…inside a bombproof safe inside the belly of a very old whale who will only cough it up if you solve these three riddles…

What I am saying it. I’m a complicated guy, and I get so tired of dealing with myself sometimes.

I am my own impatient parent.

It’s this damned advanced metaconscious mind of mine. Sure, it does a great job of allowing me to monitor my own thought processes for errors and correct them, but those same forces are the ones that rip apart any kind of stability in my find in their relentless hunger for something to distill, separate, and analyze.

And then there’s the hall of mirrors of my self-doubt. I question X, then question my questioning of X, then defend it from a new angle, and so on and so on until the whole chain of thought collapses under its own weight.

Voila! Genius. Or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Today’s been pretty decent. Got my keys back, praise be to the Steve. Was able to let myself in when I got back from school. I will probably get over the whole incident in a few days.

And that’s great and all. But I wonder why it takes me so much longer to recover from this kind of thing than it took to get freaked out about it. I embrace joy with the same reluctance with which I let go of pain. There is something deeply damaged about my fundamental table of values, and it worries me.

I think it has gotten better over time, though. So possibly it all stems from the deep deep damage I sustained from being sexually assaulted when I was barely old enough to talk. That put me into a state of mind where it was far more important to avoid pain than to seek pleasure. Where the highest value was put on safety, so high that it precluded all but the most stationary and sedentary pursuits.

And the mind prioritizes things via memory. Thus, due to my fucked up mind’s fucked up brain chemistry, pain is remembered with razor sharp vividness and pleasure is treated like anomalous noise and disregarded the moment the pleasure fades.

No wonder we depressives are all a bunch of addicts. We’re trying to self-medicate in ways that always cost way more in the long term than we gain in the short term… but wise investments are only available to those who have enough capital to spare.

Depressives, on the other hand, are always on the verge of starvation.

Let’s see : this morning, I had Short Script. It was our last day of getting to just sit around watching short films and chatting about them after. Next class, we will need to have three pitches for three different short script ideas.

I have too many ideas. When I try to pick one out, they all rush the gate trying to get out, so I have to slam the gate shut or be trampled by the herd.

Art is hard.

And I am doing way too many short paragraphs.

Or am I?

Afternoon class was TV Genre with my favorite prof, Rick Drew. And today’s genre was…. COMEDY! I was so excited it hurt. We didn’t get into as much detail as I wanted, but I had a great time anyhow. Comedy is my THING, man. Like I always say, I am there for skitcom or sitcom.

Then, after class, I had a mentorship (in other words, a half hour chat) with Rick, and he helped me flesh out a vague idea for a sitcom that has been on the back burner of my brain for a week or so. It would be a show about four people living in a rented house. One of them is a bedridden invalid who used to be a big shot business consultant before his illness took his life away. One is a crushingly shy victim of social anxiety, who hasn’t been able to leave the home in sixteen years. The third is a psychosomatic multi-allergy sufferer who nevertheless considers herself to be the only competent one in the house and acts as a kind of ad hoc den mother for the group.

And the fourth lucky resident is the niece of the previous owner of the house, who died suddenly and left it to her. Nobody expected this to happen so soon, and so she knows very little about any of her aunt’s many properties, let alone the people living in them. But she is a very upbeat, can-do kind of person, so she ends her lease, sells off most of her stuff, packs the rest in her adorable chick car, and drives across Canada to live, rent-free, in the house she now owns.

Only to find out that she has to share this house with three housebound people with a firmly established group dynamic and legal protections that make it so you couldn’t evict them with nuclear weapons. And they are not happy to give up their storage room (otherwise known as the fourth bedroom) to some stranger they have never met who just shows up out of the blue with no warning.

Thus, the niece (who burned her bridges getting here) has no choice but to move in and try to make the best of the situation (wait… so THAT’s why they call them situation comedies!). At first, the three are openly hostile to her and she thinks she has been thrown into Hell while still alive, and the situation is very tense.

But of course, as the show progresses, they relax and start to get along, and despite her initial vow to just treat this home as a place to sleep, the niece find herself drawn deeper into deeper into the strange, sad little world of these three people, and the show can explore its real subject matter, which is what happens to people when they are cut off from normal life and are forced to deal with no longer being a part of the world.

Not bad. Needs lots of work. Names would be good. And I need some secondary characters. A social worker, maybe, and a physical therapist/nurse.

You know, I just might be good at this kind of thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.