse to scream “FUCK YOU!” and throw a metaphorical brick. The evilcrazystupid conservatives have no problem with that, but liberals shrink from it.

Outrage leads to complaining. Rage leads to action.

Anyhow, back to me. I see this reservoir of deep, deep rage from all the pain and injustice I have suffered to be like the emergency power supply of the spaceship of my mind. It’s not something to run on forever, but it will provide vitally needed energy to the ship’s engines so I can power out of the dark nebula of my depression and reach the open space of mental health and contact with the Federation.

I may have mixed up my metaphor in there somewhere. Man, I sling those around a lot.

When I need energy and motivation, I can just remember how fucking angry I am at how life has treated me, and scream “KILL THE MACHINE” as I throw myself into battle with the vigor and abandon of an aged Klingon who has decided that today truly is a good day to die.

In a way, what I need to tap into is that primal “NO” that makes the Terrible Twos so terrible. That deep, irrational, non negotiable defiance in protection of self is a key part of people’s psychological defenses, and I feel like I lost mine somewhere, back when my parents were teaching me to be “reasonable”.

Well sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, and your Self, regardless of whether it’s reasonable, logical, sensible, defensible, polite, correct, or even moral, because it’s your own psychological health on the line, and nobody else’s.

Suddenly I understand seemingly completely irrational, angry people who make a huge fuss over something that is not even a big deal. They are, on some level, defending themselves from a threat to their ego.

That doesn’t make them any less of a douchebag. But it does explain it better.

So somewhere between “angry douchebag mad at the world” and “depressed loner who hates himself” lies the way out for me. I’m not entirely averse to producing some extremely angry art. After all, it was punk and metal (and therapy) that got me through high school. I could make some super angry shit.

I just have to get to the point where I truly feel the rage enough to speak up for myself. Not against the world, but against the forces of evil within me who have kept me locked inside a cage in my own mind for decades now.

I mean, the world hasn’t exactly been wonderful for me either, but first things first.

Well I have rambled on for long enough. Time to go eat some lunch then snooze for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s the amount of idea I have of what I want to write in this thing tonight. I actually have negative idea of what to write. As in, if you allowed a normal idea for a blog entry to collide with the amount of idea I have right now, they would both be annihilated in an explosion of thought.

Not a lot on my mind today. I continue to find ways to struggle against my afternoon ennui. Today’s solution was to do my baking at 5 pm instead of 11. That gave me something to look forward to all afternoon.

And that kept things going, more or less. I felt the edges of the pit of depression I tend to fall into every afternoon, but I managed to keep out of it this time.

Although part of me still wants to just lay down and cry. And later on, I probably will.

Crying is amazingly important. And yet we men are raised to see it as a weakness, or at least, a crisis. Like, if we are crying, it must mean something is terribly wrong, like you just lost all feeling in the left side of your body or see blood in your vomit. And this simple bit of machismo is astonishingly crippling because crying is actually a vitally important part of how humans cope with their emotions.

And just like having a runny nose, nobody actually wants to do it, but it serves an important function and things would be a hell of a lot worse if your nose didn’t run.

You’d drown in snot! Trust me, as someone with chronic sinus issues, it’s possible.

And the thing is, men don’t even feel safe crying when they are all alone. A typical man raised in my culture could be ten miles out in the woods in the dead of winter, with no human around for miles around, and still be unable to just break down and cry because of that Inner Male inside of all of us that is just waiting for a “sign of weakness” to pounce and grind out face into the dirt. “Oh, look, the little baby is CRYING!” he sneers.

And while being an openly gay man gives me an out for some of the more homophobic stuff (because I am not worried that someone will think I am gay, like a lot of straight dudes), that’s only part of the whole male paranoia deal.

It’s like we are constantly fighting an inner dominance battle against an invisible opponent. Who is that opponent? Who knows? Maybe it’s a specific person from their past, like a bully, or a parent. Or maybe it’s more like an abstract concept, like “society” or “the universe” or “life”.

But one thing’s for sure : you can never let your guard down for even a moment, because that is when he/they/it will GET you.

And it’s this kind of thing that drives a lot of male insanity. A lot of really aggressive men are responding to a deep and terrible feeling of vulnerability and insecurity that drives them to constantly prove they are the alpha male and that makes them feel being feared is the one way to be safe.

Where women have the Beauty Myth, men have Performance Anxiety. Women think men have it easy because they just have to show up clean and dressed whereas woman have to go through the whole bizarre female grooming marathon.

What women don’t get is that sure, he just has to show up… in an expensive enough car, with enough money to buy her gifts and take her out to fancy restaurants and above all signal that he is an alpha male who can treat her like a queen.

Oh, and he has to have a cool, alpha job, and an apartment that meets the woman’s high status standards, and so that cool job had better pay a lot of money, and oh, lest we forget, while woman with respond with righteous ire if you dare to suggest they conform to any prescribed gender role, the man has to be upright and manly and strong or he’s branded a “wimp” or “loser”.

Now I am not saying these perceptions are actually accurate. They are only as accurate as women feeling like they are fat and ugly and nobody will ever love them because they don’t look like supermodels.

Men have their own gender hell, is what I am saying, and it is just as destructive and unrealistic and corrosive as the one woman live in. It’s different, but it’s just as bad.

There’s been a meme going around about this MIT professor who left a long, heartfelt, anguished comment on some message board on what it is like to be an omega male nerd and why that might make some people like him hate feminism.

It’s not really feminism they hate. It’s women. Feminism merely makes for a good scapegoat, a way to hate women in a way that is cloaked in the far more acceptable form of objecting to an ideology, or a movement.

They hate women in the exact same way that some women hate men, and for a lot of the same reasons. They view the opposite gender as something they can’t help but want but can never had because they are somehow not good enough, as society judges it, and never will be. And this causes incalculable pain to people of both genders.

Because of this, there will always be extremely bitter people of both genders who lash out at their hated opposite via whatever means they have at their disposal. In this day and age, they can do it with the most hurtful words they can think of on all the various fora of the Internet.

Both side have valid points, but then ruin those points by using them as a cudgel to beat on each other.

The only way out is to just plain stop making blanket statements about any group.

That’s part of what humanism is all about. We are people, not labels.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know what I am talking about. The sleepiness thing.

Ended up sleeping a lot, but it was not the good, healthy, relaxing, restorative kind of sleep. It was the harrowing, uncomfortable, tortuous kind of sleep that leaves me feeling like I have run a marathon while sustaining a heavy beating.

And so, in a small way, I decided to fight back. I got up and moved around a little, and that made me feel a little better. But I still ended up feeling really depressed this afternoon.

So evidently, the problem is not yet solved. I am not surprised, and that is not just the depression talking, it’s science. A small change in Paxil dosage would take a lot longer than a few days to have any major effect.

That said, that leaves me wondering what I did right that had me feeling better for a few days.

Well, what did I do lately that was unusual? Easy… I went out on Sunday to pick up my meds. And I had lunch at White Spot. These two things helped make me feel more together and adult and capable, as well as getting me a little exercise and lots of fresh air. That is probably what did it.

So why don’t I do that more often? That’s the million dollar question right there.

Part of it is money. I have had it financially rough this month, and while the GST refund cheque was an enormous help, I still feel shaken and it is making me all weird about money again.

For a while there, I was making progress in giving myself permission to go do something fun now and then, even if it costs $. But that was when I was feeling more prosperous. The financial shocks of the last month have left me feeling vulnerable and helpless and poor again, and that makes me go into Scrooge mode, or at least, my variant of it.

I’ve always identified with ol’ Ebeneezer.

So the fact that I did something that wasn’t “necessary” while I was out there also probably helped my mood. You need to have joy in your life. Pleasure. Fun. Something to look forward to. Mere survival is never enough.

But walking out that door doesn’t have to mean spending money. I know this. There is no reason why I couldn’t just go for a short walk around the block, or go window-shopping in Richmond Center, or just go explore via the Skytrain, once I get my bus pass renewed for this year.

That’s another thing tugging my mood downwards, financially speaking. Having to come up with the $45 for my yearly bus pass. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful as hell that I get this amazing deal on mass transit. $45 a year? That’s $3.75 a month for unlimited access to the entire transit system. Not frigging bad.

But you still have to be able to pull it together. Cashflow knows no mercy for the poor. You have to have it to spend it.

It’s not that big of a deal, realistically speaking. I have $115 now. Take $45 out of that and I still have $70. That’s enough to get me through the next week no problemo.

And yet, it feels like this big burden. It’s ironic, I have all this excellent mental hardware for handling money. I am not afraid of numbers, I have an intuitive understanding of finances, I have a good mind for the kind of calculating thinking required for that kind of thing. I am good at logical thinking.

But none of that is a sure fire method for overcoming a disordered mental state and distorted emotional reasoning. I know exactly how little a problem it is. And yet, the feeling of it being a huge burden remains.

Thus we see the limitations of using rationality to conquer one’s emotions. No matter how logical you think you are, in the end, the emotions always win. We are emotional beings who can use logic, not vice versa. You either deal with your emotions or become their slave. Even reason must negotiate.

This is, I suppose, the long lesson that I am learning : to deal with my emotions, to be emotional, to remove the straitjacket of supposed rationality and reasonableness from my starved and sensitive soul and just allow myself permission to be human and fallible and unreasonable and emotional and alive.

I can say all I want about knowing that emotion is king, but to truly take that step into the darkness requires a faith in the universe that I have never had in my emotional repertoire. The idea of just trusting that you will be okay when you can’t use your massive mental machine to know you will be okay is still utterly alien to me.

I can only remind myself that most of humanity does not life within this cage of reason and gets along just fine. They have that faith in the universe I lack, and that does not mean they are constantly suffering from preventable traumas. The world is not nearly as treacherous and harsh as I think it is… that’s the disease talking.

Those people with faith they will be okay when they clearly lack sufficient evidence for such a conclusion are not broken. They are the healthy ones. The happy ones. I should be striving to be more like them, or at least, learn their lessons.

I’ve spent too much time as a somewhat smug and superior outsider to be able to hack actually trying to be normal. Ick.

It all devolves back to that fundamental sense of security variable that is set in childhood and is seemingly constant after that. All the traumas of my childhood, the sexual abuse, the bullying, the parental neglect… all that left me with a shattered sense of safety, and in the wake of that shattering, I developed this over-reliance on what I did have, namely an excellent brain and a highly flexible yet strong set of logical tools for discovering the truth.

But as powerful as it seems, that kind of think is a lousy substitute for actual emotional development.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I would never in a billion years be bold enough to actually do this, but it’s a nice little fantasy scenario and I thought I would share it with all you nice people tonight.

OK, picture this : In this scenario, I know exactly where a very hot sketch comedy show is produced. It’s exactly the kind of show that I would give the majority of my limbs to work for, and it’s produced here in the GVRD.

First step is that I manage to get my greedy paws on a highly believable UPS outfit, complete with hat. I dress the part, do a little tune up practice to make sure I look comfortable in the part, and then launch my audacious plan.

I show up in UPS mode, give the receptionist my best “friendly harmless guy” smile, and say “I’ve got a deliver for… ” I then look at the package, “the…. writer’s room?”

Once directed there, I leave my lovingly prepared package on the table, and exit. Action now moves to the package.

The writers discover my package the next time they are together. It smells amazingly good, so they open it immediately. Inside they find six delicious home-made cookies (hence the smell) and a cover letter that says “Here’s the scripts you wanted” and it’s signed “MJ” in the jaunty style of someone who signs a lot of things all the time.

Under the cover letter is, of course, six copies of a script comprised of five mind-blowingly hilarious sketches that I have written then honed to a laser-like sharpness that makes the laugh per letter ration bury the needle and then snap it.

The first one, in fact, starts with a bunch of writers eating cookies while reading a script.

Writer 1 : Wow! These are the funniest skits I have ever seen!

Write 2 : I agree! This guy would make a very valuable yet nonthreatening addition to our writing staff!”

Writer 1 : Totally… and with this kind of talent, if we don’t snap him up soon, surely someone else will!

Writer 2 : I hadn’t even thought of that! Quick, we must storm into the producer’s office and demand this amazingly talented and hilarious person immediately, threatening to quit if necessary!

(Writer 1 and Writer 2 exit. )

Writer 3 : I sure hope those guys succeed, because I really love these skits… especially that one that starts…

And that would then segue into my first actual skit.

This would really get their attention, and one or more of them would contact me just to see what kind of ballsy lunatic would attempt a stunt like this. (Obviously, I would put my contact info on the scripts and cover letter. )

when they contact me, say by the phone, I would be ready to wow them with what a cool, funny, hip, easy to get along with guy I am, and they would leave thinking that maybe this guy really would be great to have around.

So one by one, each one thinking they were the only one (because none of them want to admit to the others that this crazy stunt of mine has worked on them), they each contact the producer of their show about me and suggest that maybe he or she should contact me, at least for a laugh.

That is what gets me The Meeting with the producer(s), and I would would introduce myself at said meeting like this :

“Now I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking ‘Who the hell does this smug asshole think he is?’. Well I will tell you who I am. I’m the funniest motherfucker you will ever have security throw out. I’m a hilarious writer, a totally dedicated professional, a charmingly humble self-advocate, and one heck of a nice guy to boot. Your writers have already shown you my work, or I wouldn’t be here, so you know that I’m funny. The little stunt I pulled in order to get your attention proves that I am bold and creative. And your writers already know I can, and will, bake amazingly good cookies and take them to work. And all I am asking for is a seat at the table. Give me a chance, and I will make your show even funnier than it already is. And the best part is, I work cheap. So what do you think? I’ve already given you one heck of a story to tell your friends. Are you ready to give me a job in return?”

They would, of course, be bowled over by my charm, wit, audacity, and baking prowess, and immediately hire me on a long term contact at a handsome salary with lots of neat little perks, like a car and driver.

Even better, word of my crazy stunt ends up on the Internet and I go totally viral, with people wanting interviews with me all over the world, thus both making me famous and instantly demonstrating my worth to my new employer.

All my interviews would make me an instant media darling, and various culture scouts would come sniffing around seeing if there is anything else with my name attached to it that they can sell.

I would vet them scrupulously, of course, because I wouldn’t want to cheapen my brand. But there’s nothing to say that I couldn’t sell them some of my hilarious writings to put into a book, and allow some of my pithier sayings to be put on swag like coffee cups, posters, souvenir maps, and so on.

As my fame grew, it would become obvious that I am not just hilarious and charming, but also blazingly intelligent and insightful, and over the next two decades, I would become a household name, a beloved media figure, and universally lauded as a once-in-a-century talent that has helped the world become a happier, healthier, more humane place through laughter.

Eventually, I use my growing fortune to bankroll a vast, Disney-like media empire, as well as establish dozens of highly influential non-profit groups that grow to touch and improve the lives of all.

And when I die, the world mourns.

Hey, it’s a fantasy…. might as well go all the way!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.