I need to blog, but frankly, all I want to do is sleep.

And it makes sense that I do, because I do not get enough sleep during the week. I often only get 5 hours of sleep at best overnight. And I know it’s a problem, and on some level I tell myself that I will catch up over the weekend, but that never seems to happen.

Lately, that’s been because on Saturdays, I catch up on my movie writing. That won’t be a problem for a while, though, because I have finished the first draft of my screenplay (yay me) and so, if I am lucky, I will be able to have a couple of weekends where I don’t have to spend most of it writing.

Also luckily, this term they are going easy on the homework. TV History class has had none so far, and the homework for Pitch 2 and The Second Act is pretty light. Script Genre : Comedy just requires the usual “read the screenplay and then write me something that proves you read it” type thing. That leaves TV Script and Feature Script, and Feature Script I have in the can right now.

So the next big thing will be to finish my Bob’s Burgers script, which should not take long. Especially not after writing seventy three pages of movie script. After that, coming up with the final 13 or so pages (AKA the other half of the episode) of my Bob’s Burgers script will seem like child’s play.

And I still have more than a week to do it. How utterly laughable.

So I am on track academically, as far as I know. Which is nice. Hopefully I will be able to keep the dumb mistakes to a minimum.

Last night was one intense night of writing, because not only did I finish the damned thing, the last part is SUPER intense, with my poor Babs having to fend off a raving lunatic until her Dad can show up to kick the bad guy’s ass and save the day. So it was both intellectually challenging and emotionally draining. When I finally finished, I was both exultant and incoherent. It’s a heady mix.

Like I said before, I have enjoyed writing a movie. It was a good challenge and the sort of thing that can absorb me and fascinate me so that the whole process is quite pleasant, even if it is a lot of work. Work and fun are not as exclusive as some (very immature) people might think.

And it’s made me rethink my positions on screenwriting versus TV writing. Don’t get me wrong, I am still aiming directly at being a TV writer. But it’s made me realize that the actual writing involved is actually only a small part of that. I could write movies or television and be more or less just as happy with it, from the point of view of my own enjoyment.

But I don’t actually want to make movies. I want to make TV. Also, I want to have a job, rather than be yet another schmuck with a screenplay to flog desperately trying to get it read by the right people in hopes it might, someday, get read by other people who will hand it to other people who will have it read for them so all they have to do is read that person’s summary of… you get the idea.

TV writers don’t have to put up with that bullshit. They get hired by shows or networks, and get a salary and perks and such. That is what I am looking for. Sure, they have to deal with bullshit “notes” from people desperately trying to justify their position in the food chain, and there’s a lot of pressure and a high degree of output is required, but none of that bothers me as long as I get a paycheck that pays the bills with enough left over for some fun when I have the time.

I have no problem with pressure, I enjoy a challenge. And high output doesn’t bother me either seeing as I have spent all these years building strength and endurance in my writing muscles. I could probably write a half hour episode, from outline to final draft, all by myself every week and it wouldn’t bother me much.

If it was an hour long ensemble drama, I might need help.

So I am not about to turn screenwriter any time soon. But I will definitely ponder doing the minimum to shop my finished screenplay around. I mean, what the hell, I wrote the damned thing, the least I can do is give it some sort of shot at getting made.

Who knows, maybe I would end up getting drawn into the sordid world of film making against my will.

Oh, you want to pay me a million dollars for my script? Um, okay. What’s my next project? Give me a minute.

Next term I am going to have to write a pilot for an original series. The hard part will be coming up with the basic premise and characters of the show. actually writing the thing will be fun. But figuring out what kind of show I want to do and what show I want to do in that genre is going to be tough.

Odds are that I will end up creating a sitcom. Something with likable characters who have distinct roles both as characters and as vehicles for certain sorts of jokes, with an open-ended premise that allows for a lot of one-short characters and short character bits, like with Cheers or Night Court.

But there’s so many possible premises and core locations and such to choose from. It will take me a while to find the right one, the one I can work with, the one I want to stick with.

I know I want it to have a premise, but a minimal one. Something that establishes some parameters but that doesn’t force the show to repeat itself.

Anyhow, that’s my words and I gun’ go sleepnow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, yesterday was the big day : I went to a gay bath house for the first time. And I wish I could tell you this blog entry is totally NSFW because I am about to regale you with tales of erotic adventure in the land of cock, but I can’t, for reasons which will become clear.

So while I will warn that there is some NSFW content in this blog entry, flog fuel it ain’t.

Caveats disposed of, my adventure awaits. It started when class ended at noon yesterday. I packed up my stuff, did my best to fill my soul with the spirit of adventure, laid a total smackdown on my social anxiety in a brief but decisive matchup, and set off to walk around the block.

This, I did. I guess this is how you get me to finally explore my surroundings a little : put the prospect of an all you can eat cock buffet in front of me. So I walked around the block. Because my school is at 198 West Hastings and Steamworks is at 123 Pender, and Pender is only one block from West Hastings, I could deduce that I would not even have to cross Pender to get there.

Idea for a story : Pender’s Game.

It did involve a bit of an uphill climb. Having lived so long in Richmond, which is flat as the surface of a still pond, gradient still surprises me when I encounter it. And it’s especially weird in downtown Vancouver because, unlike my beloved home town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, the gradient in downtown Vancouver can vary any which way you travel.

In Summerside, it’s far from flat, but the gradient is exactly the same wherever you go. It’s like the town^[1] is built on a ramp. So the gradient is easy to ignore because it’s constant.

I arrive at the place, and as I suspected, it was very… discreet. Just a couple of small discreet signs that say Steamworks Bath House on them, and some very cool big wooden doors with brass handles. No doubt this is a leftover from the days when police routinely raided anywhere gay men to get together to fuck, and makes for better relations with the neighbors.

First surprise : signing up is not necessary. You can go in as a “drop-in”. It costs seven bucks more, but five of that is a refundable key deposit, so whatever. I intend to sing up eventually, and some time soon, because they have a “back to school” deal where students get a free ninety day membership.

Gonna wanna hop on THAT train.

So I got myself a “Standard” room. There’s a cheaper “basic” room but it has even fewer amenities and so I figured, WTF. Might as well spend the extra 3 bucks. I got my key and a remote control for the TV in my little room (16 channels of almost-identical gay porn, yay), and went down to find my room, room 206.

It ain’t much. The “bed” is more properly described as “a gym mat with a pillow and sheet on it”. The TV is small by today’s standards. If I ever got stuck downtown and needed a place to stay for the night, it would do, and you can’t beat the price. But luxurious it ain’t.

In fact, the whole place was a lot more rough-hewn than I would have preferred. Guess if I want something that matches my fantasies, I will have to get rich enough to be able to go to like, the super secret gay bath houses only rich people are even told about.

Anyhow, found my room, ate the lunch I bought at Subway, got undressed, then went on my first sortie. A reconnoiter, if you will. I discovered that the place was cleverly designed so that all the perfectly normal stuff like the gym equipment, dry sauna, steam room, lockers, and jacuzzi, are on the ground floor. So you can totally use the facility as a totally normal spa/gym without being exposed to any of that gay queer homo stuff at all.

That’s because the fun stuff is downstairs.

Not that this was immediately clear, because the lighting downstairs is quite subdued. Eventually your eyes adjust, and you can see stuff, but when I first went down there just finding my way to my room was tough. I wandered around the downstairs maze three times before I realized that the glory holes et al were located down what at first had looked to me like nothing more than dark recesses in the walls in the area where the rooms are located.

Once I figured this out, I slipped down into one of these areas, only to find myself nearly completely blind. It’s even darker in there, and the first time through I was too freaked out by that to slow down and give my eyes more time to adjust. So I was really in the dark.

Luckily, by the time I tried again, I was calmed down enough to let my eyes adjust and then I could see everything well enough. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to read the newspaper, but I could see what was around me, more or less.

And they do have glory holes, or should I say glory slots, which is not, sadly, a casino game where you can win gay sex but a slot in the wall you can stick your dick through in hopes that someone on the other side will feel like sucking it. Or wait on the other side in hopes of having a cock to suck. Having it be a vertical slot makes sense because that way, it can accommodate cocks and suckers of a wide of heights.

There is also something called a “slurp ramp”, which is the same thing but with the “cock” side elevated, causing the cocks to be at something more like face level on the “sucker” side. This is great news for me, because due to my knee injury I am incapable of kneeling. I can stand and I can sit, but kneeling is simply out of the question.

Ideally, the slot would have a little cushioned shelf like a window seat so I could sit n’ suck, but I guess I’m just a dreamer.

Anyhow, there was no action to be had there. Why? Because people look and see that there’s nobody there, so they walk on, guaranteeing that when the next person looks, there will still be nobody there, and so forth ad infinitum. I can only assume that when a certain critical mass is achieved, the party gets started. But I was there in the afternoon and I am guessing that is not the most busy time for the joint.

When I wasn’t walking around exploring, I was sitting in my room with my door open, hoping someone would join me. That’s how these places work. You leave the door of your room open and that signals your desire for company, so to speak. But no luck there either.

So I can’t regale you with tales of my erotic adventures because I had none. I was too depressed to even masturbate. So while I explored the facility, I didn’t exactly explore my sexuality. And neither did anyone else, for that matter.

Oh well, better luck next time. Next time I go, it will be night, and hopefully full of dudes, and I will have a better chance of finding me some action. And if not, the next time I will have to finally risk rejection by trying to take someone up on their open-door offer. I passed a lot of open doors on Friday but I was far too timid to try.

I wish I knew what the protocol was for that kind of thing, though. Do I stick my head in and ask if I can come and play? Or do I just slip in and hope for the best?

Oh well. So endeth my sad tale of a depressing lack of cock.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(WARNING, this blog entry contains a lot of NSFW references to homosexual sex and my desire for it)

New horizons made of cock!

But first, other news.

I have had my second one-on-one about the movie script I am writing, and it went just as well as the first. Boffo for me. Both instructors have been very interested in the plot and both have found the funny bits funny. They have had very little to say about improvements and overall seemed fairly impressed by it.

Plus, I now have evidence that other students are not getting the same pump-you-up rah-rah message as I am, and so bang goes the theory that they are that nice to everyone. I overheard a friend of mine say how the instructor had practically told her that she had to rewrite the whole thing, which is pretty freaking harsh.

So either I am a truly amazing writer, or I just haven’t had that particular instructor for my one on one yet.

I might just be good at this whole writing thing. In fact, there is a chance I might be EXCEPTIONALLY good at it. Which would be awesome, because I have always wanted to be a wild talent who fetches the big big bucks for my talents and, to be honest, on some level I have always felt I deserved it.

I mean, when your early childhood is filled with people telling you how brilliant you are, and then you’re a straight A student without even trying, you get the hint that you might just be special. And not “we are all special little snowflakes” special. Real world special.

Still, I don’t want to get cocky. This specialness is still something in progress, and I truly believe that too much belief in your own amazingness, as opposed to the amazingness of your output, is what kills artists and turns them into parodies of themselves with their best years behind them.

Have the biggest ego in the world, but base it on the quality of work and nothing else. And fight the idea that you are somehow better than others because of your higher status and income as hard as you can. If I ever lose my basic egalitarian humanism, I will be truly lost.

Might still happen though. Ya never know.

Today’s classes were fun. I had The Second Act, where for most of the class all we did was watch The Iron Giant from beginning to end. There was very little justification for this, but I don’t care. I got class credit for watching an amazing film that I love. Boffo THAT.

I actually hadn’t seen the movie from beginning to end since I watched it on DVD back in the early 2000’s, so it was a treat to see it projected up on the big screen in the Writing Theater. It’s a visually rich movie that really rewards the eyes at that size of projection. And what do you know, it’s one of my instructor’s favorite movies of all time.

How does THAT keep happening?

A lot of my fellow students cried at the super sad ending. I did not. Maybe that’s because I have seen it before, but then again, so had many of them. So I feel like it’s less of a “I’ve seen it before” thing as it is a “I am old and jaded and dead inside” thing.

It’s hard to be sad when you are so aware of how it turns out at the very end. I suppose age robs you of your ability to experience media in the moment like a young person does.

Then I had a nice little Subway + Purebread lunch, and talk with my fellow Acadian Ainsley for a while. It was only when talking with her alone that I realized how much I missed having a conversation at Acadian Speed. Nobody else talks quite as fast as we do, regardless of language.

Then I had TV History class, the bulk of which was taken up by watching a great documentary about Sid Caeser and his heyday as having the funniest, sharpest show on television in the 50’s. What made it so funny? Check out the writer’s room : Carl Reiner. Woody Allen. Norman Lear. Mel Brooks. Larry Gelbart, creator of M*A*S*H*. All writing an hour and a half of brilliant sketch comedy every week for 38 weeks of the year. Together. In the same room. With Sid. The mind boggles.

All of them learned to write comedy working for Sid, and all of them have gone on to have a HUGE impact on the world.

After that, I came home and started blogging.

But it’s tomorrow that I am going to talk about, because tomorrow is the day I make my first foray into a gay bath house, and I am very excited over it. And, of course, terrified. My social anxiety has a lot of say about going into this new strange environment full of strangers, and it’s doing its best to say it.

But I ain’t listening. I have a gay bath house literally around the block from my school, and I am going to take advantage of it. I am going to jumpstart my sex life and maybe even get to see what life is like when I am not chronically undersexed.

Just the thought of all that cock just waiting for me to suck on or be fucked by makes me feel like a prime bull in his stall, restless because he can smell cow cunt. But it sure as hell ain’t cunt I am after. It’s cocks, men’s asses, and mouths. I am hoping that I will get extra attention for being “fresh meat”, but I am not counting on it because I know gay men can be pretty lookist and sizeist.

But surely there won’t be a lack of dudes looking to get their cocks sucked. Especially because this place has GLORY HOLES, which neatly gets around certain prejudices.

I’m getting horny just thinking about that. Plus they have a red cedar sauna, and I love dry saunas. Very good for my skin. And of course, there’s the gym.

Basically, my plan is to go there, sign up (your have to get a membership to make things all legal), ask the boy at the desk what I need to know about local etiquette, and then get a Standard Room ($20) to use as a home base, then…. explore.

Wish me fuck, er, luck.

I will maybe see you nice folks tomorrow.

I might be…. too busy (!!).

Today, I had to stay home from school ’cause I was sick.

Not sure what happened. At first, I thought it was just the usual IBS BS, and that it would clear up once whatever was irritating my irritable bowels passed out of me. It’s been that way in the past, and while it’s not my idea of fun, it resolves itself fairly quickly. A couple hours at most.

But nope. Not this. Plus, it came with other symptoms, like nausea and confusion and, worst of all, an intense feeling of weakness.

So I am guessing it was something viral or microbial. I feel fairly normal now but I know I am not out of the woods yet. The bug or whatever might be on its way out, but I still feel kind of weak and out of it, so presumably the battle continues. I’ve been able to eat, which is good. Everything gets worse when I don’t or can’t eat.

I didn’t want to eat, but I made myself.

The trouble started last night at around 11 pm. Up until that point, I had not felt sick at all. Seemed like an ordinary night. But around 11 I started feeling fairly bad. It felt like something cold and disgusting was settling into my guts and making the bottom of my stomach ache like a toothache.

Thinking, like I said, that it was the usual IBS stuff, I tried going to the bathroom, but there was nothing “on deck”. And my long experience with IBS tells me that under no circumstances should I try to force that kind of thing. That only adds energy to the system I am wishing to quiet. I can ride the waves but I date not ever trying to work against them.

Only evil can come from that.

It got worse and worse for a while. In fact, there was a period where I was pretty sure things were going to come out the other way if they had to. But then it plateau’d and I was able to watch some stuff with Joe and Julian and go to bed like normal. I was worried I would have trouble getting to sleep, but sleeping pills are a wonderful thing. Also, counterintuitively, I found that lying on my stomach actually relieved the pain a little bit.

Then I wake up 7 am like usual, and my body plays a cruel trick on me. It convinces me that the problem has disappeared while I slept, and I was all ready to get my ass to school. I was looking forward to it, in fact, because today’s class was TV Script and we would FINALLY be getting to where we would be discussing the pages of my Bob’s Burgers episode!

So I got up, got dressed, and ate, and everything was fine (or at least, good enough). But then, about five minutes after I ate, I got super sick. It was about 50 percent worse than it had been at its worst the previous evening. So nope, no school for me, had to email the prof and say I would not be there.

That is probably why I have been so depressed today. Well, besides my physical symptoms of course. But that brief period of hope followed by my body saying NOPE NOPE NOPE was just plain depressing. It activated the “disappointment” center of my brain, and like I have said in this space before, I do not handle disappointment well. It has always messed me up. If I get my hopes (and energies) up and then the thing doesn’t happen, it takes me a while to bounce back.

So being both physically and mentally ill makes for a fairly non fun day. I ended up sleeping a bunch because it was pretty hard for me to concentrate enough to do anything else, even read, and when I am too messed up to read, I might as well hang up my shingle and sleep till the rain stops.

Plus, feeling very weak makes sleep very, very easy to achieve. And that was probably a good thing. Sleep lets out bodies really get down to fighting disease because it doesn’t have to support our energy-hogging conscious mind to support.

Did you know that our brains use 25 percent of our energy? It’s a fact!

So this morning and this afternoon are more or less a blur for me. I am pretty sure I did stuff for short periods of time but for the most part, it was sleep a couple hours, be awake for like half an hour max, then sleep another couple of hours.

I feel pretty okayish now. I don’t have a strong urge to crawl into bed and I had supper with no major negative reaction. So far so good. No matter what, I am not missing another day of school unless I am physically incapable of walking, because missing this day was depressing enough. If I miss two in a row, I am liable to go stir crazy.

Tomorrow I have another of those one-on-one meetings to discuss my movie, this time pages 25 through 50. I hope this second person, Keith, likes it as much as Jenny did. Or at least can fake it well enough to fool me. I’m enjoying the writing of it and it does me a lot of good to get some feedback as to whether or not I am doing anything even vaguely right.

Writing is a lonely profession and we writers are always desperate for feedback, at least when we’re just starting out. Presumably once we are established and well known and confident and are actually making a living stringing words together, the only feedback you care about is the feedback from the people who sign the checks.

That’s my dream and I am sticking to it.

So yeah… that’s where I stand. I don’t give a damn how I feel tomorrow, I will make it to class, or rather, to my one on one. It will only be 45 minutes long, so it should not be much of a strain.

Thursday, the day I have two classes, will just have to look out for itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no profound ideas to explore tonight. I must be going through a shallow phase.

I will enjoy it while I can.

Something happened last week that I have yet to inscribe here. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I would wear my jacket to school so that I would not be cold in the morning when I left. I decided this despite how many times that has turned out to be a bad, bad, BAD idea.

Well, when I did it on that recent day (maybe last Monday?), it was an even worse idea than usual by a factor of ten.

Usually, I am just a tad too warm coming home. Not wonderful, but usually not life-threatening. But this time… I am fairly certain I had a brush with death. See, I am very prone to heat stroke. It’s a weakness handed down to me from my father and he got it from his mother. So it’s kind of a legacy.

And I was already in a bad way when I reached the Skytrain station downtown. I was sweating like a block of ice melting in the desert, and I had that funny feeling in my head that should have been a very clear warning sign that I should remedy the situation pronto.

But sensible judgment is the first thing to go in these situations. It quickly get replaced by what appears to be my default mode, which is bloody-minded determination. Whatever it was that I was intended to do when I lost my rational faculties becomes my mission and I will pursue that mission with an almost robotic level of determination. Like this is now my Prime Objective.

This time, my Prime Directive was to get home.

And that’s how I felt before I got on the Skytrain.

So there I am, stupidly sitting there in my heavy black leather coat, sweating bucket, unable to read my book because the sweat would have soaked it in seconds (and also because I was barely literate in that frame of mind), when the worst possible thing happened.

I stopped sweating.

And let me tell you, that is a very, very bad thing to happen because suddenly my body wasn’t cooling itself at all. My temperature started to skyrocket, huge angry black spots appeared in my vision, I became extremely faint and somewhat nauseous, I could hear a sound like a million bees humming loudly at a pitch so low it was barely audible, and oh yeah, every cell in my body was screaming in pain.

Thank goodness some tiny shred of my mind remained active and alert enough to tell my body to take my coat partially off. I don’t remember doing it. But I was coatless when I came back to something approaching a rational state. This gave me an excellent opportunity to contemplate what a fucking idiot I am.

In my defense, I was wearing the jacket because I had already left it behind twice when I had taken it off then forgot to put it back on again.

But that was still pretty fucking stupid.

After I got off the Skytrain, I found a place to sit down where there was a bit of a breeze, then took the jacket all the way off and sat there as I cooled off and came to and in general come back to life. The cool air felt quite lovely, but it was still very unpleasant to endure.

Trying to walk home before cooling off completely would have been insane, though. I mean, there’s stupid and then there’s STUPID. When I got off that Skytrain, I was in a very bad frame of mind and an even worse frame of body. I came close to fainting on the escalator. Dunno what I looked like but I am betting it was not pretty.

After I was more or less certified for walking, I CARRIED my coat home, sat in front of the computer not doing much except drinking water until the adrenaline wore off some more and I could lay down with my fan pointed directly at my forehead and, eventually, sleep very deeply for about an hour.

I don’t know exactly what makes me heat stroke prone. It definitely feels like something swells up in my head and that puts pressure on a vein or maybe a nerve, and that it what makes me so ill. And as this incident illustrates, it can escalate quite rapidly, and it makes it very hard to make the rational decisions that are needed in order to extricate myself from the situation. That makes it feel like my rationality gets stolen away from me and I end up in a very bad frame of mind before I have a chance to react to the changing conditions.

And it’s potentially life threatening. Like I said, I feel like I had a brush with death. I don’t know what would have happened on that Skytrain if I had not managed to get my jacket wide open and partially off my shoulders. At minimum, I would have passed out, and then it would have been in the hands of fate whether someone noticed and knew what to do or at least called 911. I might have ended up in the hospital and if they didn’t grok that I needed cooling down, I might have ended up with brain damage or worse.

It’s a sobering (and scary) thought and a powerful reminder that I have to be fairly careful if I am to make it through this thing called life. I am not exactly in rugged good health. It would be more accurate to say I am in stable poor health. I can make it through my life but there are a lot of perils that I have to keep in mind if I want to stay and play instead of getting sidelined by illness.

My life might seem placid but I am not a well man and it would behoove me to remember that.

To sum up : being me is hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry folks, no blog entry today. I just don’t have the time.

The good news is that at least I finished my pages for the week! Yay!

Nothing weighty on my mind, so it’s time for the usual chitchat. (I typed that as shitchat the first time. That is, presumably, a conversation where one shoots the proverbial shit. )

Today’s been quite pleasant. Well, past a certain point, anyway. Waking up sucked a lot more than usual. For the first time in a long time, I woke up stewing in my own sweat feeling like I had taken a heavy beating while running a marathon underwater.

It’s a very unpleasant way to wake up, and I felt awful for a long time until my body finally caught up to its oxygen needs. I have a feeling I was dreaming heavily at the time, but if so, I don’t remember the dream at all. Waking up I was bleary, my heart was pounding, and I absolutely had to get out of bed and sit at the computer, despite the fact that I was too stupefied to do anything.

When this sort of thing happens, I become psychologically allergic to my bed for a while. When I lived with Eamon, this caused some tension, because back then I would deal with it by sleeping on the couch in the living room till I got over it, and well, that seemed mighty weird to Eamon.

It also lead to me sweating all over the couch, and that was a bigger issue.

Now that I am a far more awake and alive person than I was back then, that seems terribly irresponsible of me. But I did a lot of stuff back then that I am not proud of.

Depression is a very ugly illness.

At least now I know that it’s just a temporary association and that it will fade with time if I let it. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that I don’t remember what I did to make that stop happening. It sure as heck cab’t have been CPAP, because I haven’t used my CPAP in a year. Same old story, I’m afraid. I use it for a while and then stop using it and eventually, I stop even thinking about it.

Admittedly, I lasted longer this time than the last time. And when I quit, it was because I had woken up in the middle of the night unable to breathe at all and had to rip the mask off in order to get any air at all. That is pretty much the exact opposite of what the CPAP machine is supposed to do, plus it also activated my very deep fear of not being able to get enough air.

As a result, if I even look at the damn thing now, I can feel my throat closing up. So nope, no CPAP, not happening.

But what is not excusable is my total inaction on the problem since then. If the CPAP stopped working, I should have called my CPAP rep and talked it out with her. Or at the very least I should have told my doctor that CPAP wasn’t doing it for me and I wanted to explore other options.

Instead, I have left the problem untreated for a long ass time and I am getting worried about long term effects. I worry that I am losing lung capacity just like a friend of mine in the same situation did and that if I don’t do something soon, I will get so weak that I can’t do much of all.

Turns out oxygen is an important part of a healthy lifestyle.

So what am I going to do about it? Probably nothing. Now that I have left it for so long, it would be very very difficult for me to bring it up with my doctor. I would be too embarrassed. I know that’s juvenile, but it’s what I have to work with.

And that assumes I can even get to my GP with my busy school schedule.

But now that I have confessed to it, it will be at least a little easier for my to deal with it.

And um…. otherwise, today’s been great! I’ve written a bunch on my movie, with more to come later tonight. Right now I am on page 40, so I have completed 39 pages. That means I have 11 to go. I hope to add at least 5 later tonight, which would leave me with 6 to do tomorrow. Piece o’ cake. I should be able to finish early and then have some time to concentrate on all my other homework.

Writing the movie is awesome. It’s a lot of work, but it occupies so much of my mind that it’s like a vacation far away from the maddening monkey mind, always going a million directions at once and never settling down to actual fixate on something and see it through.

Kind of makes me wish I was the sort of person who inherently sought challenge. I have always been an easygoing kind of guy who kinda glides through life without a lot of effort. Just riding my lilypad down the river of life, taking in the scenery and doing the minimum required to maintain my flow.

I think I would have been a lot better off seeking challenges that would occupy my overflowing mental energies and push me to grow. I have gone through life thinking there was no such thing as a serious mental challenge for me because school sure as hell didn’t give it to me. Of course, I knew that there were tons of mental things I couldn’t do, but that’s different.

What I didn’t think existed was a serious challenge that lies within my particular skillset. That i what school taught me. There were only two categories : things I did easily, and things I couldn’t do at all.

But writing this script has shown me that it is possible for an activity to actually engage most of my mind. It’s a lot like how I felt when I was writing my novels, but stronger.

Who knows, maybe I can find something that can even fill that last five percent of my mindspace.

That would truly be an apotheosis for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ref. this link

I have been pondering my own creativity and how it relates to the void within.

This might be one of the reasons creativity is linked to mental illness, because it seems to me like a lot of my ability to think the big thoughts and write the big plots is that within me, there’s is an enormous open space where the big ideas, the deep insights, and other mentally large things can go to be worked on, studied, analyzed, and ultimately integrated. If they make it that far.

But that great space within me is also the soul of my depression. I have often visualized depression as a kind of black hole that consumes the depressed person’s energy and from which no light can escape. A hungering void that coldly rejoices in annihilation of things like hope, motivation, pleasure, happiness, and joy in living.

I experienced it myself quite recently. It did not take long for the ego boost from the praise I got for my script recently to be destroyed by the void within. Couldn’t have taken more than a couple of hours for my depression to sink its teeth into my good feeling about myself and my talents and suck it dry.

“She wasn’t sincere. ” said my depression. “She says that to everyone. She was just trying to encourage us at a time when a lot of us will need it. Who knows what she really thinks? Even her story about living on Summerside was probably a lie. Her words mean less than nothing. ”

Well, so much for THAT. I have never had a better look into what impostor syndrome is like from the inside. I have always intuitively understood how someone can be at the top of their field and “have it all” and still not be happy. But I had never experienced it within myself so clearly as when I watched it in action, so to speak, over the last few days.

So it’s as though the void giveth with one hand and taketh with the other. It gives me (or at least enables) my gifts, and then takes away the joy I might get from the world because of them. It makes my magic possible but also drains me of the will to wield it. It gives me the warmth of my soul, but makes me incapable of feeling it unless it is reflected in another.

It’s quit maddening, as you can imagine.

And the thing is, I know what my depression is. It’s a malfunction in my neurotransmitters. Not enough serotonin doing its job. And a reward center of the brain that has become numb and unresponsive as a result. The void has a form and that form is serotonin starvation.

I am not sure that I am better off understanding this. I am, as you all know, soothed my information and understanding. It’s unknowns and uncertainties that drive me crazy with anxiety and panic. They eat away at my sanity like boiling acid. Any kind of information is welcome, even if the news is bad, because at least then I know something and can grapple with it mentally.

So on that front, I am probably better off understanding what my depression is in a literal sense. But on the emotional front, maybe not so much.

Because it makes it seem like it’s futile to try to resist it. The serotonin response simply is not there. What can you do against something so blankly simple? Not enough X. It’s not like I can just will my serotonin department to shape up or ship out. What’s the good of all this mentation if the chemical problem is still there?

But that’s where things really get interesting, because therapy works. I am far stronger and more whole than I was three years ago. That nasty old void is much, much smaller than it used to be. I would not exactly say that it’s thinking that did the trick, because the real key was with the heart and soul and not the mind, so it’s not like my recovery was due to a process of reasoning.

Every crazy person who knows they are crazy know the things that they think are not logically sound and often don’t make a goddamned bit of sense, involves entirely unsupportable leaps of logic and the total denial of all evidence, and are, in general, gobsmackingly wrong.

In other words, they are crazy things to think. But we are stuck with them. That’s a decent definition of insanity. Maybe people don’t resist the crazy thoughts at all and more or less accept them as reality. That’s not to say these people are stupid, weak, or easily deluded.

It’s just that eventually, you run out of the will to resist these very insistent and irrational thoughts.

But I have covered the futility of trying to think yourself sane before.

And while my depression might try to convince me that if I become more sane, I will lose all that precious hangar space and hence my special abilities, but I know that is not true. They are not one and the same after all. The saner I get, the smarter I get, and the better I am at doing my thing. The depression might, on some level, be part of the cause for my being so gosh darn smart and creative and whatever, but right now, it is only getting in the way.

Slowly but inexorably, the bulldozer of recovery in my mind pushes the garbage of my depression into the void of forgetting. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but the metaphor still fits. Hopefully I can continue to knit myself back together after so many years of being so very insane.

Every day, I struggle against the crazy thoughts and the feelings they provoke… or possibly vice versa. It’s a matter both of cognitive correction and striving toward the light – reason and spirit working together. And so far, it’s working.

There’s a long path ahead of me… and an even longer one behind me.

I will get there one step at a time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I messed up again.

Forgot half of an assignment. I got that I had to fill out this questionnaire. But I forgot that it was supposed to be in response to a script call Stealing Canada, and therefore my questionnaire is useless. Damn it.

I am seriously considering asking for help from the school in handling my schedule of assignments. I obviously have a problem. I am losing marks all over the place simply by being absentminded. Sure, I have a lot on my plate, but the other students seem to get it, so it’s clearly my problem. So I have to think about asking for help.

That does not come easy to me, as you regular readers know all too well. I have huge issues with asking authority for help. But this is my future we are talking about, so I can’t afford to indulge that shit at all.

And I am pretty sure I know what the school will do. They will ask one of my classmates to help me. That will be humiliating, but it will not exactly come as a surprise to them. I mess stuff up all the time, and they know it.

And at least I will stop losing marks for forgetting stuff!

I worry that this problem is getting worse, though. I handled the first term okay, and I had ten classes then. The work was a lot easier, granted, but still. Maybe the assignments were also simpler?

Maybe I just need to get better at entering all the info in my little calendar program. I don’t know.

Had a very good day of school, mental errors notwithstanding. Class was positive and fun and I feel good about my level of social interaction. Turns out that “stop thinking so hard about what you say” thing really works. I just let the conversation flow. It’s not quite chaos, because my thinky brain clicks in after about a second, and guides things somewhat.

But the first responder, so to speak, is more intuitive and natural. If I keep this up, maybe I will start sounding like a real little boy at last. Thanks, Blue Fairy!

Now make the rest of me real.

The ride home on the Skytrain was eventful. I had the pleasure of sitting next to a gen yew wine crazy lady. She was only Level 1 crazy, as her spontaneous (and possibly involuntary) verbal outbursts were occasional, as though from time to time the words building up inside her overflowed some inner dam and had to come out her mouth.

I can relate. I have a lot of words inside me too. Good thing I am a writer. I can let them out. And not just that, I can let them out in a way that can conceivably make me money.

It’s a rare and wonderful privilege we writers share only with standup comedians : the ability to get paid for doing your own therapy.

But the real excitement happened when I got to the Richmond Brighouse Skytrain Station. As I was going down the escalator, I heard someone yelling in a manner I recognize all too well : the sound of a little guy trying to start something with a big guy.

In this case, the little guy was doing the whole “You wanna fight?” routine to a very, very tall black dude. He has to be at least 6′ 5″. And when I say black I don’t mean brown. I mean black like black coffee. Dude would meet the height requirement for the NBA. He was really quite impressive.

I didn’t hear a lot of what the little guy was saying, but as I reached where they were stopped on the escalator, I heard this :

Little Guy : You should go back where you came from. Where ARE you from?
Black Dude : I am Canadian.
Little Guy : Are ya? ARE YA?

And that’s when the boxing-ring bell went off in my head and I went into what I will generously call Guardian Mode.

So I just kinda drifted into the crowd forming, never taking my eyes off the little bastard or his “sweet Jesus take me now” ugly girlfriend, who was right there with him being just as racist, if not more so. No way was I going to let some racist shit go down in my little world. My philosophy is : if I’m there, I’m involved. Period.

Black Dude just seemed to find it funny, as did his friends.

And it didn’t take long for the black guy to move on and ignore the little guy, and the little fucker gave up except for a little grumbling. He gave up just as I was getting ready to engage my Full Islander mode^[1]. I was fully prepared to take them both on.

In Islander terms, I was ready to go’er.

In fact, I am still coming down from it. This is what happens when the “fight” response is aroused with no outlet. It takes a while for your endocrine system to scrub all the adrenaline out. Until then, at least part of your mind is still in caveman mode.

In order to aid this process, I am now going to vent some of it verbally. Please forgive this descent into barbarity. All I can say in its defense is that being a man can be… complicated.

Oh, and For full effect, read this text in the following accent :

That^[2] little fucker should be glad he didn’t start anything because I would have kicked the shit out of him. And I’m not fucking around. I have a lot of memories of being bullied by little guys who had something to prove, and I am sure as hell not going to let that happen on my watch. Not in this lifetime.

And jeezus, buddy, what do you think you’re trying to pull? Just what color IS a Canadian? Because you sure as fuck don’t look like Sir John A to me.

And look at you, acting like the big man when this heaping pile of ugly with fake tits stapled on is the best that you can do. Christ, what a dog. I wouldn’t fuck her with a stolen dick. Normally, I would never call a woman a dog, but yours is acting like a bitch, so the shoe fits.

If you’re looking for someone to fight, let’s do it, right here, right now.

But if you’re just a jumped up little pussy trying to sound like the big man in front of this arse end of a diseased bulldog you call your girlfriend, then WALK. AWAY.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Phew. I feel a lot better now. Sorry you had to see that, folks, but I just had to do it.

The rest of the madness can go away when I sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.