I finished the outline of my Bob’s Burgers episode, and I must say, I am very happy with it. I think it’s a good episode that really explores the characters, and the Bob and Linda and the restaurant plot I came up with – where they get a karaoke machine – has oodles of comedic potential.

But now that I am finished with that, I must now turn to the other thing I have that is due next Wednesday : the two skits I am submitting to Sketch class for potential inclusion in the skit show that will be produced next term (I think).

And I am freaking nearly all the way out over that, because I want them to be SO GOOD that I am putting way too much pressure on myself.

Luckily, neither skit needs to be one I submitted to class. That’s good because I don’t think any of them are all that great. I mean, they are okay, but nowhere near as good as I can do. The ones I submit this Wednesday have got to be something truly special. I really want to knock people’s socks off. I want them to think, “My god, who wrote that? Because it was hilarious!”.

I want them to stand up and cheer at the end of the skit.

The conundrum is that I know damned well that the way to achieve that end is to relax, stop putting so much pressure on myself, and let the funny come to me. My best stuff always comes from a place of fun and play. That was easy before because I wasn’t writing for anyone but me, essentially, in the sense that there was no specific audience I was trying to please and no gatekeeper’s approval to seek.

In this case, there is a gatekeeper – my prof Jackie – but I am guaranteed one skit in the show. So all she will do is pick which one.

But that only makes things worse, because I just know that if something I am not proud of is performed in the show – in front of a real audience, with real actors having to learn my lines and everything – then it will just fucking crush me.

Which is the problem in a nutshell, really : I care too damned much about this. Far beyond the point where it is productive. Sure, every artists has to care about their art in order to have any chance of achieving excellence. But they can’t afford to care so much that it makes them unable to act because the stakes are too damned high.

So some time between now and Tuesday night, I have to write not one but two dynamite, knockout, epoch-making skits that will leave audiences breathless with laughter and make me a god amongst men.

So ya know…. no pressure.

I have a few strategies in mind for getting the creative juices flowing. For one, I am going to go over my skits from long ago in order to try to get into that same mindset where I wrote what amused me and was pleased by it. I will also go through my skit idea files and try to be a little more open minded and forgiving this time so I don’t get too depressed by the experience.

A big part of the problem is that whatever I write has to be able to be performed on stage, with a very tiny budget, and no spotlights or any other kind of special lighting. This is severely limiting and quite frustrating to work around. And a little ironic, because in other classes I have been getting negative feedback about my tendency to only write conversations.

A conversation based skit would be perfect for the stage! I just resent having no choice in the matter.

I will get there eventually. I will work through all this panic and reluctance and get to a place where I can relax and let my mind wander and find that killer idea that will be hilarious, fun to write, and really show off my mad creative skills.

And then do the same thing again. Sigh. It has to be two really good skits because I have no idea which one Jackie will choose. If I do one really good one and one meh one, she might very well pick the meh one and then I will wanna shoot myself.

I have to admit, the whole thing has me so nervous that I am tempted to do the homework for Thursday and Friday first. Get them out of the way. But that might lead to my not having enough time to work on my skits, and that leads to rushing, and rushing is the mortal enemy of excellence.

And when it comes to this, I am all about the excellence.

Another factor in my favor is that there is no set length for a skit. The prof has said she needs short things as much as she needs long. So I might come up with a whole passel of little funny bits that can be used between skits. Stuff that is simple, only takes a couple of actors, and only take up a corner of the stage so people can change sets and stuff on the rest of the stage.

Then again, we have no spotlights, so…. that wouldn’t work.

Still, something like a monologue would at least give the other actors time to get into makeup and costume for the next real skit. It’s something to think about.

I know I am one funny, funny guy. I know I have written brilliant stuff before. I know that I can do it again. I just have to keep repeating one of my mantras to myself : The stakes don’t change the game. Whether it’s seen by a million people or just me, the skit is either funny or it isn’t. So I should just relax and pretend like it’s all just for fun.

Because at the end of the day…. everything is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been working on the “outline” of my episode of Bob’s Burgers today…. and it’s been awesome.

And hard. Basically, an outline is the TV world’s equivalent of a Hollywood “treatment”. Both are extremely detailed versions of everything that happens in the movie. Like a beat sheet, it is still in the form of a plot breakdown, but an outline is far more detailed.

Here’s just one section :

Int. School Hallway – Day

Louise is hurrying to class when she bumps into a girl she’s never met before and feels compelled to tell said girl how much she likes the girl’s skull and knife motif clothing. The girl thanks her and says her Mom got it for her from the P’tit Mort store online. Louise gets her to spell that for her so she can enter it into her phone and pester her mother to buy her stuff from there when she gets home from school. Louise asks the new girl why she’s not met her before, and the new girl says she just moved into the area and her first day was yesterday. Louise says she was sick that day, but she is glad to have met the new girl now. The bell rings, and Louise says “Crap!” and dashes off toward class, only to immediately dash back and say “By the way, my name is Louise. I’ll see you at lunch. Bye!” before dashing off again. The new girl shouts “Pleased to meet you Louise, I’m Eleanor!” after her.

As a result, it takes way more effort than the beat sheet did… and I am loving it. My mind is all fired up from the constant exercising of my imagination and I feel like it’s glowing like a blade in the forge as a result. I love it. No video game could hope to compete.

And that’s something I have been thinking about lately. I realize that part of the transformation I am trying to achieve is to fully embrace how much I love to create. I keep coming back to the idea of “I’d rather be writing”, and I am making a conscious effort to reinforce that idea every single time it returns so that I can loosen the grip that video games have on me and become more productive.

Video games will always be a part of my life, but in order to go forward, I need to scale it back to “fun hobby I can take or leave” levels. I have realized how much time I have been pouring into Fallout 4 and how deeply addicted I was to the time I spent in that world, where I was competent and deadly and heroic and involved and… well, all the things I am not in the real world.

And while there is nothing inherently wrong with that in the short term, the out of control escapism that is represents is not good for me. Over the last month or two, I have been doing whatever I could to maximize my Fallout 4 time, and measuring my days in how much time I would have to play Fallout 4. And I think that has drained a lot of my energies. And my work has suffered as a result. It dulled my creative edge, and led me to doing my homework as quickly and cheaply as I could so I could get back to the game.

And that’s just plain unhealthy.

Plus I need those energies for my school work. I want to produce top quality stuff and that takes dedication and focus as well as the energy to approach it with the right combination of dedication, playfulness, fun, and determination to show the world just how fucking awesome I am.

So I am going to spend more time writing and less time burning brain calories on things like video games. They’re great fun and a good way to relax, but only in moderation. Too much, and I start to lose my already tenuous connection to the real world, and I don’t have a lot of that to spare.

I have to stay connected to reality. Everything I want is there!

Speaking of video games, started on a new one today. It’s called Bioshock Infinite, and I bought it with the Indigo gift card my sister Catherine got me for my birthday way back in May, along with a couple of books.

It was hard to figure out what to buy (hello, option paralysis) but eventually I picked Bioshock Infinite because it was in my price range the the reviews for it were off da hook, y’all.

I mean seriously. The Metacritic score is 94… out of a hundred. That’s like an A+ game! And the reviewers were heaping it with praise, calling it things like “visionary”, “beautiful”, an “achievement” and so on.

And as I have finally gotten sick of Fallout 4, more or less (the two games are different enough that I may alternate), I figured it was time to give the new game a try.

And so far, it’s a hell of a game. It started off very slow… you walk through the game’s world without a lot to do, just soaking it all in. But things start getting creepy pretty much right away. The cult that runs the flying city that is the setting is super fucking disturbing… every thing I learned about them made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Lots of heavy handed Christian-like talk about the path of righteousness, being purified, heaping fire on “the Sodom below”, aka the USA, revering Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson like they are the Trinity, racism, a land that is like some kind of 1910 conservative’s wet dream where everyone is a gentleman or lady and there’s no minorities and it’s all picnics and the county fair and “wholesome” businesses.

But they really outdid themselves with the dread in one part of the intro : all along your path, you have been seeing propaganda posters about the “false shepherd” who seeks to lead the righteous away from the one true path and cast them into hell and so forth and so on.

Then you come across one that said “You shall know the False Shepherd by his mark!” and it shows a hand with AD stamped on it.

Guess what you have stamped on YOUR hand.

I was like, “oh shit oh shit o shit”. It was an amazingly effective storytelling moment.

Shortly after that, you are (of course) discovered, and the game, which has been quite bucolic up until that point, suddenly turns ULTRA fucking violent. It really caught me off guard. And now it’s a pulse pounding nonstop FPS thrill ride.

Should be a heck of a trip!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

… are here right now.

So I was on my way between apartment and bus stop when my thoughts turned to how, when I was a kid living back home, the residents of my beloved home town of Summerside only needed to dial four digits in order to make a connection. In my earliest memories, our phone numbers was simply 5849. We had considerably less than 10,000 residents, and so we didn’t need any more numbers than that.

Trust me, the math works out.

And as I pondered this ancient fact, my mind suddenly seized upon the phrase “back home” and I realized, on a very deep emotional level, that Summerside isn’t my home any more. I am not on vacation. This life of mine is not a temporary diversion on the road back home. I am home.

With this came the realization that I had never really reconciled myself to the idea of a “new home”. On that same deep level, the concept “home” still meant Summerside. The only update my concept of “home” had gotten in the last 20 years was the small change forced on me when my parents sold my childhood home (with all my stuff in it… I am still angry about that) and then I only updated it to mean the house my mother lives in now (with my brother), which happens to be her childhood home.

So she didn’t lose hers to strangers.

But here’s the thing. I don’t live there any more. And I am highly unlikely to return any time soon. To continue to think of it as “home” is not just absurd, it’s self-destructive. I can’t live my life with one foot in the past. That can only split my energies and keep me from fully engaging in the present. And like it or not, the present is the only place you will ever live. I will be far better off focusing all my energies and intentions on the present and the future, two things over which I have some power.

This is a huge psychological shift for me, however. So it will not happen overnight. The concept of “home” looms large in my mind, as it does for any agoraphobic, I assume. In my life, home meant safety and comfort and a certain kind of order and predictability. I could relax at home, especially in my room. I could control my stimulus levels. I could feed my mind. I could be myself.

My home life wasn’t always a happy one when I was a kid, but it was a damned sight better than being Outside.

So to move to fully embrace my life now as “home” is a very big shift. And I can feel part of me resisting because it thinks my current life is somehow “not as good” as my previous “home” in Summerside, and it is not entirely wrong.

But mostly what made my childhood home “better” than what I have now was the childhood part, and I left that behind a long time ago. That’s another reason to shift my concept of “home” – it is vitally important to my quest to finally grow the hell up.

As long as a certain part of me thinks of all this as some kind of temporary thing, like I am just enduring it till I can go “home”, there is no way for me to move forward. And forward motion is vitally important to me. To me, there is only growth and death. Stagnation is not acceptable. Stagnation is death. Growth is life.

So this is it. I am pulling up stakes and moving into the GVRD for reals. Goodbye Summerside! You will always have a place in my heart – and not just because my mother and brother are there – but you are behind me now, and you can’t move forward while looking backward.

Not without bumping into stuff a lot.

Part of this process of detachment and putting down new roots is my giving up on thinking of myself as an Islander in Vancouver. That’s not a useful binary. I am a Vancouverite (subcategory Richmondonian) and this is now my home turf. I live here now, and I am not planning on moving unless I can’t get work in Vancouver.

Someone around here must need a brilliant and talented writer who’s been around the block a few hundred times, right?

Ideally, I would get the sort of work that can be done entirely online and therefore can be done anywhere. I would love to have that sort of freedom. If it paid well enough, I would do it while traveling.

But my preferred destination is TV Comedy, and I get the feeling that the writer’s room is king there, and I am pretty sure that requires people to be in the same place at the same time. Skype or Facetime or the like just would not be the same. So I doubt my work will be portable any time soon.

So this is my home, not just where I live. Suddenly, I actually care about municipal politics. My lack of truly letting go of Summerside goes a long way towards explaining why I found it so hard to care about municipal or provincial politics until now.

What did I care? They had nothing to do with home.

This realization of where my home truly is only reinforces my desire to be more of a part of things. Today I was sitting in the little memorial park across the street from VFS and all around me, happy excited people were getting ready for a weekend of Pride and fireworks and fun.

And I had to ask myself, why aren’t I? Why can’t I be the sort of person who goes out and does fun stuff? Sure, I have my physical limitations, but those can be worked around. I could easily be one of those people oohing and aahing over the fireworks if I really wanted to do it. It is within my means and within my powers.

But I don’t feel like I can, nevertheless.

Too far from my comfort zone, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, I really want to apologize for not writing a blog post last night. I just didn’t have the time. I had a lot of homework to do, and not enough time to do it. I know that me not doing one did not exactly wreck anyone’s evening, but I still feel bad about it because I treasure my readers – all three of you – and I feel like I really let you down.

What I really regret is not posting a brief blurb saying I would not be posting that night. I meant to do it, but I forgot. That’s kind of a theme in my life, as you will soon see.

Because the person to whom I owe the biggest apology is myself. I fucked up big time at school, not once but TWICE, and in the exact same stupid way each time, and it’s going to haunt me.

See, twice now, I have forgotten that when a version of the beat sheet for my Feature Development class is due, it’s not due on the day of class but rather two days beforehand. Both times, I inputted this fact into my calendar program, and each time I completely forgot and said “Due on Tuesday? That must be a mistake because class isn’t till Thursday! ” and changed it.

Yes, I really am that fucking stupid.

As a result, I have received a zero on each draft. That’s a very big deal because each one is worth 20 percent of my final mark, meaning the absolute best I can now do in the course is 60 percent.

Which obviously means I fail. I’m a good student, but not THAT good. Odds are, I will get below fifty percent, and that means FAILURE.

And all because of my accursed absentmindedness! It really is my bête noire. I try really hard to keep on top of things, but no matter what I do, I am always dropping the ball. I just can’t keep all these plates spinning, and yet, I don’t know another way of doing things. Perhaps it’s one of downsides of my particular kind of mind. Things come into and leave my mind easily, which is fab for creativity and creative problem solving, but lousy for keeping things in mind long enough to get them done.

Or who knows, maybe there is something genuinely wrong with me. I did suffer a serious head injury at a very early age. And lord knows, my sleep apnea can’t be helping. Maybe I truly am fucked up in the head in a more literal sense than usual.

I don’t know. I am sure there are a lot of potential causes. All I know is that I can’t seem to keep track of things. Even a calendar app doesn’t solve the problem completely. I still have to remember that the information is true even when it doesn’t seem to make sense.

This isn’t that complicated, for fuck’s sake. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and I can’t get my shiznit together enough to pass a course I would ordinarily pass with flying colors. I am so sick of dealing with kind of thing. Taking on my own parental role has really opened my eyes about how frustrating it must be to deal with me sometimes.

To anyone, especially family, who has gotten extremely frustrated by my inability to remember shit, I offer my sincerest apology. I swear I am getting better. The more I acknowledge the problem and go through the process of dealing with the resulting failures, the better I become at working around it.

It’s being all avoidant about it that is the problem.

As far as I know, failing one course does not mean I get shitcanned from the whole program. According to Dionne, goddess of the VFS Writing program for she is the Person Who Actually Runs Things, as long as I maintain at least a 65 percent average, I will pass on to the next term.

And that should not be a problem…. I think. I honestly have no idea how I am doing in the program. I haven’t gotten any marks back on most of the things I’ve done. Maybe I was told where to find my marks and have just forgotten – given recent events, this is a real possibility. But AFAIK, they keep the marks a secret – assuming they exist in the first place.

Still, I have not gotten the impression that I am doing poorly, so I am going to assume I am pulling my usual 80-90 percent grade, and that means a 65 percent average, even given one lousy score, should not be a big problem for me.

I know damned well that I am very good at the actual writing. It’s the other stuff where I don’t quite cut the mustard.

So I am processing the whole thing. I have total faith that I will get over it – the fact that I am writing about it here assures me of that. Writers process emotions by writing, and things that seem really bad before I write about them often feel a lot better after I am done.

It’s like a functional neurosis. Functional in the sense that it accomplishes something. Neurosis in the sense that it accomplishes it in a bizarrely complicated and indirect way instead of a direct, healthy way… like processing emotions naturally.

It’s the neuroses that change the world, I think. You need to have a very demanding inner voice that, like an addiction, compels you to get more and more of the drug of choice in order to get the same effect, and the next day, you need more all over again.

That’s what drives people to the heights of excellence. It’s also what drives them to drink. Or even drives them right off the cliff into depression.

I’m sure there must be some very psychologically healthy high achievers out there. It seems statistically inevitable.

But most people have something in them that keeps them from reaching those heights… but also keeps them sane.

I don’t have one of those.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. I PROMISE.

Caveat : the way I will use those two words in this blog entry maybe not map to any existing definition by more than fifty percent at best.

I have been pondering the folly of ideological thinking lately. Namely, the sort of thinking that substitutes accepted ideological dogma for actual reason via an examination of the facts. It is far easier for people to be passionately devoted to an ideology because ideologies are usually driven by emotion and therefore act in opposition to the burdensome task of rational analysis.

“You don’t have to follow your mind and all its complications and convolutions, ” says Ideology, “you can follow an emotion you trust instead!”

Thus the appeal of ideology to people who, for whatever reason, do not trust the products of reason to be true representations of reality. Perhaps they simply don’t like the kind of answers that reason produces. Hard answers. Answers that do not take your feelings into consideration at all. Answers that do not change no matter how you feel about them. Answers that can be scary or depressing or disillusioning or, worst of all, answers that require you to change your mind and thus endure doubt.

Answers, in short, that you don’t like.

And there is always the possibility that some people can do no better. They lack the intellectual strength to reason things out for themselves, or perhaps they simply have the wrong cognitive style and/or personality for it. Either way, it’s not within their grasp.

Part of me wishes they would simply realize and recognize this, and leave the big thinking and tough decisions to the people who can handle it. People, I must say, like me.

But that train of thought goes nowhere. It’s not compatible with a free society, and even in a kind of intellectual fascist state, how you you determine who is smart enough to rule? Without bias, without error, and without being corrupted by those seeking power?

Still, there are times when I want to shout at people, “You are clearly too stupid for opinions! Sit down and shut up while the grownups talk!”

Anyhow, the emotional nature of ideology without guiding principles is what leads to fanaticism. The ideology is serving an emotional need, and emotional needs are unstable, especially for people with a certain kind of emptiness inside. As the disease of fanaticism spreads, such a person starts substituting the emotion engendered for all their unmet emotional needs. It’s exactly like a chemical addiction. And like an addiction, it hollows people out and leads to more and more extreme actions as the need for the ideological quick fix demands larger and larger doses in order to get the same effect.

Principles are much harder to implement than ideology. Principles require holding steadfast to core beliefs and then applying those principles to each situation individually. And they lead where they lead, regardless of your preferences or emotions. They have a high cognitive overload, and that means they are not suitable for some people.

The ultimate reduction of this is to trust people instead of ideology. Believe what you are told to believe by the people who say things that make you feel good. It is not possible to abdicate your intellectual duties any further without withdrawing from society completely, which thankfully some old mean and stupid people do.

They get to the point where all they care about is pudding.

Most people have principles. In fact, their principles are what truly guide their day to day life. However, these principles are not necessarily articulated. For a lot of people, morality is an emotion. Things either feel right or they don’t. And that is more than enough when you are dealing with everyday life within your own social milieu.

But things like tolerance and understanding and deeper compassion – the pro-social virtues which make modern urban life possible – require a good deal more than emotion. They require informed restraint. Not just social restraint – the sort we all learn growing up. Informed restraint, which means withholding judgment and not simply going with your first emotional response. Informed restraint means knowing that things are not always how they feel and that sometimes, you have to stifle your first emotional reaction and, in effect, select another based on your higher principles.

Assuming, of course, that you have any.

This informed restraint is where a lot of people fail. They refuse to believe that moral behaviour requires going against their feelings. They will make up elaborate sets of justifications for their immaturity, and go on and on about “pure ideals” and their “passion” and “commitment”.

But that’s ideology talk – following the emotions they seek instead of the facts. The right thing doesn’t always feel right – and the wrong thing doesn’t always feel wrong, either. You have to actually think things through if you want to lead a moral life – by which I mean a life in concordance with your ideals.

Again, assuming you have any.

For myself, morality is a very high priority. I will do what I feel is right 99 times out of a hundred. Doing what I think is right feels good, even if it’s not what I want. And doing something I think makes me feel very bad – both emotionally and physically.

Guilt has been known to make me very sick.

I would be a fool if I said I have never gone against my conscience or that I would never do so again. I am no messiah. What moral purity I have right now has a lot less to do with my dedication to my ideals than it does to with a lack of the occasion to sin.

But still, in my daily life, I strive always towards the highest of ideals, and work hard to make the sort of choices that are easy to live with. I honestly think that is the best way to live.

But there may come a time when I do not have that luxury – when it truly is a zero sum game where what I want has to come at the expense of another’s ambitions.

I am curious to see what I will do then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is how it’s done.

Hillary Clinton needs to completely abandon all attempts at being warm, friendly, approachable, nice, or even human, and embrace her inner darkness. She needs to drop all the bullshit that just makes her Uncanny Valley creepy because it’s all so clearly and clangingly insincere and play to her strengths, and as hubby Bill knows, that means embracing the face that she is an ice cold ambitious heartless vindictive snow queen, and Donald Trump should piss his PJ’s every time her name is mentioned because she is the Mother of Dragons and he’s lower than the dragon shit on her shoes.

She should amp up the scariness until all Republicans know who the scarier monster is.

When they call her a murderer, she should says “That’s never been proven in a court of law. By the way, how are your kids? ” then name every single one their kids by name, age, and current place of residence, including which window is their bedroom.

When they go after her for Benghazi, she should say “All the people responsible for that attack are now dead. Of…. accidents. ”

When they rag on her for the email bullshit, she should says “You should be more worried about the pictures I have of you and a certain special someone who is not your spouse on my private server. ”

Her nomination is a foregone conclusion. She doesn’t have any reason to play human any more. Donald Trump talks tough but he’s nowhere near as scary as she is. If she fully embraced her demonic powers, she could make him look weak, cowardly, indecisive, and ineffectual. That would completely jinx his mojo. His whole deal now is that he seems strong to his mental midget fan base. But he’s all hot air. She could seem way, way stronger if she really went for the fucking jugular.

And she needn’t worry about how she is coming across to the Democratic base. They are cowards too, and hence will be too cowed by her to even think of voting from anyone else. There might be some very quiet bitching about her coming across as “shrill” or “too aggressive”, but that won’t have any effect on the election.

In fact, you know what? I think I just wrote this week’s sketch, right now, in my head. Now it’s just a matter of the wording…

I wish I could cut n’ paste the script into here, but the formatting would go all to hell. So I will have to link to the PDF.

Here it is.

It might be a tad over the top for some. But I personally love this version of Hillary. Fuck trying to appease people. Fuck trying to be something she is not. Now is the time for her to bare her fangs and sink her teeth into Little Donnie’s jugular like the vampire queen of the harpies she is.

She might even steal his base that way. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Heck, she might even make people like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un scared of her.

Embrace the darkness, Hillary!

Today was a full day at school. There will be another on Thursday. It’s really no big deal. Once I have made it to school and made it through the first class of the day, hanging around for another is not a big effort. Ya know… whatevs.

The morning class was TV Spec. Presented my beat sheet for Bob’s Burgers. Was rather disappointed and confused by its reception – people thought both my Louise and Gene plots were out of character for them. I would counter that their understandings of the characters is far too shallow.

They thought Louise didn’t care what anyone thought of her, and that is patently untrue. She’d like people to think she doesn’t care, but she totally does. The fact that she wants people to think she doesn’t care proves that. Plus, it’s not like her turning on her new friend was a premeditated move. She didn’t plan it, she just had the wrong reaction in a stressful situation that caught her by surprise. We’ve all been there. And we have seen before that, underneath the attitude, she really does care, sometimes very deeply. The inner conflict in my episode is between her pride and her conscience.

Her conscience wins, and when someone like her’s pride break down, it breaks down completely.

They also thought Gene didn’t care what people thought of him, and that is also blatantly untrue. Gene wants to be an entertainer and is always trying to attract attention to himself and trying to make people laugh, or impress them. The fact that he is oblivious to how he comes across does not mean he does not care.

Trust me… I have been there.

They also complained, get this, about the fact that the Gene and Louise plots start similarly, in that they both start with one of the characters meeting someone they like. To them, that made them the same. Never mind the fact that, other than that, the plotlines are nothing alike. To them, things that start the same are the same, period.

And that’s so blinkered and lacking in vision that it drives me nuts.

Still, some of the notes were good. I need to put in more Bob and Linda, just so they get their lines. I am sure there are episodes where they focus on the kids and the parents are on the periphery of the plot, despite what the class thinks, but I agree there should be more B&L beats, probably involving the kids coming to them for advice and them not knowing what to say because the kids are not exactly explaining their problems coherently.

All in all, though, it was a stressful and confusing process. Normally I love the workshopping, but this time I just went away with the feeling that the class doesn’t get me and now I have to wonder how much weight to give their input.

Arting is hard, y’all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Even a very determined political optimist like myself can understand why it seems like the world’s gone crazy lately.

It hasn’t, of course. This is still the best time to be alive on planet Earth that there has ever been. All the things that make it seem like the world is going crazy – the rise of right wing politicians all over the world’s democracies, American political paralysis in the face of amazing amounts of horrific gun violence, the rise of Trump as the summation of all that is evil about modern conservatism – all of this is bad, but most of it does not actually change anything. If you live in a country that has the luxury of worrying about right wingers rising in the polls, congratulations, because that means you live in a democracy and probably have it better off than at least half of the world no matter how poor you are.

And sure, there are a lot of shootings in America – it’s never been more popular – but these are still tiny blips on the statistical radar. The average person is just as safe as they would be if none of those shootings had of those shootings had ever happened. Yes, these crimes are horrific, senseless acts of brutal violence, and that tends to command our attention – that’s why people do it, after all. But they mean very little to your daily life.

The rise of the right wing is considerably more damaging, but I can’t see a way out of it. Right minded individuals can only do their best to limit the damage and talk the general public down from their crazed state. Demographics have a rather cruel inevitability to them, and as the Baby Boomers age they get stupider and meaner and more on the market for easy solutions that don’t require thinking but that let you vent your impotent rage on targets so weak that even a coward like you doesn’t feel like they are a threat.

The best thing I can say about this period is that once these fuckheads get into power, it becomes obvious even to their supporters that they have made a terrible mistake and that the things that they thought sounded so good when they were just political slogans and talking points are actually phenomenally stupid ideas that never should have been implemented by anyone, ever. After all, one of the many things the world had learned from the Brexit fiasco is that right wingers are perfectly willing to vociferously and wholehearted support policies that they know would be a bad idea if they were implemented, but sure are fun when you and your buddies get together for a good old fashioned hate-fest.

And yes… this applies to extreme left wingers too. Neither side has a monopoly on substituting emotionally appealing ideology for thought, reason, common sense, and connection to reality.

And Trump is the Lizard King of it all. He’s officially the Republican Annointed One now, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him. These next few days should be mighty interesting, then, because now the GOP has absolutely no way to separate themselves from the things he says. He speaks for the GOP now, and no matter what idiotic, psychotic, sociopathic thing he says, all the people who are still in the party will have to support and defend it.

And if that becomes too painful, they will leave the party. Some vocally, but most quietly. They will just stop showing up to certain events, and stop participating in certain forums. Up until now, supporting Trump in public has not been too painful, and could actually be fun when it got you on TV to defend yourself.

But the closer the actual election gets, the greater the pain – both from the growing hordes of right wing Trump haters and from the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance building up in the brains of people trying to keep the ideas of “Trump should be President” and “absolutely everything he says, does, and says he’ll do” from making their brains melt and flow out their ears.

Like I have said in this space before, conservatives do not have a choice as to what to believe. They lack the metacognitive strength for it. They can’t actually derive their beliefs from observation and analysis because that’s just too much information with insufficient mental bandwidth to spare for it. So they have to believe what they are told to believe by the people they have accepted as smart and trustworthy and politically palatable. If it doesn’t pass the sniff test, they reject it. If they do, they accept it, at least consciously.

And thought it may seem sometimes like they are immune to cognitive dissonance, they are not. They simply have a deep driving emotional need that can, in some circumstances, override it. They can gloss over a lot in order to maintain their all important sense of certainty – but this is an emotional act, and as such is subject to emotional disturbance. If Trump stops feeling right to them, then the anti-Trump Republicans can gain the upper hand. And all that takes is that the deep down feeling of wrongness that is growing within even the diehards continues to grow until it poisons the warm glow of certainty and forces the populace to leap for the next source of certainty : that Trump is terrible.

A lot of the GOP have already made that jump. More will follow, I think. Trump is an out of control pedagogue, and sooner than people think and later than they hope, they go too far and say something that their audience simply refuses to assimilate, and therefore can act as their face-saving “jump ship” signal.

“I was with him up till that point, but when he said age of consent laws coddle children, I had to put my foot down. ”

It’s tempting to think that there is nothing he can say to lose his rabid supporters now.

And it’s true, there won’t be…. until he says it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains^[1], and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
–Douglas Adams in “The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul”

I would love to be able to do that. Just go through my memories like I am going through old clothes, and figure out which ones I should keep and which ones I should throw out. That’s something me and my massive metaconscious would really enjoy. It would be like getting to re-index your mind. Defrag your mental hard drive.

But instead, of course, I have to do it the hard way like everyone else. Especially now that I don’t have therapy helping me along any more.

I could still be going to therapy, now that my schedule is opening up. It’s not too difficult for me to figure out when I have time off in a week. I am sure I could find a time when both Doctor Costin and I are free. It’s just a matter of logistics and coordination.

But I would have to get there and back on my own, and therein lies the problem. That’s a very large gumption trap and I am not quite good enough yet at getting out of those on my own. To get there on my own would involve a bus ride there, a walk from the bus stop to the office, a walk back to the bus stop, and a bus ride home. And that…. is a lot of effort.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it. But I just don’t have that kind of effort to spare any more.

Plus I am really starting to worry about what my poor feet go through every school day. It takes a very long time for my feet to recover from the walk. The first time I get up from the computer after coming home is always agony. And I am always eager to get my damned shoes off.

I suppose, speaking of doctors, that I should make an appointment with my GP to get that looked at. It is possible that somewhere out there is technology that would allow me to walk without pain. It has been so long since that was true that I find it hard to believe that it’s even possible. I have a terrible fear that the doctor will just shrug and tell me to lose weight, even thought my GP, Doctor Chao, is a very sweet guy and would never say something like that.

Even if there was nothing medical science could do, he would be super sensitive in how he told me. He’s good that way.

And I know the fear that nothing can be done is the depression talking. Yet the fear remains. Depression is a mental illness and all mentally ill people have to come face to face with the fact that their minds are not entirely their own. That there are things they believe (or even see) without or despite evidence and that no simple act of will or mind will banish these beliefs.

Believing things you know aren’t true is the real meaning of mental illness, at least for me.

After all, I am Mister Rational. I have great power of logic and reason. And I don’t just use logic and reason, I believe in them. I take some pride in being naked before the truth… a slave to the evidence. That means that no matter where the evidence leads, I shall follow, period.

That, though, assumes that I have full mastery over my mind and my beliefs, and that is something no human being has ever had. Even a cold rationalist myself can admit there are things he believes a priori to any evidence – thinks like “it matters what happens to humans”.

But this isn’t about that. This is about following a chain of evidence to what you know to be true – and not being able to believe it. That’s when you are truly cognizant of the limitations placed upon you by your illness. It’s like a big thick wall between you and the truth, and the human mind is not capable of holding onto truths it does not believe.

So the truth slips away from even a muscular rationalist like myself. In fact, if I were less of a hardcore philosopher, what is beyond my reach would not bother me so much. Most people live in the twilit world between the objective and the subjective and are comfortable there. Or at least, comfortable enough to not feel the need to pursue the truth so relentlessly as I, and therefore do not end up with some of their self-worth, not to mention their sanity, tied up with their belief in their ability to believe whatever the evidence says is true.

But in my mind, the things I cannot help but believe regardless of evidence stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. In many ways I have an extremely organized and optimized mind where everything fits together like a n-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and belief without evidence cannot be made to fit in it anywhere.

But I am not helpless. The rational can fight back by stopping irrational self-talk and replacing it with something more rational and balanced. Over time, if you do this enough, and with enough ruthless determination, the bad beliefs shift towards the good.

For example, I no longer hate myself nearly as much as I used to, long ago.

Upward and onwards, children!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sometimes, just making it to Friday makes you feel like you are sliding into home base barely under the catcher’s mitt.

And yes, that’s a sports reference, and that means some of you won’t get it. Feel free to Google it. I only passed gym class because I aced the written tests that the gym teacher was always so uncomfortable giving out, presumably because it brought back painful memories of life outside the gym, where you’re expected to know stuff.

One junior high gym teacher in particular, Mister Anderson – no, not this guy…

..really didn’t like it. He always looked sullen and uncomfortable when he gave us the written tests. I, of course, was thrilled to see them, because tests were something I did very, very well. And I always felt he sensed that and that added to his discomfort, because usually he was the one with the advantage. I was, and remain, very uncoordinated, and back then I was also whiny and wimpy too.

And like all gym teachers, he seemed to believe that mocking the weak will someone make them stronger. Or maybe getting to mock the smart kids for not being good at entirely useless physical skills is the whole allure of the job. It’s like institutionalized bullying.

I wonder how many gym teachers are former bullies? I’d guess… a LOT.

But I got my revenge on Mister Anderson because it was during junior high that two important things happened : one, I went through my first major growth spurt so I rapidly become way taller than him (he was a little dude, really), and two, I became confident/fatalistic^[1] enough to just ignore him whenever I felt like it.

Nope, not gonna do gymnastics any more.
Nope, not going to do three laps when I can barely survive one.
Nope. not going to participate in soccer drills after you made fun of me. Make fun of me, I quit.

And I got away with this for the usual reasons : I knew I was an academically excellent student and so I didn’t have to worry about my grade in gym, and I knew my parents didn’t give a shit about gym class so if he called them to report my lack of cooperation, they would not back him up.

The same thing happened in elementary school. There, the teacher was Mister Thompson, a tall guy with a droopy mustache who looked like a baseball player to me. One day, when we were using the gym at Holland College because the gym in our school SUCKED SO BAD^[2], I got so fed up with facing mockery in the locker room and above that I decided that when everyone went into the gym to practice volleyball, I was going to stay in the locker room and enjoy some goddamned peace and quiet for once.

This, of course, got me in big trouble. So Mister Thompson ordered me to meet him in the tiny little office attached to the gym, and began to berate me. I was, shall we say, unimpressed.

Then he made the mistake of saying “What would your mother think of how you’re acting?” This was a mistake, because my mother worked at Holland College at the time.

So said “I don’t know, why don’t we ask her? She’s right down the hall!”

He didn’t take me up on that. Just drove me back to school (the buses had left) in stony silence.

I suppose from the point of view of some people, that was a brave thing to do. But I didn’t experience as bravery. It wasn’t bravery, it was being capable of anything when I am pissed off and defiant. That’s a form of courage, I suppose, but it’s hardly noble.

It’s certainly gotten me into trouble a lot more times than it has helped.

Once again, I must say : Jesus, was I a handful. All the moreso because most of the time, I was an obedient student who did not cause trouble. And I got great grades, which is not something you ordinarily associate with the disruptive or difficult kids.

Not until they are teens, anyhow.

But like I have said before, I had a deadly combination of stubbornness, creativity, intelligence, and the deep knowledge that the teachers could not actually force me to do anything. And a defiant streak inches long but miles deep. So I would occasionally do things like refuse to do what the teacher told me to do, or correct a teacher, or argue with them.

Presumably, every single time, it came out of nowhere from the point of view of the teacher. And it would have been one thing if I had also been proud, independent, and aloof. But I wasn’t. I was very needy and clingy, which must have been pretty rich coming from the same kid who could, at any moment, effortlessly destroy your authority with nothing more than a look that says “I know you’re full of shit. ”

Should there have been someone around who could handle me, besides Mrs. Rogers my fifth grade teacher? In the abstract, yes, of course. There should have been someone there for me in the same sense that no child should go hungry and no family should fear for their safety because of civil war.

In both cases, it happens anyway.

Realistically, I can’t get too mad at the system (for that, anyway). It would have taken a very special sort of individual, one of high intelligence, iron willpower, and the patience of a saint to handle me. My own parents couldn’t do it. What chance did some random teacher have?

Every now and then, an extreme outlier comes along, and the system is not set up for that.

And I am one heck of an outlier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging my homework – GO!

1. Louise meets a girl named Eleanor in the hallway of her school and is wowed by her skull-motif clothing. She asks about it, and the two instantly bond over their shared love of things gruesome, grisly, and disturbing. They become fast friends, and agree to meet up at lunchtime to compare notes.
2. Gene has a similar experience : he meets Geena, a girl who has been temporarily transferred into his home room. She is like a female version of Gene, and young romance quickly blooms.
3. Tina sees Jimmy Junior sneak out the back door of Jimmy Pesto’s dressed in what she calls “sexy cowboy clothes”, and is intrigued, so she follows him to : a square dancing class!
4. Louise meets Eleanor in the cafeteria for lunch, and they are happy to see her, but then someone points at the two and says “Hey, look, Louise is having lunch with CREEPY ELEANOR!”. Louise panics at the realization that Eleanor is a major social liability, and turns on her, mocking her brutally and causing her to run from the room crying.
5. Trouble in paradise : after spending an afternoon with Geena, Gene’s nerves are frayed and he begins to suspect that he’s made a huge mistake.
6. Tina joins the square dancing class without hesitation, and tries to use it as a way to get close to Jimmy Junior, but is frustrated by square dancing’s circular nature. Jimmy Junior barely even notices her, because he’s too busy trying to get close to a high school girl named Sheila.
7. Bob and Linda are sitting in the kitchen when all three of their kids, in age order, breeze past them to go flop on their beds and mope. Linda looks at Bob and says “Don’t look at me, you’re the one who cooks their food. ”
8. Louise tries to forget all about Eleanor, but when she tries to sleep she dreams that the exact same thing is happening to her, right down to people calling her Creepy Louise and Eleanor turning on her and brutally mocking her bunny ears. She wakes up screaming, and can’t go back to sleep.
9. Gene finally gets completely fed up with Geena, and yells “My god, don’t you ever stop? Do you not have an off button? I hate to break this to you but you are not nearly as cute or funny as you think you are. So do the world a favor and SHUT the HELL UP!”. It’s only at that exact moment that Gene realizes that this could be how other people perceive him.
10. Zeke shows up at square dancing class and mocks Jimmy Junior for doing something so “lame” and “gay” until Jimmy Junior caves in and quits, and tells Tina she should quit too. But she has come to like square dancing because all you have to do is what the dance caller says and it all turns out beautifully. She has even created a square dancing persona named Rosa Lee, and nought her very own sauare dancing outfit. So she is torn.
11. Louise sits with Eleanor at lunch the next day, and says she is really, really sorry and feels terrible about what she did. Eleanor, still hurt, doesn’t believe her. So Louise stands up on the table and shouts “I, Louise Belcher, hereby declare that Eleanor and I are best friends, and anyone who has a problem with that had better ask themselves just one question : do you really think it’s a good idea to piss off the two creepiest girls in school?
12. After a lot of soul searching, Gene returns to his home room class to apologize to Geena, only to find that she’s been transferred back to her usual homeroom class. And he doesn’t even know her last name, or what class she’s in.
13. Tina eventually leaves the square dancing class to pursue Jimmy Junior, but not without regrets. The last thing in the episode is Tina hanging up her square dancing outfit and saying “Some day, Rosa Lee. You and I will paint the barn red.

Not bad! All done and only thirteen beats. I was worried that I would have too many beats with my three plotlines – a half-hour show shouldn’t have more than fifteen. But it turned out fine, even with the little token appearance by Bob and Linda.

The final script will have a lot more than what’s in the beat sheet, of course. For one thing, it will have jokes, including more from Bob and Linda. Plus (how fun is this), I will get to decide what I want the business next door and the exterminators in the opening will be called.

I am thinking “Siouxsie Sushi” and “Like That Old Game Centipede Only For Real”, respectively.

Today was my only “full day” of the week. It’s not really that big a deal. I got my usual lunch from Subway : a cold cut comb on nine grain bread with cucumbers, lettuce, and onion, plus a bag of Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips and a bottle drink, which today was Diet Pepsi.

Then I went to Satan’s Sweet Shop, known by its earthly named Purebread (see what they did there?), and got my usual Thing I Should Not Be Eating. Today I tried a Salted Caramel Bar, which was very good. Favorite thing I have tried there, actually. Also the closest thing they have to Nanaimo bars, which is cray zay.

Not having Nanaimo bars in a Vancouver bakery is like not having steak in a Texas roadhouse.

Tomorrow I have one class, and it’s not till the afternoon. So I get to sleep in till nine or maybe even ten! Oh, the decadent glory of it all.

Before then I have to read the script for Bonnie and Clyde and then write a little blurb to show I read it. It’s for my Script Genre : Crime class, which is a fun class without a lot of pressure, perfect for being a Friday class.

And we get to watch large chunks of movies, too!

And after that, it’s the weekend again! Yay!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.