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.