I mean, the sun hasn’t even started to go down yet. Weird.

But I am going to be in class from 6 to 9, and so I figured I had better get my blogging done now. I imagine I will be quite tired when I get home from class tonight due to weird circadian shit, and so I am going to get as much done in this interval between getting home from therapy and heading off to class as I can.

So yeah. Thursday will be my therapy day from now on, apart from the occasional irregularity. Today’s session was not great. We didn’t really dig into anything. Plus we started fifteen minutes late. I get the feeling that my therapist is booking more work than he can handle at his age and it is starting to really catch up with him.

I mean, he told me that next Wednesday he has ten hours of therapy booked. Ten hours! . That would be too much for a young man, and he is in his late 50’s. ^[1]

Mostly we talked of superficial things. But that’s fine, really. I am not in the mood to go dig deep into the darkness of my soul. The return to school plus the lovely sunny days have put me in a very positive frame of mind. And I want to ride that wave of positivity for as long as I can.

The darkness will return, of course. But that’s fine too. I can handle it.

(—)

And now it’s 9:05 PM and I just got back from class.

The bus threw me a loop. ^[2]

So class ends and I go to the bus stop I discovered yesterday. The schedule posted there says the next bus is at 8:51 pm. This does not surprise me. The 405 runs every half hour during peak hours. It was bound to run every 45 minutes this late at night.

By the way, Tourette’s Guy (not that one) from yesterday was there again. I found that mildly freaky. I was starting to wonder if he like…. lived there. You know? Like this was the place he went because it made him feel normal.

But no, he grabbed a 430 shortly after I sat down. So I am willing to chalk it up to coincidence… for now.

Anyhow, so I wait for the bus and get on…. and I am the only passenger. Also mildly freaky. But what the hell, maybe the 405 doesn’t get a lot of customers at 8:51 at night.

Everything seems normal until we are almost at my stop. But then the bus does a right turn on Buswell, goes around the block, then stops and the bus driver says, in a South African accent, “You have to get off the bus. ”

Um, sayswhat? The 405 has dropped me off at the stop right around the corner from my apartment building many times before. Now suddenly it goes somewhere totally different?

From what I gathered from the dude, this was because I got on a 405 Brighouse Station, not a 405 Five Road. Never mind that evry 405 I have taken home has said Brighouse Station on it. The ones I take to get to Kwantlen say Cambie on them. Sure, they go to Brighouse Station. And then they keep going to my stop.

As a result of this strangeness I had to walk an extra two blocks to get home. Luckily, the stiffness in my legs has slackened enough to be no big deal, and the evening was quite pleasantly cool(as long as you were moving) , so the walk was actually kind of nice. And it’s not like I don’t need the exercise.

But still. What the fuck, dude?

The class itself was pretty cool. I am slowly getting used to the fact that every course I take has the potential to make me do group work. So far it’s simple stuff. My relatively primitive social skills can handle it.

But the more primal side to my personality still rankles at it. I am used to working alone. I have trouble letting my identity dissolve into a group identity. I prefer to do my own work.

In other words, I am one messed up beach monkey. Hopefully, going to school will let me get some of that positive social conditioning that I so desperately need in order to become a fuller, healthier, happier person.

It is a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.

I foresee possible storm cloud on the horizon between me and the prof, though. She appears to be someone who thinks writing must be concrete, which she defines in terms of the five senses.

And that is so not me. Those fo you who have read my fiction (you lucky people you) will know that it’s what is going on between people’s ears that matters to me. Emotions, ideas, perceptions, moods, attitudes, and of course, conversations are the core of my writing style. Any sensory descriptions are to support that. I am certainly not inclined to put much description in my writing. Who the fuck cares if the carpet in Adam Eden’s office is green or blue? What matters is the investigation into the Scrambled Man’s death. The color of the carpet is irrelevant, and does not serve the story.

And aren’t we supposed to avoid things which don’t move the story forward?

Worst case scenario, she is one of those people who can’t understand anything going on in a story if they don’t know what people are wearing, and I will have to write that way in order to get the best marks.

I won’t like it, but I will do it. After all, I want people with her sort of mind to be able to enjoy my work too. I guess.

But my core audience will be people who find description boring and hard to picture, and who would rather be reading about what people are thinking, saying, and doing.

And I am fine with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] Bus… loop…. there’s a joke in there somewhere.

I will talk about my day, but first, I just had one of my “funny” moments.

I get home. I get on the elevator I get off. I go to our apartment. I turn the handle… door’s open. Good, Julian must be home.

I prefer to come home to an occupied apartment. Otherwise, I get lonely.

I turn the handle, open the door, and see a completely different apartment. Almost no furnishings. Just a very ugly zebra print couch sitting in the living room. Otherwise, empty.

I am agog. Total reality crash. I think of and discard theories. Were we burgled? Did my roomies decide to REALLY clean the place up? Was I having a psychotic break?

Every office should have a psychotic breakroom, by the way.

Of course, it was much stupider (on my part) than that. The other guy in the elevator with me had pushed 5, and I live on 6. I had just gotten off the elevator the first time it came to a stop. Then I just went to where my apartment should be were I on the right floor, and then opened the door.

Really glad nobody was there to see a total stranger open their door, look utterly confused, then finally check the number on the door and realize his mistake.

These kind of things don’t happen to normal people.

Anyhow, I have the whole “getting home from Kwantlen” thing sorted. Turns out, if I had only turned left instead of right when I left KPU last night, I would have discovered that there is a stop for my beloved 405 right on the steps of the building. (Admittedly, those steps are huge. )

So I don’t have to go very far at all to catch my bus home. I pondered walking home today because the weather is GOR-geous but my legs are hella stiff from the radical increase in the amount of walking I am doing (going to “some” from “none”) and I figured walking home would be pushing it.

There was a guy with Tourette’s Syndrome at the bus stop. One thing about Tourette’s is that the symptoms are unmistakable once you know them. He tapped various parts of his body, twitched, swayed, made little grunting noises, laughed, sang the beginning three words of some Chinese song five times in a row, and muttered under his breath.

Not all at the same time, obviously. That’s not a disease, that’s an act.

I was glad I knew about the disease so I could compassionately ignore him. The last thing someone like that needs is someone looking at them like they are crazy. Tourette’s patients can no more help their tics than regular people can stop their hearts from breathing or their cells from metabolizing. Medication can help, but it’s still going to happen now and then, especially if they are under stress.

Stress is the devil.

Today I had my first class of Ideology and Politics. My reaction is… mixed. The going seemed pretty slow, but that is par for the course (so to speak) for the first day of class. The first day is always dull because you have to go through the syllabus and regulations and such. Yawn city! And yet, you dare not space out because that shit is going to be very important in the future.

Information like how to get and fulfill classwork, for instance. That’s my problem of the moment. I am not quite up with all the new technology yet, and so while I at least now know where this kind of thing can be found, I don’t feel like I really “get it” yet. And that makes me nervous. I don’t want to embarrass myself by falling behind!

After we got through the syllabus BS, the class was okay, but not thrilling. I found myself checking the clock fairly often, which is not a good sign. But the material was dry. It’s that “what is (thing the course is about)?” phase. I know what goddamned ideology is, that’s why I took the course!

Then, there was the Political Compass incident. The prof wanted us to do this Political Compass test in order for us to find out what our politics are.

I was game. But then my tablet started running super slow. Like, I would input an answer and it would take ten seconds before the button I pressed to change, let alone actually bringing me to the next question.

And the thing is, I knew this happens sometimes. But it never seemed like that big a deal until the tablet become mission critical. As a result of the slowdown, I finished the thing WAY after everyone else.

That would be no big deal, but while I was laboriously and tediously going through the quiz, my partner in the lame “interview each other” exercise was waiting for me.

She was… not ideal. She spoke very quietly, which is not good when the whole room is having discussion, and I got the feeling she was very shy.

In fact, I am pretty sure that when I was writing her answer down for one question, she was Googling the answer to the next one on her smartphone, and repeating what she had just read.

I have been very shy in my life, but I have never been “stumped for an opinion” shy. Put me in a classroom and I am bold as brass, so much so that I have to control myself or I will end up dominating the discussion.

It was always the street that was the hardest for me.

Anyhow, so we got the thing filled out and will be presenting them in class Monday.

I guess that’s my day so far. My legs feel like overstretched rubber bands, and it will likely get worse before it gets better, but I don’t care.

My body will eventually adjust to the new activity level.

Oh, right. I didn’t go straight home after class. I found a comfy spot and did a bunch of the paperwork I needed to do. Filled in as much of the disability forms as I could. The one for my student loan is surprisingly short and to the point.

In fact, if I didn’t have to get both a bank account and picture ID for it, it would be a breeze.

I will get on that tomorrow. I hope the bank account will be easyish at least. The ID… oy.

It’s like I don’t really exist.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

I start school tomorrow. I am so freaking excited.

I have done a lot of preparation, or at the very least, a lot of what I can think of. I have maps of all three floors on my tablet, plus a text file version of my schedule which includes the time I have to be at the bus stop each day to catch the 405 which will take me to KPU.

I am inordinately proud of myself for thinking to do that last thing.

Plus, Joe gave me some binders full of paper, so I will be able to take notes if I so choose. I am also taking along the boring paperwork I need to complete so that if things begin to drag too much, I can do the paperwork and listen to the lecture at the same time. I can do that kind of thing, and it will look, at least superficially, like I am taking notes.

I still have no idea what my class sizes are like. I thought I could look it up on the website, but I can’t find it now. Maybe it was an illusion, I don’t know. So I have a series of surprises to look forward to this week.

Of course, I am hoping for small class sizes. I would much rather have a course that feels more intimate and direct, rather than impersonally broadcasted. But I know that KPU is somewhat of an education factory, so I am prepared to accept that some of all of my classes might be way bigger than I am used to experiencing.

Because that’s the thing : I have never been in a class larger than 30ish people. To me, 30 is the “normal” class size. That is roughly the class size I had all through regular schooling.^[1] And UPEI is too small a university to have really huge classes.

There was one ampitheater where there could be classes of like, 100 people, but I never took anything there.

My favorite class at UPEI was Phenomenology, and it was just me, the prof, and six other hardcore philosophy student. That was awesome. It was more like a meeting of like-minded individuals than a top-down information delivery system. It reminded me of images of the students of philosophers sitting around in their togas, listening to the wisdom of their elders.

So if I end up in one of these enormous classes where the professor is a dot on the horizon, I will have to learn to live with that. I won’t like it, but I will adapt.

That brings up the whole “sitting up front” thing. My instinct is always to do so, because, like I said before, I need to be in front to see and to ask the occasional question to keep my mind focused.

And seeing as my appetite for mental stimulation has only increased due to being regularly satiated by the Internet, I might need to ask those questions all the more.

On the other hand, if I am sitting right up front doing my paperwork, the teacher might notice, and… that would be bad.

Meh. I will figure it out as I go.

I will take the bus there for now, even though I could totally walk there and back if I wanted to do so. It’s only like six blocks or so. And who knows, maybe some day I will finish class and decide it’s a nice day and I will walk home. Maybe run an errand or two on the way.

Doubt I will ever walk there, though. It’s complicated.

One thing that didn’t really click for me until Felicity brought it up was that Kwantlen is right next door to Landowne Mall. That will definitely come in handy. Especially if there’s a grocery store in there somewhere.

I have been telling myself that I need to get more good, decent, healthy food in my life, but I am too lazy to go grocery shopping on my own. But if I’m next door to it for class anyhow, I might just be able to convince myself to pop in and get myself something to eat that isn’t my usual meal of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a bowl of junk food.

That shit is just not enough to keep anyone healthy. It’s better than some people’s diets, but that doesn’t mean it’s enough. When it comes to nutrition, there are no relative measures. You are either getting enough or you aren’t.

And I cannot possibly be getting enough protein or calcium.

What else… I am going to be showing up 45ish minutes early for tomorrow’s initiation. I would like to say that is entirely because I am an intelligent person with fully adult powers of forethought and sensibility who knows he will need the extra time in order to find his classes at his band new school, but honestly, that’s not the whole picture.

It is also because the stupid 405 bus that is to be my chariot of the proletariat for school travel only shows up at quarter after the hour and quarter TO the hour, and showing up with like ten minutes to class seems pretty stupid.

I am a little worried about having to get from my first class on the first floor to my second on the third for in only ten minutes, but I have looked over the maps and don’t think it will be too hard.

I hope elevators are an option, though.

Well I guess that’s it. The next time you and I talk, Dear Listener, I will be six hours of education smarter.

As always, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But there’s only six videos, so I will likely include other stuff.

For instance, today started out weird. I woke up at around 7 am incredibly hungry. Like, the kind of hungry that makes me feel crazed and a little panicky. Maybe that was the low blood sugar… I don’t know.

But I had no choice, I had to get up and eat. After I had eaten, I felt better, and tried to get back to sleep.

But then the worse thing happened. I had my CPAP on like a good little boy, and was crossing the twilit land ‘twixt our world and The Dreaming, when I realized I was having trouble breathing.

More about this after our first vid.

For someone who really wants to be making hardcore techno songs, I sure end up doing a heck of a lot of slow mellow numbers. Not totally sold on that lovely string part. It almost works. Almost.

Anyhow, at first I thought I was just experiencing resistance (of the psychological kind) and so I didn’t do anything about it. I thought it was just my claustrophobia making me feel like I wasn’t getting enough air when I knew I was.

So I reminded myself that I had slept for a hundred hours with the thing on by now, and that all available data suggested that I was a lot better off with it on, so despite how I felt, it was fine. I also practiced my go-to visualization to combat the way panic can make your throat tighten and make it harder to breathe, which is to imagine that there’s a metal ring expanding into my throat and keeping my airways wide open.

But that wasn’t quite making the cut. I tried to sleep but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was running out of air.

And now, a vid.

Don’t worry, I am never going to do the “at arms length lying down” thing again. It was an experiment, and I don’t really like the results, so that’s that.

Back to our story. Eventually, the feeling of needing air got so strong that I had to take off the mask, sit up, and catch my breath. I then went through some of the breathing exercises (holding my breath, emptying out my lungs, etc) that I have developed for times just like these.

Times I thought would be in my past once I started using CPAP again.

Getting a grip on myself after that was not easy. I was freaking out. The worst time for me to have something scary or bad to happen to me is when I am in that hypnagogic zone where I am between sleep and wakefulness. I am extremely psychologically permeable in that state, and lifelong impressions can be made, usually bad ones.

Eventually, I got myself smoothed out again, enough to get some shitty sleep (sans CPAP) anyhow. And once I had a few more Z’s in me, I had the mental clarity to figure out what probably happened.

You just know I am going to do a vid here, don’t you?

Wow, those slides are going by way too fast. Clearly my idea of how long a slide needs to stay on the screen for people to have a chance to “get it” needs lengthening.

People need time for their frigging eyes to focus!

As for the music… meh. What I wanted it to be was a nice, easy trance-ish type piece, all soothing and relaxing, flowing in and out on the tide of the two notes you hear at the beginning.

And I guess it worked. It’s a funky groovy chill kind of piece. And yet it somehow disappoints me.

Man, being an artist is hard.

Back to our story. I think what happened is that I had gotten the hose from the CPAP machine wrapped around myself in such a way that I was putting some of my weight on the hose, thus inadvertently cutting off my own air supply.

At least I hope that’s what it was. It would be weird for CPAP to suddenly fail me otherwise.

Yup! More music.

Speaking of music, as you will learn, I had a bad night as a composer last night.

I was getting ready to do a subtitling when suddenly, musical inspiration struck. I had this idea for a peppy, Caribbean, marimba style piece of music. I dropped the subtitling (it’s a French cartoon this time!) and opened my music composing program, and after a lot of effort, got the piece of music just right and was mighty pleased with myself. It’s the first time in my life I have gone from brain to actual music that well. Then disaster struck.

More music AGAIN!

I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to accompany the melody I had created. For whatever reason, it is simply impossible to sync with. No beat or instrument lines up with it, even ones I made from scratch. It defies me.

And Lord knows I have tried. I spent two hours last night and two hours this morning trying to make it work. But it continues to taunt me. The notes are just too fast and irregular. You would have to be Mozart to figure this shit out. I have created past my ability to handle. My reach exceeds my grasp, and it’s really pissing me off.

So I gave up and created this instead :

I needed something to based a video around. And I was real tired and on edge by that point. So I churned out a by-the-books Fruvy groove. It’s not horrible or anything, but considering I started off riding a white hot bolt of creative lightning, then hit a completely unexpected and inexplicable wall, I can’t help but be disappointed.

I swear I will figure out how to accompany last night’s inspiration or die trying.

And to think, some people think this creativity thing must be easy.

Fuck that. Art will make you bleed in its name, and drag you down many a dark and twisted road. Sometimes, it is a magical and golden and beautiful experience that feels like little more than shaking your magic wand and making miracles appear.

But most of the time, it’s like trying to give birth to an enraged bobcat that hates you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I thought I would try something new tonight and share some of the music I love with you nice people. I am going to go through my mp3 collection and find stuff I really love, andpost a YouTube link to it in this article, and tell you about why I love the song and what it means to me.

If it seems to work as content, I will do more at some vague point in the future.

If it doesn’t seem to work, I guess I will just have to declare the experiment a success and never do it again.

First up, my favorite love song of all time. Some of you might already know which one it is.

To mean, that is love. A deep, heartfelt promise to be with you no matter what happens, forever. To me, that is what a relationship is : being there for one another no matter what life throws your way.

I have had very little to rely on in my life. I both want that kind of love and want to give it as well.

Plus that electric organ bit at the end is so damned gorgeous. And the fact that it is sung but a mega hottie like Robert Plant in his prime doesn’t hurt either.

Another love song I love is this one by Cyndi Lauper :

As you can tell, it’s along the same lines. Someone saying they will always be with you no matter what. I have lived a long time with the feeling that nobody could stand to be near me if they saw the real me.

Join the club, right?

An eternal pledge of love circumvents this. It means you can be yourself with this persona and they won’t run away screaming. And if you are lucky, they can do the same with you, and you can grow old as your genuine selves together.

At least, that’s what it means to me.

Next, we have one of the first of what I am sure will be many Paul McCartney and/or Beatles songs :

I couldn’t tell you why that song moves me like it does. And honestly, I don’t need to understand it. A younger me would have been unable to leave it until he had analyzed, dissected, and understood exactly why he liked it, to many decimal points.

And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a big part of what makes me the artist I am. I figure out what makes something good, and over time, that becomes integrated into my creative process and becomes yet another color for my palette.

But sometimes, I just don’t need to know. Paul McCartney shines a light into my soul that brings me joy. That’s enough.

Of course, there is going to be a fair amount of The Bourbons in these lists :

This one only recently became a favorite, though. Somehow, all the other times I had listened to it, it made no special impact. But then I started really listening to the lyrics, and I realized how liberating and transgressive its message is.

The whole idea of choosing to lose the game is extraordinarily subversive. It rejects competition on all levels. My favorite line is “No need to beat these guys who were cheating away”.

Everything in our society is geared towards promoting victory. The good guys have to not only prevent harm but to win. The only acceptable loss is one where you tried your hardest to win. Above all, you have to play.

But maybe some of us just don’t want to play at all. We want to stay where people love and accept one another without competition, rules, or comparison. We don’t like competition itself, regardless of who wins.

Even, or especially, if it’s us.

So let’s just lose, go home, and be human again.

I guess it’s safe for me to post this song by now :

For ages, I couldn’t even think of this song without the whole song playing in my mind, like Cartman from South Park and the song Sailing Away by Chris De Burgh.

It’s not hard to see why. It almost seems to cute to say the song has a driving beat. Everything about the song makes your pulse race along with your mind. It embodies the mood fo the lyrics perfectly.

Plus, the themes of lyrics are universal. The fire of obsession and desire, the feeling that you know what you are doing is futile or wrong but you just can’t stop until you have burned out completely, the perversity of trying to acquire something in a way that drives it further away from you. It’s deep down stuff plucked right from the heart of lunacy.

No wonder I love it so much. I dig insanity music. It equalizes the pressure of the insanity in me.

And now, light your lighters and sway back and forth, because we’re doing Freebird :

I love this song for many reasons. For one, musically, it is off the fucking hook. Everything is gorgeous and groovy and smooth and powerful and blazes like the glory of angels, and it makes me want to curl up in the song and live there. Live in it’s gloriously technicolor early Seventies heaven.

But I will confess, I also love it because it is the perfect scumbag redneck boyfriend song. This is the song your ex boyfriend Rodney who knocked you up again is playing when he drives off to leave you behind with the mess he made and go find some other lovely lady to charm into bed with him and make feel like she’s the best thing in the whole world before leaving her behind when things get messy or boring or whatever.

Cause he’s as free as a bird, y’all! AND THIS BIRD YOU CANNOT TAME!

Well that’s it for me for tonight, folks. Odds are fair to middlin’ I will actually remember to do a video roundup tomorrow. That would be a first.

Until then, enjoy the tunes. Whatever you think of them, don’t be afraid to share your opinion. You don’t have to like it just because I do. I want to hear from everyone. And as always….

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Apparently, I am doing this “blogging at 3 am” thing again.

Anyhow, tonight I came across a 70’s classic, animated movie The Point. And to my surprise, I ended up watching the whole 74 minutes of it.

I won’t got too deep into the plot, but it’s about a little boy born with a round head where everyone else’s head is pointed. Eventually, this gets him and his dog Arrow exiled from the Pointed Lands, and he goes on a psychedelic adventure that teaches him that everybody has a point, even if you can’t see it.

It’s for kids, so, not subtle in the slightest.

Anyhow, at the end of it, I saw that it had been made by Murakami/Wolf, the same people who would go on to do the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. But not before they made one of my favorite movies of all time, The Dirty Duck, also known as The Down And Dirty Duck and Cheap.

Here’s the movie in its entirety, if you are brave enough to try it :

I originally encountered the movie as an impulse rent from the Hollywood Video near where I lived when I was attending UPEI. It looked messed up and obscene and just plain weird, and I figured, what the heck. Let’s give it a try.

Then I watched it. And it changed me forever.

It was way more than just some dirty cartoon. It actually had a very deep and powerful message of self-acceptance and embracing who you really are. It is at times hilarious, at times beautiful, and at times so sharp in its satire that it leaves me breathless. And it does it all with such ease and color that it makes me want to cry.

It also has amazingly beautiful songs by Flo and Eddie, who used to be the two leads in the band The Turtles, and holy crap you can tell. That big big symphonic rock sound is all through the movie. Not only did they do the music, but they also voiced the two main character, Willard Eisenbaum and The Duck.

Here’s one of the less obscene ones.

As that implies, the movie is filthy. It glories in its own cheapness, perfectly reflecting the “cheap thrills” ethos of the Seventies,and is filled with nudity, depravity, madness, fantasy, surreality, and just plain filth.

Is there any wonder I love it so?

To me, all that cheap nasty stuff not only serves the plot, but it serves to weed out the sort of people who were never going to understand the film anyhow and who frankly don’t deserve to, in my bitchy yet humble opinion.

It takes a strong, open mind to see the glorious life-affirming beauty underneath the tits and drugs and psychedelia. The lesser minds will, no doubt, be offended and take it out on the film. They will say it is cheap vulgar trash with a juvenile sense of humour that wallows in its own depravity and has no socially redeeming value whatsoever.

And they will be right.

But it is so much more than that. These are the same sorts of people who will never understand the Rocky Horror Picture Show either, and that is fine because, to paraphrase its protagonist, “it wasn’t made… FOR THEM!”

I am entirely confident when I put those two in the same category. They are both highly sex-positive, open-minded, audacious movies that celebrate life in a way that is rarely seen. Every time I watch either movie, I come away feeling wonderful. It makes me feel so good to see something so clearly made for the freaks, weirdos, dropouts, losers, perverts, addicts, and all the other people society doesn’t want and doesn’t want to think about whom I consider my people.

Call it the ultimate in outsider art.

Back to our story. Having been reminded of the movie, I decided to see what of it was available on YouTube these days. Previously, I had felt like I was the only person in the universe who had seen the movie and actually liked it.

And that impression was not challenged by anything I saw. Sure, there was more about it on YouTube than ever before, including the whole darn thing, and I was very happy to see some of the song were on there (yoink!), but then I clicked on a link for some thin but even layer of anal scum calling himself The Cinema Snob reviewing the movie, and I ragequit five minutes into it.

Here it is. I highly doubt it will make you as mad as it does me.

Despite what he says at the beginning, he clearly doesn’t get it. Add in his calculatedly irritating voice, and it’s no wonder I want to smack him with a pair of panties with a rock in it.

And then I made the worst mistake… I looked at the comments.

Such a total wasteland. What the hell did I expect? YouTube comment sections are where all that is pure and good in the world goes to die. They are a hotbed of stupidity, malign ignorance, the worst of human nature, and the grammar of a retarded Speak and Spell on low battery.

And that’s when I realized that it has finally happened. The fate I have dodged, more or less, over many years of being into things way out of mainstream. I have become a person I did not wish to be.

I am the angry critic railing against people for not appreciating real art when they see it and instead preferring to worship social status and wealth by watching the Kardashians and caring what happens to them.

Luckily, I know I will get over it. Writing this all out helps a lot. I am into a lot of other stuff that is bizarre and disturbing and not at all to the public’s taste.

I mean, I love The Residents, and they made music like this :

That’s one of my favorite of their songs. And it’s one of the more normal ones!

So in the future, I will go into looking up my favorite stuff with a much more guarded attitude.

Maybe I am the only one who gets it. But at least there is me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am so weird about money that it takes an act of will for me to buy name-brand pop.

The price difference is trivial. Getting name-brand probably costs me, at most, two to three bucks a week. And the name brand stuff is genuinely better than the store brand stuff. I am legitimately getting a lot more pleasure from my pop drinking than when I only bought the generic stuff. By all logic, it’s a sound investment.

And yet, every time I do it, I have to suppress my deeply ingrained instinct to get the cheapest stuff possible. I have to face it : my economizing is compulsive. It persists even when it makes no sense at all. And this is a problem.

Why? Because it keeps me from being happy and feeling good about my life. I have gone on and on in this space about how important pleasure (especially the kind that activates our reward center) is to mood, and I know that to be true.

And yet, when it comes to investing in my own pleasure, I am a mindless miser.

Where the rubber really hits the road is my weekly budget. I have $100/week to spend. And I don’t have a lot of expensive needs. So more often than not, there’s a little left at the end of the week.

And in a healthier mind, that would be it. Sometimes there is money left, and sometimes there isn’t. Whether or not that happens is not super important. I mean, I budgeted the money that way with plans to spend it that way. Right? If I can’t spend it all, it’s not really in my budget, is it?

And yet, if there is nothing left, I feel intense guilt and a feeling of exposure and danger. I have lost my buffer, and for someone like me, having all the buffers between myself and harsh reality is a necessity.

It’s not easy being this sensitive.

I have been fighting this lately. I have been telling myself that my happiness is more important than my money supply. That I should actually be proud of myself for overcoming my senseless savings craving and using the money to have fun instead. That feeling better is more important than feeling safe. Because I AM SAFE.

But it’s rough going. It’s a real wrestling match. I feel like I am arm wrestling a demon.

And I suppose I am. The demon’s name is Self-Minimization.

That’s one of my theories, anyhow. The same instinct that made me always tell my parents that I was fine, just fine, makes it hard for me to buy anything but the cheapest. Anything more than the absolute minimum makes me feel exposed, like I have revealed a weakness to an enemy who will surely punish me for it.

I guess that enemy would be Life.

And that feeling of exposure is a very top rated member of my Primary Fears squad. I seek safety above all else, like a lot of depressives and victims of anxiety disorders, and the amount I have, in the past, been willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe is truly staggering.

Pretty much my adult life so far, really. When the only way you can feel safe is to hide from the world to the greatest extent possible, it really limits your options. I have spent twenty years of my life retreating as far from life as I can short of total catatonia, and that’s one hell of a disability.

People in wheelchairs get out more than I used to. Depression can turn you into a seemingly voluntary invalid.

The other theory as to why I am so weird about money, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive, is that I just plain have never had much money in the first place.

In fact, I have lived large portions of my life with no cash whatsoever. I lived in a constant state of cash starvation. And when that ended, it was because I got on welfare, and had to figure out how to survive on the pittance they afford you.

So whatever instincts I had towards thrift were very, very much encouraged to flourish.

But it’s more than that. Ask my ex-roommate Dhugal. Every time we went to Costco, it would be the same thing. He would tell me “we can get whatever you want!” and I would be simply incapable of uncramping my mind enough to take advantage of that. I would always be working out how many meals we would get out of something for how many dollars – cost benefit analysis – and he would just shake his head in disbelief.

And that was way before I was on social assistance and had any cash of my own. I was, in fact, many years into my long long cash drought, and I had no personal budget to worry about. I was doing all my worrying on behalf of others.

So I was like this long before I moved to BC and went on assistance.

I honestly don’t know what it would be like for me to have more money. I have had two budget upgrades since I moved here in 99. Both times, I have managed to turn it into a lifestyle upgrade…. eventually.

It’s hard to upgrade your lifestyle when you almost never leave your apartment.

When I was a little kid, I dazzled Mrs. Moase, the lady who ran the local corner store, with my ability to do the math in my head when I wanted 5 of this and 7 of that and 2 of the other.

She said I was going to be a rocket scientist some day. And other kids would be amazed when I left with this huge amount of candy. They thought I must have a huge allowance.

But no. I just had a deep and powerful instinct towards value. Instead of a few expensive items, I got lots and lots of little cheap items, and thus got more candy per penny than them.

Maybe that went to my head.

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.

So, I didn’t make it to the Kwantlen orientation today.

I was planning on it, but then I woke up feeling very ill. I had wicked heartburn, and I felt headachey and feverish, and the room was very gently spinning.

Normally, if I get sick before doing something scary, I immediately think it is psychosomatic. And that could definitely cover the headache, and maybe the feverish feelish.

But heartburn is pretty specific and hard to image yourself into. Dunno if I am coming down with something, or I acid refluxed real hard out of nervousness, but whatever it was, it kept me here instead of my going there.

And I dunno how I feel about that. I have a real clusterfucktacular of a conflict about it. The old me would be exoriating myself on being a wimp and a pussy and giving up on myself and hiding from the world and blah blah etc.

But I am working hard at disabling that system. And I mean, it’s not like I missed anything priceless. I am pretty sure I can find a campus map online and that is all I will need to find my classes. Whatever else, I can probably figure out from the website, onsite literature, and plain old asking around whatever else I need.

But the old monsters are still there. They’re just caged up for the moment. For now, I am listening to The Jagoff when he tells me that it is really no big deal. I don’t like it, but it’s better than ripping myself apart over it.

That never accomplished anything. In fact, it’s utterly counterproductive. You can’t get ahead by destroying your own strength!

Presumably, after a couple of days, I will have put this behind me and will be ready to carry on into the brand new grand new adventure of higher learning at the age of 42.

I know I won’t have trouble with the class work. But I am beginning to worry about actual class.

I haven’t had to sit still while absorbing a lecture in twenty years. That kind of passive absorption was never exactly easy for me. That’s why I would sit in front and ask (or answer) questions. I needed to do it in order to stay awake and engaged.

But I don’t know if that will be an option, and so I may have to cope other ways.

I could record the lecture. I am sure I would not be the only one doing so. Anything I spaced out for, I could catch up on when I watched the recording. That would be a very modern thing to do.

But it feels wrong. It feels like I would be insulting the professor by ignoring him and letting the machine do the work. Like I am saying he or she is not important enough to actually be worth my attention. That doesn’t sit right with me.

Plus, of course, I can’t ask a recording questions.

Another possibility would be to find a more active form of note-taking. I almost never consult the notes I make, but the exact of writing them gives me something to do and keeps me from getting too nervous and restless.

But I have had twenty years of Internet-fed development since I was last in a classroom, and that might not be enough any more. My stimulation needs are much greater than they used to be.

A third option would be to find video games I can play unobtrusively (tricky, when you are sitting up front) and which take up just enough of my mental bandwidth to keep me calm and focused and hopefully looking attentive.

And in a sense, I have been practicing to do that exact thing. I have been listening to podcasts while playing my Picross game on my browser, and that is pretty much exactly the same as listening to a lecture on the basic level.

But I would hate to get caught playing a video game in class. That would be mortifying. If I was worried that recording the lecture would insult the prof, imagine how I feel about being caught playing my game.

I could tell the prof that I can do both, and that I actually find it easier to concentrate if I have something to occupy unimportant parts of my mind while I listen. But I would not expect them to believe me.

And I am not the smug and thoughtless youth that used to love to be caught “daydreaming” and seemingly not paying attention to my teachers only to be able to repeat back to them what they just said, verbatim. That me was a prick. No wonder sometimes not even my teachers liked me.

Ah, the self-centeredness of youth. I thought it was downright hilarious. Like I was demonstrating a superpower, or a magic trick, or something.

So this Tuesday, when I start off my education with a trial by fire via six straight hours of class, I will see just how well I cope with this highly passive form of learning.

Then again, for all I know, education is entirely different now, and not nearly so passive and soporific. Maybe all the professors are hip new professors who are entirely down with the Net and have exciting, dynamic presentations with charts and diagrams and stuff.

I admit, that’s not likely. But it could happen!

Also education related : I will have to get a bank account and my picture ID soon. I am hoping I can charm my way into getting them to re-issue my BCID in picture form. The last time I tried, the bitch blonde at the counter told me that, basically, you can’t get your picture ID back without some picture ID.

So apparently, nobody has ever gotten their driver’s license reissued, ever. Lose it and you are fucked forever.

As for the bank account thing, I should get one of those anyhow so I can stop paying $20/month to Money Mart just to cash my monthly cheque. So getting one for the student loan is no big deal.

Well, that’s the local update. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The K is for Kwantlen, of course. I start classes one week from today.

I must admit, I am nervous. Not about the classes, of course. Those aren’t going to be a problem. It’s more like I am nervous about the newness of it all and worried that all that stimulation will give me a panic attack.

So in a sense, I am nervous about being nervous and anxious about being anxious. Neuroses are so meta.

That’s why I am glad (and nervous) about orientation tomorrow. Granted, it will be more socially stimulating than just showing up for classes next Tuesday, but I think not knowing my way around will be easier around a bunch of others in a similar state.

Besides, part of my plan for going back to school was to give myself more social exposure so I can further my recovery from depression, social anxiety, and whatnot.

So despite a potential social anxiety meltdown, I am going to go to the damned thing. I think I will take an extra Paxil that day, however. My therapist says that is totally fine by him. Nothing wrong with a little extra chemical sangfroid when I am entering a potentially triggering situation.

What I can’t figure out is whether it is truly an all day event, from 9 am to 3:30 pm, or whether those are just the hours it will be going and I am free to drop in and do whatever I need to do while I am there.

Obviously, I would prefer the latter. I wouldn’t have to be there at 9 am and I would have the comfort of autonomy and crowds instead of feeling like an animal being herded.

And it seems unlikely that they want me there all day. Surely a campus orientation can’t last all THAT long. Those hours seem a lot more like an elementary school day than a college event.

And I am fairly sure the entire thing is option, so there’s that.

But part of me is very nervous and hence wants to do everything “right”. I am trying to calm that part of me the fuck down, but it would be a lot easier if I had some solid info to go on. And yet, there is no contact info on the thing I got in the mail, so I don’t know who I can ask about it.

I may have to just call the university and wing it, and that would be very difficult for me.

God, mental illness sucks.

But whatever. It says on the webpage for orientation that my attendance is “expected”, which is less than “mandatory” but more than “optional”. So I will be there.

I just don’t want to be there all day. That sounds tiring and dull.

Overall, of course, I am looking forward to being back in school. I have total confidence in my abilities to do well in the classes I am taking. It’s just this little orientation speedbump that I have to get over first.

Part of me really wishes I could just show up for classes a week for today without any other bullshit.

I need solid intel, dammit.

Oh, one small bit of bad news : I do not have Mondays off, like I thought before. I have next Monday off, but that’s it. After that, I have one-half of my Ideology and Politics class on Mondays and the other half on Wednesdays.

Dang it. Oh well, welcome to the five days a week world, I guess.

Still, that’s a course I am looking forward to. Seems right up my alley. Like I said before, those are two of my favorite things. In fact, I think my love of politics is driven by my love of ideology, because politics is ideology writ large. It’s the arena in which a nation figures out what it really believes. How can I not love that?

So that’s Mondays (and Wednesdays). Tuesdays will be the big day because I will have six straight hours of education. From 1 to 2:50 pm, I will be in Intro to Journalism. Then I have ten minutes to get to Intro to Psychology : Areas and Applications. That’s it, ten minutes between three hour courses.

Should be fun! Crazy fun, the kind of fun that really requires you to stretch yourself, but still. Fun!

I am curious about what they teach in Intro to Journalism. I find it hard to imagine. I hope it’s essentially a boot camp for learning how to write like a journalist. That would suit me just fine. I would love to learn enough to try to make a go at a soft journalism job like columnist or reviewer. Or at least be able to freelance that kind of thing.

Wednesdays, I just have that other half of the Ideology and Politics class between 2:30 and 4.

Thursdays, I have Intro to Creative Writing at (bizarrely) 6pm. Not sure what goes on there, either, but at least it’s directly on target for my degree. My instinct is to be all cocky and say “What do they have to teach me? I’ve written four books and a metric whack of short stories!”

But that only shows that I have done it, not that I know what I am doing. And I haven’t submitted anything for publication, so as far as I know, I might be doing it all wrong.

Then on Fridays, at 1 pm, I have Intro to Psychology : Basic Processes. I am glad that I can take both Intro to Psych classes in the same semester. It means I get double the dose of one of my favorite subjects in the whole world. And it also means that I can sign up for more interesting stuff in the second semester.

That should take the sting out of the fact that I am going to be taking my one mandatory brutal math course. I don’t know what to think about that. I am quite good with numbers at a sub-calculus level.

So hopefully, I can learn calculus now.

I know at least one reader of this blog who could tutor me. You know who you are.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, and give you all the gory details.