And that’s a rather big problem. ^[1]

Because I have realized that the chain reaction fireworks of assumptions I bring to every social interaction don’t just lead to a very distorted view of reality. They lead to my radically misunderstanding people’s motives and reactions, and hence misjudging them.

So tonight’s round of Face the Insanity will be about how full tilt crazy I am inside when it comes to social interactions with people I do not know very well. In other words, people who are not in either my group of friends or my family.

There is always so much going on in my head when I am in less than perfectly safe social situations, and most of it is not sane. Fusillades of emotional fireworks are going off constantly – possibly because I have such trouble expressing myself in other ways. So while I am having what seems like a normal-ish friendly conversation, something like an artillery battle is happening inside. No wonder I have trouble keeping my attention fixed on people sometimes!

Like I said before, I just want it too bad. I want so badly to be funny and charming and likable that it raises the stakes on even the simplest of interactions beyond anyone’s ability to cope. It also makes success nearly impossible because I am trying to hard to get so much out of every interaction that I am doomed to fail.

And the thing is, I know it’s crazy. I know I’m crazy. It’s not just a matter of consistently low mood. It’s a matter of knowing that things you think and believe are not just untrue but insane, and not being able to stop believing them anyhow.

I always feel like people are just barely tolerating me and that, at any moment, I could be neglected, rejected, and ejected. Even when I am relaxing with my friends. That little mind gremlin of mind is always there, convincing me that nobody really likes me, people only put up with me out of pity, and everyone silently wishes I would just go away and spare them all the burden of having to humour me.

Countless times I have been told this is patently untrue. And yet, the feeling persists. I have no rational evidence to back up this persistent belief, and lots of evidence to the contrary. And yet I still feel that way most of the time.

Only the intensity varies.

The more active arm of that suite of toxic beliefs is my defensiveness. I always expect to be ignored, neglected, and given the lowest possible priority. And I am not saying it doesn’t happen. What I am saying is that I am not sure that I do not play a part in it, on a subconscious level.

Perhaps. like a person who has been beaten up by every romantic partner they have ever had, I need to take a good look at the common factor in all the incidents, namely me. It seems highly likely to me that I unconsciously create the situation with which I am familiar, namely being treated shoddily. Perhaps, at times, I project an air of unimportance as I try to disappear into the woodwork.

I know damned well that there is, within me, a mighty struggle between the desire to be seen, heart, and known, and the desire to be hidden, overlooked, and safe. That fundamental feeling of being unsafe is a very powerful thing, and that is what makes me want to disappear. In the past, it’s been so strong that I have wanted to vanish from existence entirely and live like a ghost, just wandering through the world feeding my spectral head without any worldly dangers or complications, safe at last.

Or at least until some assholes in jumpsuits show up and “bust” me.

But of course, it would never work. I need people to talk to. I need companionship. I need to be seen and heard and so on because when I am not, I feel like I don’t exist. I have gone through times of extreme solitude, where I was entirely on my own with nobody in my real life that knew me, and it went very badly indeed. I became extremely depressed. So depressed that it went well beyond a negative mood or self-loathing and become more like a very dark dissociative state. Nothing felt real, and I felt like I was disappearing and that at any moment my pilot light would go out and that would be it for me. I would die like the flame of a snuffed candle.

So I have no delusions of solitude. No Walden Pond for me. I might not be the most social guy around, but I definitely need people in my life.

I truly believer that people can engineer their own doom without knowing it. All it takes is part of your mind influencing your seemingly random choices and informing your supposed reason with its negativity and suicidal desire to self-negate. Over time, this leads you to the exact same negative result as before… and the worst part is, part of you is relieved. Ah, good, the same old nastiness. Good ol nastiness. Now I can stop worrying about whether it will happen or not.

Picture all that coming from an Eden-type snake. Now THAT would be REAL evil.

The thing is, I have no idea what the real territory, the one beneath all the delusions, even looks like. I try to imagine what it might be like to have normal emotional responses and I can’t. Not in myself. I honestly have no idea what it would be like to be free of all this craziness.

Seems like it would be a lot better, though.

I am going to go see my therapist at least once during my break. Maybe twice. Maybe he can help me sort through all this mental detritus.

Otherwise I am stuck doing it myself, and that takes forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about my fucking glacier again.

For those of you who are new to the game, when I talk about my iceberg, I am talking about the huge mass of frozen repressed emotion inside me. It is the burden of many years of suppression under the reign of depression – while also being its cause.

Nobody ever said mental illness was fair.

It might even be the basic cause of depression in others too. That would certainly explain why therapy works, and matches my subjective experience of it. Therapy, as defined as the unearthing and expression of repressed memories, works to reduce the mass of that inner glacier, and over time as the glacier gets smaller, its chilling effect lessens, and the easier it is to think, feel, and regulate your own mood.

That’s what the four or five years of therapy before going to Kwantlen were for. I had to birth enough icebergs and watch as, separated from the main mass, they drifted southward and melted.

As I have said before. the process itself is rarely pleasant – nobody has depression from years of suppressed joy, methinks – but the results are phenomenal. I am so much more than I was even six months ago.

Heck, I’m so much more than I was at the beginning of this term, and that’s seven weeks ago!

So VFS has been very good for me on that score. It can’t replace therapy – something I will get back to on break – but nevertheless, it accelerates the process. Maybe by forcing me to have to get the fuck over myself in order to get done what I need to get done.

Speaking of which : right now, what I should be doing is working on the final version of my detailed outline for my Bob’s Burgers episode for TV Spec class. But the suggestions people had for it the last time it was presented represent such a radical change that I am having a lot of trouble getting started.

I thought I was cool with it earlier, when I was thinking about it in class. So they want the episode to be mostly about the karaoke plotline. I can do that. It could be quite hilarious. Karaoke, plus they also liked the Tina plot, then I would have to pick either the Gene or Louise plot to be my C plot^[1]. I thought I was ready for this, my first time basically having to start over.

But nope. I really don’t want to do it. Part of me is still pissed off about them not thinking the Gene and Louise plots are in character. To me, they totally are. I will admit that they are too similar, but I reject the idea that they are out of character. Louise definitely cares what people think of her and so does Gene, if you can puncture his obliviousness. Which Geena CAN.

What’s more, I think a spec script that shows a really deep understanding of the characters will impress people more than a formulaic retread of what’s come before.

So I suppose the problem is that I am of two minds about the whole thing. Part of me feels like I should make the changes suggested, if for no other reason than to practice the sort of flexibility I will need once I am in the industry. After all, if I am working on a show and the head writer tells me to make a ton of changes, I am gonna have to make those changes. Otherwise I will risk getting fired and, worse, get a reputation for being “difficult”.

Being labeled “difficult” is the kiss of death in entertainment, especially for people starting out.

And I suppose it would be a tad precious of me to say that I will do it for money but not for marks.

So I guess I will have to do it, at least a little. Maybe the trick is to stop thinking of it as starting over and think of it as a totally new episode that happens to include some elements from another, perfectly good episode.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’ll still have my original outline around – I am hardly going to overwrite it. I will just spawn a new version of the file and work on IT. There will be two semi-related scripts, one the radio edit, the other the original cut.

I guess I can live with that.

Now theres just a matter of putting in the work. That means I have to expand the karaoke plot a fair bit. That shouldn’t be too hard. There has to be tons of comedy gold in the idea of Bob’s Burgers characters singing karaoke. Imagine how hard it will be to get Linda to let go of the mic!

Back to that glacier parked on my heart.

I think it’s what gets between me and others, too. Part of me feels like other people can feel its coldness, but that sounds like crazy thinking. It’s more like other people can feel the distance it creates between me and them, and can tell how walled off I am and how hard it is to reach me.

And the thing is, people will only try to reach you for so long before giving up. And that traitor, depression, looks forward to their giving up because that will relieve the tension of having to deal with people at all.

This is what leads to isolation – and it’s the isolation that really kills you. It cuts you off from all the positive inputs that would help you and leaves you on the brink of total emotional starvation.

And if you’re a fat person like me, you try to cure that salvation with food. I have been extra hungry lately, and it’s led me to wonder if I am truly hungry or is that just my primal response to emotional needs. It’s a very tricky question given my diabetes. It could be either.

One thing is for certain, though :

I should never ever ever ever ever skip a meal.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This morning was unpleasant.

That would be because I had my bimonthly IBS attack. Something about eating a bunch of greasy popcorn way too fast early in the morning did not agree with me, so I spent a while in the bathroom once I got to school. That’s never fun. I had to sit there while my body sorted things out, and moved the bad stuff out in waves.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not big deal. It happens now and then. That’s all.

Had my final Dialogue class this morning. We got unto what is a touchy subject for me : formulas.

All through my VFS education, I have been being taught certain ways to go about writing things. 7 Pillar Beats. Beat sheets. Outlines. And so on.

And all of these things are useful, I assume. But odds are that when I sit down to write something, I am going to just fucking write it. To me, most of this method I am learning is bullshit. It’s for people who need to learn things methodically, bit by bit, step by step.

But I am not that kind of writer. To me, method is crap. The story is what it is to me. It get told however it needs to be told. Method’s only job is to assist in the birth. To that end, method must remain as flexible and form-fitting as possible. Teaching people that there is one way to do it and this is it is, to me, far too restrictive. It’s trying to force the baby into a specific mold.

And I just won’t do that to my happy little brain babies.

It came up because today, my Dialogue prof was the first member of the faculty to admit that there are other ways of doing things. He told us that the important thing is to barf out the story however it occurs to us and only then worry about what form it takes and what needs to be done to clean in up and make it healthy.

And that’s basically what I have been saying, although not exactly in those worlds. ^[1] I am still working on that second part, but the basic idea that you have to get the story out however it comes, even if it comes out in ways that seem ridiculous, makes total sense to me.

I brought up the fact that when I wrote my novels, all I worried about was whether I knew what happened next. I didn’t have a plan, an outline, a beat sheet, or a treatment. I just set off on the journey, and that kept me motivated to keep on writing, because I never knew what was going to happen in the long term.

Now, seeing as very few people have read a single word of my four novels, I have no idea how successful I was in my novel writing endeavors. Maybe anyone in the publishing world would read the first chapters and say “Wow, you didn’t plan this out at all, did you? You should have. This is crap!”. But somehow I don’t think so.

I’m pretty good at the writing part of things.

So I am very glad to have confirmation from a VFS prof that the formulas we have been learning are not the be-all and end-all of Writing The Official Way. Sadly, he also mentioned that studios and such are often looking for things that fit the formula in order to give them some way of cutting through the tens of thousands of scripts they get every year.

He says they even have software that will check scripts for formula compliance now. I have no idea how a piece of software figures out where the second acts break is in a script, let alone whether it’s in the right place, but then again I am not a programmer. So I believe him.

Luckily I am not going into film. I’m a TV guy. I love movies but I have zero desire to write them. And the TV world is far less formulaic. It used to be the opposite, because TV scripts have to fit commercials into their structure and there should be a moment of suspense or drama before each commercial break to make people want to keep watching after they get back from the bathroom.

And that is still true if you are writing for the major networks. But the field is increasingly dominated by the commercial free subscription model services, whether that’s a big game changer like Netflix or the same old pay-TV channels like HBO that have had such success lately. And according to my prof (who works in film, so I am taking this with a grain of salt), what these new players are looking for is unique shows that make their service different from the others.

Music to my ears, if it’s true. I am a unique kind of guy and I deplore the idea of just doing what everyone else is doing. I would love to create a truly fresh and original show some day.

Call me, Netflix!

I am looking forward to being able to fully dedicate myself and my time to TV after the next term. The way it works at VFS is that the first three terms are more general, and the other three are specialized into writing for either TV or film.

TV all the way for me. It’s why I went to VFS in the first place!

Speaking of terms, got some bad news this week : apparently I am getting ten days off between terms.

Total bummer. I don’t want ten days with nothing to do and no focus to my life. I want what we had last time, the Thursday and Friday of the last week off, then back on the horse next Monday. And hell, even then I ended up getting depressed.

But I have no choice, so I will have to figure out some ways to keep from losing my marbles over the break.

Maybe I should keep them in a bag or something….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had one of those moments when I realize just how deeply damaged I am today.

It was during class – TV spec, not that that’s important. I was sitting there feeling like I suck and I am terrible and nobody is listening to me and so on – the usual. But then I had a moment when I realized just how tragic the whole thing was.

After all, I doubt anyone else in the classroom thought I sucked. I was sitting there feeling terrible because I was, in some very ill defined way, not doing well enough at…. something. But to any objective observer, I was sitting there contributing to the other student’s TV outlines. Some of my suggestions landed and others did not. That’s true for everybody, I imagine.

And yet, there I was, in a morass of self-doubt verging on self-loathing, and without a single shred of logical justification for it.

Looking back now, I can see that at the center of it my desperate need for attention and validation. One of the most treacherous ways in which depression destroys from within is when it treats all lack of success as failure. So there is no in between – either you achieve (at minimum) exactly what you intended to achieve, or you have failed completely and should be ashamed of yourself.

This does not exactly breed persistence. And that’s exactly what depression wants : for you to give up and return to the kind of flat, lifeless, low stimulus existence depression desires.

And I was facing the depression and feeling the vast difference between my feelings and reality, I started pondering all the social damage I have suffered and how badly malnourished and atrophied my social machinery is as a result.

I am grateful that at least the desire to connect with others persists. I will say that from the outset. It leads to a lot of pain when I strain against the vast accumulation of psychological scar tissue that is getting in the way of said connection, but as long as the desire persists, I know I will overcome the barriers sooner or later.

But sometimes the layers upon impacted layers of paranoia, fear, and hostility towards others that I can feel lining that vast gulf between me and others drive me to despair. I have so much negative input to overcome, and it’s easy for my therapist to say I need to overwrite it with positive input, but the input has to be able to penetrate first.

And the thing is, I know I should be striving to be more social. Show business is all about making connections, and I’m not making any. Sure, my teachers know me, and that means a lot because they all have lots of connections in the biz. But I am not going to get that far on that alone. It would be far better if I made a deeper connection with my fellow students.

Problem is, I freeze up inside with fear when I even think about it.

The best I can hope for is to kick myself out of the door to attend the next social-type event I see advertised about. Assuming there will be more of them. I could try to invite myself into something I overhear them talking about doing, like going to a movie or whatever, but I don’t want to impose.

But if it’s the only way to add myself to the social scene at this late date, I may not have any choice in the matter.

Anyhow, back to me in the morass. I know that my overweening need for attention and validation puts me in a highly vulnerable and unstable position. It’s a classic case of wanting something so bad that it actually interferes with your ability to get it. I am sure the neediness comes across and that’s never good, but that’s not the major problem.

The major problem is that, metaphorically speaking, a starving person takes failure to get food a lot harder than a full one.

If I could just tone it down a little and hold back, and mostly important, relax already, I would probably get more of what I want out of social interaction. But to get that, I would need to feel more confident and less vulnerable in social situations – and that’s not going to happen without more of that positive social input I was talking about.

It’s not quite a Catch-22, because there’s always the slow an inexorable process of recovery grinding away, but it is certainly Catch-22-ish.

And the thing is, part of what makes it so hard for that positive social input to get through is that depression lies in wait for that exact kind of thing and invalidates it as fast as it can. And what it can’t logically invalidate it simply scrubs from the tapes. Any kind of positive input fades away faster than an afterimage, and of course, the negative stuff persists ad infinitum.

That’s not the sort of thing that be changed cognitively. It’s not simply an illogical thought pattern. It’s something far deeper and darker. It’s that fundamental table of values that I have talked about before, and that dictates much of how we feel. And it is the sort of thing that cannot be changed by thought alone, or by any direct method for that matter.

Only a long journey into that dark and twisted forest that is the subconscious mind can do it. As I have said before, I am well aware that my deepest problems lie outside the world of reason, logic, analysis, and all the rest of that left brained shit. I know that the view that somehow that brightly lit laboratory of the mind is all that there is (or all that matters) is false, and the product of a cowardly instinct to pretend that which one cannot handle does not exist.

But it’s still incredibly hard for me to imagine going out into that dark and twisted forest. It’s my total lack of faith that does me in. It leaves me uniquely unsuited for tackling that which cannot be known in a rational sense.

Still trying to learn to explore after all these years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It seems very odd to me that I am both someone who sees the desperate need for a new kind of religion and can even imagine what it will look like, and also someone who knows that he is not the person to start one in any way, shape, or form.

I’m too much the rationalist for that.

Unlike other rationalists, however, I do not believe in some kind of grand revolution of reason that will sweep away all the “superstitions” of religion and bring in a new era of enlightened reason. That’s a notion more unrealistic than any dream of an afterlife or a global spiritual awakening. The truth is people need religion and that means it’s not going anywhere.

Most people are not cut out for a life of being naked before the void. They need the answers, the comfort, the connection, and the myriad other benefits of religion in order to get through the day. It’s easy for us liberal intellectual types to take the stand that we refuse to believe anything that is not logical or provable (although we’re usually full of shit on THAT, too).

But for the average citizen who just wants to get on with their normal life, the absolute truth cannot be their highest priority. They can’t afford to spend a lot of time pondering the eternal verities of life. They are too busy actually living their lives, and hence, the things they believe only need to be “true enough”.

All the rationalist rugged philosopher lifestyle is the very cold comfort of knowing you are, on some obscure level, “right”. And cold comfort alone is never enough.

Any new religion would have to take this into account. It would have to resist defining itself in opposition to reason while also providing that which reason alone cannot provide. It needs to offer warm comfort that comes from things like a feeling of community, a sense of connection to something greater than oneself, and a conviction that no matter what, there is a very powerful creature who loves us and will take care of us as a Cosmic Parent.

Perhaps some day, we will be ready for true adulthood, without any need for such a parent. But that will only come to pass if we evolve a religion that serves those same needs.

For they are human needs, and will be with us as long as we remain human. We will always need the comfort of feeling like there is someone strong and smart in charge of things. We’re social animals, and social animals need leaders.

We will always need to “belong”, to feel like we are part of a community, because it is that feeling that keeps a social animal’s social unit together. Without it, we would simply drift apart from one another and the social unit would never come into existence in the first place. It’s our need for belonging and community that causes us to band together on many levels, whether it’s churches, sports, workplaces, families, or fandoms.

We will always need nurturing. Communities care for their members, and that’s what makes them so strong. So we will always have a need both to care for and be cared for. Modern life does a lousy job of even acknowledging this truth, let alone meeting said needs. The altar of individualism demands that we give up all hope of being cared for past our adult years, as if our deep social instincts magically turn off at whatever arbitrary number of years we have decided means “adult”.

And the list goes on.

Any new religion needs to meet all these unspoken needs of ours. It’s not a matter of overthrowing the entire idea of religion, as if you can just rip it away from people and have them thank you for it. It’s a matter of taking what is good about current religions and bringing them together in one system of beliefs while eliminating the bad stuff that only hurts people.

So away with all the mindless sexual taboos. A new religion has to embrace human sexuality in all its forms, not try to suppress what it fears like a child. Ditto obscure dietary rules and other restrictions, and all forms of the “traditional ways of doing things” that interfere with people’s healthy expression of self.

Don’t get me wrong, traditions are necessary. But they must remain traditions only… not rules. When they become rules, forced upon generations who don’t understand them and to whom they mean nothing, they become toxic and no longer serve any function.

And it’s all so unnecessary. Traditions maintain themselves just fine. Nobody enforces Christmas, and yet most people in Western cultures celebrate it anyhow. Why? Because it’s what people do.

Another thing a new religion must do to be successful is to maintain a positive focus. Making people feel guilty does not work in the long run, especially when it it not counterbalanced by a clear and understandable way to go back to feeling good. In the long run, the best strategy is to be people’s source of whatever positive emotions they need to get through their day.

And what moral stance is taken (for this is another role a religion must fulfill, that of moral guidance), it should always be clear that actions may be bad but the people are not. Thus, moral error is seen as a temporary aberration and nobody ends up feeling like they are bad deep down.

Any new religion must also “fit” with people’s lives. That means a fair amount of flexibility must be built into it. I think there is still a very big place for a weekly worship ritual, where people come together to observe their faith. But this experience needs to be as relaxed and pleasant as possible. It should be a time of solace, an escape from the ordinary world. Not some sort of unpleasant ritual people endure out of a sense of compulsion rather than genuine desire.

Any religion that defines itself in opposition to reason and reality is doomed.

But one that accommodates it all might last thousands of years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, I feel like shit.

Had a negative experience last Thursday. Apparently, the detailed outline of my Bob’s Burgers episode was due Tuesday, not Thursday. So I was super late on it, too, just like those versions of my Feature Development beat sheet I fucked up.

And what bugs me about that is that now I have had two teachers act like that’s how it’s always been. But it isn’t. It’s a fairly recent development. I admit that I am having trouble making the learning curve on this development. I still tend to assume things are due next class. But they are due 48 hours earlier so everyone in class has time to read it and generate notes for feedback.

I think I have a grip on the idea now. And in the process I have realized how I tend to just do assignments based on whatever I happen to remember about how to do them, as opposed to looking up how they are supposed to be done. That’s sure to bite me on the ass hard, over and over, so I better put an end to that shit ASAP.

The problem is that I am always so eager to write that I don’t want to slow down to research how it’s supposed to be done. I suppose that, on a subconscious level, I feel like things like that aren’t important, what matters is the quality of my writing.

Which is ironic coming from Mister First And Final Drafts here.

I feel like my current stage of evolution as a writer is the one where I come to terms with that big bad bugbear of mine : rewriting. And in a broader sense, the fact that writing for a living is going to involve a lot more work and effort than I am used to having to address.

That goes double for school. In a TV writer’s room, I will at least be, in general, only working on one thing with one deadline at a time. But in school I’ve got seven courses on the go. And the organizational aspect of being a student is growing increasingly complex.

Once more, I wish I had an assistant to keep track of everything for me. But I don’t. So I have to do it myself.

Back to rewriting. I don’t mind taking multiple cracks at something. Like I have said before, school gives me what I need to make that happen, which is that second party to look at the work, evaluate it, give me an idea as to what needs to be fixed, and give it back. That carries me across the threshold I can’t cross on my own, the threshold between how it is and how it should be.

I do not yet possess the ability to switch from creating it to evaluating it and fixing it on my own. if I try that, the whole thing falls apart in my head and I lose all belief in the thing’s merit, and my own. Editing is so radically different from creating. I can’t switch modes on my own.

More disturbing is what actually went down with said outline. Here’s a link to it : Outline for Bob’s Burgers.

They (my class) still don’t buy my take on Gene and Louise. That’s to be expected, I suppose. And they think the A plot should be the Bob and Linda Go Karaoke plot, which I thought of as a D plot. And if that was all, I would just shrug and chalk it up to artistic differences.

I’m artistic, and they’re “different”. Ha ha ha.

But seriously, they made the very valid point that this is supposed to be a spec script, and therefore should be as “typical” as possible. Which means I have to make it less unique and have it be less of a change for the characters. Which, to my mind, means making it less unique and less interesting.

I honestly don’t want to make anything I do more “typical”.

So now I have to face the first major challenge for any artist who wants to make a living with their art : compromise. When you are just doing it for yourself and maybe a few friends, you don’t have to compromise at all. You make it just how you like it, and that’s it.

But once you want to earn a living with your art, you have to start thinking about what the gatekeepers want. And that means maybe/probably having to make the art “worse” in your mind in order to get paid. And that goes directly against the grain of the drive towards self-expression that is the wellspring of art in the first place.

I really want to work in the biz. So I am going to have to rewrite the thing as being karaoke-centric and maybe choose either the Gene plot or the Louise plot as the B-plot, and Tina as the C. Also, I need to have the plotlines interact more often.

And that’s going to be a big shift for me. But I don’t think I will have too much trouble once I get over the psychological aspect. After all, a karaoke machine based episode of Bob’s Burgers could be a heck of a lot of fun to write. And it’s not like I have to discard the Gene and Louise plots forever.

I just have to decide not to include them, or at least eliminate one of them. Spec scripts are resumes, not think pieces. Like my prof said, TV producers want to hire a writer they can just drop into the writer’s room knowing they can already match the style, context, and tone of the show, and for that, you need to present them with a “typical” show.

And man would I love to work on an animated sitcom like Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, or the Simpsons.

So I have got a lot to learn. And I am not talking book learning. I mean the kind of learning where you have to change.

And you can’t study for that. You have to do the work, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had supper at what is becoming a favorite of mine, a little hole in the wall diner call Bob’s Sandwiches.

Alert fans with good memories will recognize this as the place I described as “ethnic food” for the patrons of the otherwise all Chinese and Filipino (shut up, it’s spelled that way now) mini-mall that I pass through every school day when go from Skytrain to home.

Most of the other businesses there intimidate me too much for me to approach. Half of them are restaurants with little to no English on their signage. There’s a traditional Chinese Medicine herb shop that makes me feel like I buy a Mogwai there. There are a couple of Filipino bakeries. ^[1] Apparently Filipino style bakeries are quite popular in some corners.

And/or have insanely high margins.

The only other business there that I have been in in the past is a convenience store. I try not to go there because their prices are insane. But sometimes I forget to get my stuff downtown, and it’s the last place I pass before I get home. So I pay.

But mostly, it’s Bob’s. Not only do I love the old time diner feel to the place, it’s amazingly inexpensive. I got a hot dog, fries, and a can of pop for just $5! When’s the last time you paid that little for a meal? Hell, you can’t even get a meal for that little at McDonald’s any more.

And you can get a burger n’ fries and a drink for the same price^[2]. $6 if you want bacon n’ cheese on it. $6 for club a club sandwich et al.

And the food is decent. Not wonderful, but decent. I’m not surprised that the place is packed at lunch. Meals that cheap bring the people, especially those like me who are sentimental and nostalgic for the diners of their youth…. as well as the prices.

It really feels like a place that hasn’t changed in 50 years.

So now I have a place to go when I want to eat out but I am low on dough!

I had a great bit of tiny vindication recently. Let me tell you all about it.

There’s a place I pass on the way to school called the Bulldog Cafe’, or possible Seeds because it says that on the windows. Not sure what exactly their business is, because when I look in, it sure doesn’t look like any cafe I’ve ever been to. Looks more like a hookah bar. Possibly because it’s next door to a pot dispensary. I dunno.

But I digress.

They have chairs out front, and before I really got the whole walking from Skytrain to school thing down, there were a few times when I had to stop and sit there, even though the place is less than a block from school. I never gave it much thought. Lots of places downtown have chairs out front for weary potential patrons. It costs them next to nothing in upkeep, and it probably brings in business.

But one day when I sat there, this Bob Zmuda looking motherfucker comes out and hassles me about the chairs being for paying customers only.

And he says it in that bitchy “my words are polite but my tone and body language are hostile’ way I associate with bullying welfare office workers. Except for them, it’s suddenly raising the volume of their voice to loudspeaker levels while saying “I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE THAT LANGUAGE FROM YOU, SIR! PLEASE STEP BACK FROM THE COUNTER AND CEASE YOUR AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR!”.

Man I wanted to give that bitch of piece of my mind. And I wasn’t the one getting picked on. It was this frightened looking wimpy little guy who looked like he couldn’t be aggressive towards anyone. To be honest, I kind of wish I had done it anyhow. But a wise man does not enter into fights he might not win.

At least, not when the check that keeps him alive is on the line.

Anyhow, so this guy was a dick to me. Being me, I resisted for a bit, just to prove my point that he was being a dick and I didn’t have to do what he said, and then got up and left because I had to get to school anyhow.

Fast forward to last week. As I was passing the place, I noticed a sign out front that said “under new management”. Good, I thought. That asshole is gone.

So imagine my joy this week when I saw that there was a new, much larger sign, in a much, much larger font,and it read “Now under SUPER COOL and VERY FRIENDLY new management!”.

Ahhh, sweet sweet vindication. What that sign said to me was “Yes, Michael, that guy WAS an asshole, so much so that we need to reassure people that we are TOTALLY NOT LIKE THAT!”.

That makes me so damned happy. It’s like when Zellers had signs and ads talking about their “new, clean, wide, brightly lit aisles” and “easy to find, helpful staff” now. That was them tacitly admitting that the two biggest complaints people have had about the big Z (cramped dirtyaisles and mythical staff) were valid and they had now addressed them.

I attribute that to big box places like Wal-Mart moving into the same areas as Zellers and crushing them via competition through such underhanded, cheating tactics as “having much lower prices”, “making sure the staff actually does their job”, and worst of all, “not actively punishing people for shopping there”.

Those Americans, with their big ideas.

Then again, I have resented Zellers ever since they replaced my beloved Towers Department Store in my hometown mall.

It wasn’t exactly Rodeo Drive, but it was eons ahead of Zellers’ bullshit.

It says something about a chain when K-mart seems like the classier, more upscale choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So get the fuck up already.

Today was an okay day of school. Just one class, Dialogue, with Aaron Bushkowski. Got into an argument with him about his issues with my Three Page Dialogue, which made no sense to me. Not every character needs to have a clear objective in a scene.

In my scene, linked here, one character (Manny) is very drunk. Drunk people don’t have objectives beyond “stay drunk”. You could say his objective is to stay at the bar and keep drinking, but that’s a cop-out. You’d just be defining his objective as being the opposite of Ricky’s objective, which is to get his big brother home so their Ma will stop worrying.

Ricky’s worried too, and for much clearer reasons.

Honestly, I felt like what I was getting was a formulaic criticism. Like instead of really reading it and understanding it, the prof just ran down a checklist in his head until he found something to say about it and then harped on that.

But I could be wrong.

I have been feeling like that about a lot of my profs – that they don’t really know what they are doing. And that would be understandable – none of them are professional educators. But feeling like I know more than those purporting to teach me is kind of a big issue with me. It’s something that has been with me ever since my first day of school.

And the thing is, the problem could be me. I think that “obvious intelligence” thing unnerves teachers and professors. They may feel, on some level, like they have to defend themselves from me. And that might end up leading to a sort of power struggle between them and me as they try to retain their superior status.

The fact that I don’t acknowledge said power struggle could be interpreted as not considering them a credible threat.

On the third hand (you should see my shirts) it could just be that I am feeling irritable because of tension and that is expressing itself via my argumentative nature. Comments that normally I would simply ignore as irrelevant now rankle me so much that I feel like I have to argue my case.

And you know what? I just plain should not do that. When I argue with people, people get hurt. Usually them. When it comes to argument, I have enormous strength and skill and that means I can’t play by the same set of rules as everyone else. I can’t participate in verbal struggle the way most people do. If I try, I end up with arguing with rooms full of people and, more importantly, I come across like a smug asshole who argues for fun and loves to prove he’s smarter than everybody else by verbally twisting their arm behind their back until they say uncle.

And that is mostly not true.

So if I want to go to the next level on this thing (and I always do), I am going to have to look at things from the professor’s point of view a little more. And work with them to make this education thing work for both of us.

I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I don’t want to make anyone look bad. But a twitch from me can do more damage than an average person’s hardest punch. Having your argument destroyed by someone of superior intellect must be extremely painful and humiliating. No amount of being “right” can justify that.

So I dunno. Maybe becoming disillusioned with my profs is inevitable for me because I want so badly for them to be the genuine authority figure I have craved for so long that I build them up in my head well past the point any mere mortal could possibly live up to.

And so, the quest continues.

I argued with Jackie, the Sketch prof, too. And shes totally an expert. She’s worked in skitcom for 20 years, on and off, and written for tons of TV shows and other projects. If she says something would be better with X change, I really should believe her, or at least not argue with her about it.

I don’t want to slip back into being the obnoxious person I was sometimes when I was in my early twenties. That side of me is not to be reinforced. I am very grateful to the various people who gave me the medically necessary doses of ass kicking I needed in order to get over myself and realize the damage I could do if I did not control myself.

It’s possible that I over-learned that lesson to the point where I lacked assertiveness. But better that than using my mental muscles to push people around. Unchecked, I could have become a real self-satisfied prick on a level that would make Dennis Miller look like Forrest Gump.

And there will always be a part of me that wants to say “fuck it” and let loose anyway. Force the world to deal with the real me, with the safeties off and the reactor shielding down. That’s the nature of the id, I suppose. The superego can restrain it, but it can’t actually keep it from wanting things. And the longer it is restrained, the stronger it gets.

So what I really need is a way to let that side of me out to play in a non-destructive way. I suppose I could become a message board troll. Not in the sense of setting out to hurt people – I could never do that, I’m too sensitive and responsible.

But in the sense of being that to kick ass while chewing bubble gum. Take on all the twits and destroy their evil beliefs. Give them the verbal thrashing that they might deserve.

At least in that arena, people are there (in a sense) to argue. Sharing and airing one’s opinions in a public forum is inviting critique. That’s how the interchange of ideas works.

I would still be obnoxious. Just…. in a more approved way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging about my upcoming skits deadline did the trick yesterday, along with talking with my friends at Denny’s, and I now have the clarity and confidence to go ahead with some skits.

I feel like every artist has these periods of self doubt and difficulty. Art is hard. In order for it to be worth a damn, you have to be expressing from deep inside you in your art. Rules and formulas are never enough. You need to find what you need to express, and express it.

And that involves deliberately (if not necessarily consciously) far, far deeper into yourself than most people will ever go… and that’s the way they like it. That’s why art skews towards the introverts who have no problem sitting alone and thinking about stuff because by doing so they create their own stimulation.

Especially writers, of course.

So it’s no surprise that, while rummaging through our outsized closets stuff with unpressed thoughts, sometimes we open up some stuff that is going to take some time and effort to process, and that means that, during that period, we have even less resources than usual for things like self-confidence, mood, and creativity.

And until we process all that, we lose contact with our muse and if we suffer from the disease known as depression, that leads to a crisis of art where we doubt whether we are talented at all and feel like everything we have ever done is so bad we cringe at the thought that we ever let anyone see it, including ourselves.

I suppose what makes someone an artist for real as apposed to an artist in potentia is whether you get over that or not. A lot of people don’t. They reach their first speed bump and realize that they are going to have to really push themselves to get over it, so they decide that the speed bump is really an insurmountable wall a thousand feet high and ten feet thick, and that getting over or through it would literally be impossible.

No matter how absurd a notion that is. I know this, because I have been there. I have had to face those awful moments when someone asks why you can’t do something that is so obviously the right thing to do, and you have no answer. You just know that you can’t. You can’t explain why.

That’s why a major milestone of my recovery was the realization that not knowing was okay. That it was permitted. That might seem like the wrong answer because it seems, on the surface, to be pro-depression, but it really isn’t. Anything that opens the door for self-forgiveness destroys depression. And once I forgave myself for not knowing, that freed up my mind to concentrate on what was going on that was keeping me from doing stuff, and removing the blockages one by one.

Then you reach that final door, and you have to ask yourself, do I really want to leave? And when you realize that the answer is “no”, you have to ask yourself why. What is outside that door that scares you? Because for me, it was no mere reluctance. It was stark unreasoning animal level terror and dread. The kind of fear that requires no specific object, nor does it require a specific negative outcome to be in mind. It is the root fear that is behind a lot of our compulsions and fears. The feeling that if you do X, or fail to do X, Something Terrible Will Happen. Something so terrible that your mind refuses to imagine it. It’s just…. Something.

And the really tricky bit is that when you realize that you don’t actually want to leave your personal Labyrinth of Misery, you have to also face that you built the Labyrinth you have been telling yourself you hate for so long, and that it served a purpose, which was to distance and protect you from the world Out There.

That’s what happens when you withdraw into your own mind in order to protect yourself. You forget you did it, and start to think that your Labyrinth is reality, therefore reality sucks. After all, you can’t see your way out of it (by design), so there must be no way out. Right?

Even though that’s like saying that if you can’t see Paris, it must not exist.

The good news is that it’s your Labyrinth and therefore you can dismantle it now that it has outlived its purpose. It’s not easy – you WILL need therapy in order to shed your emotional baggage – but it can be done. And it can be done gradually – it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing if you don’t want it to be. You can do a little when you have the energy, and then stop. You can do it in baby steps. Depression loves to make you feel like you have to climb the entire mountain in one go or it’s impossible.

But it’s not true. You can climb a little and rest. Climb a little more, rest some more. You lose no progress by stopping. Don’t believe depression’s lies. You can do it.

The great thing is that the more recovery you push yourself through, the easier it gets, because every emotion defrosted and released frees up more of your mind for pushing you through the rest. It’s a self-perpetuating process by that point. All you have to do is crank the handle and the machine does the rest.

And it still doesn’t matter how many times you stop and rest.

I do miss my weekly therapy sessions. I should look into the counseling options at VFS. It would be no big deal for me to go to counseling during lunch, or during periods I have off, or after school. It would be a hell of a lot easier than getting back to Richmond then taking the bus then having to walk from the bus stop to the office. Then another walk + bus to get home.

Recovery is a lot faster when you have someone to talk to about stuff. Someone who will ask you the questions that bring the catharsis.

It’s like emotional Ex-Lax. It might not be fun will it’s working, but afterwards you will feel SO MUCH BETTER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.