First, last night’s video :

I think I’m really onto something with that accelerated pace. The content is meh but the style might just perk up my talker videos a bunch.

Reminds me of old Walter Winchell, that WWII era Rush Limbaugh. The story goes that he would drink lots of water before each broadcast so that his bladder would be very full when he entered the booth, and of course, he couldn’t go to the bathroom until he was done.

Hence his famous sense of urgency. Story’s probably bullshit, but it’s still amusing.

Feeling pretty sleepy today. Or rather, right now. Odds are that by the time I finish this thing, I will have perked up. But I will give myself the chance for a nap anyhow.

Not sure what I will do for today’s vid. Music, maybe.

I’ve become addicted to listening to podcasts while playing Picross. It gets me in “the zone” so nicely. You know, that awesome mental space where you are fully occupied and hence too absorbed to be self-conscious or distracted. It’s a rare thing for me, as I have a lot of consciousness to occupy. But this combo seems to work nicely, at least for now.

Part of me is still restless, though. And that’s a good thing. I will encourage this feeling of wanting more. Restlessness is the opposite of false contentment, and I need as much of that as I can get my metaphorical hands on.

It’s a false sense of being content because that emotion is supposed to come from everything being okay, not from fooling yourself into pretending everything is okay by shutting out the entire universe except for the few things which are purely mental enough to be acceptable.

I have been stewing in my own juices because of this wretched contentment for my entire fucking adult life, and it’s left me miserable and deeply pent up. I got stuck at the threshold to psychological adolescence and it will take a lot of restless energy to get this wagon train moving again.

I have a lot of ego development to do, and not a huge amount of time to do it in. Not if I want to build a life while I am still alive and my diseases haven’t caught up to me yet.

Which brings me back to that question of how to be a teenager thirty years too late. As this process of resurrection continues, I can feel an urge to cop a major fucking attitude growing in me. To wit :

The world can go fuck itself. I am me, and that’s it. If you don’t like it, that’s too fucking bad. The world is going to make room for me even if I have to shoulder the crowd aside to make a space for myself. I will bash through the walls around me (they’re only gyp-rock and cheap lumber anyhow) with a sledgehammer made of solidified rage, backed by all the things I am supposed to have by now but don’t.

I deserved a better childhood. I deserved to have a family that accepted me warmly and made me feel included in everything. I deserved to be trusted with responsibility long enough to learned how to do it right, instead of having things snatched from my hands the moment I screwed up. I deserved to be treated with respect, and to have my needs valued and met, instead of devalued and ignored. I deserved to be treated like part of the family, and not like an unwelcome house guest, or a pet that they bought when it was cute but now it’s full grown and they’ve grown tired of it.

Maybe they should have just put me in a shelter and be done with me. Or had me put down.

I also deserved a school system that actually stood up for the safety of its students, instead of sitting idly by while I was tormented, beaten, bullied, and abused on a routine basis. I deserved teachers willing to lay down the law and punish the people who bullied me. I deserved a school system that could handle me, complexities and all. It’s not my fault that I was born the way I am, brain the size of a planet and full of contradiction. I deserved a school system that actually kept me challenged instead of just leaving me bored. One that engaged me instead of alienating me.

I deserved a school system that could handle me. I was just a kid. I couldn’t do these things for myself.

I deserved parents who were there for me when I needed them. Who would listen to me when I had something to say. Parents who encouraged me to speak up for myself, instead of acting like they were surprised I was still around when I tried to bring up the bullying or anything else I might need. I deserved parents that treated me with equal love and care as my three siblings, instead of neglecting me to the point of not even getting me braces when the dentist told them, very clearly, that I needed them bad.

My two sisters got braces when they needed them. But not me.

I deserved parents who were willing to make sacrifices for me, rather than of me. Sacrifices of their time, their energy, their money, their comfort. It should have never been exclusively my job to fit myself into their world in the hopes of getting even a tiny glimmer of attention.

I deserved a society that could figure out that I was very sick when I was a kid. I was depressed even back then, and not mentally stable at all, and I desperately needed help. It was up to all the adults in my life to see this and help me. I certainl couldn’t do it myself.

I was just a kid!

I deserved all this and probably a lot more when I was a kid.

The question is, what do I deserve now?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I listened to a fascinating and engrossing podcast today about a lady named Paige.

Paige has a highly unusual gender issue. It’s entirely unlike the typical gender dysphoria with which people are familiar. You see, for years, Page felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body…. but only some of the time.

The rest of the time, she felt entirely biologically male. And the worst part was, she would flip between gender identities at random. One moment she’s comfortably male. The next, her male body disgusts her so much, it makes her throw up.

This, needless to say, made life pretty stressful. Especially after she got married.

Luckily, after some very terrible years in which she felt like she was going out of her mind and could find absolutely no help in the world, only people who doubted what she was talking about was really happening, she went on estrogen therapy and is a lady pretty much full time now, with only the occasional relapse.

She has also become part of some brain-gender studies and through websites for bi-gendered people has learned that there are other people out there who have had the same problem.

It is an extraordinary case. I can see why so many people doubted it was real (including some gender researchers, who should know better) because it sounds impossible. You either have one brain gender identity or the other. You can’t flip between the two any more than you can change your eye color.

But I make it a rule to never ever tell someone what they experience is not real. They experienced it, it’s real to them. Calling it unreal makes no sense whatsoever. Their explanation for their experience might not make sense or be supported by evidence, but the experience itself is real, and unquestionably so.

So you can quibble about whether this is just an unusual presentation of gender dysphoria or whether Paige is actually just mentally ill or other such trivia, but don’t say what happened to her was not real.

Even things that only exist in your imagination nevertheless exist.

My feeling is that her experience stemmed from an unusual sensitivity to hormone levels. The gender flips came from random fluctuations in hormone levels that in most people are not even noticed. Atypical sensitivities to hormone fluctuations have been know to occur in small numbers throughout the human population. This could be that.

The fact that estrogen therapy smoothed her out into female mode supports this theory, at least partially.

However, we have to face the fact that she may, in fact, have been crazy for a while. She described getting surges of typical M2F gender dysphoria when she was a teenager and young adult. It could be that her mind was fighting a pitched battle against these surges of gender confusion, and when the female side was winning, she felt female, and when the male side won out, she felt male.

And, of course, it could be both at the same time.

Myself, I found myself identifying with Paige’s problems with being between categories. As my loyal readers know, I have my own gender issues, and I don’t think there’s a category for me except perhaps “pan-gendered”.

Yes folks, even ‘bi-gendered’ is too much of a commitment.

Yet I found myself identifying with Paige. In particular, I feel like I would have an experience similar to Paige’s if I felt like I had to be one or the other all the time. I can well imagine myself going through spates of feeling very female and femmey, then that part of me sort of tiring itself out and I would revert back to male for a while.

I can also imagine external stimuli bring out the man or woman in me. Heck, just change the topic of conversation and I could easily switch polarities, if you want to be that binary about it.

That’s exactly why I just don’t bother with the whole gender binary thing. Labels are for produce, not people. I feel like I have heavy doses of both genders within me and I feel no need for them to fight it out for the title.

To the world, I am male. I have no desire to change that, at least on the physical equipment level. But I know deep down that I am so much more than any puny little binary could ever hope to encompass.

It would be like trying to encode a symphony into a single bit.

So I am my particular breed of weirdo. It’s not an easy thing. Paige talked about how much better she feels now that she fits into a category (M2F trans), and I think I would feel a lot better if I had one as well.

But I doubt I will find one. I guess I am quite cynical when it comes to the search for identity through categories. I have been starkly different from everyone around me for my entire life. I have never met someone else like me.

Oh, I am a proud nerd and a Furry as well as an intellectual and a writer. Those labels all fit.

But I am so much more than that. I really feel like there is no category big enough to contain me. I will always be a spinning gem of many facets, and even the cleverest topologist in the world could not define it.

It’s not as good as it sounds.

Especially if you are not the sort to get really into your own awesomeness. The very thought of that level of self-involvement makes me ill. I can never be content to just sit in rapt self-fascination and sniff my own farts like that.

What would make me truly happy would be to know that, through my abilities, I was making things better for people. I would take great pride and happiness from knowing I was making the world a nicer, better, kinder place with my gifts.

As opposed to having them all trapped in my skull making me crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, my therapist thought my joke^[1] was funny.

That made me feel a whole lot better. He found it so funny that he couldn’t imagine anyone not finding it funny. Now granted, he’s my therapist, so that part might have been hyperbole, but his laughter was genuine.

So, phew. I had been doubting my funniness ever since I told it in class and there was dead silence apart from a supportive noise from Felicity. I had thought the joke was quite good, but then it fell flat, and that made me doubt my very sense of humour.

But now, I feel safe in assuming that everyone was just way too tired, hot, and distracted to get it, and that if I show up next Tuesday with jokes I think are good, odds are they are.

And speaking of showing up with jokes… meh. Still haven’t written any. I know I come up with stuff constantly, but I still haven’t installed the patch to my brain that would divert these jokes into something more permanent than a temporary amusement.

I know I can get there. I just have to cross the distance between “I don’t want to slow down” to “Wow, I can’t wait to bring this awesome joke to class!”.

Still, I will resist the whole “sitting down to write jokes” things for as long as I can. The very act of trying to be creative works in the opposite direction of creativity. One of the great paradoxes of art is that you have to focus in order to get thinds done, but being creative requires an unfocused mind open to inspiration.

That’s why a lot of artists of whatever medium suck at meeting deadlines. The deadline is a focusing tool, and perfectly reasonable from the point of view of whoever’s waiting for your art. But some part of the artist’s mind understands that creativity requires an unfocused mind, and so they can only do their art when the deadline has past and things are comfortably unfocused once more.

Myself, I have no problem with deadlines. Sometimes I even enjoy them precisely because they give me something to focus on. I suffer from a grand lack of focus and a small bit of help is welcome when it comes time to Get Thing Done.

More than a little, though… that’s where trouble starts.

Like, right now, I really don’t want to sit down and write jokes. At all. I know it may come to that, but I really don’t want to do it. It seems so artificial and alien and strange for me. For me, jokes have always been spontaneous. Or at the very least, the ideas have been spontaneous.

When I was writing skits, I didn’t exactly have a deadline, but I had the idea written down beforehand. Then I wrote the motherfucker. And some of them are damned good.

So maybe I just need to repackage joke writing as skit writing. Or bit writing. When I wrote those list-style bits for video ages ago (the “What not to say” bits), I had to pick a topic and riff on it. That’s not very different from writing jokes.

So as long as I approach it as something fun, I can probably handle joke writing.

I’m glad I could talk myself through that.

One thing that came up during… wait for it… therapy was this feeling I have that taking in advice and instruction about creative endeavors is somehow an intrusion of something dead and artificial into something alive and natural in me.

And through that discussion, where my therapist pressed me on why that was (so awesome to have someone do that for me), I figured out that for my whole life, my creativity has been mine. Something I used to amuse myself, feel better about things, and cope with the unfortunate realities of life.

Every comedy writer worth their Simpsons dolls started out telling jokes to themselves.

The world of art owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the loneliness of children.

And because my creativity has always been my own almost exclusively, it is also a major part of my inner refuge. And when you are a lonely person with a deep and profound mistrust of people, the number one rule of your inner refuge is that you are alone in it.

It becomes something profoundly person and incredibly private, and to try to open that up and put stuff into it directly is bound to provoke a primal response. In this case, the response is : “Fuck you! Get out of here! Ow, ow, you’re hurting me!”.

It really does make me feel a very physical sort of psychic pain. Like a headache.

So if I want to learn to learn from others even on the creative level (obviously, I absorb knowledge from them just fine), I will have to negotiate with that part of my mind. Talk it down from the tree where it sits like a terrified cat, all a-bristle and ready to claw anything that comes near.

Definitely not a situation where I can solve via the time-honoured BFI (brute force and ignorance) method. It’s a good method and highly effective in some situations.

Sometimes you let the thief pick the lock. And other times, you’re in a hurry, so the barbarian just rips the door it off its hinges. Both get the job done.

But some things are immune to force. Like me, in a sense. Nobody can force me to do something I have decided not to do. I have tremendous won’t-power. So I have to be very careful not to set up situations where I am, in essence, in a contest of wills with myself. Nobody wins in that situation.

So sometimes, I bludgeon the emotions that are holding me back with a sledgehammer of raw rage at my cage, and other times, I pull a couch up to the tree and ask the cat if it wants to talk about its feelings.

You have to be flexible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Keep forgetting to post my videos to here. Time to fix that.

When last we did this thing, it was for this vid :

Like all my attempts to provoke, it didn’t. But I don’t mind. I am still not entirely comfortable with that side of my personality, anyway. I want to make people think, which is the basic function of the trickster. I want to wake people up and get them to think about what they believe and why.

On the other hand, I don’t want to upset them or hurt them. Hence the quandary.

My original vision for that video was way, way more obnoxious. No apologia, no backtracking, no switching into polite academic mode. Just declare myself smarter than the viewer and dare them to prove me wrong. Needle people into responding.

So basically, I would have trolled people. What can I say, I am desperate for validation, and negative attention is still attention. I just want to be noticed.

But clearly, I am not actually capable of being that obnoxious. Not against an unknown target, anyhow.

Give me an obnoxious right winger to attack, and watch the fuck out.

Especially if they are a Stephen Harper supporter.

Next, we have this highly appropriate topic :

Now I am not claiming that following the advice in that video will be easy. It won’t, it will be very hard. Part of us will always resist growing up and learning to truly accept our own role in what happens to us. We all spend 12 years of our lives in a world divided into two parts : school, where all you had to do is do what you were told, and all the planning for your future was done for you.

And everything else was play. All you had to do was amuse yourself. Even the school day had lunch and recess set aside specifically so you could go play.

And people keep that exact attitude when they grow into adulthood. But in adulthood, your future depends on you. It’s not all plotted out for you any more. And that means that you will be called upon to do things you don’t want to do and which nobody is forcing you to do.

That’s where people get stuck. A child doesn’t have to think of their future self. Adults do. Either that, or they have to accept that they have chosen the life they are leading.

Next we have the revival of this fine tradition :

The Sarcastic Slideshow! As you can see, I sampled Uptown Funk for the background music. The sampling isn’t quite perfect, which bugs me, but for whatever reason, I could not make that tiny pause disappear. I set my video editor to maximum magnification and shaved tiny tiny bits off the sample, but it was still there.

What I should have done was take the sample into a sound editing program and looped it there. Oh well, I will know that going into the future. It’s all a learning process.

Then I stuck my toe in the warm waters of sample based music once more, and came up with this :

Meh. It’s not awful, but it’s not exactly inspiring. Ends a little too abruptly too.

When it comes to music, I find it hard to find inspiration. Or maybe motivation. I have all kinds of music in my head, but I lack the skills and knowledge to turn that into reality.

So I end up just trawling through my collection of samples for inspiration, and while that can work, the results almost always end up disappointing me.

I wish I could read and write music.

Then there’s this thing :

From what I gather, this fridge food theft is a widespread problem. Not for me, of course, because I’m an unemployable drain on society and we buy groceries communally in this household, but still. There’s a lot of human suffering and confusion being caused by this seemingly baffling case of rampant disregard for people’s property.

I have had a chance to think about the problem a little more since I recorded that video, and I think I have a partial solution for those who, for whatever reason, don’t like the camera idea.

According to recent research, all you have to do is draw two eyes on the fridge door. Just the feeling of being watched tends to make people a lot more honest. It doesn’t matter that it’s just two googly eyes on a fridge door (two more inside would be good, too), it activates that part of our brain that tells us we are being watched and that makes us less likely to try to get away with something that we know will bring consequences.

Makes me wonder if we should paint giant pairs of eyes all over Wall Street.

Finally, there’s last night’s video :

I know that I am treading on dangerous ground by addressing this issue at all, let alone poking at the presumptions around it, but that’s just the kind of person I am. The more taboo something is, the more interesting it becomes because the bigger the taboo, the more likely it is that it is full of unexamined assumptions.

And part of my function in life seems to be to think about the things nobody else wants to think about.

Since recording that, it has occurred to me that there is another biological basis for determining age of consent/majority, but people would not like it very much : brain growth.

See, our brains don’t stop growing until we are around 25 years old. That’s why the 18-25 age bracket does all the crazy shit they do. They are full of hormones and the urge to explore, but their brain isn’t quite there yet. Hence their inability to think out the long term consequences of their actions.

So really, it would totally make sense to make 25 the new, rational age of majority. The age of reason, even.

Have fun convincing people of that, though.

I will talk talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been such a child for so long.

The non-incident at comedy class yesterday illustrated that. I really thought, in the back of my mind , that my joke would go over like gangbusters and everyone would see how funny and talented I am.

Like somehow, the things that limit others don’t apply to me. Sure, other people should not expect everything to go perfectly on their very first day when the whole point of the class is to learn to do it, but surely that doesn’t apply to me.

After all, I’m super talented!

And I can see what is going on there. I am still looking for that situation I had when I was anbsp; kid, where being bright got me a steady flow of opportunities to show off how smart I was and get approval in the form of high marks and being a very lazy sort of teacher’s pet.

And the thing is, all that shit was effortless to me. Math, history, science, English… Total breeze.

But the cracks were already showing even in my elementary years because I reacted very badly to the things that did NOT come naturally to me. Things like arts and crafts, gym, or anything else requiring physical adroitness instead of mental was met with massive resistance. I was a hellaciously stubborn kid who knew seemingly from birth that authority was arbitrary and required a heck of a lot of cooperation from those it is imposed upon. Cooperation I was free to withhold if I didn’t like what was going on.

So nobody could make me do anything. And the worst thing was, emI got away with it. /em

When I look back at those days, it is amazing the crap I got away with. I acted exactly like the rules did not apply to me, and the truth is, they didn’t. My brilliance, stubbornness, and unusual view of authority meant Inbsp; could, metaphorically speaking, get away with murder.

And that’s the situation some part of me is still looking for : praise and approval for doing things that require no effort, and free to refuse to do anything I don’t feel like doing.

Not gonna happen. To put it mildly.

I’m an adult now, and that means that I have to learn to accept that, in the real world, you can’t get by on just your magical specialness. The classroom is never coming back. The same rules that everyone else has to follow apply to me as well, and that means that, just like everybody else, I will have to learn to stick with things that do not come naturally to me and work on them until I am good enough.

It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

More when I get home.

(—)

Life will always be work.

Nobody is so naturally gifted that they can make all their dreams come true without having to do anything they don’t feel like doing ever. Even the most talented people in any given field have to work at it. They have to do their work whether they feel like it or not. They have to invest effort and endurance into things which may never pay off. They have to settle for net gain via compromise rather than full gain without compromise. They have to accept trade-offs.

In other words, they have to grow the fuck up.

It’s not like all this effort hoarding does anyone any good, anyhow. It’s not like when you need to put an effort in to something, you have so much effort stored up that you could move mountains and barely break a sweat.

Instead, you get weaker and weaker from the total lack of exercise of your will. Your world gets worse and worse because even simple things are hard when you have let your muscles atrophy completely.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if some forms of depression are simply the result of a tragic lack of growth. Arrested development. Somewhere along the way, the psyche did not get the psychological nutrients it needed to complete a growth spurt, and as a result, stopped development right then and there.

In essence, these forms of depression are rooted in a lack of growing up.

I am not ignorant of the potential for that kind of statement to seriously piss people off. For some people, telling a depressive they need to grow the fuck up sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim.

But it’s not. It’s suggesting that there is something the victim can do to escape their victimhood. Whether or not it’s pleasant to hear, it’s the truth, and if it makes you really fucking angry to hear it, ask yourself why.

The truth hurts like a bitch sometimes, but it’s the only thing that will truly set you free. Face the music, pay the fine, and get the fuck on with your life.

Build strength. Gain vitality. Make a life for yourself. Go find your happiness and be willing to do what it takes to get it. Stop being a filter-feeder (what imagery), stuck in one place and only getting what nutrients happen to float by.

I just figured it out : I keep slipping into the second person because that way, I can lecture myself.

Face the chorus of fear and the clamorous clanging of alarm bells in your head and know that by opposing, you can end them. Stand tall, do not waver, and they will die away when it is clear they will not get their way.

And the more often you do that, the less hold these fears and compulsions will have over you. Overcome yourself. Know that the real you is capable and strong and fierce, and perfectly capable of breaking through all those bonds that have been holding you back and making you think you are weak when you are anything but.

You’re as strong as you want to be.

Or would you rather keep pretending to be weak?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well… not class, really. More like a support group married to a workshop. But whatever.

Had my first official… whatever of Stand Up For Mental Health today. Session? Let’s go with session.

And it was fun. I was both right and wrong about there being homework. There was none assigned, but I would have been a lot better off if I had done what Felicity did and written a bunch of jokes beforehand.

I ended up going last, which is a constant theme of my life, and if I had brought more material, I have a bad feeling we would not have gotten to it. By the time it was my turn, people were tired, and we ended early because I did not have stuff.

Won’t make that mistake again. I hope.

I brought only one joke : “I think the only way SUVs could get any bigger is if they add a second floor. ”

To me, that’s pretty funny. It’s tightly phrased with a good punch word at the end. The meme of bigger and bigger SUVs has been around for many years now. I didn’t think I needed to explain it.

But the joke was met with deafening silence. Felicity made an acknowledging noise (to be fair, she had heard it before) but otherwise, dead fucking silence. Most people weren’t even paying attention.

This activated approximately all of my issues.

Now, it might have been that it was getting hot, people were getting tired, it was the very end of the session, and hence it could have been the funniest joke ever and people still would have made absolutely no noise.

Honestly, criticism would have been less painful. Sometimes it is better to be abused that ignored. At least if they abuse you, they acknowledge you exist.

Some of us need a lot of validation.

And it could have been that it was just too fast a joke for tired people to get. It happens. It’s possible to make a joke too compact and muscular, and not by leaving words or concepts out so that it makes no sense.

It’s just too fast and too dense for most people to pick up. Even smart, funny people. People didn’t even have time to turn on their brains before it was over!

And I know I am funny. Really, I do. I have had people tell me I am the funniest person they have ever met. And only one of those people had just gotten out of jail!

Ba dum bump.

So while I know I am funny, I learned today that I still have a lot to learn. Which is good, because otherwise going to the rest
of the classes would be kind of stupid, at least from an educational point of view.

Still, next time, I am going first.

My fellow… um…. session-mates seem like cool people. There was one chick I particularly liked. She was funny and had attitude. Seemed to have a real spark to her.

And there’s another guy who has made it all the way to getting minor gigs, and he did his set for us, and it was hilarious. I am quite encouraged by seeing how excellent his material is.

Now I just need to get my ass in gear and bear down to attack this comedy business in a formal, school work manner. I really, really, really don’t want to do it. When it comes to comedy, I thrive on spontaneity. Putting it all down in text and then monkeying with it feels like I am killing and stuffing it and sticking it under glass to me.

But I have to assume that I am wrong about that. There must be a way for me to make my creativity more open-ended. Right now, stuff comes in and out, but it’s a very personal and intuitive experience. Not the sort of thing that involves the rational mind except as the final step.

A lot of comedy has gone in to me. I have done a lot of thinking about what makes things funny. I have felt compelled to try to be funny in my life since way, way before I was any good at it.

But my creativity comes from all the stuff that I have experienced which has dissolved into the (water imagery) cauldron of my creative mind. Things crystallize out of this potent brew on their own. Sometimes the real world provides the beginning of the crystallization, but it’s still a non-conscious process.

I guess, deep down, I am worried that if I open the hood and poke around in there, I will break it and it will never work again. That isn’t rational or probable, but it is still how I feel. I don’t want to lose the goose by trying to make better eggs.

Nut that’s a silly way of looking at it. I do all kinds of things rationally and that doesn’t make me any less creative. In fact, truly powerful creativity involves the left and right brain working together so smoothly that something greater than the sum of the two emerges.

I have felt that happen, It’s freaking amazing. A total high.

For me, being an intuitive intellectual type, it’s like the two sides (on a good day) work together like the hands of a concert pianist. I couldn’t really tell you where one ends and the other begins with me. It’s like asking which hand you are using to climb a ladder.

Well, both, obviously.

So what am I afraid of? That if I open up my process, the magic will get out?

Not likely. And the truth is, if my eggs aren’t good enough to sell yet, then what am I really risking? The only way to get good enough to make money at things like comedy and writing is to stop fucking around and introduce some structure and focus to the process. Otherwise, it will continue to just be stuff in my head.

And I am almost completely sure that I want to escape my mental prison and live in the real world.

Emphasis on almost.

I will tall to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lots of stuff I should be doing today, but I ain’t feeling it.

It’s one of those little adjustments I have to make now and then. Right now I feel sullen and lazy and self-indulgent. Just want to spend all day listening to music and playing video games and in general acting like I am on vacation.

A pretty shitty vacation, but still.

Like I have said before, summer brings that out in me. I guess it’s a sign of how much growing up I need to do. The longer, sunnier days still push me towards that “kid out of school for the summer” mentality. I want to hang out and have fun and enjoy the sunshine and blue skies, and not do anything that isn’t fun.

And take absolutely nothing seriously.

Basically, I don’t want to focus. On many levels, focusing requires effort for me, and I want to go back to being a happy little cloud floating wherever the wind blows, doing whatever he feels like doing.

And the thing is, I can totally do that. I have no actual obligations, in the sense of things where if I don’t do them, people will get hurt and I will suffer a penalty. I am perfectly free to live like that.

But I won’t, because that way of living is profoundly stupid.

It’s the sort of thing favored by the part of me I call the Jagoff. The one who has led me to my current profoundly unsatisfying life. The one who is always positive in a really negative way, like the enabling wife of an abusive husband.

The husband, I suppose, would be my overdeveloped superego.

The Jagoff is the one who tells me it’s not so bad, certainly not bad enough to warrant action or change. It’s the one that makes sure I have as much distraction as I can take so that I remain too absorbed and diverted to look at my life and wonder if this is all there really is.

Protip : It isn’t.

I really feel like that is how I have spent the last twenty or more years of my life. By brutally limiting my actual horizons, I make it through the day with the thing I already have, not happy exactly, but content.

I am beginning to see what Nietzsche was getting at when he railed against “wretched contentment”. For years, I thought that made no sense. Isn’t the whole point of life to become content? Inner peace and all that? It made no sense to me.

But now I get it. As it is with all things, an excess of contentment is poisonous. It poisons the will, strangles the spirit, and robs you of all your strength. You put up with things which are bad for you and make you unhappy because that Jagoff is always there to convince you that it’d not that bad, and that because you are not actively unhappy (or at least, not unhappy enough), everything must be fine, or at least, good enough.

My cure for that is anger. Rage. Dare to be discontent. Don’t filter out all the “bad stuff”, the stuff that threatens your soul-numbing contentment. The stuff that might conceivably wake you up from your dreaming state and make you actually want to do things. Things you don’t normally do. New things that involve the risk of change. The horror.

And it is easy to filter that stuff out because it seems like it leads to unhappiness and pain. And it totally does. To go from content to discontent is a downgrade when viewed on its own and through the lens of a very narrow kind of hedonism.

But the path to happiness is not a sliding sidewalk. You have to go through being less happy in order to go out there and get greater happiness for yourself. Enlightened hedonism recognizes this and is willing to work hard at being happy.

That’s why it is better to be happy than content. Happiness is the presence of joy. Contentment is the absence of pain. Obviously, it is far better to be happy.

Similarly, engagement is better than mere distraction. Distraction is the absence of boredom. Engagement is the presence of enjoyment. There is more to life that merely numbing the pain.

It’s the fear that holds me back. On a very deep level, I am afraid of the world. I spent years of my elementary school life living in a world where the only safety was in remaining hidden and/or unnoticed. It gave me a very deep-running sense of constant danger and a resulting tendency to isolate myself to calm my fears.

Safety in solitude. What a trip to lay on an innocent little kid.

Oh well, progress is being made. Tomorrow is my first actual Stand Up For Mental Health class, and I am, in no particular order, excited, nervous, stoked, scared, enthusiastic, and avoidant about it.

I don’t have any jokes written. I have a very strong feeling that David assigned us some homework at the end of orientation, but I don’t remember what it was. Felicity has ten jokes to present. I have, at best, two.

Although, to be fair, one of them can lead to a whole small routine. So there’s that.

I still don’t know how well I will adapt to adding formal structure to my comedy process. Ideally, I will simply absorb it and it will become part of my creative process.

But it will be rough going at first, I think. I have resisted taking formal external structure into my creative process for a long time. That’s why it is pointless for me to buy books about how to write. Deep down, I fundamentally reject the intrusion of anything external (and hence, to me, artificial) into the depths of my creativity.

But I suppose the formal stuff from the textbook is not the most important thing. The important thing is to write funny jokes and deliver them well. The exact path I take to get there is not that important.

At least, I hope it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s the day I am officially celebrating my birthday. Tonight, we will go to one of our favorite eateries, dinner and dessert will be had, Julian and I (his birthday is the day after mine) will get gifts, and there will be much rejoicing.

And I am trying really hard to build up some appropriate enthusiasm, but so far, it’s rough going.

Traditionally, birthdays are a time for people to take stock of their lives, which is usually something I passionately avoid. I generally assume that the result can only depress me and fill me with despair, so I figure I am better off not going there.

But fuck that kind of weakness. I am slowly learning to do exactly the opposite of what my instincts tell me to do, like George Costanza, and so today, I will do my best to take stock.

And then I will figure out what to do with the other 800 words. Ha ha ha.

We will start with health. That is a tricky one. I have a lot of medical issues, and most of them are untreated. My diabetes is at best half treated. I take my pills and 60 units of insulin at night, but I never test my blood sugars so I have no idea if I am doing enough.

I somehow doubt it, though, given my extremely sedimentary sedentary lifestyle and weakness for junk food. So who knows how much extra blood sugar I am rocking and what damage it is doing to my body.

Then there’s the sleep apnea. Totally untreated. The closest thing to sleep apnea treatment I have is my sleeping pills. They at least keep me asleep long enough to get some deep sleep and recover at least a quorum of brain function going.

But otherwise, I am presumably forgetting to breathe in my sleep a lot, and hence, getting oxygen starved on a routine basis when I am asleep and can’t do anything about it. And what am I doing about that?

Not a damned thing.

Then there’s the depression. On that, at least, I can say I am doing all I can to combat it. I take my meds, I write in this blog, I go to therapy once a week. I might strain against the bars of my cage a tad more, but at least I have a regular thing where I go to White Spot on Wednesdays now.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

Then there’s the damage to the cartilage of my knee. That’s not a huge issue at the moment. I have learned how to walk on it (inasmuch as I walk at all) and I think the muscles around the injury have gotten stronger, so it mostly just makes me walk with a slight limp.

But I worry that some day, I will over-strain it somehow, and it will become a far worse injury.

And then there’s the fact that I have two inch-long holes in my abdominal wall through which my guts dangle.

All of these problems are pretty bad. And yet, for the most part, I feel well. Somehow, I have adapted to all of this, and I can get through the day.

It helps to have been sick so long, you’ve forgotten what healthy feels like.

And then there’s wealth. Not much to talk about there. My computer, antique as it is, counts as an asset. Tablets too. Plus my ancient and well-loved king sized bed is worth something or other.

But like most things in my life, most of my wealth is entirely in my head. I have a lot of assets there.

Talent, creativity, wit, intelligence, charm, and a whole lot more. On paper, at least, I have a lot going for me, and there’s a lot of people who would envy and covet my many mental assets.

Kind of hard to translate them into liquid assets, though. Maybe I should rent them out.

And how about my social assets? Well, I have three very good friends, and that’s all I need on that score, as far as I can tell. I am not someone who needs to have tons of friends in order to feel good about themselves. I just need a few reliable, stable friends with whom I can have high level intellectual conversations and/or just goof around.

These days, though, you also have to take your social support network into account. By that, they mean who you can go to in times of trouble, and I definitely have people in my life who could help me out of a jam.

The problem there is, I have a lot of trouble asking people for help. It was rather strongly discouraged in my childhood. I was the kid who wasn’t supposed to be there and as such, my “job” was to take care of myself and not bother anyone.

In other words, I was supposed to disappear so they could forget they had me.

So the social network is there, but I find it hard to access, so in a sense, it doesn’t count. Not the fault of anyone in my social world, just the product of a terrible childhood I have yet to overcome.

I have a hell of a lot of growing up to do. And it’s taking forever.

Last stop : the future. What does it hold?

Comedy classes. Excited/nervous about those. Not sure how I will take to heavy duty workshopping. We will see.

And of course, Kwantlen in the fall. Back to school. Looking forward to that, big time. I am insanely good at school. So good that I didn’t even realize how good I was until many years after I had left college.

After that, the main goal : Vancouver Film School, Writing for Television and Film program. That is still my ultimate goal and I will only change that if something better comes along before I get there.

Who knows, I might stumble into a comedy writing gig via standup.

So that’s my life in review. Now, I need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, yesterday’s stupid video.

This five minute limit shit has got to go. Yeah, I know, I should be learning to be less voluble and more succinct. Felicity says the videos should be less than four minutes long, and she is probably right.

But a deep part of me resists attempts to cut down the amount of noise in my signal because it does not trust that it can be done without loss of signal. And I treasure my signal, as many writers do.

We shouldn’t. Murder your darlings and all that. But we do.

And I am a person with a lot to say. I may ramble through the brambles when I am trying to say it, but still. I have billions of words inside me and they all want out. It’s very hard for me to pick and choose among them.

There’s that option paralysis again.

Still, in my own way, I strive towards focus. I have always wanted to be the kind of author who can produce tight, polished prose that uses the minimum amount of words to get the story across so that you forget you are reading a story and become completely immersed in it. The best writing can do that and it makes that writing so much more powerful.

And as a writer, I want to really reach people. I want to touch their hearts, not just their minds. I want to write things that cut through the background noise of everyday reality and give people the sense that there is more to life than the everyday business of living.

In fact, I want to write prose so good, it makes people feel like they’ve been in contact with something greater than themselves.

When it comes to art, my ambition is limitless. Martin Luther changed the world with words. So can I.

And obviously, I am not going to get there if I continue to do things in the sloppy slap-dash way I have been doing them. And yet, the resistance to taking my time and then cleaning up after is very strong. So I definitely will not be able to transform myself into a monster prose machine overnight.

I keep talking about the same damn things, don’t I? Fuck. I don’t edit my work. Option paralysis. I should really start sending things out. Water imagery. Yadda yadda ya.

I’m getting as bad as Garth.

And what I find frustrating is that it makes me feel like I never really make progress. I’m just the same old dog on the same old leash, walking in circles around his tiny little yard and pretending like I am getting somewhere.

But I can’t afford to think like that. I know I am not the same person who sat at this computer a year ago. I know that I am growing in strength and losing mental dead weight all the time. This very blog is part of that process.

It’s just that the growth is so slow and steady that it’s like trying to watch a tree grow. (Note : not water imagery!)

On a staggeringly unrelated topic, today I found out that Oliver Sack is gay.

Or at least, I think I did. I feel like maybe I learned it before then forgot it. But either way, I was floored.

And saddened. Because of the era he grew up in, his love life was very sad. There was a guy he fell in love with in college. A real alpha ideal kind of guy. Smart, athletic, handsome, the whole package.

And they were good friends, and Sacks would give the guy backrubs (!!), and then one day Sacks went just a little too far, and the guy said “I like you but I’m not that way.”

And for a little while, they were still friends, but after this Alpha Ideal dude came to Sacks because he was worried about a problem with his groin (!!!), and Sacks quickly found that there was something very wrong that was probably really serious, Sacks never saw Alpha Ideal again.

Years later, he meets another guy, a sailor, who also liked bodybuilding and such (fun fact : Sacks was once a champion weightlifter), and they moved in together. And they had a lot of fun and were best friends and all was well and good until Sacks once more went over the line, and then the guy got up, showered, then told Sacks that he couldn’t live with him any more, and left forever.

So Sacks, the brilliant and sensitive doctor, gave up on having people in his life.

Holy fuck that’s harsh.

Luckily, the story has a happy ending. He met someone, they grew closer over time, and then one day this other fellow confesses his love for Sacks in like, the most British way possible : “I have conceived a great affection for you. ”

Isn’t that adorable? Nerd love rules.

What else… feeling super lazy today. Don’t really feel like doing a video after this. But if you want to establish a habit, then the most important time to do it is when you least want to do it.

So I will make a vid of some sort tonight. And I will try to put a little extra ambition into it. But no guarantees.

I had a pretty good groove going earlier today, listening to podcasts while playing a logic game on my tablet. Not the most productive pair of activities, but it kept this overgrown brain of mine busy enough for me to relax, and those times are precious to me.

My whole life, I have had more brain than I knew what to do with. I think that’s part of why I can be very quick to create limitations or compulsions in my life. Their real purpose is to limit my horizons and thus keep me from realizing how goddamned bored I am.

The cows were quiet and pliable until they got a whiff of all the fresh grass outside their pen. After that, some of them were angry and wanted to leave.

But other were angry at the breeze that brought them the news of the wonders of the outside world.

They had been happy before. Or if not happy, content. They liked being content. Or at least…. they were content with it.

But that stupid breeze had to come along and ruin everything by reminding them of how little they had.

They named that breeze Satan.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.