(SPOILER ALERT : The thing in the title. )

That stands for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, of course. That’s what ended last Thursday.

For various reasons, some practical and some, I am sure, emotional, my roomies and I didn’t end up watching the final episode of the Daily Show With Jon Stewart until tonight, the Monday after.

I wasn’t looking forward to it. I get super emotional during the final episodes of shows I like. The final episode of Cheers damned near killed me with the verklemt. Final episode of Night Court was even worse. Hell, I even remember being traumatized (in a good way…. hell. a great way) by the final episodes of M*A*S*H and All In The Family.

So I knew that watching the episode would be rough going. That doesn’t mean I anticipated being miserable the whole time, or even part of the time. It just means that I know I would be going through crate upon crate of feels, and for better and for extremely worse, I barely go through a box a week normally.

Really should seek out catharsis catalysts more often. I am so bound up and frozen inside. I always end up stronger and happier as a result. Spring can’t come soon enough in this cold and lonely heart of mine.

Anyhow, I went in to the episode expecting a hell of a lot of emotions. And I was not disappointed. Seeing all the correspondents come back (and I mean all, even Michael Che), hearing him give an awesome speech about bullshit, and holy shit, the power of Bruce Springsteen is not diminished … it brought up a lot of emotions in me.

But the amazing thing is, there was very little sadness. I suppose that’s obvious in retrospect. It’s a comedy show,after all. And Jon is not the sort of person to wallow in bittersweet tears. So there wasn’t going to be heartbreaking montages or some melodramatic turning off of the studio lights.

For one thing, the show isn’t ending. Technically.

But like I said before, as much as Jon, being a Sagittarius, doesn’t like responsibility and is uncomfortable with open and non-ironic shows of emotion, he was still a huge part of many people’s lives and we will miss him so very much.

We never asked your permission before we fell in love with you, Jon. And we’re not asking for your permission to go right on doing it no matter what.

We love you and we’ll miss you. Man up and handle it, you magnificent bastard.

My Moon sign is Sagittarius, so I grok not wanting responsibility. Even when I have been the guy in charge, something in me inherently resisted the idea of being the “authority”. I don’t really believe in authority in the formal sense. I am far more comfortable when everything is loose and relaxed and only minimally hierarchical. Responsibility is so restrictive. Why can’t people just get along and be cool?

But the Sun always rules, and my Sun sign is Taurus, and we bovines have very, very deep feelings about responsibility. When you have the power, you have the responsibility, and whether or not you asked for it, wanted it, or like it is immaterial.

You have the baby. Your job is to see that the baby is taken care of. It doesn’t matter whose baby it is, it doesn’t matter whether or not you ever wanted to be in charge of a baby, it doesn’t even matter if you just plain hate babies.

Well, okay, that matters because it probably means you are a horrible, horrible person, but still.

So while I have a natural aversion to responsibility, if I end up with it, I will execute it with care, caution, and diligence.

And, of course, humor, wit, and wackiness. I mean, you might as well have fun.

So anyhoo, I enjoyed the final episode and it didn’t make me sad. In fact, I am rather amazed at its ability to be both an extremely appropriate and wonderful sendoff while also continuing to be funny and soul satisfying as well.

I feel like I got a lot of necessary catharsis from the episode itself. I am not claiming that I am not sad about Jon Stewart leaving TDS, and I can only imagine it will get a lot worse once the residual levels of Jon Stewart have completely left my bloodstream and I start hankering for a fix of JS, knowing it will never again come.

But I feel like the nature and execution of the final episode was so positive and loving and wonderful and life-affirming (yes, I went there) that it will make the grief more tolerable. It is a magnificent last impression for a show that has been the same for almost seventeen years, and if you have to go, going out on the highest note you can is the best way to go, every time.

I will do my best to leave space in my heart for Trevor Noah, even though he will face the same challenge as Larry Wilmore (replacing a beloved figure and the inevitable backlash that creates) times a million and ten. I have stuck with Larry even though I miss Stephen Colbert something fierce (as shown by the childlike joy I felt seeing him in the last ep), and I am sure I will hang in there with Trevor Noah as well.

But it will never be the same. It can’t be. You can’t go home again, there will never be another Casablanca, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was something unique and special, a melding of man and (production) machine, and while it’s always possible that the Trevor Noah version will be as good, it can never, ever, ever be the same.

And that’s okay. At this point in my life, I have outlived a lot of show I loved, and came to the conclusion that instead of mourning the episodes that never will be, we should be glad that the vast and mysterious monster known as Television gave us so much of the episodes that were. The episodes we still have, and will always have.

You can’t go home again. But you can visit, and remember.

And that is, more or less, enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Way back when I was in elementary school (a period I seem doomed to revisit over and over), I had two distinct problems.

On the one hand, I was extraordinarily bright. Could read before I even entered school, knew math up to but not including fractions, and so forth and so on.

On the other hand, I was extraordinarily clumsy. I couldn’t catch a ball. My penmanship was atrocious. Anything involving fine motors skills was near impossible for me. I ran into things. I tripped a lot. I has hopeless in gym.

And the thing is, I arrived at school that way as well. I’m not sure why. But even when I was your average happy kid playing with my friends Tammy and Janet, I wasn’t very coordinated. I was happier holding the handle of the jump rope than jumping it. I fell over when I tried to play hopscotch. Everyone assumed I would grow out of it.

But I didn’t. At least, not entirely.

So my school, Parkside Elementary, decided to tackle these problems separately. In Grade 2, I spent part of my day in regular class, and part of the day in rehab of sorts for my twin issues.

For the “too smart for my own good” issue, I went to Mister Matthews, and we played backgammon, and talked. That was it. That was my school’s idea of a gifted student’s program. We’d play backgammon, we (mostly he) would chat, and he would let me win.

I know without the possibility of doubt that he was letting me win because to this day I don’t know how to play backgammon. I honestly never knew what the hell was going on in the game. My mind has never taken very well to that kind of strategy.

I can barely comprehend checkers.

For my other problem, my motor issues, I went to a therapist, a woman whose name I have forgotten (grr), a woman with big eyes and a big mouth who was from Jamaica. It was her job to get me to be able to catch a ball and write legibly.

And to my shame, I fought her the whole time.

Not out of spite or rebelliousness, but because to my mind, she was someone who was always asking me to do things I didn’t want to do and which made me frustrated and angry and sad, and so I resisted her every inch of the way by being whiny and difficult and resistant. Day in and day out, she would toss a ball at me and sit me down to do writing exercises involving these styrofoam squares that had the letters of the alphabet cut out of them, so all I had to do was move my pen on paper through these and I would make the letter perfectly.

I suppose the idea was that by doing that, I would build up muscle memory of the motions needed to make the letters properly and then be able to do it without assistance. I imagine for a lot of kids, that would have worked.

But the problem was between my eyes and my hands. Still is. Plus, again, I was stubborn and resistant and so on.

And that’s the part I feel guilty about. Because it’s clear from my memories that I ran that poor woman ragged. I wore her out. Every therapy session was a battle of wills and when it comes to those, I am a natural champion. So over time she became more and more exasperated with me and my attitude, not to mention my lack of progress.

I can only assume that her training had not prepared her for a kid like me. Honestly, I don’t think it possibly could have. I was too much of an extreme outlier. Like I have said before, stubbornness and intelligence are a bad combination to have when you are a kid because you are fully equipped to resist anything you don’t feel like doing and there are some cases where being able to be forced to do things is a good thing. It’s how you learn that you actually can do things which you don’t think you can do if you just stick with it and keep trying.

But I was the impossible child. Nobody could reach me. I had absolutely no fear of adults, I saw the arbitrariness of rules and authority, and I was too clever to be dominated intellectually. My position was that I wanted to be dealt with rationally and reasonably (like at home), and anything else was resisted or ignored.

No wonder people ended up giving up on me. I wore them out. I proved to them over and over that they couldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do, and with each “victory”, I essentially punished them for trying.

What else could they do?

And sure, it’s easy to say that it was the school’s job to handle me and by not being able to do so, the school system failed me. This is absolutely true, as far as it goes. In a perfect world, there would have been people with the strength of mind and power of personality to put me in my place, a place in which I would have undoubtedly been a much happier and healthier kid.

I might even have gotten over myself, which is a healthy thing for anyone.

But no. I was impossible to deal with. Impossible to dominate. Two of my favorite people from my childhood, my babysitter Betty and my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Rogers, were people with strong personalities and minds who could, at least partially, put me in my place and calm me down.

And I loved them for it.

But I still feel bad for that poor woman. I think by the end of our time, she had just plain given up. She had come in with simple therapeutic goals : get me to be able to catch the ball eight times out of ten, and get me to the point where I could write a readable sentence or two.

It’s something she had done many times before, and I assume that, unless I soured her on her career choice entirely, she went on to do it many more times after me.

But I can’t imagine she remembers me fondly. In fact, I doubt she likes to remember me at all.

I was such a weird kid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sometimes, I get lost.

I don’t know why. Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with my brain (few would be surprised). Maybe it’s one of the hidden costs (or causes) of having the sort of intellect and creativity I have. Maybe it is a necessary part of having a truly open and insightful point of view.

But I get lost.

And it can happen at any time. Sure, there’s obvious times, like when I am very tired, or when I just woke up from fitful sleep. But it can happen in the middle of a sentence. One second I am fine, the next it’s like I lose all contact and contents in my mind and I have to fight to stay focused on what is happening long enough to put myself back together again.

This is pretty goddamned stressful.

And it’s been happening my entire life. I can remember it happening when I was still in my high chair. It was especially problematic in school, when I was trying to pay attention to what the teacher or professor was saying.

Now it’s not amnesia. I don’t forgot who I am, how I got there, or what I am doing. It’s more subtle than that. But sudden amnesia is the best thing I can think of to compare it to. Sudden partial amnesia, I suppose.

Otherwise, I don’t know how to put it into words. It’s a feeling of disorientation and confusion, and it often makes everything around me seem alien and hostile. It comes with a feeling of cold fear, as one might expect of something that so thoroughly scrambles one’s noodle. There’s a feeling of disconnection and alienation.

I have many, many, MANY memories of times when this happened in a social situation and sent me into a panic as I desperately tried to get back on that moving train of social interaction that most people don’t even know exists because they don’t have something wrong with their brains that, now and then, they fall off.

No wonder I ended up with social anxiety.

On the plus side, I think the necessity of pulling myself out of these mental potholes has contributed to my mental strength and insightfulness. There’s something about the process that sharpens the mind and makes it very good at deduction.

I guess I regularly have to deduce my way back to sanity.

At these moments of disconnection, what I truly need is some sort of very solid, real, and comforting reality. For another sort of person, that might be God. But I am, for better or worse, incapable of believing things which are patently absurd and logically unsupportable. I cannot accept as true that which makes no logical sense.

And there are, as far as I can tell, no sensible arguments for the existence of God, or Allah, or whoever.

This feeling of unreality when I disconnect informs a lot of the deeper machinery of my psyche. I have talked before about feeling like I am not really real. That I might disappear at any moment like someone blew out my candle.

Looking at that from the point of view of today’s topic, perhaps what is really going on is that the world feels unreal to me. Subjectively speaking, it can disappear on the emotional level at any moment. I have felt only loosely attached to reality due to my extremely cerebral nature for a long time now.

Perhaps these disconnections are both symptom and cause of that.

either way, I wish the world seemed more real to me. Real, solid, reliable, normal. Perhaps this is what happens when you wander so far away from the walls of the mind that keep other people’s realities together that you lose sight of them entirely, and then it’s just you and the void.

And then you have to find your way back. Over and over. You never learn.

I only know one way to deal with these disconnections : anxiety and panic. Those are the fuel I use to get back to reality, or at least, as close to it as I need to be to feel better. Perhaps if I could remain calm while putting things back together, I would not feel so anxious when in social situations.

Perhaps the real problem is that I prioritize internal processing over realtime dealings with reality to such an outrageous and insane amount that even when I am trying to deal with reality directly, my internal processes can come and pull the rug out from under my consciousness by taking resources away from it to suit their own needs.

Bad things happen when you spend so much time alone.

I wouldn’t even know where to start in trying to prevent this. I don’t know. Maybe if I spend enough time trying to focus on the real world instead of the galaxies inside my skull, the problem would straighten it out.

But I’d really rather not do that, which is the problem. In many ways, despite my rugged pragmatism, I am reality-averse.

In fact, perhaps the real wellspring of my hardcore philosophers POV is that I need that in order to keep what grip on reality I have. I keep my sanity stitched together with reason, logic, and pragmatism, and every else seems, to me, like chaos, madness, and the destruction of my fragile glass tower.

I am deeply and desperately afraid of losing contact completely. One of my most terrible nightmares is the one where I finally snap completely and there is no more objective reality for me at all, and I am alone with my dreams.

Some would think that experience would be wonderful, like a peak lucid dreaming experience that never ended. Why, here in my dreams, I can do anything I want!

But I know better. I know that if I lost contact completely, my mind would descend into chaos and madness.

I need to believe in reality. Perhaps that’s why idealists (in the philosophical sense, meaning the opposite of realists) make me so damned mad with their talk about how there is no such thing as objective truth.

In that case…. I would be truly fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Seriously. This fucking night. Holy shit.

I knew tonight would be the final Jon Stewart episode of the Daily Show. I have tried to prepare myself for that, but there’s only so much you can do. Mostly, I have just been dreading it. The sort of dull, cold, helpless dread that comes from knowing something bad is coming and that you can’t do a damn thing about it.

I’ve thought of some really horrifying metaphors for that (because I cannot, for reals, help myself) but I am not going to share them because I like you people and think you should be able to sleep at night.

I know that, once I watch that last episode, I will begin grieving. Yes, grieving. We associate that word with death, but we grieve any kind of loss, whether it’s a loved one dying or the removal of someone from the place where you know them and love them and see them hundreds of times a year.

They say that grief is like losing a part of yourself, and I feel like Jon Stewart became a part of me and every other Daily Show fan. He was the magical man who could take horrible things said by horrible people for horrible reasons and turn them into laughter. That’s why the Daily Show became the most trusted news source for people with functional brains. You got the poison and the antidote in one dose. With Jon Stewart’s help, the news was far more digestible because the Daily Show filtered out the worst of it and helped you with the rest.

What I am saying is that Jon Stewart was America’s kidney.

And the things is, I know that the show will still be funny. It will have the same correspondents, the same writers, the same producers. I know that a lot of Stewart’s glow is from the light of others.

But not all of it. It’s you we love, Jon. And it’s you we’ll miss. I know that makes you uncomfortable, but it’s still true.

That’s why everyone is acting like you are dying tonight. We all know that the man we know as Jon Stewart isn’t dying.

But The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is dying, and that is going to take a long time to get over.

Honestly, I feel really bad for Trevor Noah. He’s going to experience the ultimate form of having to follow the headliner.

You know what? Let’s move on to something marginally less depressing : Canadian politics.

I learned today that the first national debate leading up to the October election here in Canuckistan. We have been ruled by the monster Stephen Harper for around eight years now, and he is someone for whom there is not enough hate in the Universe to express my degree of loathing for him. He has spent all his time as PM dismantling everything Canadians hold dear, fulfilling every twisted dream of the moral cripples who call themselves Conservatives these days, and Canadians, being the polite and reserved people that we are, have been quietly waiting for the chance to boot his ass into a decaying orbit.

Canada would be greatly improved by his assassination. Even at this late date.

However, take heart, gentle reader. His poll numbers are so low they have had to add a new sub-basement to store them. Canadians are sick and fucking tired of him. I bet you could go to a thousand Tim Hortons’ and still be unable to find anyone who will admit to having voted for him. The fix is in as far as he is concerned, a fact which I dearly hope his enormous fucking ego will hide from him until it is far, far too late.

Right now, the battle is between the Liberals, who are Canadians center-left party, and the New Democratic Party, otherwise knows as the NDP. To me, there is no fight. It is not a center-right era. Justin Trudeau (son of great PM Pierre Trudeau and leader of the Liberals) can’t hope to match NDP leader Tom Muclair’s ability to translate the people’s anger towards not just Harper but the financial establishment, the 0.1 percent, and plutocracy in general. The Liberal party is just as in bed with the corporate elite as the Conservatives. They are tainted, compromised, and just plain unacceptable to any real left-wing Canadian.

People are just plain angry, and there is no way the Let’s Be Reasonable And Talk About This party can compete.

Oh well, at least our cousins to the South are providing some light entertainment tonight with their own hilarious brand of politics. Tonight is also the night of their first Republican political debate for their election in November… of 2016!

And it will be, of course, a thigh-slapping clown car demolition derby. It will be a debate with ten, count’m, ten participants… and that leaves seven genuine presidential candidates out!

I love it already. I mean, how the hell do you have a ten person debate? No matter how rational and fair a system they have worked out, it’s already merry chaos.

And of course, they will all be gunning for the frontrunner, Donald Freaking Trump. And the thing is, they can’t get him. Not only is the man’s ego bigger than his fortune, his supporters are not listening. They, like him, don’t listen, don’t care what anyone says, and all the challenges to his character, his experience, his policies, and his qualifications won’t make the slightest bit of difference to them.

They will only make him seem more alpha as they roll off his back.

I am also hoping that they start sniping at each other. Less of a chance of that, because they do have a single enemy, so to speak, but at least some of smaller dogs on stage are going to want to take down Jeb Bush, the… secondrunner? middlerunner? The secnd guy in the polls, too.

And seeing as these people are, to a man, despicable, nothing but good can come of them doing their best to destroy one another, and, as a byproduct, the Republican brand.

Let’s just sit back, munch some popcorn, and hope for a very high casualty rate, shall we?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No idea what I want to talk about today, so let’s just check out where I am in life right now.

Let’s see. I am doing fairly well with the CPAP machine. Been through several waves of resistance to using it lately. These will get smaller over time if I just maintain firm pressure towards greater discipline.

Right now, I would say I am something like 70 percent compliant. In other words, I use my CPAP machine for around 70 percent of the time I am asleep.

One odd phenomenon has cropped up. I will sleep with the CPAP machine on, and wake up feeling rested, but only from the neck down, so to speak. My eyes are still tired and I feel a little lightheaded and dizzy.

My current working theory (of course I have a theory) is that while my lungs are happy with being CPAP’d, my face muscles are still adjusting to my sleeping with this thing (the CPAP mask) on my face.

Plus, there is no guarantee that the machine is curing my sleep apnea one hundred percent. According to the data I got from my last trip to the sleep store, I am still having four sleep apnea “events” per hour. That’s a whole lot better than the seventeen per hour I was having before the CPAP, but it’s still not a one hundred percent cure.

Then again, that was before the pressure increase. Maybe I’m down to three per hour now.

Anyhow, part of me is still resisting putting on the mask “just to sleep”. It seems absurd, at least to the more primitive parts of me, to strap on a plastic mask just to sleep, and that part of me resents it and tries to convince me to skip it “just this once”. And about thirty percent of the time, it does.

But my will is iron, and I will overcome this incarnation of The Jagoff. God, I hate that asshole.

What else…. well, I am still on track for Kwantlen, of course. I have made some progress towards finding funding. At the very least, there seems to be some federal money I can access. There’s $250 per month of study for disabled people, and there’s money for students from low income families, and well, I am my own family, more or less, and very low income.

$11K a year, folks. It’s not a lot.

Unfortunately, for the disability money, I am going to have to jump through hoops to prove I am disabled. Apparently, the fact that the BC government thinks I am disabled is not good enough for the Feds. And that will be a pain because it’s not something I can just fill out online. I will have to get a hard copy and get my therapist to fill it out. Which is a drag.

The real problem is that I can only tackle this stuff in occasional bursts of activity. Otherwise, I get too stressed. This, despite the fact that I know I can handle it, at least the parts that just involve filling out forms online.

I still have trouble dealing with reality.

Plus, all the Google fu required just to find this damned information really stresses me out. I am just not cut out for research. I get too frustrated when I can’t find what I want.

I have had this issue with frustration for my entire life. Like I have mentioned before, I got away with a lot of not doing what the other students had to do because I was so damned stubborn. I would get frustrated when trying to do anything like arts or crafts, and then I would refuse to keep trying, and I don’t need to tell you (but I will), that’s not a great approach to life.

Come to think of it, it was frustration, but it was also anxiety. I suppose they can be the same thing sometimes. I would be trying to do what everyone else was doing, but because of my motor-sensory issues, I would not be able to do the simplest part of it, and I would feel like a loser and an idiot and that everyone was staring at me and judging me.

That anxiety – the feeling that I just can’t work reality right – is with me to this day. I get very anxious when anything involving competently handling the physical comes up.

This is an enormous issue. I have done myself no favours by avoiding anything that involves using your hands for anything but typing and using the mouse. It’s one thing to be too clumsy for sports, but being too clumsy for life? Not good.

But that might just be my depression talking. That, and some very old tapes from my childhood. Realistically speaking, I am physically competent enough for a lot of stuff. I would do fine with office work of any sort. I am fully capable of manning a cash register or a copier. I am sure I could flip burgers and work french fry machine.

So the bizarre disconnect between my eyes and my hands is not nearly as debilitating as I sometimes feel like it is. It’s not like the ability to glue glitter to construction paper is in high demand. There are a lot of jobs I could do perfectly well, if I could actually get the job.

But that’s another issue.

So maybe I need to ease back on my feelings of incompetence. I am competent enough for modern life. Maybe I couldn’t do some manual labour jobs and I will never be a master of the visual arts, but I am already a master of words, so if I was good at drawing too, that just wouldn’t be fair, would it?

Not that I would turn it down if offered. If I could take a pill and become very good at drawing, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Because then I could write and draw comics!

And some of them wouldn’t even be porn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, we’ll get this out of the way.

Cool video. Weird to see Stipes act all anchormanly.

Anyhow, yeah, it’s been a bad day, and yes, this blog entry will be dedicated to me bitching about it.

It started when I was looking for flog fuel^[1] this morning when suddenly I get this screen popping up telling me that I have been caught viewing, storing, or distributing pornography that features stuff that is illegal in Canada (which could be anything from hardcore BDSM to bestiality to pedophilia or really, anything that’s too ‘weird’ for Canada) and that my device would be blocked because of that, and that CSIS was coming for me, and etc whatever.

I imagine that someone less savvy would be flat out terrified by that, and I feel bad for those people, because they would fall victim to this obvious scam, and maybe even live the rest of their lives in fear of every knock at their door.

Luckily, I’m so sharp I can split infinitives with my mind, so to me it was obviously a scam. All the “information” they had on me, like my IP address and what kind of tablet I was using, is information you can get easily on anybody just from their IP.

That’s how ads these days know how to target your country, or freak you out a little by saying “we have hot girls looking to have sex with you in (name of your town)”.

Sorry dear…. wrong merchandise.

Oh, and it even had a randomly generated “CSIS Case Number” to make it seem all official like.

But it was clearly a scam not just because of the bullshit listed above but because they asked for money. And they had the gall to say that you would be paying a fine you’d incurred for being so pervy (honey, you have NO idea) and by paying that fine, they would, in essence, let you off with a warning.

AWOOOGAH. Bullshit detected! That is not how either law or government works. If anyone ever suggests you pay them in order to get off with a warning, they are not legitimate law enforcement and you don’t have to give them a goddamned thing. If a cop writes you a ticket, that’s it, you get the ticket, it goes on your record, you lose points on your driver’s license, and you have to pay the fine… at the courthouse.

Otherwise, that’s someone shaking you down for a bribe.

Presumably, the scammers hope that you will be so full of guilt and fear that you will pay them and consider yourself lucky. But I am too skilled a smartass to fear them and as for guilt, I was not raised in any kind of religion and seeing as all I was doing was reading text files, I feel absolutely no guilt about the content of any of them.

It’s just text, people.

Oh, and the final tipoff that it’s a total scam : they wanted payment not via VISA or Mastercard or even PayPal (all of which have a paper trail) but by one of these traceless transactions that only require a 19 digit PIN.

Sadly, their ability to turn my beloved tablet into a useless brick is no fantasy. Right now, it’s just a device for showing their message and that is it. Can’t load anything and rebooting does nothing to stop that.

So I will have to research how to un-brick it. I’m sure there’s a way.

After that, I went to my pharmacy to pick up some meds and some alcohol swabs for my insulin injections, only to discover it was closed. And at first I was all “Whuuuuuuut?” but then I remember it was a stat holiday today, one I call “So We’ll Have A Long Weekend In August Day”.

Well fuck. Luckily, slightly more than a block away from that pharmacy is a Shopper’s, and they are a major corporation and therefore not inclined to do bullshit things like close on stat holidays like people just don’t get sick then.

So I walked there, handed in my Rx, and sat down to wait for them to fill it. No problem, I thought, I brought my tablet along so I could entertain myself…..

Yup. It was THAT tablet.

Do’h. So all I could do was sit there and wait. And while waiting, I was briefly targeted by one of my social anxiety’s archnemeses : the friendly retarded guy.

That’s a double whammy for me, because I generally don’t want my bubble of anonymity shattered when out in public anyhow, no matter who it is, but especially not by… well…

Retarded people freak me out. I am not proud of this, nor do I think it is in any way morally justified. They didn’t ask to be how they are any more than I did. They have as much right to be treated with respect as anyone else.

It’s me, not them.

But look at it this way : I have issues relating to people of normal intelligence, and get freaked out taking to them.

Luckily, he only said a few words to me. I was terrified he’d latch onto me. Again, not proud.

And then the lineup at Shopper’s was HUGE, and who was right ahead of me in line? The friendly retarded guy. Luckily, he was too busy with what was, for him, the clearly tricky business of paying for his things to notice me.

Then I went to White Spot, ordered a BC Chicken Burger, and it was way too juicy. I had to wring it out onto my plate before each bite or it would have soaked me in its drippings.

As it was, it still got me a few times, so I got to walk home with stains on my T-shirt anyhow.

So yeah. Not a great day. Tablet bricked, pharmacy closed, wrong tablet, stains on shirt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.