It has occurred to me that I might not be as cool-headed and restrained as I have always thought myself to me.

In fact, I might be kind of a hothead.

I hope not, I really do. But in light of my recent incidents with arguing with teachers and getting into it with that asshole on the Skytrain, I have to at least consider the possibility that I have a quick temper given certain stimuli, and I will have to try to watch out for that in the future if I don’t want to end up shooting myself in the foot on a regular basis.

I’ve always known I have a quick mouth. Trying to restrain that is probably part of what made me start overthinking what I say in the first place. I learned at a fairly early age that I could not just say whatever popped into my head and I certainly could not let my thoughts flow out of my mouth like some people seem to do. If I had done that, I would not have survived long enough to attend school. I have always felt the need to carefully choose which of the many possible words that could be coming out of my mouth I would actually go with.

So a quick temper makes sense from that point of view. After all, a quick mind powers that quick mouth and emotions start in the mind.

Plus I know that I have enough suppressed anger that it fill the Grand Canyon up to the brim. A lot of bad shit has happened to me in my life, and I was too scared, timid, or weak to deal with it even by getting angry, plus there is the anger generated by all that latent pain. And like I have said many times before in this space, I have trouble expressing anger because of my Dad and his out of control temper. Because of him, I vowed that I would never take my bad mood out on others.

But I went too far in the other direction.

So yeah. Lots of pent up rage that has been brewing inside me for ages. It could be that my recent outbreaks of temper have been symptoms of my finally having progressed far enough through the recovery process to release some of that impotent rage. It’s something that I know has to happen before I can be healthy, but I have been reluctant to do it. Perhaps, in the name of recovery, that choice is being taken away from me for my own good.

That’s all well and good – but in the meantime, I have a life to lead and people I really don’t want to hurt or piss off, for reasons both ethical and professional.

If that’s the case, then at least there will be an end to the process. My suppressed rage might seem infinite sometimes, but it ain’t. Eventually, I would run out, and probably be a heck of a lot happier as a result. Makes me wish I could press a button and release it all at once. Spend a few months as a raging psycho in a mental ward.

That could actually be a funny scene. A big scary looking dude like me in the max security wing of a psychiatric facility screaming in a rubber room somewhere, spewing incoherent profanities, threatening everyone around me at the top of my voice… then suddenly stopping. Brief pause, then a polite knocking on my cell door.

“Um, excuse me? I’m done now, and I’d like to get out. ”

Anyhow, the other main possibility is that I have had this quick temper all my life, but I never knew it because it was buried under fear, depression, and eagerness to please. That would mean it’s the sort of thing I am just plain going to have to learn to live with, which seems like a huge amount of work and hassle.

But hey, the potential reward is sanity, so it’s all worth it. I guess.

Part of my recovery is to remind myself that life with real emotions, as opposed to the artificial calm of depression, is going to be a lot more messy and complicated. As a Taurus, I instinctively eschew complications, chaos, and confounding variables, and on that level, I find the inner regime of enforced tranquility soothing.

There’s a reason why a lot of the most destructive and horrible fascist leaders have been Tauruses. We’re prime candidates for favoring order above all else.

But that’s not real life. Real life is organic, complex, and interconnected. Even the most austere of regimes is nothing but a playground for cranky children who are so determined to hang on to their childhood innocence that they will destroy everything in the world that is too complicated for them to deal with.

And i want to live, dammit. Depression turned me into one of the undead, numb and cold, locked away in my ice palace and freezing to death. So emotionally suppressed that I could not even express my deep inner pain to the world in any form. Instead, I acted like nothing was wrong. And the sad part was, I even believed it.

And all that time, I was rotting away inside.

So now I want to live. To be part of the great big chaotic scary wonderful world, and partake of its warmth, that I might blossom at last.

That means learning to adapt to adapt to a life where the variables slowly increase in number and complexity, and I will have to, again and again, face the cold black wall of my absence of faith as I exceed the number of variables that can be known, calculated, controlled, predicted, and “handled”.

Once that happens, faith is the only thing that can save you. Faith, and trust. Faith that things will be okay even if you don’t know they will. Trust that the world is more than a cold and hostile hellscape. It’s also whatever else you want to make it into. But first you have to invest.

And that means risking loss.

And I know that’s not easy.

Of course, the REAL real answer might be that the summer heat is making me cranky.

But where’s the fun in that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I could probably write a hundred of these, but today I will concentrate on items related to intelligence and verbal skills.

I had to learn to use my gifts responsibly when I was a younger man. I had the same kind of arrogant prejudices about what I should be allowed to do as any modern neckbeard because I had not yet learned that I had great power and with it came great responsibility.

I owe a lot to the exasperated people who had the patience to hang in there and force some wisdom into my brain. Without them, I would have gone down a very unpleasant path of intellectual elitism and misanthropy and ended up on some libertarian message forum yakking about I am the only one who really gets Ayn Rand.

here’s a few of the things I had to learn :

Once someone said that to me (or words to that effect), I was instantly chastened. I realized how ridiculous it was to go to the mat with someone over some argument that didn’t amount to a hill of cut rate beans in the grand scheme of things. Nothing is being decided, nothing is at stake, and no matter who comes out on top, absolutely nothing will change. That’s because…

2. Nobody has ever won an argument, ever

Not in the sense of changing the other person’s mind or proving who is right and who is wrong. All “winning” an argument proves is that you are better at arguing than the other person. And that’s equally true no matter what side of the issue at hand you take. And you certainly haven’t changed their minds because human beings just plain don’t work that way. When someone’s belief in something is attacked, they dig in to defend it and that goes exponential for when they lose the argument. People’s beliefs are the foundations of their world-views and hence their lives, and so if you attack their beliefs, they have to hold on to those beliefs all the harder just to maintain equilibrium.

It’s like they are standing on a branch of a tree, and you’re sawing at that branch and making it shake. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to hop to another branch. But the real thing – the human thing – is to hold on tight.

The idea that an argument can have a “winner” is an illusion created by the primitive parts of our brain, the deep reptile part, that thinks that you can always dominate your opponent and declare victory and that means you are better than them. But that doesn’t work when it comes to conversation, which is all that any argument is. “Winning” means absolutely nothing. All it proves is who is stronger, which brings me to my next point…

3. Intellectual/verbal bullying is still bullying

There is no difference between pushing someone around because you’re stronger than them and pushing someone around because you’re smarter than them. It’s still the strong attacking the weak for their own amusement, and that is the very definition of bullying. Intelligence and verbal skill grant no special immunity to this fact, nor does being a victim of bullying yourself. The strong should protect the weak, not prey on them. One of the worst cognitive crimes is to see another person as not human, and there can be no more pungent an example of this in hunters like us than to see your fellow human as prey.

4. Bullying is not necessarily obvious… or conscious

I learned this from some profs I had at UPEI. Verbal/intellectual bullying does not have to be something as obvious as dominating someone in an argument or mocking them until they cry. It can be something as simple as dominating a discussion by thinking faster than other people. Or taking joy in proving someone wrong. It could even be as subtle as asking questions that seem mild to you but to others are poisoned daggers throw straight at their hearts.

So it’s about more than simply not doing evil things. You are an elephant amongst mice. It’s not enough for the elephant to refrain from doing overtly evil things. It also must be very careful that it does not hurt anyone accidentally with its great size and strength.

I know that can seem like an unfair burden sometimes. After all, others don’t need to be so cautious. Why should you?

The answer is that you are more capable of hurting others than others, and that calls for superior restraint.

You should always remember that…

5. Not everyone is as strong as you

So what to you might seem like a light, playful verbal jam could be a deathblow to the solar plexus to someone else. And just like with the more physical form of bullying, it’s up to you to know how intellectual strong someone is before you engage in argument. It’s the only way to be sure that you’re not the asshole in the situation.

Think of a muscle bound jock coming up to a nerdy intellectual type and socking him hard on the shoulder. In his group of friends, that’s a friendly greeting. But to the nerd, it’s a random assault.

The exact same thing can happen on the field of argument. And because you’re the one with the superior strength, it’s your responsibility to understand that not everyone is like that. Which brings me to my final point of the evening :

6. It’s only a game if everyone knows they are playing and is having fun

This was a big one for me. I love to argue. For me it’s great fun and a marvelous form of mental exercise. And when I was young, I took whatever opportunity I could to play what amounted to my favorite game.

But the other people didn’t know they were playing, and had never consented to being my intellectual sparring partner, and odds are they are not having fun at all. There I was, obliviously pummeling people senseless, only caring about how much I was enjoying it.

Well that’s not argument. It’s abuse. It’s abuse as surely as a jock pushing around a nerd is abuse. Conversation is not consent. Even airing an opinion publicly is not consent if it’s in private, face to face conversation. No matter how inane you think someone’s stated opinion is, that does not give you license to go savage on them with all your might.

No matter how tempting that might be.

That’s all I can think of at this moment. I get the feeling the world would be a better place if that list was posted to every message board in the world.

Strength is not license. It justifies nothing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all this time and all this progress, here I am again, back where I started.

With hours and hours to fill. Days stretching before me all the way to horizon, daring me to find a way to fill them. All that purposeless unstructured time and nobody to tell me what to do but me.

It’s a nightmare, really.

Moreso because of its deadly familiarity. It seems incomprehensible now, but this is how I wasted spent most of my adult life – and I am 43. And for 15 of those twenty or so years, I wasn’t even blogging. All I ever did was play video games and hang out online. For years.

From the point of view of the person I am now, this seems incomprehensible. I don’t know how I did it.

I guess I just didn’t know any better. It’s like when I founded the local furry community and we had that night out at the movies, and I felt this enormous relief because suddenly I knew what it was like to not be lonely any more. The relief was so profound I almost cried from the enormity of it. And with it, came the knowledge of just how lonely I had been, and that was almost as staggering.

Now I know just how unhappy I had been in my sluglike passive childish existence of video games and other time wasting bullshit. I have connected with the world via purpose and it has changed me for the better so profoundly that facing my previous “normal” existence now seems like a goddamned fucking nightmare.

A lot of that is because of the memories being trigger, though. A feeling of being back in the cage it took you so long to escape. Of course, that’s not true – I will escape again on the 29th. Guaranteed. But try telling that to the scared little animal deep inside my soul.

So here I sit, full of that nameless dread that has no source and no destination. I know I can find my way out of this morass.

But right now, I can’t feel it. So for the moment, it’s more of an article of faith than anything else.

And I have never been very good at faith.

I feel cold inside. Dead. That’s the depression, of course. Depression, at least to me, is more about the deadly chill inside that numbs as it destroys than it is about any kind of sadness or anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, social anxiety sucks and has caused me untold damage over the years as it diverts all my social inputs into its own stultifyingly confined yet maddeningly complex maze full of nothing but dead ends and negative conclusions.

But that’s anxiety. When I think depression, I think of paralytic numbness. Like I have said before, recovery for me is like waking up a foot that’s fallen asleep. Sure, it hurts – it hurts pretty bad. But that beats the hell out of the dead numb cold feeling it is replacing, and it feels so good to have life returning to the effected area that the pain is entirely justified.

Because deep down, you know that the numbness is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And the only way to cure the wrongness is to wake things up again, and work through the pain.

Sadly, a lot of people end up in the same position as I was in, too full of suppressed emotion to begin the thawing process. It takes therapy to cut down on the frozen emotions chilling your soul and let you start to come to life again. And there will be times you want to stop because it hurts so much.

But once you get a real taste for the results, namely feeling more alive and aware and healthy and whole, you know that no matter how often you stop, you will start again once you are ready.

It’s remarkably like taking a long and difficult shit, really.

I know I will make it to the other side of it. In fact, the fact that I am experiencing the depression of it right away is actually a really good sign. It means that I am ready to work through it right away instead of going into “dizzy and dim denial” mode, where I pretend everything is going to be just fine and don’t deal with the problem at all until I just can’t stand it any more.

I would rather burn through the garbage that’s in my way right away, and hopefully be able to enjoy my vacation, or at least, not resent it so much.

I am going to start writing my movie soon. That’s one way out. I am going to write three things in total, in reverse order of preference, which is how I always do things. So the movie first, then my Bob’s Burger episode, then the full package for my animated series Sam.

That means polishing up the script for the pilot, coming up with a season’s worth of plotlines, and various length of pitches. Then I will follow the method Victor taught us for getting our idea out there – it involves thoroughly abusing the free two week trial they offer for imbd Pro – and trying to get it made.

I truly believe that it could be a really great show. And very successful as well. It’s the sort of show that, by coming at familiar issues from an unusual – but still relatable – perspective can really touch people, as well as reach out to kids like Sam (and my inner child, of course) and make them maybe feel a little less alone in the world, as well as show the world that these kids exist and that they have their own set of problems too.

My odds, of course, are very low. But I am not exactly betting the farm on it either. It’s something to do over the break, and who knows, maybe it will be my ticket into show biz.

And if not, at least I had fun!

There, I got through my darkness and ended on a positive!

Yay for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all this time and all this progress, here I am again, back where I started.

With hours and hours to fill. Days stretching before me all the way to horizon, daring me to find a way to fill them. All that purposeless unstructured time and nobody to tell me what to do but me.

It’s a nightmare, really.

Moreso because of its deadly familiarity. It seems incomprehensible now, but this is how I wasted spent most of my adult life – and I am 43. And for 15 of those twenty or so years, I wasn’t even blogging. All I ever did was play video games and hang out online. For years.

From the point of view of the person I am now, this seems incomprehensible. I don’t know how I did it.

I guess I just didn’t know any better. It’s like when I founded the local furry community and we had that night out at the movies, and I felt this enormous relief because suddenly I knew what it was like to not be lonely any more. The relief was so profound I almost cried from the enormity of it. And with it, came the knowledge of just how lonely I had been, and that was almost as staggering.

Now I know just how unhappy I had been in my sluglike passive childish existence of video games and other time wasting bullshit. I have connected with the world via purpose and it has changed me for the better so profoundly that facing my previous “normal” existence now seems like a goddamned fucking nightmare.

A lot of that is because of the memories being trigger, though. A feeling of being back in the cage it took you so long to escape. Of course, that’s not true – I will escape again on the 29th. Guaranteed. But try telling that to the scared little animal deep inside my soul.

So here I sit, full of that nameless dread that has no source and no destination. I know I can find my way out of this morass.

But right now, I can’t feel it. So for the moment, it’s more of an article of faith than anything else.

And I have never been very good at faith.

I feel cold inside. Dead. That’s the depression, of course. Depression, at least to me, is more about the deadly chill inside that numbs as it destroys than it is about any kind of sadness or anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, social anxiety sucks and has caused me untold damage over the years as it diverts all my social inputs into its own stultifyingly confined yet maddeningly complex maze full of nothing but dead ends and negative conclusions.

But that’s anxiety. When I think depression, I think of paralytic numbness. Like I have said before, recovery for me is like waking up a foot that’s fallen asleep. Sure, it hurts – it hurts pretty bad. But that beats the hell out of the dead numb cold feeling it is replacing, and it feels so good to have life returning to the effected area that the pain is entirely justified.

Because deep down, you know that the numbness is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And the only way to cure the wrongness is to wake things up again, and work through the pain.

Sadly, a lot of people end up in the same position as I was in, too full of suppressed emotion to begin the thawing process. It takes therapy to cut down on the frozen emotions chilling your soul and let you start to come to life again. And there will be times you want to stop because it hurts so much.

But once you get a real taste for the results, namely feeling more alive and aware and healthy and whole, you know that no matter how often you stop, you will start again once you are ready.

It’s remarkably like taking a long and difficult shit, really.

I know I will make it to the other side of it. In fact, the fact that I am experiencing the depression of it right away is actually a really good sign. It means that I am ready to work through it right away instead of going into “dizzy and dim denial” mode, where I pretend everything is going to be just fine and don’t deal with the problem at all until I just can’t stand it any more.

I would rather burn through the garbage that’s in my way right away, and hopefully be able to enjoy my vacation, or at least, not resent it so much.

I am going to start writing my movie soon. That’s one way out. I am going to write three things in total, in reverse order of preference, which is how I always do things. So the movie first, then my Bob’s Burger episode, then the full package for my animated series Sam.

That means polishing up the script for the pilot, coming up with a season’s worth of plotlines, and various length of pitches. Then I will follow the method Victor taught us for getting our idea out there – it involves thoroughly abusing the free two week trial they offer for imbd Pro – and trying to get it made.

I truly believe that it could be a really great show. And very successful as well. It’s the sort of show that, by coming at familiar issues from an unusual – but still relatable – perspective can really touch people, as well as reach out to kids like Sam (and my inner child, of course) and make them maybe feel a little less alone in the world, as well as show the world that these kids exist and that they have their own set of problems too.

My odds, of course, are very low. But I am not exactly betting the farm on it either. It’s something to do over the break, and who knows, maybe it will be my ticket into show biz.

And if not, at least I had fun!

There, I got through my darkness and ended on a positive!

Yay for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, it was purely verbal.

I was on the Skytrain home from my little one-on-one with my Sketch prof^[1] when a loud argument erupted near me. Some young blonde dude was trying to panhandle on the Skytrain, and that’s totally against the rules. People want to be able to commute in peace. Panhandling on the street is find because you are not getting in people’s faces about it. But when you panhandle on mass transit, you are inherently getting in their face and invading their personal space at a time when they would rather not be pressured to do things.

So this older guy, lets call him Mallcop because he had a very “rent a cop” vibe to him was telling the younger guy, whom we will call Blondie, that panhandling was not allowed on the Skytrain, and Blondie was doing that super irritating thing where he would agree with the guy, but then argue that he should be allowed to do it, then agree again that he will stop doing it, then move off looking exactly like he was going to start doing it again, and Mallcop was not having it. And I am trying to ignore it but Blondie is really starting to piss me off and I know something is coming.

So of course, I butted in. I could see that Mallcop lacked the mental maneuverability to handle Blondie once Blondie started in with the sob story about mental illness and panhandling for 22 hours and selling his body to an old man and so forth and so on. So I had to take over.

And he, of course, tried the same bullshit with me, but I see through that kind of thing. Highlights include :

Blondie : I was starving on the street!
Me : So you’re not on social assistance?
Blondie : Well… yeah, I am, but they only give me a few hundred dollars….
Me : It’s $550 and I know you can live on that because I have.
Blondie : But…. you had a place to live!
Me : And you don’t have a place to live?
Blondie : Well not yet… I’m on a waiting list for an SRO and I am crashing on a friend’s-
Me : Sounds to me like you are right on track, then.

I wish I had said “You have $550 and no rent to pay and you STILL think the rules don’t apply to you? Check your privilege, bro. ”

Blondie : And people are so hostile to me just because I’m poor-
Me : No, it’s because you are breaking the rules.
Blondie : Yeah, but I need money…
Me : So you think most panhandlers don’t need the money?
Blondie : Well, no….

And then there’s this gem :

Blondie : Well yeah, panhandling is against the rules, but you know what’s worse? Stealing, or murdering, and I’m not doing any of those-
Me : You don’t get credit just for not breaking the law!

I mean, talk about aggressive panhandling. “Give me money or I am going to steal and murder!”.

One more snippet :

Blondie : I have so much mental illness, I feel like killing myself all the time…
Me : Me too. For the last 20 years.
Blondie : Well I don’t attack you for that and tell you you’re a piece of shit because of it…
Me : I never said that.
Blondie : Well, no, but…

Basically, he was a clearly overprivileged spoiled immature asshole who wanted to take people hostage by talking about killing himself and thought the rules didn’t apply to him because they were not convenient for him and could not imagine that anyone ever had the right to be mad at him or object to what he is doing and so they can only be doing it because they are heartless and mean.

I don’t put up with that bullshit no matter who is doing it, whether it’s some young dude on the Skytrain or some old conservative whining about taxes. I can’t stand it when people think the rules don’t apply to them. Like they have such a profound sense of their own personal preciousness that they can’t even connect the rules everyone else follows with their own behaviour.

Rules are for other people, not me!

And there was something really galling about how pouty and whiny and childish he was acting.

The only part of it that I regret is that, after he had moved away to the other end of the Skytrain car I was in, I overheard him whining to some of the people there about how heartless I was, and I snapped and yelled “Get the fuck over yourself!”

That was wrong. It was wrong because I yelled and I can be very loud, it was wrong because I swore and to some people that’s a big deal (I could hear people gasp and I could tell I had lost what public sympathy I had left) and it was wrong because I lashed out in anger while making it personal.

And while I don’t think I said anything wrong, I do wish I could talk to him again now that I am somewhat calmed down.

Here’s the advice I would like to give him :

Get over yourself. No seriously…. get over yourself. I’m not saying this to be mean or to hurt you. I am saying it because getting over yourself is the best damned thing you can ever do for yourself. You need to accept the fact that you are an adult now and that means you are in charge. Only your mother owes you unconditional love. And in case you haven’t noticed, your momma ain’t here. Going around whining and wheedling with your lower limp sticking out will get you nowhere. You need to do whatever it takes to get yourself well then get on with your life. There is nothing you can get from another that is more valuable than learning to rely on yourself. So it’s up to you…. you can go on blaming everyone else for everything and acting like a child…. or you can man up, take responsibility for yourself, and become a happy grownup. It is all up to you.

The worst part about the whole thing was that it didn’t upset me at all. In fact, I enjoyed it, and after it was over I felt a great relief.

So clearly I have some stuff to work through and I need to find a healthy and harmless way to do it.

Anyone know of a good right wing forum for me to lay waste to?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am incredibly close to completing my second term at VFS. In fact, I’m only fifteen minutes away!

I shall explain.

All I have left is my one-on-two with my Sketch prof and the nice lady who is going to produce the skit show next term in which actors will actually act out one of my skits. The idea is that they will tell me which of the two they chose and why, and hash out any last minute concerns with me.

I am not looking forward to it.

Why? Because I feel acutely embarrassed by the skits I submitted. They are not my best work. Most of the skits of my classmates are better. And both my skits are super short. One is one page and the other is two. So whichever one they choose, my bit will be real real short.

I feel like I fucked up big time.

My skits aren’t terrible or anything, but I can do so much better. I didn’t spend much time at all writing them, and it shows. So while they do contain my characteristic wit, I feel like they are sloppy, hurried work, and there was no excuse for that.

Besides wanting to get back to my fucking video game. Which is no excuse at all.

Heck, even some of my old skits from Way Back When would have made a better choice than the two POS I submitted. Sure, those skits seem hopelessly amateurish to me now, but at least they were more than two pages long and were made with much precision and care.

Instead, I submitted an updated version of my Hillary skit and a quickie about an athlete who thanks Satan for his success.

The immediate issue is that I care too damned much. This is Sketch, something I love, and something wherein I am extremely eager to make a good impression. But I am too neurotic for that level of enthusiasm, and so instead of healthy zeal, it turns the whole thing into crushing anxiety, self-doubt, and second guessing.

And then, in what I am beginning to think might be the basic pattern of my mental malfunction, the maelstrom of emotions leaves me paralyzed, unable to act. Just brood, and hate myself. And when I finally overcome that, I have built the writing up as such a huge thing in my mind that it terrifies me and I (drumroll please) just want to get it over with as quickly as possible!

Voila, the formula for sloppy crappy work.

So clearly, I need to learn to corral my neuroses. Honestly, I am starting to think that cocky self-assurance might actually work better for me as long as it comes with a work ethic attached. After all, a cocky attitude got me through school and college. Didn’t study or take school seriously at all, waltzed in, aced the test, walked out. That might seem like a terrible way to do business and it certainly doesn’t pass the common sense test, but for someone like me, it has hidden benefits.

Namely that the cockiness counters the screaming neurosis and allows me to function so I can actually do a good job.

As I have mentioned many, many, many times in this space before, I never had to study at school. What I don’t think I have mentioned is what happened when I tried. I tried to learn to study many times, but it always resulted in exactly what I am talking about : I became a nervous wreck, what had been easy for me now seemed impossible, and I was far worse off than before.

Turns out, cockiness really works for me.

So perhaps I will attempt to stay cocky and egotistical in the future – the kind of egotistical that would not dare to let anything go until it was good enough to be released under my name.

In other words, I need to stop being so goddamned lazy/fearful and buckle down and work really hard on this shit. That means not considering it done the second I finish the first draft. That is going to require a significant amount of psychological growth, because when I go back to improve said first draft, all that neurotic bullshit starts happening. I suppose it’s because when I stop writing about it, I have to either shove it out the door so I can forget about it, or stay with it and start really thinking about it, and unleash a tidal wave of self-doubt and neurosis which destroys my confidence in the work entirely and leaves me broken and fearful.

Clearly, I need a third option.

Because I will not always have a forgiving editor or other person to act as the other half of the equation and make the corrections, which I then implement. There will be times that I have to do the whole thing by myself, from beginning to end, and if it’s not good enough, I just plain won’t get the job (or whatever).

What’s more, I need to be able to keep the whole thing in my mind even after the first draft is done, because I need to be able to improve it. So it can’t always be a “fire and forget” thing. I need to somehow get to the place where I can do all the perfecting and polishing myself.

Oh well. At least my skits (remember those?) are funny-ish and the organizers said they wanted some short stuff to use to vary the pace of the show to keep it interesting. So my stuff might be good for that. I am probably being far too hard on myself out of rampaging insanity. I am a good writer, and a very funny guy, and I should remember that when times get tough.

So I fuck up sometimes. Who doesn’t? I will catch up and everything will be cool.

I just have to cut down on the time I spend in the “safety” of video games and the Internet so that I get used to going without it and get my fucking priorities straight.

And now, I will go play a game I downloaded from the Internet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got into an argument with one of my profs. And that’s got to stop.

I still think I was right, of course. I was being criticized both for putting too much dialogue in my TV episode outline and not putting in enough description. Description? This is a plot summary, not freaking storyboarding. I will add relevant details when I write the damned thing, but the outline is suppose to be plot only.

And none of the other students were held to the same standards. I mean, I was being told that I was supposed to write in every hand gesture and bit of incidental action, like what characters are doing when they say their lines. Again, nobody else did that.

Plus they said my outline was all dialogue and no action, which is patently untrue. Granted, I don’t have any car chases or rocket explosions, but every scene has people doing lots of things, as well as saying things. So what the fuck?

And yeah, I said “they”, because of course the rest of the class backed up the prof. So there I was, in the position of arguing with a whole room full of people, again.

But whether I am right or wrong or something in between, it doesn’t matter, because I should not be pissing off the professors that I am counting on to use their connections to get me work when I graduate. Especially not her… she knows everyone in TV and has tons of friends on tons of shows.

So it is in my own best interest to try to keep my temper in check. Even if I am certain I am being wronged. The best thing I can do is just to smile and ignore the bad advice.

But it’s going to be a long old road to get to where I can do that. I am the sort of person who has a temper that can flare up very rapidly, but people who know me well can go years without ever seeing it. That’s because my friends are very reasonable people and rarely engage in wholesale departures from reason and accountability.

Now I definitely have some problems when it comes to my schooling. I went through a bad phase a couple of weeks ago when I was not keeping up all my work and worse, I was not holding up my end of the bargain when it came to the TV and move script classes. The deal is that the people presenting their work on a given class would post it two days before the class, and those who were not presenting would then read it and type up some comments and suggestions about it, and print said notes out and hand them in to both the teacher and the student.

Well I fucked that up, like, a LOT.

And that might well cost me a lot of marks. Hopefully not enough to cause me to drop below a 65 percent average, and hence flunk out. But it’s a possibility.

So I have done things to make my profs genuinely upset with me. And maybe they are taking it out on me, without realizing it, via criticism. Well if they are, they need much better arguments. I am quite happy to take constructive criticism, and up until recently I have taken in all suggestions and implemented most of them, with nary a complaint.

I’ve been a lamb about the whole thing, to be honest.

So it’s not like I can’t take criticism. I totally can. In fact, to be honest, I revel in it, because to me, it sounds like excellence. Getting good, well thought out criticism let me make my thing better, and that’s a wonderful thing. Like I have said before, it means I am not limited to only my broad-but-still-finite perspective, and that goes a long way towards easing my usual paranoia.

But it has to be well grounded criticism. If you come at me with criticisms that don’t make sense, aren’t valid, or are just plain crazy, I am going to argue my case, and for better or for worse, I am extremely good at that.

And as my sister Anne can attest, I don’t ever back down when I think I am right, and I have a LOT of stamina.

So I can be my own worst enemy. I am going to have to learn (slowly and painfully) that any worshopping type class I go to has the potential to set me off, and I will have to be ready for it. I am sure that if I had simply kept my cool today, the situation would not have escalated at all. I could have just said “uh huh, interesting”, written down this bullshit about detail levels, and then ignored it for the rest of my life.

But because I was not ready, I flew off the handle, and maybe alienated a lot of people.

I will have to be on my best behaviour next term. I need these people to like me, maybe even love me. That’s how I will get jobs in the future. Someone I know from my VFS class will be looking for someone to write with or to hire, and I want them to think “I know! That Michael guy from school seems pretty smart! I’ll call him!”

Not “Whatever we do, we can’t hire that hotheaded asshole Michael. He’s too ‘difficult'”.

I may not be able to do a lot about my lack of social integration right now. There’s still too much wrong with me for me to learn to make friends and hang with the kids and all. That social damage is a bitch and I am not going to fix it overnight. It’s better if I am realistic about that.

But I can at least control how I act in class. I can do my best to seem like exactly the sort of guy you want around when you need help.

And I can be that guy.

I just need to learn to not get so combative when I am defending my territory.

Oh well, I am sure I am not the first moody prick to go to VFS!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had some sort of soul-searching self-therapy topic for today, but I have forgotten. So let’s go biographical.

The main thing going on in my life right now is that my second term at VFS is ending. I have four classes left : two on Monday, one on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday. After that, I will have twelve days off before starting Term 3 on Monday, August 27. This suits me fine.

Intriguingly, according to the current schedule, it seems like I am only going to be taking five classes period next term. That makes sense because next term is when shit gets real. All the preliminary work is done and we are ready to seriously start writing. Term 3 is when we will be writing our TV spec scripts and our (eek) feature films.

Suits me fine. Like I have said before, I would rather be writing than sitting in class. And by that, I mean really writing, not this preliminary bullshit. I am sure treatments, outlines, and beat sheets are very useful to some, and I certainly would never claim that they won’t be a lot of help when it comes times to write.

But I am chomping at the bit to get to the actual writing part of this whole thing. What can I say, I’m a writer, I want to write. I am hoping that, once I have something substantial to sink my teeth into, I will be able to restrain myself enough to approach things with the proper amount of forethought and care.

Or at least, to edit that way.

As I have said, mine is an impatient kind of creativity that balks at being slowed down or constrained. It wants to streak across the sky like a runaway comet, not carefully tend a tiny word garden. And so patience is a lesson I will need to learn in this writing thing.

I was a little bit worried about this expanse of free time in front of me, but I am not worried any more because I realized that there’s nothing stopping me from writing my movie or my TV spec script over the break. It’s not expected of us, but there’s no rule forbidding it either. So I will attack those tasks and that can keep me occupied. Especially the feature film script. That strikes me as being a lot like writing a novel, and my novel writing days were quite happy because I had something that drained away all my excess mental energy and left me practically normal.

And for a hyper-cerebral person like myself, that’s a welcome relief.

I wonder how much of my mental distress has excess mental energy as its root cause. Maybe if I could find my way to draining that shit off on a regular basis, the intense pressure in my mind would relent and I would actually be a much calmer and happier person, with oodles more patience and forbearing than now. Maybe my inner demons would starve without all that spare mental energy to feed upon. Maybe without my mind vibrating like an unbalanced dryer all the time, my mind would actually have the peace and quiet it needs to really heal itself.

Instead, all it can do is slowly and painfully dig the shrapnel from my flesh piece by piece. So slowly it’s as if it was being pulled out by a magnet, or that it is rejecting the shrapnel like a tree can reject a nail by simply continuing to grow behind it until it is pushed out by it.

Man, do I dig metaphors.

But where does this cerebral surplus come from? I get the feeling there’s no single simple answer for that. One part of it must be my intense mental exercise regimen. In many way I am an athlete of the mind, and I need to constant exercise my mighty mental muscles just to retain my tiny supply of sanity. As a result, though, I build up strength and conditioning and that makes for a very rapid mental metabolism, and a great deal of energy generated for which I have no use.

So it ends up going into things like neurosis, anxiety, self-doubt, depression, and all the other mental maladies to which I currently play host.

Maybe that’s why depression skews towards intelligence. It’s us “smart” people who generate this excess mentation. Normal people don’t have to worry about that shit. And it’s so hard to explain to people what you mean when you say your thoughts are so intense they keep you awake at night because your mind, like a frisky toddler, will not settle down and rest.

The Ben Folds Five know what I am talking about.

It’s so intense because your whole brain is a juiced up amplifier, Ben. And because you have trouble expressing emotion.

The thing is, I don’t know what the solution is to this problem. It’s not like you can get a USB jack embedded in your ear and use your excess mental energy to recharge your phone. Writing works for me because, unlike video games, writing provides mental exercise and an outlet for those energies without stimulating my mind at the same time.

And I am trying – I really am – to get to a place where my favorite leisure activity – the one I go to be default when I am bored – is writing. And I have never been closer. I know that I enjoy writing and that, despite the stress and the strain, it almost always makes me a happier fellow.

Video games should be for when I am taking a break from writing, not the other way around. And I swear, I will get there. I will be the dude who writes. Who knows, if I can go far enough down that particular road, maybe I will become super prolific like Isaac Asimov was.

There are advantages to not having a life, and I tend to exploit the fuck out of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The personal revelations just keep coming lately.

What if I need to be depressed? What if it serves some function that I don’t perceive because I am in the middle of it?

I’ve talked about this sort of thing before. The idea that depression is, in a very sick and maladaptive way, functional. Its main function is to protect the depressive from the world via keeping them permanently in a parasympathetic state of running and hiding. It’s like it’s a maze designed to keep the depressive busy, thinking they can find their way out, when all the time all they had to do to escape the maze was to stop needing it.

Easier said than done, I know.

But today, that questions seems more raw and primal than my lofty language could hope to encode. I’ve been living on the raw ragged edge of mental illness lately, and that’s good, because that’s where the answers lie and where the real damage can be healed.

But it can be a tad rough.

Behind the question of the day is a vision I had – no, not a vision, a feeling – that the whole entirety of my depression is some kind of long cycle of ups and downs that act as a kind of slow and lazy eliminatory function to my psyche. Something akin to a kidney builds up a certain amount of mental waste product then shunts it to another portion of the consciousness for disposal.

Or perhaps what I am really talking about is recovery. Depression as it was for all those wasted years was the disease. Depression as it is now is a healing process.

Maybe. Or maybe this eliminatory process has been churning way the whole time, but it took four years of therapy’s assistance for it to make enough progress to be able to do any more than make glacially geologically slow progress.

And now that I am not in therapy any more, it’s slowed down again. Going to VFS definitely speeds up another part of the process, the burning away of all that emotional scar tissue. It also makes me have to deal with my issues instead of just limply letting them lie and doing whatever it takes to minimize my pain.

Kind of like breaking your leg and deciding the best solution was to just lie there and not move for the rest of your life.

I think a lot of what keeps people from making the changes in themselves that they desire is an unwillingness to pay the initial cost. Going from a point of stability, even a really bad one, to a much better point of stability is always going to be hard. You have to overcome your own inertia first, and override that little voice that says “You know what would feel good? Giving up. ”

That’s the main appeal of the Wrong Option. Giving up is the faster and easier solution to the stress of trying to change and the relief of that stress can feel downright narcotic. Such a sweetly cool, relaxed, mellow sensation! What a perfect positive reinforcement of a maladaptive behaviour!

So the price of change is always high, especially at first. If you persevere long enough, you overcome inertia and then you only need to supply enough energy to replace that which is lost via friction. Not only that, but you begin to be cognizant of the benefits of the change now that the strain and pain are mostly over.

So people get stuck in their lives – and I speak as the King of Stuck on this matter – because they can’t see past that initial cost. Or perhaps that’s just internally generated bullshit. Not a real reason, just an excuse not to try and thus not disrupt the equilibrium of their lives, or force them to look outside the tiny cage they have made of their lives.

After all, looking outside the cage only leads to wanting to escape it, and the official position of the politburo is that escape is Officially Impossible, so looking out of your cage can only lead to suffering and pain. Right?

This is how the sheep convince themselves their pen is the entire universe.

That got weirdly political.

My point is, there’s lots of people pretending to themselves that it is this factor or the other that is holding them back, and if it wasn’t for that one pesky thing, they would totally live out their hopes and dreams, like, right away.

But there’s just one little problem : they’re not looking for solutions any more. So they have no idea whether their problems are as impossible to solve as they pretend them to be. And if the malaise is deep enough, you could even hand them the perfect solution on a silver platter and all they would do is find some tiny flaw to fixate on and make THAT their excuse for turning it down.

Or they would just run away from it all. And make up the excuse for why they did it later.

The real reason, of course, would be that the excuse they gave for why they couldn’t do their thing was total bullshit and the real reason for not doing their thing is a blank and unreasoning fear of change and the unknown. With just a hint of being overly attached to a view of themselves based on exactly who they are at that moment.

And if you are exactly who you are right now, any change would destroy your current identity, and to the human mind, destruction of identity equals death.

And the thing is, there’s no rational way to express what it is within you that remains the same even after fairly radical changes. You can call it The Real You, but that doesn’t get you very far.

But I will say this : it’s only when you change that you find out who you really are.

And that makes it worth the cost even if everything else goes wrong.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it’s time I learned to live with it.

I was raised, by and large, by television. ^[1] And as I have mentioned before, rather flippantly, to me the sitcom world was ideal life. A world where everyone was witty, good always on over evil, and everything was always fine by the end of the 22 minutes.

But I think the problem goes much deeper than that. I think that, in a deep subconscious way, I have been trying to turn myself into a sitcom character for a very long time. And I think that’s possibly part of my problem relating to people. Normal people don’t go around trying to be as witty as a sitcom character, so right away I am behaving in a strange way.

On some deep level, I think I feel like if I could only become that sitcom version of myself, my life would become a sitcom and everything would be all right from then on. And when that doesn’t work, I blame myself instead of blaming the flat out impossibility of what I am trying to achieve.

It’s my fault for not being sitcom enough! Maybe my life needs a laugh track.

This what happens when you are raised by television. All my role models were TV people. All my life modeling came from TV lives. All my moral training came from the morals taught on TV. I never had anyone to teach me right from wrong, or what is safe and what is not, or what I should be doing with my life…. nothing. I had extraordinarily little input from adults about whatsoever.

All I had was television, and it makes for a very poor substitute indeed.

So in some ways, I am made of television. No wonder I want to be a part of the television industry so badly. It’s the closest I can get not just to going home to my parents, but to crawling inside the TV and living there for the rest of my life.

Just let me in…. I promise I’ll be good! This is the only place where I feel like I belong! Like I am welcome!

It’s a rather bracing and profound thing to realize about oneself – that you have been pursuing a literally impossible ideal for a great deal of your life. No matter how hard I try, I will always live in the real world, not TV land, and that means making peace with being merely human and nonfictional and hence governed by all the rules and restrictions of a drearily mundane existence.

Right now, this piece of my interminable inner puzzle is still too freshly detached for me to have a clue what its long term effects will be once it had disappeared over yonder horizon. But it’s such a huge piece that it can’t help but shake me to my very core.

Obviously, if before now you had asked me if I thought I was living in a TV universe or if I was trying to become a sitcom character, I would have said no. These things work on levels much deeper than that bit of ourselves that is known to us and that we cannot help but think is, on some level, our entire selves.

After all, knowing you have a subconscious mind does not you cease to have it. Drag all the demons into the light you want. The darkness outside the circle of light will remain.

I am curious to see who I am once I have really processed this revelation. I am hoping it leads to a revolution in self-forgiveness. My world will never be like the TV world because I am a real person. And the sooner I accept that, the better off I will be and the sooner I can get on with my oh so real life.

This television model of life also explains some of my feeling of unreality. Not all of it – the bulk of it comes from spending too much time in a very low stimulus environment causing my nervous system to tune out my environment so completely that I don’t even perceive it on an emotional level any more.

But the remainder, I think, comes from some deep feeling that the world inside the TV is the “real world”. When I was a lonely little kid, I often felt like life was this annoying thing that kept interrupting my TV watching. This was especially true in the summer. To the weak, fictional worlds are always better because fictional worlds are safe.

It takes a feeling of strength and competence (and above all, safety) to prefer the real world. Only then can the real world truly be more rewarding that our well developed inner lives. And the thing is, that feeling of strength and competence cannot be found within the confines of said inner lives.

Only by going out into the real world and surviving can you build up the confidence in your own ability to cope that leads to the strength and the courage you need. That’s the catch. There is no safe road there. You will have to venture at least a little ways outside of your comfort zone.

And what do you know – if you do, your comfort zone grows. And then you go a little further, and a little further, and slowly you become healthier.

For now, all I can do is repeat to myself that I will never be a sitcom kid who is precocious and witty and funny and whom everyone loves. That’s not a real thing. No matter how hard I love all the TV families I have joined in my life, they can never loved me back, and if I want to get the connection and belonging I crave, it will have to be in the real world.

And it starts with tearing down the walls inside me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.