No? Dang. Guess I’ll have to write one myself.

Have I told you people about the fax thing yet? No? Well then fasten your seat beats, it’s going to be a very boring time.

Basically, in order to get into Kwantlen requires, naturally enough, my transcripts from my high school, the venerable Three Oaks Senior High. So I emailed one of the school “administrative assistants” (apparently, there’s no such thing as a school secretary any more) and asked her about my transcripts.

Luckily, they still have them. I mean, it seems like the kind of thing they would keep around, but I have been forgotten so many times that I have lost count, so I tend to expect the worst.

I know. That’s fucked up. Working on it.

All I had to do was sign a form and everything would be a-OK. Problem : I am almost as far away from my hometown as one can get and still be in Canada. Can’t exactly go there to do it, and the mail would take forever.

Solution : Faxing! Remember that? The secretary offered to fax it here where I could sign it and fax it back.

Problem : Who the heck has a fax machine these days?

Answer : Older people! People of my parents’ generation. For them, the fax machine was probably the last new technology they fully understood. And they are darn handy for things like this.

If it’s 1998. But anyhow.

First, I asked Felicity if her mother had a working fax machine. The answer, sadly, was sorta. It sends, but it does not receive. Tragic, I know.

But then I remembered that my therapist had one. He has one of those fax/printer/copier gizmos that still impress the hell out of me despite being seriously obsolete.

What can I say, I love that someone finally realized that all three functions can be done with the same machinery. It is a brilliant merger of products.

Anyhoo, I called my therapist and he agreed to lend me his fax, so to speak. I emailed the fax number to the secre admin assistant, and when I got to therapy, the form was waiting for me to sign.

Amusingly, my therapist filled it out himself (except for the part with my signature, of course). I guess he is so used to doing that kind of thing that it didn’t even occur to him that I was capable of doing it myself.

Oh well, it got done, that’s what is important. It got filled out, signed, and faxed back.

PEI is in the Atlantic Time Zone, which means they are four hours ahead of us in time. So the school was closed when we sent the fax. Presumably, they won’t actually see it till Monday.

But the point is, they will sent my transcripts to Kwantlen in Richmond, and I will have dotted my T’s and crossed my I’s.

And I’s the b’y that built the boat, after all. And I’s the b’y that sailed her, too. True story.

So, therapy. Going to talk about what went down there, because of course, a lot happened other than just the fax. M’am.

See, I have been having suicidal impulses lately. Now don’t flip out! That’s all they are, impulses. They come, I resist, they go. They are something I have dealt with, off and on, for ten years at least.

The difference is, this time I actually told my shrink about them. That was not easy for me. I usually keep that shit to myself because I don’t want to scare people away from me or freak them out. Unconsciously, I had been doing the same with my therapist. I’ve been going to him for two years, and yet, I was still shielding him.

And if there is one person who should know about your suicidal impulses, it’s your therapist.

That’s like, totally the kind of thing they deal with.

It’s not easy for me to tell you nice people about it either. Nobody ever sees me with the reactor shielding totally down. I don’t want my radiation to hurt people, or scare them away, or make them decide I am way too much trouble to handle.

I have a serious, deep down, and not altogether irrational fear that direct contact with my hungering darkness can do serious damage to healthy people. Especially if expressed in words, face to face. Then it’s powered by my gift for self-expression, my high emotive power, and the worlds of hurt I keep locked up deep inside.

Maybe that’s not rational. Maybe I could expose people to my darkness and they would be perfectly okay, no harm done. Maybe the notion that all that cold I keep inside would freeze people to death if I exposed them to it is just another ghost posted at the door to greater mental health by my depression, there to scare me away from the road to my depression’s destruction.

It can be so hard to tell sometimes.

But one of the other things that came up today is my inability to do things I know will hurt people, no matter how beneficial to myself the action may be.

That sounds good on paper. And in a healthy, balanced individual, it’s probably good in practice, too.

But for me, it leads to things like not telling your doctor about something because you don’t want to upset him. And that’s just plain crazy, right off the bat.

The problem is, I am so sensitive that it’s like those people who pump up the gain on a microphone and hear ghosts. If your instrument is too sensitive, it amplifies things all out of proportion to what they really are.

And you start hearing things that aren’t there. Like imagining people will be brutally hurt by things they would actually barely notice and shrug off like The Hulk shrugging off a bazooka blast.

The more I try to sort this stuff out, the more I understand what the Care Bears meant when they said “Be true to who you are, and whatever the fuck happens, happens. ”

I might be paraphrasing.

Oh, and here’s yesterday’s crappy video.

Getting better, tho.

First, the video I recorded yesterday :

Sorry for the fact that it starts out of nowhere. I had to trim it because the program I am using for video editing on the tablet has a five minute limit unless you shell out for the full version.

Which I am totally going to do. The program is called Viva Video and they seem to have cracked the problem of how to design a full featured yet user friendly video editor on an Android device. So far, I love it, love it, love it. I can do pretty much anything I can do with the big PC programs, and with comparable deftness.

I am not sure how to make something big and complicated with a lot of cuts with it yet, but I will figure it out.

Oh, and sorry for the “up my nose” angle. I thought putting my tablet flat on the table and peering down into it would make the thing more visually interesting. And I really thought I was a lot further from the camera than I was.

Oh well, the point was to do one. Tonight’s will be more fun and enriched. Might do a slideshow. Dunno yet.

That taken care of, on to our subject : I have been pondering the pros and cons of being water today. Or, put less cryptically, of being very, very flexible in a very specific way.

I have the kind of mind that easily seeps into the cracks and crevices of ideas. That ability to generate possibilities that fuels my insights and creativity (and option paralysis) allows me to see possibilities where others see none, and the malleability of my mind makes me very, very good at deducing the shape of the lock from the shape of the key.

This flexibility also allows me to flow over, around, or through things which would be major obstacles to others. I’m the guy who doesn’t even see the walls that constrain other people’s lives. It gives me the ability to go directly for the heart of the matter in terms of philosophy and creative problem solving. Mentally speaking, I can take the shortest distance between two points while others have to take the established path, which is anything but direct.

In that sense only, it’s like I am four dimensional. In the world of the mind, it can seem like I teleport. After all, what is teleportation but the appearance of having gone from point A to point B without traveling through the space in between?

Of course, I do travel through the space in between. I just take a path others cannot see.

This water-like mind also, I think, informs my deep sympathy. I can really understand people because my mind can flow into the cracks and seams of someone’s personality and get a really high resolution image of what makes them tick.

Think of it as making a mould of something. The thinner the liquid used to make the mould, the more detail will be preserved.

And I can make my mind very thin indeed.

So those are the good things. Now, the bad.

Water doesn’t hold its shape. It takes the shape of the container it’s in. And despite its strong desire to be free, it desperately needs a container not just to keep it contained, but to give it identity. It doesn’t know who it is without some kind of container to conform to.

And water does not move on its own. All that fluidity denies it any rigidity. It can’t hold together for long, and when it stops keeping itself together, then splash. Form is gone and I revert right back to being a puddle.

And then… all I can do is wait for something else to come along to give me form. At the same time, I have become very good at avoiding the very form which I seek.

Because I fear form as much as I crave it, if not more. To take form means to choose one of myriad possibilities I can see, and once you do that, you lose all the rest of the possibilities.

And with so many possibilities, how on Earth could anyone be confident they chose the right one?

Besides, the primitive part of my brain conflates loss of possibilities and being “trapped”. What if I chose the wrong thing and now I am stuck with it, and the situation calls for a totally different shape?

Tragically, this leads to me taking puddle form pretty much all of the time. And puddles don’t get a lot done.

Then there is the question of identity. When you can take so many shapes, which one is the real you? Like Clayface from Batman : The Animated Series, the flexibility precludes identity. Identity has to be something solid and stable within you, and my fluidity seems to actively resist the formation of anything approaching that level of persistence.

After all, we can’t have any limits to our mental maneuverability or we’ll be “trapped”, right?

It’s insane, with all that implies. The less safe I am, the more terrified I am of having to choose, and the more puddle-like I become. All possibility, no actualization. That’s what fuels my crippling escapism : I want to get away from the stressful situation so I can revert to being a total puddle again.

Only then can I calm down and feel safe, because I have all my possibilities back. The same possibilities that keep me from being able to choose things in life.

Life is about choices. Every decision we make means the death of a thousand possibilities, but it also creates a thousand new ones at the same time. Things become possible that you couldn’t even see until you made the decision.

And I can’t go around complaining how everything inside me falls apart when I am the one ruthlessly (and compulsively) disassembling them in the first place.

I need to remind myself to let things be solid in my mind. Make choices and stick with them. Stop trying to control outcomes and just live life according to my own happiness.

Follow your bliss, and all that crap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I will get to my subject in a moment, but first, I must share this :

I was on the bus, and these teens behind me were trying to explain where one of them lived. At one point, when the listener had suffered a brain crash and said “I have never heard of there”, the one with the home in question said, ” Well, we live in parallel universes. ”

Clearly this is my kind of kid.

Anyhoo, the subject at hand is the future and having too much of it.

Today is a lovely day. Sunny and bright without the heat. Fru weather. And it got me thinking about how some people can live life a day at a time, enjoying every precious moment. They can stop and smell the roses without even thinking about the possibility of bees.

And I… can’t.

I am always looking for life’s booby traps. I am constantly worried about what is to come, and trying to see the potholes in time to swerve around them.

And traditionally, those of my ilk have had nothing but disdain for those of the opposite temperament.. We see them as blind, ignorant fools constantly blundering into easily avoided pitfalls and congratulate ourselves on being smarter and wiser than those idiots on the other side of the fence.

But here’s the thing : all that worry takes its toll.It drain energy and possibility from the present in order to patrol the future. And if you are plagued by inner demons, they will push you to greater and greater sacrifices of the present in order to pursue an impossibly high ideal of “safety”.

But there is nothing in the external world which can protect you from the enemy within.

That is what has happened with me, I think. Childhood trauma combined with high intelligence pushed me hard toward the future oriented end of the scale. In a desperate attempt to control outcomes, my mind constantly stretches itself as far into the future as it can, regardless of the cost to the present.

Sacrifice too much of the present, and you end up too weak to do anything at all. Your life becomes very unpleasant, and what is even worse is that, because you are so focused on controlling outcomes, you blame yourself for your sorry state.

And you ARE to blame, but not how you think.

So you end up with a shitty outcome despite your paranoia , and what is worse, your future oriented nature makes it very hard to see the here and now. It’s like you see life through a telescope. Your paranoia runs so deep that you feel like if you look away from your telescope for one second, disaster will strike.

Even if the whole goddamn planetarium is burning down around you.

And notice how neuroses turns possibility into certainty. It is not that if you look away from the telescope, disaster MAY happen. No, if you look away, it WILL happen.

That is superstitious thinking at its very worst.

So how does one stop being paranoid and take the present back from the demons of the past that push you into the future?

Answer when I get home.

(—)

And the answer is : I dunno.

Ha ha ha. I’d never do that to you people! For one thing, it would suggest I don’t have a theory, which we all know is impossible. Theorizing is as natural as breathing to me.

And maybe that comes from being future oriented as well. In the abstract sense, all theories are predictions, and what would a tragically future oriented person love more than to be able to predict the future?

Anyhow, to answer the question for real this time : I think rescuing yourself from the future requires finding some way to reach that deep part of you that never feels safe and therefore always feels paranoid, and sooth it somehow.

Only then can you pry your eye away from that telescope without thinking that means guaranteed disaster.

Because, you know,. that’s when they GET you. The one time….

Or so we tell ourselves when we want to reassure ourselves that our paranoid compulsions are actually justified. No really, I’m totally in control. My irrational compulsions are actually wisdom, caution, and intelligence!

Whether you try to control outcomes too much or too little, you’re equally wrong. It’s easy to count all the bad things that never happened to you because of your forethought. Far harder to see all the things you missed because you were too chickenshit to take even the tiniest of risks.

Especially when you don’t want to see them. Because if you did, you wouldn’t feel so goddamned smug about how ‘smart’ you are. You would realize that you are, in fact, an idiot, but not for failing to control outcomes.

For sacrificing too much in an attempt to do so. No matter how you look at it, when your method is antithetical to its own aims, you are doing something wrong.

And the thing is, reform means going in the exact opposite direction of your instincts. Your instinct is to respond to stress by thinking harder about it. By pushing yourself further towards trying to control outcomes. And when it’s something real you can actually do something about, that is absolutely the right response.

But when it’s something inside you driving you to try to control all outcomes forever and punishing you for your failure to complete this impossible task, you have to do the opposite of what your instincts tell you and worry less.

I know, I know. It sounds like absolute madness. Worse than madness, because madness makes a kind of sense. This is divide by zero consciousness crashing stuff.

How can you become safer by worrying less?

But that’s the thing : there is a lot more to life than safety. The idea is not merely to survive but to thrive.

After all, the point of all this is to be happy, right?

So what makes you happy?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My life needs more content.

It’s really come to a head lately. As I predicted back in March when I officially stopped the daily baking, I have gotten very very bored with only having this one “thing” I do, and crave another.

It will probably be videos. Time will tell.

The way I know it is coming to a head lately is that I have starting dreading the job of filling my hours again. I find myself thinking “this is my life?” and “what’s the point of me, anyway?” and “How long till the next meal?”

When eating is the highlight of your day, something has gone dangerously wrong.

What I really want is something new. Something that will feel fresh and new and interesting. Baking did that for me for a long time. I had baked before, but never every day and I tended to make the same things over and over again. Baking was the perfect thing to absorb all my excess energies, as it was both physical and mental exercise along with a small amount of stress.

And you’d be amazed at how stressful a stress-free life can be. ^[1]

But it eventually became boring and routine. Plus messy and very expensive. So I stopped.

Writing fiction instead of this stuff does help somewhat. Right now, I am waiting for inspiration to strike. Don’t hold your breath, though, True Believers, because that doesn’t happen on demand.

Still, odds are good that sometime soonish, you will be reading a new work of fiction by me, and not the same old psychological navel-gazing and bone-chewing that ends up in this diary.

And maybe that will be enough, although I doubt it. I still have a lot of hours to fill.

Oh right. It’s my birthday today. Happy Me Day! For whatever reason, I just can’t get excited about it this year. Normally I try to boost my enthusiasm for life via promoting my birthday, getting a party together, basking in the one day of the year where you are supposed to make it all about you.

But not this year. I suppose I have reached the “thanks for the presents but who gives a shit” stage of life, where birthdays are less “yay me!” days and more “one digit closer to death” days.

I’ve always found that to be very sad. Your birthday is your special day! Everyone deserves to be celebrated once a year. And I am still pretty excited by other people’s birthdays. They are excuses for me to express my natural effusiveness.

What can I say, I feel things strongly and my natural inclination is to express that to the hilt. Most of the time I hold back because I have high emotive force and me at full (nonliteral) volume freaks people the hell out.

Especially because I am a big guy. We big guys can’t play by the same rulebook as average sized guys. Everything we do is amplified by our size. We are, through no fault of our own, “loud”.

But still, I dream of finding a place in life for myself where I can be a full-strength version of myself. Maybe some echelon of gay subculture full of people with big personalities, a sort of Valley of the Giants for the large of body and soul.

Where was I…. oh yeah, enriching my life.

More than a second “thing”, though, I think I need to think in terms of making my life more satisfying and meaningful to me. I am loathe to admit it, but depression has made my actual horizons very, very tight. Sure, my mind can go all over the place without fear, and I can pat myself on the back for being such a powerful and fearless philosopher all I want.

But my actual life is nowhere near as wide open, and the truth is, the reason is cowardice.

I need all this hyper-familiarity just to keep myself from freaking out. Even just the thought of going out of this tiny little corner I have painted myself into makes me feel anxious. Forget actually doing it.

And yet, I desperately need it. I have hid behind the excuse of lack of funds for a long time. But I have a bus pass and feet. I could go to stuff. I could prove to myself that I am not, in fact, trapped.

But then I have to face the angry chorus of options all screaming “Do me! Do me!” at me as I stand there frozen in place just like when my siblings used to all shout instructions at me at the same time.

Just pick something and do it, people say. And they are right. But it’s not that easy.

So maybe I fool myself into thinking my life is far more restricted than it is because true freedom represents the hopeless agony of option paralysis. Easier just to pull my head back in my shell and pretend that’s all there is.

Some philosopher, huh?

The answer, as always, must be somewhere in the middle. Somewhere between too many options and not nearly enough.

I think the real problem is lack of faith in my own ability to choose. If I was stronger in that area, I would just make a decision and go forward and not worry about whether it’s the “right” one. It just has to be good enough.

Hell, it just has to be better than doing nothing all day and hating it.

That’s what coming out of your shell really means. Opening up your world, not just your mind. The shell is transparent… you have always been able to see everything. And you have tried to pretend that is enough.

But it isn’t. Life is more than mere survival and we need experiences in order to grow and thrive, not just thoughts.

Life in realtime. It’s a scary thought. But I have to do it.

And one of these days. I will stop talking about it and actually do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Deep down, under all the intellect, civilization, kindness, gentleness, and good intentions, lies The Beast.

We all have one. An id. The animal inside. The creature that lives both figuratively and literally deep within our brains. In the West, we like to pretend like that part of us is optional, that we can suppress and ignore it all we want in order to prove to one another and ourselves that we are humans, not “mere animals”.

But brain science 101 teaches that brains evolve by adding, not subtracting. Ours were built from the most primitive animals outward. Our brain stem is just like what passes for a brain in a fish. Around that is wrapped the exact same kind of brain a reptile (or bird) has. Around that is wrapped a mammalian brain, the same kind of brain a cat or dog or wildebeest has.

And around that, o course, is the absurdly large add-on that is the human brain. It’s what makes us so much more intelligent than any other animal on Earth, but that is more a function of quantity than quality.

Basically, we are animals with upgrades.

Without these upgrades, we would be chimpanzees. Bonobos. With them, we are human beings. But we are still animals. The massive brain mass upgrade added extraordinary capacity, but it’s the monkey within us who is in charge.

The monkey just has a human sized brain to use.

Myself, I am an intellectual. This is a sub-breed of human who is more intelligent than the average human. This gives us extraordinary powers of thought. It also makes us, in a sense, moral leaders, because we can see more of the picture than the average person and thus see the possibilities in humanity. We can see the better path, And to a certain extent, higher intelligence makes it easier for us to live primarily by reason and not merely “going with our guts”.

But the thing is, we’re still monkeys too. It’s easy to lose track of this fact when we look at the rest of humanity, who lack our advantages, and conclude that they are, compared to us, mere monkeys. Our frustration with them often leads us to lash out like that. It’s entirely natural.

For a monkey, that is.

And what happens when one forgets one is just another monkey on the human family tree is that one begins to lose touch with one’s monkey self. The intellectual force of our brains makes our egos arrogant and we end up pretending like we are all reason now, without any of that other stuff holding us back.

This is not, can never be, and has never been possible. And a life of denial never leads anywhere good.

And then we wonder why we seem to lack motivation. Why we’re scared all the time. Why we’re so confused by human things. Why the world seems so damned cold.

It’s because we haven’t acknowledged and incorporated our monkey selves. We have instead moved into the chilly upper branches of our powerful abstract reasoning skill tree, and you can’t have a healthy tree when you don’t just neglect the roots, you pretend they don’t even exist.

This is where we get our image of angels on clouds. There they are, enjoying the land of high intellect without having to be connected with anything lower.

Angels aren’t real, though. And there’s no point in trying to be one. You would have a better chance of trying to walk without legs. It’s just as realistic a proposition.

My own beast has been long neglected. I thought I had only neglected my inner child, but it turns out my inner monkey has been getting the short shrift too. I have followed the path of the mind so far that I got lost, and all those suppressed emotions frozen within me turned the land within into nothing but frozen tundra as far as the eye can see.

Recovery, therefore, means waking the beast. He’s a very, very angry beast, and that anger terrifies me because sometimes it seems so vast and powerful that it could destroy the person I think I am and drive what is left of me after to do some seriously crazy things just to force people to pay attention to and remember us.

But I can’t let that stop me. Somewhere between soul starvation and stark raving lunacy lies the person I want to be : integrated, whole, healthy, hearty, and happy in his own skin.

It’s a work in progress.

And what I realized today is that this beast wants everyone to just fuck right off. Leave it alone. It wants to growl the deepest of growls from the very core of my being in order to warn the world to back the fuck off… or else.

Deep down, I know it just wants to be safe, and that it is fear and suspicion that make it so hostile. It is the fear that drives the rage and urge to destroy. The beast does not and perhaps cannot understand the futility of seeking peace through violence.

Humans are at their most dangerous when scared. Scare them enough, and the minute your back is turned, they will kill you.

The real solution is, of course, somewhere in between.

There’s a line in a Green Day song called Have A Blast that goes like this :

Do you ever want to lead a long trail of destruction and mow down any BULLSHIT that confronts you

And the answer for me is a resounding yes. But it’s not about hurting anyone. It’s about cutting loose on all the hypocrisy, cruelty, ignorance, immorality, and other BULLSHIT in life, and doing it in a way that people will never forget.

And if I hope to get better, I am going to have to be willing to bring those kind of thoughts to the surface and release and acknowledge and “own” them before my lies disappear and the truth sets me free.

I’m a lot of things – poet, storyteller, jester, sage, and so on – and amongst all that, I am also a very angry monster.

But where is the Androcles to pluck the thorn from my paw?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or maybe vice versa.

Just got out of bed, so you know I feel like absolute shit. My head hurts, my blood oxygen level is that of David Blaine right after he came out of the glass coffin, every cell in my body aches, and I am trembling slightly.

Just another day in Casa Del Fru. Or maybe Cabesa Del Fru.

Today will be, by my standards, busy. Supper with Le Gang at 6, then straight to the BCSFA meeting, then back to the homestead for our usual Sunday videoage.

Right now, that feels like way to much. But that’s okay. I know I won’t feel like that later.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Remembering that how you feel now is not permanent. You have felt differently before. You will feel differently again. That’s how you overcome the tyranny of mood and get the hell over yourself.

Not only is this mood temporary and transient, but you have the power to improve it. There are actions you can take to feel better. You don’t have to passively endure it. You can fix it. Not with a single silver bullet solution that gets you all the way from utterly crappy to totally happy in one shot, but in stages, over time.

Instant gratification is great, but when it isn’t available, eventual gratification is the next best thing.

I am having trouble with this. It is my current struggle. Most people have a job to keep them going, and thus, they get lots of experiences waking up feeling crappy, boosting themselves into barely functional mode with out without the help of caffeine, then getting to work and having its structure and demands to work towards. Over and over again, they get proof that how they feel when they wake up is not how they will feel when they get going.

But I don’t get going. Not often, anyhow. Most of my days, most of the time, there is no particular reason to get out of bed and get my day going. Nothing bad happens if I just lay there feeling like crap for hours on end.

Well, nothing bad except feeling crappy. Nothing external.

So I have to become a self-starter if I want to get truly ambitious. And that is exactly the opposite of how I have been in the past. I have always lacked initiative. By default, I retreat within myself. Without something external to motivate me, the intense gravity of my inner planet sucks me down.

This rich inner life thing can be downright dangerous when it gets too strong. It takes so much energy to get even a little closer to the sun. And when that energy runs out, I crash to the ground again.

No wonder I end up spending most of my time lying down.

I know I don’t want to be like this. I want to be someone who is happy staying engaged and active most of the time. Someone who doesn’t retreat into his inner sanctum at the slightest impulse. Someone ruled by will and desire, not weakness and fear. Someone who isn’t stuck trying to interact with the world with mile long chopsticks because he’s trying to get things done without leaving his filthy fucking fortress of the mind.

Someone for whom being fully engaged with reality is the default, not the exception.

So what’s stopping me? Hard to say. I could say I am too weak, but that’s not really an answer. More accurate to say I feel too weak, but that doesn’t mean I really am too weak. It’s just an excuse for not trying.

And if you don’t try, you never find out you are not that weak after all and then you’d have to change your mind about a lot of things, wouldn’t you?

Plus, you might have to stop switching to the second person all the time. And you’d hate that.

Right now, I feel like I am some little shore creature that darts out to grab some food from the sea floor in between waves. I make progress now and then, but only between waves of misery and dysfunction.

A lot better than nothing, I suppose. But I wish low tide would come so I could get some things done.

I guess the real question is, are the up times getting longer and stronger? Am I making progress? And the answer is : definitely. I get more done in a month now than I used to get done in a year.

And I will go back to doing videos soon. We’ve almost caught up with all the videos I did in 2014, and I promised myself I would start doing videos again if we reached the end of those and I hadn’t found another “thing” besides my blog by then.

I imagine I will start off small, with simple “talkers” where I just look into the camera (from further away this time) and blab. But I hope to turn it into someplace where I can do more ambitious stuff, like this :

It’s funny, it was fun to do, it’s content-rich, and it’s not like it was back breaking labour. Took like an hour. And it uses my comedy skills, which don’t get a lot of exercise on this blog for some reason.

Too busy using it as an offshore angst dump, I guess.

I suppose I can also use the videos as a place to work on my standup comedy routines. Technically they have am audience. Not the kind you would find in a comedy club, but still. A place to put together a routine and test it out then watch the video and see what I did wrong and get it as good as I can before sharing it with the world.

That actually sounds really hard. But if I want to make a go of life, I can’t keep just making things and then shoving them out the door before the paint is even dry.

It just hurts to slow things down that much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has had its ups and downs.

All internal, of course. My life is still primarily content free. Most of my time is spent in naps and video games and fucking around on the Internet.

What can I say, it’s what I know. It’s how I survived childhood. The only difference is the Internet. All through my childhood, I mostly buried myself in comics, books, television, and video games.

Because when you bury yourself in those deeply enough, you can’t see the cruel and confusing outside world any more, and that makes you feel safe.

Every fixation is an escape.

I wonder about my passivity. I can’t help but think that it is, in part at least, a fundamental part of my basic personality. The sort of thing they used to call temperament. Some babies explore, some don’t.

I’m guessing I didn’t. Or not much.

And my point of view is that if I am happy where I am, why move? There needs to be a specific reason for me to do something, something that compels (and impels) me to do it. A need, a desire.

Other people need a reason to stop.

Of course, once I was old enough to get into books and other media, I did my exploration there. It is, in its own way, a solution to the conflict between passivity and the urge to explore. I could go all kids of places without moving at all. Stay where I am safe and if not happy than at least content (starting to hate that word) and explore the world of the mind instead.

As I have send before, intellectually I am restless and easily bored. It takes a lot to keep my enormous sprawling complicated intellect busy. So my mind is constantly searching for answers, insights, and illumination. Or if none of those are on the menu, amusement will do. Or at the very least, distraction.

If I had to summarize how I have spent most of my life, “distracted” would be an acceptable answer.

And like all addictions, it is both the problem and the solution. The things I escape via distraction would not even be there if I spent less of my time distracted and more of it paying attention to reality and plotting my course through it.

God knows I’m smart enough. It’s the other parts of the equation missing.

I would be a lot better off if I turned away from the world inside and figured out how to get along better with the real world, and yet, I feel so weak. The very inner isolation that has caused the problem has also done a brutally efficient job of keeping me away from any and all life experiences that might have stimulated growth in spirit and will.

I am brilliant, funny, sweet, charming, creative, inventive, and one heck of a nice person. And yet, I still feel like I am just a bag of skin full of nothing. None of that adds up to an actual person. I can’t explain why that is, but that’s how I feel.

Maybe I’m afraid to be a real person. Reality is such a commitment.

Perhaps the yawning hungry void inside is purely chemical. Some imbalance in my brain, maybe that excess of internal anesthetic I go on about from time to time. It floats around in my mind, suppressing emotion, blocking out the sunlight and warmth I need to nourish my soul and help my spirit grow. It leaves me cold and numb and devours everything inside me.

And yet, until I heal the wounds prompting the released of these endorphins, the void and all its terrible nothing, nothing, NOTHING will continue to plague me and I will remain in a state of slow and painful glaciation.

Oh well. At least I can feel the sun now, albeit very weakly. It gives me something to go towards.

The word “draining” has been on my mind. Not just in the sense of depression “draining” my strength, joy, energy, and damn near everything else. It’s also another sense of draining : the kind that turns a swamp into farmland.

I feel like swampland in need of draining. I feel bloated will ill humors and drenched in dirty brown poison, in need of some spiritual lancet to puncture me and apply suction to drain the wound and give me a chance to recover.

All that unexpressed energy curdling and turning within to infect and poison my soul. Perhaps it is my shell that requires puncturing, or at less my albumen.

Water imagery. Always.

Oh well, progress is not linear. Very little in the real world is, and as much as I hate to admit it, real progress can only happen in the real world, outside my well padded cell.

I wish I could just open a vein and bleed on the page until all the bad stuff was gone. Let all my poisons flow out into the world and down the drain, and hence, out to the ever-restless seas.

The sea is our mother, and she is mighty. She can take all our pain away. But only if we dare release it.

Had a minor panic attack earlier. Nothing major, just increased heart rate, respiration, a panicky feeling. No external prompt, just the usual feeling of being trapped and unable to free myself or escape, backed by low oxygen levels from sleep apnea.

Guess I should be doing something about that whole smothering in my sleep thing. Oh well. It’s not like I’m in charge.

Oh wait, I am. Fuck. I need to learn to delegate.

If only I had a strong male figure to gather me up and take me someplace where I will feel warm and special and safe and valid. Feel like I am enough. Someone who loves me, warts and all, and who never, for a single moment, makes me feel like I am a burden he’d be better off without.

But who can love the unemployable man?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Well, pre-comedian, anyhow. Proto-comedian.

Today, Felicity and I traveled to Burnaby for our orientation for Stand Up For Mental Health. And it was fab. I am even more excited about the program than before because in just this one session, I learned a ton of valuable things about stand up comedy, and that makes the comedy nerd in me happy enough to plotz.

The most important thing, the thing that is the big world-changer paradigm shifter for me, is the idea that you don’t set out to write jokes. You write down true things about yourself, and then find the humour in them.

Brilliant! That way you can decide what you want to express before feeling the need to find a way to express it. All we did today is write down facts about our mental health experience and then turn them into jokes.

And yet, I feel positively enriched! All the stuff I feel shame about (and I have a lot of shame for someone raised without religion) can be turned directly into comedy gold, and using the skills I already have, to boot!

Pha King A! I think this is going to go splendidly. I’m going to love it!

Another bonus : when I woke up this morning, I felt horrible. Absolutely wretched. Felt like I had slept in a cardboard box with insufficient air holes. Classic sleep apnea hangover. Eating helped, but then I wanted to go back to sleep.

That is the pattern I have unconsciously fallen into : get up, eat lunch, go back to sleep. Now my body expects to go back to sleep after the first time I eat. So I felt both stifled and sleepy, and generally crappy.

And that is absolutely marvelous, because I went anyway.

The idea of not going was not even on my radar. I knew that I absolutely, positively, definitely go no matter how shitty I felt. And realizing that I did that, set my mind on something and carried it out resolutely and with total conviction, is wonderful new indeed. I feel better about myself. And that’s worth all the money in the 1 percent combined.

And I feel much more relaxed about the program. I was very funny today, and what’s more, it was a place where being very funny was not only allowed but encouraged. I got to shine some today, and that helps a lot too.

As does the lovely sunshine. Really have to look at whether I have SAD. (Me depressed caveman. Me have sad. No hunt. Stay home in cave. Binge watch Veep. )

Another thing I realized is that I am already a comedian. I mean, I guess a sort of always knew that, but it really crystallized today. I “write jokes” all the time. I just don’t write them down. We were talking about my experience with group therapy and a certain somnolent psychiatrist (Doctor Dahi, go ahead and sue me! I’d richly enjoy humiliating you in open court) and I realized I already have material on it. Stuff I came up with at the time. Things I use to express myself about that time when it comes up in conversation. I am a natural joke-smith. It’s a deep part of how I express myself.

The only thing missing is that I don’t write the stuff down.

So I will learn to do that. I don’t want to do it, but I will. A big part of me doesn’t want to sacrifice the spontaneity of the moment by slowing down and writing down a joke, but it is a compromise I am willing to make if it leads to comedy.

Or maybe I will voice record it. Whatever. Point is, capture the magic, goddamn it.

So I am confident that I will learn a lot from the course and have a lot of fun doing it. A lot of it will be helping other people with their material, and I am totally cool with that. I love helping people and I really love making the word a funnier place, so I have no problem sprinkling my sunshine onto other people’s lawns.

On the contrary, it’s the time spent with my own material that I worry about.

See, I don’t normally open up my creative process to, like, anybody. I don’t want other people making ripples in the pond (water imagery) while I am trying to create something. From beginning to end, my creative process is closed.

You can have it when I am done with it.

Obviously, that is going to have to change. I will come to class with jokes I am working on, or even jokes I already think are dynamite, and open them up for judgment and criticism.

And I am not proud of this, but I am not sure I can be totally cool about that.

I want to be, but I can’t guarantee it. I am fairly worried about this. I am not used to this sort of… input. I am worried that I might snap at someone, and that selfsame comedic talent can cut people really deep if used as a weapon.

And these people are fragile enough already.

So I will have to guard for that. I am free to ignore people’s advice and I am capable of being an adult about this whole group discussion thing. I can get used to this kind of process.

But it cuts very, very close to where I live. I remember how depressed I used to get after reading to the Richmond Writer’s Group. And it wasn’t because they didn’t like it.

It was that they didn’t understand it.

So I may be juggling live grenades at first when I bring in material and people don’t get it or don’t think it’s good. I know it is supposed to be a supportive, helpful atmosphere free from harsh judgment, but like all artists I am quite sensitive and emotional when it comes to my work, and even constructive criticism hurts.

I will have to learn to let down my guard and trust people before I can sure I am out of the woods on that one.

Must. Control. Sarcasm!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. It’s gender’s turn on the Perennial-Fru-Topic-O-Rama. I just can’t wrap my head around gender. But lately, I’ve been getting angry about it.

Who gave society the right to demand a label of me? I refuse to suppress any part of myself just to make myself easier to categorize. And that most definitely includes gender.

As far as I know, there is no gender label for me. Even “genderfluid” (when was the last time you checked your genderfluid levels?) is wrong, and you’d think a label that vague would cover everyone.

But you’d be wrong. I don’t feel like my gender is fluid. I might feel more M or more F at one moment or another, but I don’t feel like I become those things then. No matter how M or F I feel, I still refuse to be labeled.

My gender goes much deeper than that. I feel like I am always both, in large amounts. A mental hermaphrodite, in a way. Or possible an inchoate chimera of some sort. I don’t know.

I prefer to think of myself as a brand new beast, a one-off creation, something wild and original and fabulous. A rare specimen that puzzles scientists and is a big hit on the talk show circuit.

So, Jay, is this the first time you’ve talked to an animal, or just the first time it’s talked back?

I won’t claim it is easy to forsake labels, though. Individualism teaches us to seek our own identities and one of the ways we do that is through labels. A label can make you feel less alone by powerfully suggesting the existence of others like you, and that means there actually is a group to which you belong. You might never meet them, but you know they exist.

So part of me is sad that there is no word for what I am. Various other labels, like “gay” and “nerd” and “depressive”, have helped me a lot in figuring out who I am and where I stand. If there was a word for what I am, that might help too.

Something like “double gendered”, maybe. Or “supergendered” Or maybe “Gender X”.

Nah. That sounds like a third rate X-men clone from the Mutant Mania era. One with transgendered mutants. Their mutant power is that they are men and women trapped in the bodies of women and men!

Meh. I keep wanting to fall back on “I’m a me. ” Not that most people would understand that. But then again, maybe I should not worry so much about being understood and concentrate on being true to myself and what I am.

Whatever that might be. Honestly, sometimes the question itself bores me to tears. Who am I, who am I? Who the fuck cares. You are who you are. You’re the only one of you there is, and there is no need to try to become someone else.

It won’t work, anyhow. You can’t become a copy of the people you admire. You can only use their examples to aid you in the quest for who you really are, if that’s what you’re into.

I dunno. Maybe I am stuck with this identity quest because I am trying as hard as I can do finally go through emotional puberty, and that involves the seeking phase that all teenagers go through. Why should I be any different?

Apart from the fact that I usually am.

The perils of being too much of an individual for even the most individualist culture, I suppose. Conforming has never been a goal of mine. I have tried to connect with people and get along with them, but as myself. Like I have said before, I can honestly say that changing myself to conform to people’s expectations never even occurred to me.

Maybe it should have, at least in passing. I might have learned better social skills that way. But I am who I am, a weird creature that grew in the dark, like a bizarre bioluminescent creature from the deep, deep ocean.

The thing is, despite not changing to conform, I was still desperately lonely and in need of friends. I was scared a lot of the time, and I tried to make friends with others, I just had too little in common with normal, regular children who thought and acted like… well, normal, regular children.

And like I always say…. things grow strange in the dark.

Looking back, even when I had sort-of friends, I was usually in a state of high social anxiety when I was around them, especially when I was in their homes. And that kind of anxiety and the retreat into oneself that results tends to paralyze you inside, no matter how hard you try to seem calm and cool on the outside.

Interesting thought : I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been on Paxil way back then. It’s often the fear and not the social skills that really make someone awkward. It’s hard to be smooth when a million alarms are ringing in your head and you feel like you might pass out or puke or both, hopefully not in that order.

I have had anxiety make me so lightheaded and dizzy that I had trouble looking directly at anything because my eyes (and head) couldn’t hold still for long enough. I have had it make my heart and respiration rates go up so high that I thought I was having a heart attack (which did not help). And don’t even get me started on the nausea and indigestion and bowel issues.

But from now on, I am going to stop trying to hold back the tide of anxiety and instead, I am going to throw the doors wide open and scream “Give it to me! Give me all the anxiety you got! I can take it! You don’t fucking own me!”

Ride the storm. Dare it to come at you. And when it’s given you its worst, scream “Is that all you got, you pussy? Well then FUCK YOU! Go back to your mama, you punk ass BITCH!”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another Wednesday, another White Spot dinner.

Officially starting to get nervous and excited about the orientation for Stand Up For Mental Health (SUFMH) on Friday

Still not sure I actually want to be a real standup comedian, though. I know I can write the jokes and do the act, not so sure about living the life.

Fairly sure I would enjoy the travel, at least at first. Even if it’s Greyhound. I am prety sure I could do Greyhound for four or five hours, probably. If the seats are not too small. And the one advantage bus travel has over air is that they can let you out to stretch your legs.

Trickier to do on an airplane.

But doing the same act, over and over again, night after night… I don’t know. I suppose I could treat it like a one man, one act play. I have done short drama before, as writer, director, and star. And as a comedian, you are all three.

But here is the thing. I have never performed in a play more than three times. Every single time, it has opened on Friday, closed on Sunday, one show in between.

Um, not because the plays were terrible. That is just how amateur theater works.

So doing the same show dozens of times… dunno if that would work.

I think I would have to be thinking of and writing new jokes all the time, as well as tinkering with existing material to perfect it. That is the only way I could stay motivated. I am primarily a comedy writer. A creator. Performance is a lot of fun and I am definitely a bit of a ham, but that is not who I am at the core.

I am a writer. I make somethung out of nothing. I give birth to dreams.

Still, spending some time slogging it through the dues paying part of a comedy career might do me some good. Get me out of me my shell, expose me to novel social situations, get me out and about.

And there is no reason it would HAVE to involve traveling all over. I could be a local comedian. Have jokes, will travel… anywhere my bus pass will take me.

Doubt you could make a living doing it like that. But it would get me some extra cash, And most importantly, it could be the first step in my my real plan : find people for a skit comedy group!

Mua ha ha, thunder crash, etc.

I figure that I would look for the people who have very good material but who seem uncomfortable with the whole performing thing. That would indicate to me that they, like me, are comedy writers at heart, and I only want writer-performers for my troupe, at least at first.

You can talk a talented writer into performing. You can’t talk a performer into being a talented writer.

And my goal would be to make YouTube skits. No live performance. No “show”. Just video skits, so we can do as many takes as we want and tinker with it as long as we need in order to make it as good as it possibly can be.

Fuck live performance. I demand quality!

Plus, the overhead is way lower.

Make the skits, put them on YouTube, promote the hell out of them, hope someone decides to invest in our dazzling talents, fame and fortune ensue.

Or not. Maybe we would make our fortune off YouTube and Kickstarter. Fine by me! Better, actually. I would rather be beholden tonthe audience, who only expect to be entertained, than to investors, who expect a big return on investment.

Enough for now. I grow weary of tablet typing. When next we meet, I will be home.

<--->

Wow, I wrote 615 words when I was at White Spot. That has to be a new record.

That, despite the fact that the keyboard was fighting me the whole way, or so it seemed. I was typing on my Google Keyboard (a virtual keyboard replacement) just fine for the first hundred words or so, then something happened and I just could not get back into the groove with it.

All I had to do was slow down and take it slow until I got up to speed. But I just couldn’t seem to do it. The Diet Coke I was drinking probably didn’t help.

Oh well. This is not the first and not the last time I will look back on a situation and say “If only I had taken a second to calm down and collect myself!”.

Which is a very easy thing to say…. once you are already calmed down and collected. But situations have their own momentum and create their own limitations sometimes, and sometimes, the idea you were looking for so hard when you were all hot and bothered and trapped in the moment falls right in your lap the minute your mind relaxes.

The trick is to not let these petty little things change your basic self-worth. That is, I think, one of the key differences between the healthy and the depressed. For healthy people, little mistakes might piss them off or even make them feel like an idiot, but the core of their self-worth is not changed at all.

For the depressed, it’s always all on the line. And when one little mistake, the kind that healthy people don’t even think about and just correct along the way, like fixing a typo, can send your self worth crashing through the floor, it’s no wonder we end up so far into the red.

The house always wins.

So there must be a way to wall off some of your self worth and take it out of circulation. Decide that you are basically okay, maybe not perfect but good enough and no worse than the next person, and the little petty things don’t count.

Learn to just ignore the little bumps and bruises and build a much, much higher standard of proof for detracting one iota from your self-worth and self-esteem.

It has to be possible. Others have done it.

I will find a way.

And I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.