I swear, I had a bunch of good ideas to write about in tonight’s blog entry. But now that I have finally sat myself down to write the dang thing, poof. Gone.

But I should tell you a few things that are “up” in my life.

Starting with today. Today I had my first one-on-one consultation with a VFS prof about the first 25 pages of my movie script. The idea is that instead of presenting chunks of your script to the whole class and getting a ton of opinions on it when you are in the middle of writing it and wrecking our already frazzled nerves, we instead consult with a prof whose only job is to give us a little light feedback and help me with any problems I might be having.

I’m not having any to speak of. I hate to admit it because I resenting having to make it so much, but having that detailed outline I did last term is SUPER helpful. Whenever I get lost and can’t remember what happens next, I just pop over to that file and presto, ici est la! It lets me concentrate on the details of writing the actual screenplay without having to keep the entire plot in my head in order to make sense of what is going on.

So I guess I have to reluctantly admit that VFS knows better than me.

Not sure if I will write detailed outlines of things I write in the future. I will hopefully be writing comedy, which tends to have a minimum of plot. Still, it might be helpful if I am writing for a sitcom and want to pull off some Arrested Development type fancy dancing. Or if I wanted to do a particularly intricate kind of skit.

My desire will always be to dispose of the preliminaries and just write the fucking thing already. I have a very demanding and impatient muse and it wants to get in there and get busy as soon as possible, or it starts to lose interest.

Anyhow, my one-on-one with a prof I’d not met before, Jenny Siddle (not a typo), went very well. We spent the first twenty minutes getting to know one another, and mirciale diablo, it turns out that she spent a summer living in Summerside! She was 19 years old and moved there to follow her boyfriend and ended up spending the summer working for the Summerside Golf Club tending the greens. I told her I was an Acadian, and therefore related to all those Arsenaults, Gaudets, Gallants, Cormiers, Gautiers, and all the rest.

I referred to it as a “rich genetic tapestry”, which sounds a lot better than “not as inbred as that makes us sound’. My people, the Acadians, pretty much just have one family tree. Or rather, it’s like one of the forests where the trees grow so close together that the branches are all tangled together.

And like such a forest, it’s all very cozy but it’d damned hard to get in, and not a lot of light gets through.

But enough about me. What did SHE think of MY script?

She loved it! Said she couldn’t wait to see what happened next. That is, approximately, exactly what I was going for. She was so interested, in fact, that I had to explain the entire rest of the plot of the movie to her in order to satisfy her curiosity. Also said she really liked my character descriptions, which is good, because they don’t come naturally to me. I think in terms of works, ideas, emotions, minds, conversations, and so forth.

As opposed to, you know, height, weight, eye color, what the wallpaper looks like, how the room is laid out… you know, the boring stuff.

She told me that what was good about my character descriptions is that they concentrate on what the character is like, not what they look like. After all, if I put in a lot of physical description of the characters, then they have to find an actor or actress who looks just like that, and that severely limits the talent pool.

Far better to concentrate on what their personality is like. How they present themselves, how they talk, that sort of thing. Then whatever very talented actor/actress they hire will have something to go on.

and that’s fine by me because it suits the way I naturally think anyhow. I am perfectly content to let others ply their trade and figure out what the character wears or how they do their hair. As long as it loosely fits my idea of the the character and doesn’t get in the way of the good stuff, I am a happy camper.

So that was a highly positive experience, that little one on one meeting. Coming home was not so nice.

Why? Because I forgot my keys. first time in a long time. I am such a doofus! Totally forgot my keys, and didn’t realize it till I got to the school and went to wave my card at the reader in order to get access to the elevator and whoops, it was not there.

Don’t worry, I didn’t lose them or anything. They’re right here. I just forgot them.

The smart thing would have been to call Joe and tell him to be ready to let me in. But I have the darnedest time remembering things I am supposed to do before coming home. Once class ends, I just want to leave and go home.

So I did not do that, and it probably wouldn’t have helped anyhow, because like me, Joe sleeps the sleep of the dead and is very hard to awaken. I got home, used the buzzer system to call home over and over again, slipped inside the building and pounded on the door, yelled for Joe, everything.

But no matter what I did, it did no good. I got back to Richmond around noon. It was 2:35 pm when I finally got in.

So that was very frustrating and a tad alienating. But WTF, I got in eventually and I will not forget my keys again any time soon.

Or so I would hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had therapy today, but we didn’t end up covering anything substantial.

And that bothers me. I feel like somehow I have ended up being responsible for keeping therapy on track and digging deep and really getting shit done. I don’t want to chat and I don’t want to end up pontificating either. What I want is more like digging shrapnel out of a carbombing victim than any sort of conversation. I need my therapist to be tough and to push me.

The problem being, of course, that due to this high-falutin’ brain of mine, even my slightest push back and I can blow people to the back wall. I have a very powerful mind and will and personality, and finding someone who can deal with all that and still be able to push back is, perhaps, asking too much of the world.

It underlines my deeper issue with not trusting authority. Not in the sense of being a rebel who can’t stand the idea of someone trying to control them – I mean, that’s true in some ways, but this isn’t that.

No, it’s about not being able to trust authority to do their job. To be there when I need them. To be able to help, like…. at all. To be even remotely reliable. To treat me with respect and to take my concerns seriously, as opposed to just brushing me off to be rid of me. To be able to protect me like it’s supposed to do.

To be worth a damn at all, really.

No secret as to why I have these issues. Authority was never there for me as a kid. Especially after I started school. The teachers did nothing to protect me from the bullying. The administration was equally disinterested (or even supportive) of the constant violence directed at me. I had older siblings but they weren’t around to protect me. Even when they were – like when I was in grade 1 and my brother Dave was in grade 5 – the rigid age/grade stratification kept us apart. I didn’t feel like I was part of their world at all.

And if not their world, and not my parents’ world, and not my friends’ world, what world was I in? Where did I fit in?

Answer : Nowhere at all. And so I wander between walls, seeing much, understanding much, feeling much…. but always as an outsider, not part of the world. Just an observer. Part of me will always be looking for a place where I fit in. Surely somewhere there is a social context for me.

Unless I really am too smart for my own good. And too unique. Too strange. A creature that does not fit into anyone’s taxonomy. A species of one. Things grow strange in the dark, and I have spent most of my life in the darkness.

I think that means I’m some kind of fungus.

I’ve been feeling those long dark cold corridors lately. Or perhaps they are icy canals, and I move through them quietly at the slow and steady pace of a Tunnel of Love ride. Maybe it’s the river Styx. That would be appropriate for pale shadows like myself. Only there is no Elysium or Hades waiting for me. My journey is endless, or at the very least, there’s no end in sight.

And it’s cold and it’s quiet and it’s slow and it’s dead, and I feel trapped there. And yet, I think part of me also finds it soothing. It might well be that these long dark corridors of mine are my depression’s heat sinks, the place my mind retreats into when enough life has seeped through the defenses to threaten my marrow deep frozen state.

And then I would thaw out and then I would wake up and be really alive, and everything would be loud and hot and intense and chaotic and I wouldn’t be able to handle it rationally, I would have to deal with emotionally, without knowing what the “right” answer is, and that’s just plain madness.

Or heaven. That honestly could be the key to my future mental health. Something that would force me to deal with things emotionally despite my hyper-muscular brain trying to reason things out all the time. I feel like that would make me feel very young and free, and yet it doesn’t seem like something I can initiate on my own.

I need the right kind of stimulus to get things moving. In the past, it’s been the right movie or other piece of media coming along when the ice was thin and I was ready to melt down a big chunk of that almighty iceberg inside myself. Sometimes it’s done that by connecting me with the idea of a whole and wholesome life full of good people and happy families.

But more often, it’s been something that has made me very depressed or very scared or super angry – the kind of anger that is categorically different from usual anger because it comes from someplace deeper – or otherwise disturbed my equilibrium so much that I had to find a new one.

The question now, then, is whether or not I have the courage to seek that kind of thing out deliberately. Assuming that’s possible. It’s not like I know what is going to have that effect on me beforehand.

Except that I sorta do. I don’t know what new things will have that effect, but I sure as heck know what things have had that kind of effect on me before. If I was really brave, I would put on my copy of Disney’s The Fox And The Hound and force myself to watch the whole thing in one sitting.

I’ve never done that before. The movie plugs right into my deepest emotional self and I have never watched the thing all in one sitting. So I have avoided watching it because it’s so intense for me.

But maybe that kind of emotional intensity is what I need to override my bad instincts and free up my true id.

Maybe I will do it, maybe not. But if I do… it might be able to do me a lot of good.

But it won’t be much fun getting there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And four to go!

Had quite the productive night last night. Got six more pages of my movie script written. Only four more to go, which I hope to polish off this afternoon. The plot is advancing nicely. There’s a lot of things that need fixing but that can wait until the second draft.

First drafts are all about getting the damn thing written. Forward momentum is key – no looking back. Things can be fixed later. It’s not rocket science, it’s about puking out the words.

I’ve been enjoying the process. It’s a lot of work and there is a lot of struggling to get the words out, but it feels good to be so heavily engaged in something. Writing this screenplay is something capable of absorbing (almost) all of my considerable mental resources, and that leads to a happier, calmer me.

It’s kind of disturbing to imagine that one of the root causes of my depression/anxiety might be a lack of sufficiently mentally demanding activities. Even my beloved collectible card game styled video games don’t quite make the grade. It is still possible for me to need more, which is why I often listen to podcasts while I play them.

But writing can do it. Especially this new form of writing that I have never done in this kind of detail before. I’ve written skits, but mechanically speaking, a skit is mere tinker toys compare to writing a screenplay or a TV episode. Prose also seems simple to me now. In prose, you just write what is and that’s it. You don’t have to translate it much. If you can get it down in words, that’s enough for prose.

Admittedly, the translation is only hard because I apparently completely failed to pick up how certain things are done in a script from all the scripts I have read for class. I guess I was too absorbed in the story to pick up things like “Oh, so that’s how you do an intercut phone conversation” or “that’s how you describe a montage in a script”.

Things like format are largely invisible to me. I am totally not a detail oriented person, or at least, those kinds of details. I might obsess over minute elements of the plot or rework a line to be as smooth and natural and logically sound as possible, but to my mind, formatting is the packaging and I only care about the contents.

That doesn’t mean I consider the script formatting unimportant. I am far too self-aware and mature to go around thinking that whatever I don’t like doing is therefore unimportant. If I was a script reader I would throw out any script that was not even vaguely formatted correctly without reading any further, because I have a hundred scripts to read today and I don’t have time for scripts that are going to be considerably more irritating for me to read because the person doesn’t know the conventions at all.

It might be a wonderful script, but I’ll never know. I’d tolerate small irregularities, of course, like if the sluglines are supposed to be in italics and they’re bolded or whatever. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker. But bigger stuff would make me hit the reject button right away.

So I get it. Format counts. Part of me wishes people could prioritize content over packaging and that if the script is good, people will be too invested in the story to care about formatting. But that’s a highly delusional and self-serving mode of thought. I am well past the point where I expect people to ignore the muddy footprints on my masterpieces just because that’s more convenient for me.

But I know I can only learn this stuff piece by piece. If I try to remember or learn it all at once, my brain will crash just like it did in Linguistics class and I will get nowhere. That was why I hated Format class so much back when I took it on Term 1. There’s just something about me and a certain type of thinking that spells brain pain overload.

Luckily, there are programs that do the basic formatting for me, and I can look up specific things on Google, and so I think I will be able to limp forward that way.

In order to get as far as I have in the script, I have also had to reach fairly deep into myself, and that’s a good thing too. I have a lot of garbage lurking in the depths of my psyche, and normally it comes up very slowly through glacial lifting. External things that prompt me to go deep and draw from the deep down darkness and bring that stuff up into the light speeds that process up considerably.

If only I could press a button and have all that shit drain from my brain all at once. One big mental evacuation that would be ten kinds of hell to go through, but afterwards I would be done.

I might be permanently insane, but at least I’d be insane and empty.

But no, it has to be done over a period of time. An annoying long one. The healthy part of me is very tired of putting up with the crazy part and wishes I could just pull myself together, stop fucking up, and get the fuck on with my life.

And that’s a great goal, but I won’t be getting there any time soon, methinks. I have traveled many miles to get where I am, and I have many more miles to do. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and try not to pay any attention to how far I have to go before I reach the mountaintop, and instead think about how I am the closest I have ever been to do it, and every day brings me closer.

I don’t have class till Wednesday. I am going to use that time to catch up on all my homework. If only I always had this much time to get things done!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The word mines, that is. Black ink. Texas text.

Today has been a writing day for me. I have 25 pages of movie script due Monday afternoon, and when I got up this morning, I had 8.

But I am proud to say that, due to working literally all afternoon, I am up to 15! W00t w00t me.

Though it says something about screenwriting that it took me five hours to do seven pages. Admittedly, a lot of that time was spent either pondering the next move or chatting with the fuzzies, which is the activity I do to keep myself emotionally balanced when doing heavy stuff like writing.

The idea that I would go faster without it, while partially true, disregards the emotional stability factor. And with a screwloose creative type like me, that’s always a major factor.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I had a choice as to what I became. By that, I mean that I wonder if there was a chance that I would not become the walker between walls who seems to have one more dimension than the rest of humanity and is therefore incomprehensible to it. Was I always going to be a person who searched for the truth regardless of the consequences to himself? Was I born with this need to seek the truth no matter what, or was there something that set me on this path?

In some alternate universe, is there a version of me that grew up normal and happy within the paper-thin walls of social reality?

Maybe. Certainly it seems plausible to me that this bizarre nature of mine is the result of specific hardships in my life. For example, being too smart to be happy at school. I spent most of my educational life incredibly bored. Yet I am not the type to act up because of that. For the most part, I’m quite docile and if not precisely obedient then very agreeable, which amounts to the same thing.

Acting up never made any sense to me. So I didn’t do it. That suggests a serious problem in and of itself, because it show that I was exercising rational restraint at what is arguably too young an age. And the thing about rational restraint is that it kills nearly all the paths by which one might express one’s emotions. Especially the more boisterous and energetic ones.

After all, I was a child, not a Vulcan. And like a Vulcan, I have always taken pride in my restraint. Others might go off half cocked or act on emotion without thought to the consequences, but I, the rational reasonable restraint guy, would never do those sorts of things.

I’m too smart for that!

But the thing is, a child acting up out of boredom didn’t decide to do that. They are acting out of emotion and by doing so, express that emotion. They might get in more trouble and they might never get to pat themselves on the back for how much more in control of themselves they are than other kids, but they also accumulated far fewer suppressed emotions to weight them down too.

And at this point in my life, I’d trade.

I think, at the root of it, the problem began as an unintended consequence of the circumstances of my birth. Because I was the lost child who showed up uninvited, I ended up with the distinct impression that I was not allowed to be a child. I had to grow up fast and learn to behave and always check my behaviour before I committed the unthinkable acts of drawing attention to myself and forcing someone to actually look after me for a few moments.

That would have gotten me in trouble big time.

So I was, more or less, expected to look after myself from a very early age. Especially after I started going to school. That’s when the babysitter disappeared and I was truly on my own. I felt like no matter what happened, nobody cared, and the last thing that was allowed for me was to not be OK, let alone ask someone to MAKE it OK.

That’s where I got the ghost that still haunts me, the feeling that nobody really wants me around and that people would be happier if I had never showed up in the first place and that I was always just barely earning the right to be around people and that meant that if I made myself any more of a burden than the bare minimum, I would be ejected and abandoned.

The fact that I had no people my age around once I went to school was also a factor. All my role models were at least four years older than me. I had nobody to model normal childhood behaviour for me. So I thought I had to stop being a kid and catch up as fast as I could, or be left behind.

Being left behind might be my biggest fear ever.

So in a sense, I was never a kid in the emotional sense. I never tested the limits, never acted up just to see what happens, never learned to ask for things to get my needs met. And, most importantly to the actual point of this blog entry, I spent a lot of time in school bored bonkers.

So I retreated into my mind. In doing so, I became a thinker. A ponderer. A philosopher. I sought the truth of things, which I found via deduction and intuition based on the data I had. Instead of exploring the world I explored the world inside.

In other words, I figured shit out.

And so I always knew more than the other kids too, and I am not just talking about academic subjects. I understood more of the world, partly become of my constant deduction but also because of the sharp, deep input of my empathy. I figured out that people were often insincere and that people lied to protect their emotions at a very young age.

So could I have been a normal kid? Maybe. Maybe if I had lucked into connecting with the right kind of mentor who could put up with my sometimes difficult nature and provide actual guidance to me, I could have stayed more attached to the world instead of being sucked deeper and deeper into the world within, whereupon I learned strange truths and was changed by them.

Or maybe I would have turned out somewhat the same no matter what.

I guess we’ll never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
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Been thinking more about how I have been subconsciously trying to act like a sitcom character lately.

What got me thinking about it was an exchange I had with a cashier at my favorite sandwich spot, Bon Chaz. I had finished ordering and I made some sort of joke – I forget what it was – and she responded with a kind of halfhearted “ha ha ha” kind of laugh.

Now the fact that my joke failed to laugh is not that big a deal. Most of mine don’t, especially in RL.

But what I caught myself feeling was a grave disappointment. And not just a disappointment in myself – that’s par for the course – but a disappointment in the world. As if that wasn’t supposed to happen. As if I thought my joke was great so their SHOULD have been laughter.

As if I had been sufficiently “sitcom” and should now be rewarded by the laugh track.

Like I said before, it’s clearly a bad idea to try to interact with others as thought life is a sitcom. For one thing, these people aren’t in on the game (neither was I, until recently) and therefore the effort is doomed from the start.

For another thing, from a purely comedic point of view, a joke might make a great sitcom joke but be a lousy real world joke. It’s as if I am playing up to the invisible audience in my head while expecting the real world to reward me for pleasing it.

That’s clearly not gonna fly. Yet I don’t know how to change. It’s pretty fundamental to how I operate. I am not sure I could adjust to living entirely in the real world. I need my various escapist filters on reality in order to be able to handle the intensity of it all.

To an introvert, the world is very loud.

All I can do, I suppose, is beaver away at slowly destroying this particular delusional structure until something happens in my life that will make me better able to live in the real world.

Like, say, gainful employment and the resultant boost of self-worth and feeling of greater security. Not to mention the ability to afford more leisure activities and other ways to actually get what I want, instead of being frozen out of the warm and beautiful world by wretched poverty.

Well, semi-wretched, anyhow.

I learned something rather exciting today from one of my profs, Kelsey. He told us that comedy writers makes more money than drama writers by far.

Which of course made my eyes turn into dollar signs accompanied by an old fashioned cash register CHA CHING sound. Writing comedy is my thing, dawg, and the fact that sitcoms have huge writer’s rooms full of writers means that they always need new talent to replace the talent that has gone on to better things or just plain burnt out.

This fills me with hope. Getting a high income sounds grand and I am positive I can come up with jokes at least as funny as the ones on shows like Big Bang Theory.

So the future looks bright indeed to me right now.

It’s very frustrating to be where I am in my spiritual development right now.

Because I can feel that there’s life out there to be had. I strain toward it every moment of every day. But it’s like there is this invisible membrane, like a layer of cellophane, holding me back, letting me to approach life but not reach it and embrace it.

Part of the problem is that I am still, for the most part, following the old patterns. And I know that new ways of being come from changing your patterns. Doing new things. Acquiring new inputs to replace the old ones that have fallen into a stupor from overuse. Open the windows and let some fresh air in to the house of my soul.

But change is hard for me. I lack the necessary courage. That enervating dread rears its ugly head when I think about it. So things that on the surface would be easily accomplished seem impossible because of the use chasm of fear between me and them.

For instance, I could just decide one night to go to something. Either here in Richmond or downtown or somewhere in between. A play, an improv night, a place with a nice walk and plenty of places to sit. There’s endless possibilities.

And all I have to do is pick one that seems like it would be fun. And go there.

Hmmmm. It just occurred to me. Steamworks Bath House is downtown too. One of these days I could hop on a bus after class and, ya know, go exploring.

Just tried to look up how to get from my VFS campus at 198 West Hastings to Steamworks at 123 West Pender, and get this… Translink seems to think that is a literally impossible journey. It won’t give me any directions at all, just an error message in read that says there’s no route and that this is due to one of three factors :

No service is provided during this time of day. Um, nope, we are talking downtown Vancouver at 4 pm. Approximately ALL the busses are on the road at that time.
Your starting and ending point are more than 0.5 km from the closest transit stop Also nope. The corner near my school and the block up from it has stops for like, ten different buses.
An unreasonable number of transfers, or a trip longer than three hours The unused portion of the nope. Dunno how many transfers, but the two points are definitely NOT three hours apart.

So it seems I have stumbled upon a an intriguing mystery. What could be the source of this error? Could 123 Pender be an “unlisted” address in the databases of Translink? If so, why? Could it be that Steamworks prefers it that way because it lends a certain discretion to their business? Or could there be some secret homophobes working in the Translink IT department?

Or could it be a very boring and entirely ordinary computer glitch?

On thing’s for sure : I am going to get to the bottom of this, even if I have to go to the top to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m tired as hell but I am going to blog anyhow.

The good news is that the first half of my first draft of my Bob’s Burgers is complete. It’s a little underweight at twelve pages, but I can always add stuff later. There’s a D plot that I haven’t even used yet because I wasn’t sure I was going to need it. But right now… it looks like the answer is yes, I will need it.

Damn it feels good to be able to use italics. You’re not supposed to use italics or bold or any of that kind of thing in screenplays, which I find irritating. I have honestly forgotten any other way of indicating emphasis. All I can do is hope it comes through via context.

Today was fine. Had Pitch 2, so I will heave to learn to pitch again. I took Pitch 1 in my first term. This teach, Ita, seems a lot more focused and serious than the other one, Kelsey. My social anxiety is, of course, squealing like a car with locked brakes rolling downhill, but I am not paying much attention to it.

The thing is, I know I can pitch well if I just get my shit together. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that I can really cast a spell on people when my charisma and enthusiasm are firing on all cylinders. We watched some pitches today and the good ones (as judged by Ita) all seemed to take the sort of spellbinding storyteller approach that I imagined myself using when I pitched. So clearly that is the proper approach, and it’s one that comes to me naturally.

So, I’m good there, I guess.

But it’s harder for me to pitch in class. I think the problem, ironically, is that I know my fellow students. That makes them part of my social reality and makes the stakes higher. If I fail to impress some room full of strangers, oh well, there’s always next time. I may never see those people again, and regardless of that, they are not part of my social group and therefore there can be no social repercussions.

But I work with my fellow students all the dang time. And I will be working with them for the next eight months. SO if I make a fool of myself in front of THEM, repercussions galore.

Well, in theory. That’s what my social anxiety tells me anyhow. I am slowly disarming it. It’s tricky work. I have to move very slowly and cautiously so I don’t accidentally trigger it. And when it does get triggers, I have to struggle with it to keep it under rational restraint.

Maybe that’s my problem. I am trying to restrain it with reason when emotion would do the job better. Fight emotion with emotion. Ita mentioned something that I wrote about a while ago today : turning nervousness into excitement. I had forgotten about that technique until she mentioned it, and then I was like, “Duh!”.

So I think I will give it a shot. I am also going to try doing next week’s pitch as if I didn’t know anyone in the room. I think that will be the only way to access my A game.

for this first pitch, we have to pick an existing movie and pitch it. I don’t like that exercise. For one, it’s hard for me to pick a movie. For another, it’s hard for me to come up with a pitch for something that isn’t my work. Compared to my own stuff, it feels like I know too little about the movie, and then there’s my rabid insistence on originality. I don’t want to promote someone else’s movie for the same reason I don’t want to direct someone else’s script.

Namely, that it would mean the sort of splitting of identity I find distasteful. If I am promoting my own work, than there is just one identity involved : my own. But if I am promoting someone else’s work, well… now there’s two of us.

Or at least that’s the closest I can come to explaining it.

So I am not looking forward to this combination of option paralysis and identity weirdness. But I will get it done.

Having trouble concentrating, on and off. I guess it’s because I have so much on my mind now. But it worries me a little. Because it means my mind keeps wandering when I should be paying attention and that’s not good. It’s rude and offensive if it happens while someone is talking to me, and I would never do that deliberately. But it happens anyhow.

And out in the real world, it could be downright dangerous. I could get seriously hurt if I space out, say, while crossing a busy downtown street. Or waiting for the Skytrain. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me up nights (figuratively speaking) with worry.

Plus, it represents a victory for that terrible gravity well in my mind that is always trying to pull me out of reality and into the inner world of my mind. And as regular readers know, getting stuck in my own mind forever is one of my worst fears period. I know damned well that it would be my own personal Hell, not some lucid dreaming paradise. I have too many demons yet to be able to believe that an inability to connect with reality on any level would turn out pleasant.

And I am desperately trying to become more engaged with reality, not less. I want to be part of the world and bask in its warmth, not become endlessly lost in my space-cold world of the mind. I want to live, goddamn it.

And I will keep fighting the war against the tide inside until I have won.. or died.

After all, I’ve been the living dead for long enough!

Hopefully my physical health will hold out long enough for me to win.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.