A hollow mind, afraid to feel
The feelings that it must conceal
For if they were to be revealed
Then that would make them really real

 

And all the children bark and beg
The products of a hollow egg
With undeveloped arms and legs
And cotton balls inside their heads

 

And all the rest just sit around
Praying they will not be found
Their ship came in, but ran aground
And all the souls within it drowned

 

Because no one sails here alone
No one sails here alone
They might die very far from home
But no one sails here…. alone.

Well, I guess that’s that.

I imagine that I am gliding slowly though life like I’m in the Tunnel of Love, but this tunnel is cool and dim and utterly silent except for the sound of the water lapping at the sides of the passage. There is a sense of total stillness, and my mind is very full and completely empty at the same time. And there is a feeling of a deep and terrible stillness that brings with it a sense of rising awe and dread in equal measure.

It’s another one of my recurring images. Or maybe I should call them visions. That’s not really the right term either – it’s not like the transcendental visions of a mystic at all, and I have no sense of leaving reality – but I honestly don’t know what to call them.

Flashes of intuition, sort of. But not in the sense of a sudden strong emotional message along with a sense of certain knowledge. I’ve had those too, this isn’t that. It’s a lot more like when I get story ideas in a sudden flash of inspiration, and in that flash the entire thing crystallizes, and all I have to do then is unpack and execute it.

I can totally understand why pre-Freudian people thought things like that must involve some kind of supernatural entity. From the naturalistic point of view where the conscious mind is assumed to be the entire mind, what other conclusion can one come to when something far too dense and complex for your conscious mind to create suddenly appears in one’s consciousness, fully formed?

Anyhow, back to the tunnel. I used to think it had something to do with my depression. Like it was a representation of what depression was like. And maybe at some point that was true. The silence, the tunnel walls, the way I go forward at the same rate without anything changing just like I went through time when I was depressed without anything really changing in my life. It makes sense.

But now, I think it means something else. I think this state of deep stillness represents the kind of state of mind I have to be in when I want to send my deepest thoughts and feelings  out into the world. As if I am setting each bundle of deep darkness on its own little toy boat and then carefully placing them in the water of the tunnel, and watching as they float away, never to return.

If so, then despite the awe and dread, this is actually a very good frame of mind. It’s one where I can access and deal with my stuff. Perhaps my soul needs to be so very still in order to sneak these emotions past the barricade of anxiety and the endless mental agitation that usually keeps the demons down. Perhaps the dread comes from that great grand-daddy of all psychological fears in the Western world : the fear of that which we repress COMING OUT against our will. Perhaps the awe comes from a sense of what might happen if it did.

Something like that could change everything. Everything.

If I am right about this state of mind being the birthing mode for all the dead babies inside me, that would certainly explain the attack of poetry I had at the beginning of this entry. I am not normally someone who is comfortable just letting his emotions flow out onto the page like that, with no attempt made to make them make sense to others. Normally, I am too worried about connecting with and pleasing people.

It would help me if I got over that some, to be honest. Worry instead about getting what is in me out and to heck whether it makes sense to others. That’s supposed to be what this blog is about, and for the most part, that’s what it is.

But it’s still a pretty left-brained and linear process. It’s the product of my verbal mind, which is very powerful and which knows many lovely and clever tricks, but when it comes to expressing what is deep inside me, it’s quite inefficient and indirect.

Poetry gets the job done faster and deeper, but at the cost of comprehensibility. I mean, I’m not James Joyce.  I can’t just write things in a totally subjective mode and then push it out into the world and say “Deal with it!”.

At least, not yet.

I do think about from time to time, though. What it would be like to just open a text file and write and write without giving myself any time to think about it so that I can’t censor myself or worry about how it will be received. I have done it before in my life, but back then, I lacked the self-awareness to do anything more than just drain off the surface level of my overflowing mental energies.

If I did it now, it would be with the specific intention of going as deep as I possibly could so I could stick my psychic sump pump into the really dark and nasty stuff that lies at the bottom of my sick polluted soul, and pump that shit out of me and onto the page where I can lock it away forever.

Consider it a psychological septic system sucking.  Or detox for the soul. Other people can do that via some psychological construct of divine intervention, or by going on some kind of mystical journey via meditation and asceticism.

Me, all I got is my words and my mind.

Guess they will have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just watched the episode in the title, and I feel compelled to discuss it because it was amazing and dealt with subject matter both highly relevant and of deep interest to me.

Those don’t always line up.

The episode takes place in a world where everyone has these augmented reality implants in their eyes that let theme see people’s ratings. Ratings are an overall score out of five, and anyone and everyone can rate you at any time for any social interaction.

So of course, society is now all about one’s rating. It’s more or less a digital value of your social status, or rather, how popular you are.

Superficially, this encourages people to be really nice to one another. In fact, once I figured out the premise near the beginning of the episode, I thought, “Well this doesn’t seem too bad. At least people are being nice, whether they mean it or not. That’s something. ”

That’s before I knew that the whole society was rigged around that score. Stores have minimal rating requirements and high scoring people get special discounts and can buy products nobody else can. The protagonist’s workplace has a minimum score of 2.5 and if you fall below it, you can’t even enter the building.

That made the true nature of the program evident : it was a brilliant use of modern rating systems (which are EVERYWHERE online) as a way to explore social injustice in a very potent and fascinating way.

Because one can hardly conceive of a system that would fit better into people’s intellectually (and spiritually lazy tendency to believe the world is just and those who are not benefiting from it deserve whatever happens to them.

After all, if someone has a low rating, it’s because people have down voted them, and that means they must have been unpleasant, rude, unethical, or otherwise bad. If they weren’t a bad person, why did people rate them so poorly? Even if a few people gave the person a low rating for unjust reasons, surely they are outweighed by everyone else voting honestly. I mean, why would they lie?

It’s even “fair”, in the sense that a low rated person can always start being super nice to everyone and raise their rating. In theory. In practice, of course, the rating means that people have already judged you before you open your mouth and will interpret everything you can and do based on that judgment.

But again, the rating does not actually reflect whether someone is a good person, only whether people like them. As someone who was at the very bottom of the totem pole all through school, I can vividly attest to the fact that people can dislike you for all kinds of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with who you are as a person and everything to do with surface appearances and other superficial things, like your level of conformity, your trendiness, your wardrobe choices, whether or not they like the sort of person they think you are, whether or not they like people with glasses, and so forth and so on ad. infinitum ad. nauseum. 

I am sure that in the society depicted in the episode in question, there is a great deal more bullying than now because the bullies would be empowered by the idea that you deserve to get abused because you have a low rating. ^[1]

It’s a brilliant conceit for a science fiction anthology show, and it was brilliantly executed. I won’t bother to explain the plot, but it’s good. It examined the issue thoroughly without ever once seeming slow and pedantic. ^[2] The production was gorgeous. It didn’t feel like television at all. It was more like a one hour movie. And the actress who played the lead, Bryce Dallas Howard ^[3], really got into her role and nailed the character’s tragic arc from popular to very much not so.

Interestingly, one of the episode’s writers is Rashida Jones, aka Angie Tribeca. I looked up the writers partially because of a feeling that I should probably take an interest in that sort of thing if I am to be a TV writer some day (and I am), but mostly because I had a very strong intuition that a woman wrote it or co-wrote it, and I was right.

The basis of my intuition on this matter was that the entire concept of popularity seems, in this era at least, to mean a lot more to the ladies than it does to the gents. It’s not that men don’t care, of course. It’s just that the patriarchal cultural programming we all receive tells women that being liked is the most important thing in the world, and tells men that they are not allowed to care about that.

Men are supposed to all be rugged individuals who don’t give a fuck what others think, and most of them try to be exactly like that because they want to be popular with the chicks,

I do think the basic conceit would not work exactly the way it was depicted in the show. People can like or dislike one another for a lot of reasons, plus people would feel bad about rating people really low,  and so, in the fine grain, most people would probably be between 3 and 4. Middle of the bell curve.

But a certain amount of simplification is always needed for effective storytelling, especially when dealing with the kind of complex ideas that makes for good science fiction.

And my gosh was that good science fiction.

In fact, I wish I had wrote it myself. It’s exactly the sort of smart, modern, intelligent television I would love to write.

Six months to go!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The veil of sadness is toxic to both those who wear it and those they touch.

Been pondering this whole “pathetic aura” business. I am still working to imagine and understand what a more confident and respect-worthy (I will never be respectable) version of me would look like.

So far, all I can see is a sort of Zaphod Beeblebrox / Judiciary Pag sort of person. Talented, smug, sarcastic, aloof, deeply convinced of his own brilliance and ability to talk his way into and out of whatever strikes his fancy, and determined to get as much of the good stuff as he can while exerting the least amount of effort he can get away with.

In other words…. a prick. The kind you want to beat with a shovel.

But none of that necessarily precludes being a nice person. Obnoxiousness might be irritating but it’s not a crime in and of itself. I could be all that yet still be a basically good guy who loves helping people and looking after them and who will always do what he thinks is best in all situations.

Heck, none of that precludes being a fun guy to be around. I might get on people’s nerves, but if I am a fun, funny, charming person (and I know I can be that), they will likely forgive me. Or at least most of them.

Some people are so dedicated to a life of grumpiness that they loathe anything that even mildly suggests they should relax and have fun.

These people are beyond my powers to save.

So what’s left to me is to somehow integrate those two pictures of myself, the Zaphod and the sweetie,  into a single identity. I wish I could think of a role model in this. Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage is kind of in the ballpark. He’s funny and eccentric and ridiculous^[1] and emotional and maternal. And occasionally sarcastic to low IQ twinks he has to perform with, which I love.

And I admire his courage. He has made his decision to be who he is even knowing it’s ridiculous and that it makes him a kind of a caricature and a joke. I wish I could be so bold and so free. Maybe I will be once I unpack enough of all this goddamned emotional baggage and find the suitcase where I packed the real me.

I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

But there’s still that veil of sadness between me and others. It’s a lot lighter than it used to be, a lot lighter than my deadly duvet of depression, but it’s still pretty heavy and it makes it so hard to truly connect to others and be there with them in realtime.

And I crave that connection so badly. I want to come in from the cold. I have been such a good dog and I think I should be allowed back in the house now, with the people. I don’t know what I did to end up tied up outside and ignored but whatever it is, I am very, very sorry. As sorry as I can be. And it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s lonely out here, and I can hear the people inside the house getting together and having fun, and I can smell the food I don’t get to eat and feel the love I am not getting either, and I would very much like to come in now, please.

Pretty pretty please.

The coming of Halloween has reminded me of what a lonely and sad child I was. Trick or treating all by myself, getting these brief glimpses into people’s warm and happy lives, going home when curfew struck to console myself with the food I had so painstakingly gathered. That’s what it was all about, right? The candy?

I always did very well on that score. Insert joke about Halloween being the example of to get a fat kid to exercise here. I covered a lot of ground in my merry greed.

But I would have traded my entire half a garbage bag full of candy just to feel included. To go somewhere where I was valued and loved and cared for and accepted, instead of being relegated to the shadows where the light of day never shone.

My belly grew but my soul shrank. As did my world.

So how do I escape that world and enter the world of humanity? How do I go from the cold and dark into the warm summer sunlight? Where do I go inside to get to home?

Perhaps my current state could be likened to a state of convalescence. I am healing but not yet healed. There’s a lot of very painful work ahead of me if I want to get better. But I am willing to put in the effort and the strain and endure the fear and the pain if it will make me whole again.

Insert rap beat here.

I think this image has occurred to me a few times before, but if not, here goes : one image of recovery that recurs is of a spring practice in my home town, namely shoveling the snow on your yard out onto the street where it will melt and go down the drain. That way, you get rid of the snowbank way faster than if you let it melt on its own.

Totally illegal. What if we had a cold snap? You could have turned your street into a rink!

But lots of people did it anyway.

And that what I feel like I am doing as well,. I am methodically shoveling the snow from the snowbank around my heart onto the street, waiting for it to melt, and shoveling more.

Over time, I can feel the warmth of the sun better and better, but I am still buried deep and I don’t know when that last shovel full will disappear and the green grass below will finally get the light of day on it again.

But the thing about winter is it always ends.

Mine will too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I hit upon a very rich vein of personal insight last night, and I want to explore it further in tonight’s blog entry.

Specifically, the idea that I am stuck in an “attract care” mode. It explains (at least in part) my tendency towards passivity.Part of me is always hoping someone else will step in and look after me, and relieve me of the burden of taking care of myself. Perhaps that even explains my tendency to neglect myself.

That same part of me is hoping someone will step in and give me the guidance and structure that I never got as a kid.

Kids shouldn’t have to raise themselves. They’re not good at it. They’re not qualified. But that is what I ended up doing. There were people who were there with me, but nobody was there for me. I grew up terribly alone.

Part of that, I recognize, is the illness. Depression. I withdrew into myself very deeply, and in doing so put up a wall between me and the world that I am still struggling to overcome. There were people on the other side of that wall who might have been able to help me. But when I laid down in that snowbank and willed myself to die, I gave up on life.

It’s the only thing you can do when you come to the conclusion that you are powerless to avoid the pain.  I was getting bullied all the time. Neither the teachers nor the administration at my school seemed able or even willing to intervene. All they wanted was for me to go away, just like at home.

It was a message I was pathetically accustomed to receiving.

I might have gone to my parents if I had been encouraged in any way to consult them when I was in trouble. Instead, it was made clear to me that I wasn’t to bother them with my life issues because they were too busy to view me as anything other than an irritating burden. I was always made to feel like I was not merely the lowest priority in their lives, I has zero priority, a null set, and therefore there was no logically possible condition in which I would matter.

It occurs to me that this attitude of pathetic need for nurturing probably contributed to people’s not wanting to deal with me. Especially when combined with my precocious and unpredictable intelligence. I have talked before in this space about the mixed messages I put out. A powerful mind, especially one like mine that sees through the social illusions and mental grooves that limit most people’s reality, sends a very strong message of power. In my case, it apparently comes off me in waves like being next to a power substation. And yet, this attitude of entreaty and eagerness to please sends an (at least) equally powerful message of being lower status than everyone I meet.

And when the human brain processes those kinds of messages,  power but not status, the emotional output of that process is “bad alpha”, and we HATE incompetent alphas.

So what I need to do to move forward is to change the message I am putting out into the world. I have to stop being the sad dog that wags his tail whenever anyone even looks in his direction and find a way to be someone people can respect.

Note, I do not mean by this to say I am planning to change who I am. Just that I need to change how I come across if I want to get closer to people without creeping them out.

We will take the need for improvements in personal grooming and care as a given.

The voyage to a less pathetic me has to begin with the ability to imagine the destination, and I am not there yet. I have no idea what a more respectable me would be like. I have been the sad version of me for so long.

The lack of employability and resulting low income lifestyle had done a number on me as well. I hope to correct that via my VFS education and my natural abilities, but that’s six months away and I would kind of like to feel good about myself before then.

Besides, when I am hustling for a job out there in Entertainment Land, an air of pathetic neediness will not serve me well.

Without a clear vision of the version of me I want to project into the world, I will have to kind of feel my way around till something occurs to me.

Certainly, I need to lose (or at least, conceal) the feelings of hopelessness and uselessness. I am not as incompetent as I often feel. It’s true that I have difficulties in doing some things, but that’s due to factors beyond my control. It in no way attaches to me as a person, any more than my eye color or my allergies.

Another thing that has to go is the desperate longing for positive attention. People inherently avoid people like that. It’s cruel but understandable. People around someone who is nakedly needy makes people uncomfortable because it feels like said person is asking for far more than you would normally give in social circumstances.

So I have to come across as more self-contained. And yet, at the same time, I can’t come across as closed off and aloof. It would be very easy for me to go into that mode. It feels like it’s the next setting on my personality controls. I am already prone to isolating myself and doing my own thing. Why not turn that into an asset?

Because I would come across as a total penis, that’s why. Plus, my warm personality is the power core of my charisma and I would be a fool to cut myself off from that powerful an asset. I can be downright magnetic when I have my head right.

The trick is to get my head right.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, in my favorite White Spot, waiting for my fewd and typing to you nice people.

I just cashed my monthly cheque and after meal I will walk over to the PriceSmart  (shop smart. Shop PriceSmart.) and get some decent food for myself.

By that, I don’t just mean more nutritious, although God knows I need that too.

I also mean food that will seem like a treat. Stuff that makes me look forward to the next meal. I might not be the sort of person who can generate their own goals and rewards yet, but I csn still motivate myself with food.

Obesity CAN be hacked.

Maybe I will get some flour and Spends do I van resume my sugar free dessert baking. That would definitely give me things to look forward to, and making enough desserts for the week every Saturday would not be that much work.

Maybe two, maybe three recipes, tops.

Aww crap,  an allergy attack. I am sure I took my antihistamines last night. Maybe they only last “up to” twenty four hours. That would figure, wouldn’t it?

As usual, the sneezing and runny nose are only the most obvious effect. The more pervasive problem is the body wide inflammatory response. That causes all kinds of problems down the road.

Back home now. Took a cab home from PriceSmart. .. Five bucks, big whoop.

Where was I? Oh yeah, inflammatory issues. The inflammation can make my joints ache, my head hurt, my eyes red and watery, my IBS go nutzoid, and drains my energy.

All from a sneeze. Motherfucker.

This is why I get bent out of shape when my antihistamine doesn’t do its job. There’s far more than sniffles and sneezes on the line. There’s a whole cacophony of pathology tied up with those sneezes, and I would really, really rather it never EVER went off.

I wonder if taking an aspirin or similar anti-inflammatory analgesic would help in these situations. Is Aleve anti-inflammatory? We have those.

According to the Internet (oh wise and mighty lord of us all), it is! I will go take one.

There! Wow, those are big. Good thing they’re soft and squishy.

Been pondering the whole smartness issue again. That old bone. You know, how to be smart without being an obnoxious asshole. Funny how that’s immediately think of when I imagine letting loose.

But I know what I could potentially be like if I didn’t watch myself. Obnoxious, pushy, manipulative, sarcastic, mocking, dismissive of others, and all in all a diabolical pain in the ass to all who encounter me.

But maybe that’s only one side of the equation. Maybe if I made the jump into genuinely not caring what people thought of me and not worrying about whether my expressing my personality and intellect at full power bothers people would lead to a better, more rounded and grounded me.

The superego always uses the id’s worst impulses as an argument in support of its draconian oppression. But maybe the id wouldn’t harbor such dark impulses if it was not so tightly repressed. Maybe a freer id is a happier and healthier id.

Maybe people would even like me better. It’s not exactly like I am racking up the buddies being meek and sensitive. In fact, I think my nurturing deficit has left me in “attract care” mode, which works great if you’re a kid but just makes you pathetic as an adult.

It’s a case of learned helplessness. I have a strong impulse to surrender my problems to others. I guess I never really made it out of the “take it to mommy who will kiss it better” due to the harshness of my childhood. PArt of that harshness was having people take tasks away from me because I wasn’t doing them right and they made the short term decision that it was easier in the moment to do it themselves rather than teach me to do it for myself and thus build my self-esteem and competence.

Instead, I got the direct opposite message : that there was something deeply wrong with me that made me incompetent and a burden on others and there was nothing I could do about it because I was just plain broken.

And if you can’t do it for yourself, what choice do you have but to get others to do it?

I wonder if everyone was so impatient with me because my father’s impatience rubbed off on them. There was definitely a point at which everyone got tired of me. The metaphor I have used before of being a pet people are sick of is apt. Once I stopped being precociously adorable and once the school system took care of me during the day, people just plain lost interest in me and I became that dumb dog that everyone is sick of cleaning up after and walking and feeding, and whom everyone wishes would just go away.

And he’s the same dumb ol’ dog he always was, friendly and excitable and desperate for attention and affection. He doesn’t know why nobody pays attention to him any more, but he can tell when people are angry and impatient with him and it makes him very sad. he tries to do everything right, but nothing helps. People are always mad at him, and nobody pays any positive attention to him, so he just hides from everybody.

And that dog is me.

Damn. I don’t think I have ever summed up my childhood so well before. I’ve officially bummed myself out. But in a good way, a way that lets me process stuff that has needed processing for a very long time.

Growing up is like the measles : the older you are when it happens, the harder it is going to be on you.

I feel like I spent twenty years in a kind of suspended animation and I am still only half alive. I fumble towards the sunlight, making steady but not linear progress as I go.

Maybe someone will love this old dog after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fair warning, tonight’s entry is going to be about my deteriorating health, and may therefore be disturbing or even frightening to those who care about me.

But this is all stuff that I have been ignoring and/or denying for a long time. So I need to talk this all out in order to get out out my system so I can get over the denial and tackle theses things head on.

First, a little backstory. I just finished watching an episode of Forensic Files that revolved around a kind of mold that made the people who lived there very sick. The symptoms of their illness, such as memory and concentration problems,  sounded eerily familiar.

Now let’s talk about my nervous system, shall we?

It’s no secret that I have been having cognitive issues lately. I’ve already talked about all the forgetting I have been doing. Being a depressive, I have naturally been blaming myself for that. It’s my sleep apnea, it’s my diabetes, it’s my being fucked up in the head, it’s a sign of middle age,  etc.

But the thing is, looked at objectively, my symptoms are fairly stark and indicative of someone who is undergoing a neurological decline. Simply calling it “my absentmindedness” just won’t cut it any more.

I am finding it increasingly hard to concentrate. I forget things nobody should be forgetting, like our phone number, or the names of my instructors. As it stands right now, I can usually recover from these mental absences, but only by straining my mind to it’s fullest in order to deduce the answer from the remaining information. I’ve been losing track of what I am saying in the middle of a sentence. I have this growing sensation of vacuity, as if there was wide open spaces in my mind where my thoughts should be.

I have to admit, there’s a certain pleasant peaceful sensation to it. Like I can finally experience periods where my overweaning intellect is blissfully quiet.

And then there’s the physical symptoms. I am increasingly clumsy and my sense of balance is starting to go. I get up from sitting and instead of the usual self-righting that our sense of balance allows, I end up staggering into a wall or nearly tipping over and it takes a considerable effort just to regain my equilibrium. Things seem to jump out of my hand sometimes. My hands and feet get cold easily, especially on my right side.

Ah, my right side. I have done a little informal testing, and my right side is definitely weaker and less sensitive than my left. I frequently get a pins and needles feeling in my right hand and right leg. I experience a lot of random symptoms in my right foot. Sudden feelings like hot or colder water has been splashed on it. Little electric shocks. Cramps. Spasmodic twitching. More or less the entire neurological pathology buffet.

Oh, and I have been experiencing digestive issues too. Might be my IBS. Might not.

So clearly I am in some degree of neurological distress. I am far from blameless in this. I’ve been eating sugary shit all the fucking time. I have not been treating my sleep apnea at all. My diabetes is uncontrolled because it’s been three years since I tested myself. I’ve even started to forget to take my nightly insulin. My blood sugar levels must be through the fucking roof by now.

But the thing is, I’ve always been in a kind of mental fog. I assumed that was just do to my dreamy otherworldly mindset and general weak attachment to that cozy old neighborhood called “reality”. But now I am wondering whether I have been neurologically depressed my entire life, or at least, since I was abused.

I know one thing : I have fallen into the trap of thinking that if I can keep going, I must be fine, or at least, good enough. That is a very specious kind of thinking. It’s akin to the old joke about the optimist who fell off the top of a skyscraper and at every floor was heard to say “So far, so good!”.

Clearly, I have to start taking this shit seriously

Now that I can take a look at the whole picture in the pure and sober light of reason, I realize that taking it on might well require some serious interventions. The kind that land you in the hospital for multiple days, and maybe involve doing a lot of physical therapy and enduring a lot of lifestyle restrictions.

And here I am, in the literal middle of my VFS education. Inconvenient to say the least.

How did I get like this? I think it all traces back to my bout with serious hypochondria in my early 20’s. I pulled myself out of that deadly state where I was malnourished, dehydrated, in serious bowel distress, and constantly terrified. And I think that in doing so, I overcompensated. I went from overreacting to every little twinge and twitch to ignoring all the bullshit my body did if it wasn’t a clear and overriding symptom.

Something I couldn’t ignore, basically.

But you can learn to ignore anything if it comes on slowly enough. And we Taurus types have an inborn gift for carrying on no matter what. It’s quite noble in the right circumstances, but there are times when you really should stop and look after yourself instead of bulldozing (ha) ahead until one day, you drop dead in your harness.

And the coroner says, “To be honest, it’s surprising he kept going for as long as he did. ”

Yay for us.

So this might be the sort of situation I am facing. One where I have done something I have always looked down on – namely ignore the warning signs – and now I might just need a pretty serious level of intervention in order to save myself from myself.

One little bright light : I saw an ad for a medicine called Lyrica that claims to be able to treat diabetic neuropathy.

I might not be a total wreck yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was the first day of my fourth term of VFS. It went fine for the most part.

In the morning, I had Production For Writers – Story. Got the skinny on what we’ll be doing. Turns out, we were also supposed to have come up with a short pitch for the little five minute movie we will be writing.

I’d felt like we had something like that due, but when I asked about it on my class’ Facebook page, people said there was no pitch due today.

No big whoop. I’d already figured out what I was going to do. It’s a distillation of an idea I had not too long ago which Felicity helped me elaborate.

The basic idea is that our protagonists are a producer and a director, both young and very ambitious but extremely low on the totem pole, who have been sent by The Studio to a small film festival with orders to find the next indie darling screenwriter… or else.

This means setting up one of those open pitching sessions, where anyone can come pitch their script to people in The Biz.

That’s just the setup, though. The meat of the comedy is all the truly horrible and/or crazy and/or completely horrifying pitches they get, plus their reactions to them. The whole thing is a springboard for getting people to go in and do a little improv if I can. Also, to get ideas from my fellow writing students for bits for it, preferably ones whose scripts are NOT being produced so they can get a little bit of something produced anyway.

One idea : A guy who keeps showing up pitching “Die Hard…” concepts, like “Die Hard… with Dinosaurs!” or “Die Hard… with carnies!”.

Another : A character who starts off normal but their pitch rapidly devolves into an incomprehensible series of sound effects and silly voices.

These would be intercut with one another to keep things moving quickly. The object is to create five minutes of fast, funny, high density rapid-fire comedy that I can use to wow people with my awesome comedy skills.

Of course, I might have a better idea before this is done. My pitch today did not go over great and I realized that it’s something that would be easy to understand if you saw it, but which is very hard to get across in words because it’s very low on plot.

The plot is basically :

1. Setup protags and situation
2. Midpoint : Protags get close to quitting in frustation but carry on
3. Protags find script they are looking for
4.  Script is huge success (done with fake headlines)

The rest is the wackiness. So while I am sure the end product will be hilarious, I am not sure that matters, because based on the pitch alone, it won’t get made.

Unless I act the whole thing out myself…. hmmmm….

Anyhow, wherever I end up, I know I will have a lot to offer my group. I can write, direct, compose music, organizes things, handle the money, and even edit the darn thing.

Mental note : make sure to present those as possible jobs as opposed to giving people the impression that I don’t even need them. Quite the opposite. I need people to fill in the blanks both in the production sense and in the sense of the blanks in my mind where I forget what the heck I am supposed to be doing.

Of course, getting this idea of mine produced could also be a way of sneakily recruiting people for the skit comedy troupe I want to form. Find the funny people!

But like I said, I might come up with a better, more sure-fire to get made idea. I still don’t have a clue how to make something the millennials will like. Something about the virtues of being a quiet nerdy type, I suppose.

Or, as came up in class today, just go full Wes Anderson.

Between classes came lunch, and that did not go well. First, the morning class ran late and we didn’t get out of there until 12:10. Then I had to go down to the computer lab in the basement to do the course evaluations for the previous term. That involved the usual struggle between my strong drive to be objective and truthful and my personal feelings about the professors involved. So that took me to 12:35.

Then I just barely had time to get the Subway and get my sub before my second class, TV Pilot, started. Note that I have not included the time it took me to eat. That would be because I had no time to eat. So all I could do is stick the sub in the kitchenette’s fridge and get my ass to class.

Only to find all my fellow students eating right there in the classroom, which is something I rejected as being too gauche,

TV Pilot class seems cool. We’re going to learn to write a series proposal, which is somewhere between 10 and 15 pages of info on my original series.

Presumably, by the time I write it three weeks from now, I will have an idea for one.

I exaggerate. I actually have two ideas, which is good, because I have to pitch two ideas next class, which is Friday. Yes, I will actually be doing TV Pilot twice a week!

This means that I am actually only taking 3 classes this semester. Harsh. Luckily, there will be a pilot to write and then there’s all the production stuff. Otherwise, quite frankly, I would get bored and restless pretty darn quick.

And feel just a little bit like I was getting short changed, education-wise.

Had supper at Bob’s on the way home. Club Sandwich, fries, can o’ pop : $7.05. And it was a pretty good Club. The bacon in it was especially good. I am going to have to try their breakfast menu some time.

And then I came home, took a nap, got up, had some dessert (sugar free marble cake, awesome), and then sat done to type to you nice people.

As for the rest, well…. you were here!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I am in a burning down phase right now.

That’s the phase where enough of my emotional garbage has surfaced to allow for a good clear burn off. The disgusting gunk is spread out on the ground so that the sun can dry it out, then raked back into piles and ignited with a flint, a tinder, and a little rage.

And then I can just stand back and watch it burn away slowly. Like a peat fire, it’s smokey and smells pretty bad, but when it’s done, everything is clear and clean and better than before. The system has been purged and for a while, I can feel the sun.

Eventually, though, that deep inner process will drive more gunk out of the system and onto the surface, and the whole cycle will begin again.

It’s not as zero sum as it seems, though. That deep inner process is slow but its results are final. The dead intentions and smothered feelings and grimy memories are gone for good, and the system as a whole runs better now that there’s less of my personal bullshit clogging up its pipes.

The burning hurts. But it also feels good. The feeling of relief makes the pain more than worth it. And some kinds of pain are not that bad.

Fear of pain does more damage than mere pain ever could. We are not and cannot be free until we learn to choose pain and thus free ourselves from its tyranny. The ability to say, “I know this will hurt but I am doing it any way because I want the result” is the first and probably the most important step towards adulthood and maturity.

To the childish, animalistic mind, choosing pain is madness no matter what the result might be. After all, animal instinct’s biggest rule is “seek pleasure and avoid pain”. It’s such a basic part of our minds that we can even convince ourselves that blatantly short-sighted and self-destructive actions are the “intelligent” or “sensible” in a deeply cowardly way.

But then again, intelligence has always been able to cloak its cowardice in virtue. Even when the choices cowardice makes are stupid as hell.

Once we can not just choose to do the painful thing, but to do it with eyes open and with full intent, we can cross the threshold and claim our reward.

Because this is not about mindless self-denial or some abstract notion of self-discipline for its own sake. This is about enabling our own happiness by expanding our powers to get what we want regardless of how we feel or whether or not it involves pain or sacrifice or scary,  hard decisions.

The voice of immaturity will try to convince you that whatever is painful (or scary or whatever)  can’t possibly be worth it. After all, you’ve done without it so far. And what kind of idiot chooses to suffer? Better to avoid it.

But imagine you have a toothache. You know damned well that the only way to get rid of it is to go to the dentist. But going to the dentist is scary and hard and dentists do painful and weird stuff to you.

So you just sit there and suffer due entirely to your own cowardice.

That’s a pretty cut and dried example and most people wouldn’t do that. But people do the equivalent all the time. Including me. Especially me.

Anyhow, that’s all old news. Where was I? Oh right, the burning.

There’s this image that recurs to me from time to time. It goes like this : there’s a place up in the mountains, a kind of natural temple where people can climb a twisting path up and down the bare living rock to a place at the end of the path, where it dips down and then just suddenly ends.

People go there and stand on the lip of the abyss to sacrifice their pain and suffering and damage to the gods as a way of declaring themselves to be free of them. They go there and they scream it all out in brutal honesty and call upon the gods to take their burdens from them and set them free.

But this is not an act of servile contrition or self-abasing supplication. This is an act of a very deep kind of pride, the kind that drives out unworthy feelings and puts them in our hands so that we can hold them high over our heads, roar our challenge at the sky,  and let them burn away into the air in a wrenching act of incendiary sacrifice.

I can see it clearly in my mind, as if I’d dreamed it very recently. But it’s not a dream, or at least, not the kind you have in your sleep. It’s something that pops into my head fully formed now and then, and each time, more details are added.

That;s what creativity looks like from the inside, at least for me.

Poetically speaking, I guess you could say it’s a place inside of me. I think of it more as a place I wish existed in the real world. Some place where you can sacrifice your pain and sorrow and all the other things we need to shed if we are to be light enough to fly free.

My desire for personal growth, for spiritual evolution, is very strong. It is, in a sense, what I desire the most, although my methods for seeking it might seem rather circuitous or at least indirect to an outside observer.

I learn. I think. I experience things. And I grow. Not as fast as my ambition desires, but I know of no other way.

Perhaps if I had the capacity for spirituality, I would grow faster. With spirituality (or mysticism, or religion, or faith, or whatever you want to call it), transformation is possible, as is the option of facing your demons directly.

But alas, I must forever toil in the cold light of reason’s ignorance and that means doing everything the hard way.

But at least when I get there, I will remember the route.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

snark, v. : to lash out at something or someone with sarcasm and/or wit.

I have been feeling very snarky lately.

And while it’s not fun, I am choosing to look at it as a sign of progress. It means that my deeply suppressed anger and bitterness are surfacing and trying to find a way to express themselves. And by itself, that would not be a problem. Express away.

But of course, it’s not that simple. It wouldn’t be that simple even if I were an average person with average verbal skills. People can hurt one another plenty that way.

But I am heavily armed when it comes to verbal battle and my kind of sarcasm can do a lot more damage to people because it has all my frustration and irritation behind it, which is then being focused by my outsized verbal skills, emphatic insights, and incisive intellect.

So yeah. I pack lasers beams, y’all.

So I have to be extra careful. I don’t want to hurt people. I want them to respect me, not fear me. And I believe in never hurting anyone by accident. That’s my definition of manners. And I hold myself to a very high ideal on that front.

Perhaps too high. Don’t know what to do about that.

On the other hand, I don’t want to outright suppress this urge to be snarky to people. It’s a healthier form of dealing with my anger than burying it in an emotional hole and having it rot there and poison my mood. I might not have a healthy and non-destructive way to express this snarky rage yet, but I am still better off choking back the words than swallowing them and letting them damage me that way.

It’s like having the things Basil Fawlty says under his breath going on in my head.

I will find am acceptable focus, I am sure. Maybe I will start a political rant type vlog. It would help me to get a lot of things off my chest. Or maybe I will finally go through with my plan to join some major forum or find the right Reddit board and unleash my verbal might on some deserving douchebags with odious opinions.

Both would be ways to work out my anger with words. I don’t seem to have the capacity to do it physically. I have tried the whole “beat up a pillow” school of dealing with your anger and it did not help much, just made me feel absurd.

And all the time, I was thinking “But this doesn’t MEAN anything!”.

So apparently my rage requires a living target. Something deep and primal inside of me needs to lash out at the world that has hurt me so much, and that world, as far as I can tell, does not include pillows.

I’ve always gotten along fine with pillows and their kin.

And of course, I know who the villains are in this rage filled world inside me. They’re the bullies who abused me, the teachers who ignored it, the family that made me feel like an unwanted stranger in my own home and who were never there to support me at all, the random people who froze me out and made me feel like I could never belong anywhere, and the list goes on and on.

None of those elements are things I can address now. The teachers are all dead or retired (or both, I suppose). My siblings, I believe, now know how bad I had it back then and how I felt like I wasn’t welcome in my own home. The bullies are, quite frankly, meaningless to me. Of all the guilty parties, they are the ones who cannot justify their actions or deny what they did. I doubt any of them think what they did to me was A-OK. And the random people were just reacting to a very weird and sort of disturbingly pathetic kid who was as hard for them to relate to as they were to me.

I’ve had my own little planet like the Little Prince for a long time, and it sucks.

Much harder to address than my anger is my very deep nurturing deficit. Men are kind of not supposed to want or need nurturing, even gay men. When we do, people lose respect for us entirely.

Especially women, but that’s not exactly an issue for me. But why do you think women mock men for “turning into big babies” when they’re sick? You think they would say that about another woman? Of course not. But when men want someone to nurture them, they get mocked and rejected.

Anyhow, I don’t know what to do about this nurturing deficit of mine. I fear that it is one of my “thirsty dogs”, aka a deep need acquired young that can never be fully fulfilled. It might well be that I could find a person who was willing to look after me in the way I need and even retain the ability to respect and love me at the same time, and it would never be enough for me.

That could lead to a very dark place where people feel like I used them, and then discarded them when they ran out of love to give. And they would not be wrong.

But I have a lot of love to give too. I have a very strong desire to look after people. I would love to have a man in my life whom I could dote upon. I guess my ideal relationship would be two people spoiling the heck out of each other.

That could work with the right man. I am a very giving person. I would give of myself freely and happily to the right man. And all I ask for in return is someone strong to look after me and make me feel safe.

Wow, that is the textbook definition of daddy issues. I am obviously looking for a surrogate father figure. That could lead to… trouble.

Oh well. Better trouble than this endless pit of loneliness and isolation.

Something’s got to break down these walls.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was better than yesterday because I had something to do.

Namely, therapy. I had my first therapist’s session in a month today. It went all right.

I mean, no huge breakthroughs. Just my therapist telling me things I already know but nevertheless needed someone to tell me because that’s just how brains work sometimes. Things we hear from others seem more real to us than the knowledge in our heads, and in this case, I needed someone to tell me to take sleep more seriously, goddamn it.

I might be paraphrasing a little on that last bit.

And of course, as you wonderful folk know, I already know this. I’ve explained it here. I think my lack of quality sleep is the major cause of how my mental acuity deteriorates over the term and how I need to make some major changes in my life if I don’t want to end up in a semi-vegetative state in a month or so.

Which means both getting more sleep and better quality sleep. I can see that more clearly now that I have had a couple of days of no pressure and no alarm clock. This business with only getting five hours of sleep on the nights when I have class in the morning has got to go. There has to be a workable solution.

But it’s complicated. I also treasure my time watching the Daily Show et. al. with Joe, and he doesn’t get home until around 12:30. Plus there’s those nights when Felicity is over.

If it wasn’t for that, I would just go to bed at 11 pm like a sane person. But I am loath to remove my main form of socialization from my life.

I could try to get three hours of sleep before Joe gets home. Dinner at 6, blogging between 7 and 9, 9-12 naptime… the number work out.

But that would leave me little time to relax and have fun. By which I mean play video games and chat with the fuzzies, of course.

But that would only apply on days when I I have class till 4. And during the next term, that will only apply on… some of the days.

Damn am I getting frustrated with the lack of regularity in VFS’s calendar.

I had this great idea : to input all my classes for the whole term into my little student calendar app so I would always have the schedule in my pocket, and not only that, in a form that integrates with the rest of the program so that I could put in my homework and my courses all fit together.

And to be honest, anything that makes it faster and easier to input my homework would be extremely welcome. I realized today that one of the main things that leads to me to slipping into not inputting my homework is that said homework is given in class and I have to take my attention away from the class to input stuff (because I am not a multitasker) and then I fall behind in the class and have to figure out what I missed when I was inputting.

And that’s very stressful.

That leads to my strong stance on instructors putting EVERYTHING on Moodle. When it’s on Moodle, I can check it and get my coursework suggestions there, in a permanent medium, as opposed to it just being words in air and if you missed something, tough.

I never do well when there’s no room for error. I’m an error prone dude.

Anyhow, so I go to input the classes only to find out that the program I have been assumes that you will have a single, regular weekly schedule so it only lets you input classes by day of the week.

Well VFS don’t play that. I’m lucky if I have the same schedule two weeks in a row. That’s not been a huge deal in the past because I had no desire to make things regular as long as I knew what class I had next and when.

But now it’s beginning to bug me. And not just because it apparently means I need to find a new student calendar app. Having a regular weekly schedule would make it so much easier to plan ahead for things like, just to pick a random example, regular visits to one’s desperately needed therapist.

Oh well. According to the schedule as it is written right now, I mostly have Wednesdays off. That will have to do.

Been thinking about the “former child prodigy” thing again today. I really feel like part of me is stuck in the past, trying to recreate that golden time when everyone was so impressed with me and I got oodles of praise and validation from all the adults around me.

And all for stuff I found easy!

But the thing is, life is never going to be that easy again. That time is gone and it’s never coming back. My life as it is now is not some temporary thing I have to endure in order to get back to The Way It Should Be. It’s the real thing. Being an adult. Far out.

No wonder so many of us former child prodigies have a lot of negative feelings about the prospect of growing up. We understand that once we become grownups, that last chance we had of going back to being a child prodigy is gone forever.

When you are an adult, nobody is impressed by how smart you are any more. Even if you are unarguably bright, way above average, nobody cares. Nobody is going to praise you for your intrinsic qualities any more.

What matters is what you can do. What you can produce. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I understand the temptation to rail against a world that seems hard and scary and cruel, but all the world is asking for is what you expect of others. That they do their job.

After all, if you go to the pharmacy to get your prescription filled, does it really matter if the pharmacist is really smart and a nice guy if he or she can’t fill your prescription?

No, it doesn’t. What you want is for people to produce for you the results you want.

And that’s what the world expects of you, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.