Meant to write this yesterday, but a story happened instead.

Here I am, back from VancouFur 2015. I had an awesome time. Went to a ton of panels, got to do the hotel thing, saw people I know, hung out in furry town for 4 days, it was fab.

Tonight, I am going to give you nice people the quick and dirty version of a con report so I can put down these memories while they are (relatively) fresh.

So tonight, I will do the panels I went to. Tomorrow, more general impressions and anecdotes.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Only did one panel. Programming didn’t start till 6:30. This was the “landing” day, for people to get to the hotel, get registered, unpack their stuff, and basically get ready for the mayhem.

7:00 PM : Writer’s Meet and Greet. Very informal, just Tony GreyFox and a bunch of us writer wannabees shooting the breeze. But writers love to talk to other writers. There is a shared understanding, a mutual vibe to writers that is hard to define. Obviously, we’re all super verbal people with a strong urge to communicate, but below that, there’s something else. Maybe we all share a “storyteller” gene. Who knows. Anyhow, enjoyed the heck out of it. There should be more events in life where writers get together to just hang out and talk without anything like criticism entering into it.

Friday, March 6, 2015

The first full day of programming. I was revved up and eager to go.

12 noon : General Anxiety Group. Appropriately, I was 15 minutes late for this panel, and therefore had to convince myself that it was okay to arrive late and that it would not mean that everyone would stare at me and hate me when I came in. It was a great panel, with a lot of us anxious/depressed types getting a chance to tell out stories to people who totally understood. The main leader of the panel was a hyper/anxious type (as opposed to the sluggish/anxious, like me) and I found her honesty and manic energy quite refreshing. Near the end, she was beginning to obsess over whether the panel had helped anybody and whether it had been worth doing and so forth, so I made a point of stopping her panic cycle by breaking in, then asking the audience “Do you think she did a really good job today?” and they all said yes and cheered and applauded for her.

It’s when I can make moments like that I feel like I might be just a little bit magic.

1 pm : Flash Fiction Panel. I was not pleased with this panel. The host showed up without pens or paper for us, which you would think would be the most basic and obvious requirements, and if there had not been someone with a pad of foolscap and a plethora of pens in the audience, we would have been doomed. Plus, it was in the cleverly titled “Secret Room”, otherwise known as the hotel’s garage, where it was cold, dusty, and prone to vehicles driving in and out as we tried to write.

I am totally not making that up.

As to the actual flashing of our fictions, I took a bit of a hammering on my writer’s ego because I thought I was going to just blow everyone away, but I had forgotten that I am not good at being brief, and therefore not good at being fast. Plus I feel compelled to finish everything I start, so when the timer ran out, I was compelled to cheat and keep going for a little while. And then we had to read the thing out, and that’s a whole other set of variables.

Luckily, it turned out not to be a contest at all, so nobody judged my hasty work. We just read our stuff out loud and people either got it or didn’t.

I did the first story on paper, but the other two or three on my tablet. I might post them here at some point.

3 pm : Writing In 3d : It’s Showtime Had no idea what this was before I went to it, but it had writing in the title, so show up I did. Turned out to be a long and somewhat tortuous discussion of the difference between “showing” and “telling” in writing. I can’t say I learned much, but that has mostly to do with my being 41 and knowing all about the subject already. Plus, it kind of lacked focus and drive, and the older I get, the crankier I get about getting to the goddamned point.

4 pm : Self Publishing For Beginners. I’ve been to a half dozen of those kinds of panels, so it is debatable whether I am a beginner any more, but still. Picked up some leads as to where to go should I ever start writing furry fiction. Dare I unite the two worlds I live in?

I dunno. Maybe.

After this, there was nothing I wanted to attend until….

10 pm : Bad Movie Night. Obviously I just had to attend this one. Every time me and my friends get together, it’s Bad Movie Night! It was, unsurprisingly, mostly MST3K/Rifftrax content. We watched a bunch of shorts, including a fave of mine Jimmy Goes To The Fair, and a movie called The Rebel Set, which I must have seen before but didn’t remember. It was actually a heist film, and a half-decent one even without the MST3K treatment. Had a very compelling and sexy guy as the criminal mastermind who turns out to be the villain.

We also watched a short produced by the City of Montreal in 1948 about all the playgrounds they were building for all the children of Montreal. It gave me a heavy dose of what I will call pre-nostalgia, nostalgia for a time before you were born. It was so full of optimism and benevolence and a sense of making the world a better place for future generations! And a sense of the best kind of order, the kind that supports and protects people so they can live their lives without fear in a saner, safer, more comfortable, more affluent future.

Compared to today, when people are so shortsighted they can’t even see the point of government, that 1948 seems like heaven.

Saturday and Sunday will be covered next entry.

And of course, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wrote this on Facebook last night :

To all the misogynists turning “nice guy” into a dirty word, here are some suggested alternatives to get the same idea across :
1. Relatively inoffensive
2. Not particularly evil
3. Not quite as bad as I could be
4. Comparatively fairly okay
5. The good kind of mediocre
6. Not actively harmful
7. Less toxic than some
8. Helpful if it’s not too much work
9. Hotness minus testosterone
And finally, our number 10…
10. Hey, you could do worse!

And I am proud of it. That’s some sharp comedy writing. I should do that kind of thing more often. Then again, there’s a fucklot of things that I should do more often, and I don’t do any of them.

Anyhow, it gave me the idea of seeing what other gems there are in my Facebook posts.

There is this one :

To all the thinkers of the world : beware the time (and it will come) when you begin to shun that which causes doubt.

How aphoristic! You can tell I have been reading Nietzsche.

Anyhow, as my faithful readers, you already know about my theory of conservatism as being basically the ideology of convince people that things really are as simple and straightforward as they can handle. Its message is “Good news! There’s nothing you don’t understand! Everything about the world is so simple and straightforward that you don’t even have to think in order to understand it. Just go with your gut (in other words, your emotions) and everything will be just fine. And absolutely everyone who says different is an evil lying degenerate villain whose sole goal is to hurt you and your family. ”

It’s ideology for people who don’t like thinking, can’t stand doubt, and thus who need all the crusts cut off their milquetoast before they can digest it.

And that’s what the above quote is about. At a certain point, as our minds lose elasticity just like our bodies do with age, we will begin to resent anything that forces us into a state of doubt and thus requires the kind of high level thinking that we just do not feel up to any more.

Because we’re tired.

And that is the exact point where even lively intellectuals like myself start to turn into static minded conservative fossils. You don’t have the energy or the mental maneuverability to change your mind about things. It starts off with a few little things, like whether Pluto is a planet or a new host on your favorite game show, but little by little, more of the mind calcifies, and eventually you can’t change your mind about anything.

Now I don’t want to make this sound too dire. That’s not the only possible outcome. There’s lots of evidence that keeping mentally active keeps your brain from getting too stiff, so there is hope for us all.

But already, I feel it happening in my own mind. The urge to greet things which conflict with what I already know with a sneer and a “fuck you, leave me alone!” is within my mind, and growing.

Conflicting information causes pain in your stiff old mind, and you instinctively want to fight it in order to make it GO AWAY and stop hurting you.

Reason does not enter into the picture. Is the new information true? Who cares, it hurts.

Another recent post :

I don’t know who you are and have only a vague idea what you do, Grammy Award Winner Joe Bonnamasa, but thanks to your enormous Youtube buy, I now hate you.

Trust me, I did not get to that point overnight. But seriously, this YouTube ad for some concert of his at the Queen Elizabeth Theater has played before 90 percent of the videos I have watched for more than a week, and I am really fucking sick of it.

So by making such an enormous ad buy that I saw his ad a zillion times, his people have made me hate a guy I know nothing about. Doesn’t matter. I hear the name and have a deep down GRRR reaction.

Fuck you, Joe. Fuck you sideways with a baseball bat.

I also responded to this image :

… by saying this :

See this, you billionaire bastards? THIS is the ground trembling beneath your feet. Raising wages for your low end people is *cool* now. That means the people doing it will become socially dominant over you. Soon, you will become an embarrassment and your peers will distance themselves from you like you had the plague. After that, you will be about as welcome at the fancy to-do’s that make up so much of your life as a Nazi pedophile. THIS IS YOUR HELL.

And looking back on it now, I have to say, that’s some powerful language. Maybe being someone who is desperate to be heard really does make one into a writer.

Or in the case of the above, a firebrand reformer like Martin Luther, who is a hero of mine. I would love to nail my critiques somewhere everyone would read them. Civilization is under threat from these billionaire bastards. They bribed the gatekeepers and now they are looting the palace. Someone has to stop them, and I am more than willing to be that person. If, like Luther, I can stir people to action with my words, I would be willing to be the lightning rod for that revolution.

The problem with lightning rods, of course, is that you have to put them in a very high place in order to attract the thunderbolts. And I, as of this writing, am a subterranean creature, well below even the floor of society, and the only way for someone to find me is with a pick and shovel.

And there is always the issue of making choices. If I choose “firebrand”, then I give up on “comedy writer”, “science fiction writer”, “comedian”, and so many more.

My closet contains many hats, most of them seldom worn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Other than that, not sure.

Coming to you earlier than usual because of things.

Right now I feel very cold inside. Especially in the middle of my chest. God I hope I am not developing heart problems. (Hello, hypochondria. It’s been a while. ) Both my weight and my radically untreated sleep apnea can lead to heart problems once you hit middle age territory, so it’s not out of the question. My blood pressure and cholesterol are good, so at least those risk factors are not active. But I am still very worried.

You see, I have been having…. oxygen issues lately. There are times when I have trouble breathing and times when I feel very weak. Usually, the solution to both conditions is to deliberately empty out my lungs so that the used air which seems to accumulate in the bottom of my lungs is expelled, and good clean air can replace it.

So maybe I am suffering from sleep apnea related lung damage. I only recently learned that damage from sleep apnea can accumulate in your lungs and reduce lung capacity. I don’t know if that’s permanent or not. But I could not stand to live in a future where I have tubes down my throat 24/7.

They would have to keep me knocked out, or I would kill myself.

Today was a therapy day (surprise!) because my therapist will be out of town come Thursday, so it was Tuesday or nothing.

Works out perfectly, because I also will be going out of town come Thursday. As you all know, I will be going to Vancoufur come Thursday, and I am pretty excited about it.

Not just for the convention, but just the chance to escape my life for four days. Being semi-agoraphobic, I don’t exactly get many changes in scenery, and it will be nice to stay in a good hotel room with fresh bedding and hopefully an excellent AC for a while. A chance to spend some time somewhere a little more civilized than the bedlam I tend to live in.

I have a taste for order, cleanliness, and neatness. I just don’t seem to be able to provide it for myself yet.

Therapy was meh. Not a great session. Mostly, I talked, and while I love to talk, I can talk for hours and hours about my bulging bouquet of neuroses and nothing really gets done except for a little catharsis. I need some pushback in order for therapy to be worthwhile, and today, my therapist did not have much that was useful to say.

These things happen.

Then again, I was in a somewhat sorry state myself. See, last night I made a teensy weensy mistake.

I took my sleeping pills twice. (That is to say, I took the required pills then took a different, identical set of pills later. Taking the exact same pills twice would have to involve something extremely disgusting. )

And at first, I was pretty scared. Who knows what that could do to me? And with me having therapy the next day! I pictured myself sleeping to a coma-like level of deepness for like, a day, and missing therapy entirely.

Of course, that did not happen. In fact, I barely noticed any difference from a single dose at all. I was a little sleepier than usual at therapy, and it took a little more energy to get out of bad than usual.

But as someone who regularly has days where he is sleepy as hell, I guess I have developed a resistance.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I thought something big and dramatic and possibly quite trippy was going to happen, and instead, it was business as usual.

About that resistance, though : I have joked before about thinking I only got the mentally overactive part of ADHD.

But looking back on my life, I don’t think I have ever been all that good at sleeping. Even as a child I would wake up in the middle of the night either scared or cold, and it would take me a while to get back to sleep.

And as such, I think I had to get really good at keeping myself awake. Maybe too good, because I started having a hard time turning that off at the end of the day.

And according to one theory of ADHD, the problem is that the brains of ADHD sufferers do not produce enough of a keep-awake brain chemical to actually keep themselves awake, and so they have to develop a deep habit of constantly stimulating themselve with fevered activity or they will fall asleep.

No wonder so many of them say that forced inactivity makes them feel like they are dying. In a sense, they are.

Turning now to my steady diet of mental stimulation, I can’t help but wonder if something similar is going on. Certainly the worst times in class for me were the times when I was sleepy and had to keep myself by sheer force of will.

Actually, those situations are hell for me no matter when or where they happen. Makes me afraid to go too far from my bed, because what if I suddenly need to nap?

And that does happen.

So in the big picture, I really wonder if I have ever had what you would call normal, restful sleep. I think something went fundamentally wrong during that period where you learn to sleep through the night, and I have been living with that for at the very least all of my life that I can remember.

So maybe me and that prick Mister Sandman have never really gotten along. And that makes me wonder what effect that had on my life. Have I been sleepy all the time, and never known it?

And how, with the high level of mental stimulation available to me 24/7, would I be able to tell?

Actually stop doing anything to stimulate my mind and see what happens?

But that would be so BORING!

It would feel like dying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I had to call it something.

Once again, I have no idea what to write. Or rather, I have a ton of ideas but none of them will sit still long enough for me to write them down, so I am, alas, adrift.

I know, I’ll talk about Nietzsche.

I’ve been rereading my Portable Nietzsche for the n+1nth time. I love that long dead crazy son of a bitch. Some of what he said was brilliant, some of it was barely more than articulate gibberish, and a lot of it lay somewhere in between.

But all of it carries this magnificence to it that I find irresistible. Even his craziest scribblings radiate a powerful aura of confidence and fearless uniqueness, the courage of the iconoclast, and I love him for it. His work is ferociously independent and carries with it the impression of a emperor of thought.

He was, of course, anything but regal in reality. He was a frail, stooped, mild fellow who was nearly blind. He lived in a tiny freezing garret with a stove that did not work, and he suffered from a whole host of ailments, such as digestion issues, a weak heart, and above all insomnia, for which he took a bewildering assortment of what passed for medicines back then.

He took all his meals at the commissary of the small German university where he worked, and people found him to be soft spoken, slow moving, and so incredibly polite it was almost painful. When conversation was required, he spoke of bland inoffensive things like the weather, but for the most part, he kept to himself.

Most of the time, he was alone in his garret. He spent most of his days tormented by his various illnessed and wracked with pain. Everything he wrote, he wrote in those precious hours when his illnesses have him peace.

And that, I think, is the key to understanding Nietzsche. I have known the endorphin mania that comes from being suddenly free from pain after a long bout of suffering, and it is amazing. The pain you suffered had caused your body to release tons and tons of endorphins (from the planet Endor) and when the pain stop, the endorphins are still there, so you are high as a kite and feel like the universe is full of boundless opportunities and you can do anything.

Like all such highs, it’s fun but also frightening because part of your mind knows that things are getting out of control and you are, metaphorically speaking, strapped to the front of a speeding locomotive.

And this manic state is when Nietzsche wrote! That explains all the arrogance and self-confidence and grandiose language. He was tripping balls on endorphins the whole time! He might as well have written after a dozen rails of cocaine.

One thing I noticed this time through the biography section of the book that I hadn’t noticed before was that Nietzsche and I have something in common : we both write it then forget it. No editing. Admittedly, he had the excuse that he was writing with quill and ink in dim light and had such poor eyesight that he could barely read what he’d written, whereas I am writing on a computer in a way that makes editing something the easiest it has ever been, but still.

Makes me wonder what his penmanship was like.

The other thing that Nietzsche and I have in common is writing from a place of deep isolation. My isolation is nowhere as profound as his was, but there is real isolation and there is internal isolation, and I have a poisonously large dose of the latter. I have been internally isolated for almost my entire life. It’s very hard for anyone to truly reach me. Sometimes I wonder if even the heat and power of true love could ever warm this lonely planet of mine.

And so I think we both lived mostly inside our own heads, in the world of words and ideas and thoughts, and that with the both of us, there is a deep urge to use our words to write our name on the sky in flaming letters of blood and iron in order to say to the world “I am alive and a powerful force to be reckoned with! I will force you to DEAL WITH ME!”

Maybe all iconoclasts are really just acting out. Who knows.

Of course, my work isn’t like his because I am not writing while high as fuck and I am not quite as cut off from the human sphere as he was. But I have seriously considered doing my own Zarathustra project. A novel where a central character expresses and encounters my deep philosophy.

Who knows. writing it might be a profound form of therapy. In a novel, you can really let your imagination run wild. Whatever images, characters, themes, concepts, or anything else you need, you can create.

Make it a philosophical novel, that is one created expressly to be metaphorical, imagistic, and as surreal as it needs to be, and the door is open even wider.

I even have a protagonist in mind ; the Space Angel, an alien creature who comes to Earth and has to figure out what this thing called a “human being” is all about. She is a very caring and gentle kind of alien (hence the Angel part) and has the power to travel anywhere on Earth in an eyeblink (she crossed between stars just to get here) and she is immortal and free from the need to eat, mate, or so on.

She is a being of pure thought and emotion (er, energy) , and she is going to encounter humanity. I almost feel sorry for her.

Look for her in this space. If I ever do my Zarathustra, it will be here.

Because honestly, who would buy that kind of thing? Certainly not traditional publishers.

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

Been a while since I shared my Netflix viewing with you nice people (I know, you were waiting with bated breath) so tonight’s entry is a sort of summary.

1. Danger 5

I’m starting off with this one because it’s the hardest one to explain and modern pop psychology insists that doing the hardest/most dreaded thing first is the route to success.

Kind of like doing the hardest question on the exam first.

Anyhow, Danger 5 is a crazy little show coming out of South Australia that is a high density parody of the type of 60’s spy show that had a team of heroes from all over the world working together to do awesome super spy stuff. It is the same era that gave us Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, and all the other Supermarionation shows, and it is done in much the same style, only with people.

The show works on a bunch of levels all working at the same time. First, to pump up the awesome factor to suitably ridiculous levels, despite its 60’s style, it is somehow also set during World War 2, and so their enemies are Hitler and his Nazis.

Also, they take the multi-ethnic team thing to extremely by having characters who simply speak their native language (with subtitles, of course) and everyone understands one another anyway.

Anyhow, I can’t really do the show justice, it would be like trying to explain what is so great about the Simpsons. All I can do is recommend it to you.

If you have Netflix, the first season is already there. Watch it, and let it amuse, amaze, and entertain you.

2. The Institute

It’s a documentary about this big social experiment/alternative reality game/cult that started in 1960’s San Francisco. People would get a mysterious invitation to something called the JeJune Institute, located in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. When they get there, it looks like a completely normal financial industry office. They mention JeJune Institute, and are led to an unremarkable room where they watch a presentation from the group’s founder.

From there, it leads to secret rooms, surreal scavenger hunts with secret signs and bizarre symbols, mysterious clues about the fate of a little girl named Eva, secret radio channels that declare the JeJune Institute to be evil, and other good stuff.

And I was enthralled. This seemed to me like exactly the kind of grand, intricate, imaginative fiction that I would love to create for other people to play in. I had enormous admiration for the people who set it up and woven in so many stimulating details and given the whole thing this air of mystery and transcendence.

And then, two-thirds of the way in, I realized the whole thing was fake, none of this ever really happened, and the movie was the real fiction. And that made me very depressed.

They had me thinking the world was a more wonderful place that I had ever known for a while. Then, poof, gone.

Needless to say. I stopped watching at that point. And I sincerely hate the people who made it.

I don’t care if that’s fair.

3. Cloud Atlas

Six story lines which sort of intersect but not really.

That isn’t too important though because they are all fairly interesting and extremely well made. All the stars play multiple roles, which is always fun.

Especially tasty is seeing Tom Hanks play a person who seems to be one character’s best friend, a doctor who agrees to treat the other main character for that plotline for a terrible tropical disease. The treatment involves giving said character’s regular sips of a yellowish liquid.

Later in the movie, it turns out that Tom Hanks is actually poisoning his patient, and he becomes this chortling, drooling, greedy, Dickensian villain. The classic “demon in gentleman’s clothes”.

And that’s delightfully unexpected in Tom Hanks.

Two of the plotlines are science fiction, although one’s post-apocalyptic, so fuck it.

It did, however, give an answer to something I had wondered for a long time. If a future version of English is well thought out, consistent, plausible, and delivered like natural language, is it still really fucking annoying?

The answer is : oh God yes.

And the endings for all the plotlines are incredibly corny. I am used to not being satisfied with the endings for a lot of things, but to have six crappy endings in a row is rather trying.

Still, overall, I enjoyed the movie. The artistry that went into alone was worth my time.

4. The Terminator (partial)

I am finally watching the original Terminator again. This is only my second time seeing it, and the last time was around 1988, so my memory of it had grown threadbare to the point of nonexistence. The more I watch of it, the more I realized I had forgotten about it.

Part of the problem is the simple factor that memories, especially ones without a lot of emotions attached, decay over time.

But another part of it is that I have seen Terminator 2 like eight times. Therefore, it is a much stronger memory than the one time I saw the original, when I was barely paying attention anyhow.

Watching it this time, my strongest impression is : THIS IS THE EIGHTIES. Everything about the movie seems like a blueprint for all the 80’s action movies that came after it.

The style, the pacing, the editing, the sometimes extraordinary camera angles… everything.

Including the often annoying LOUD INTENSE ACTION soft quiet conversation OH NO MORE ACTION formula. Like action porn and theyt are alternating between high intensity sex and soft quiet refractory periods.

Of course, it’s really hard to keep what we all know now from influencing your viewing. For me, the movie comes off as a prequel to T2 now.

When they first showed Doctor Silberman, I practically leaped from my seat and growled at him. HATE. HIM. SO. MUCH.

Like, approaching Kai Winn levels of hate, and I pretty much maximum hate her. I am not capable of more hate.

Well, that’s what I have been watching lately.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.