Today is the first day of my four day between-terms period between Terms 3 and 4 of my VFS education. And already, I am bored and depressed.

Not that I don’t know why, though. For one thing, I had laundry to do, and that meant I had to spend the afternoon naked, and that always fucks up my mood.

Even when school is on, it makes me depressed. But with nothing in my immediate future to focus on, I felt it a lot more keenly.

And here I thought four days wasn’t going to be enough! It should be just right, actually. By the time Monday morning rolls around, I will be rested up and ready to take on the world.

At least, I hope so. One of the things I’ve realized lately was that I was not getting back all I put out over the second half of last term. In fact, I was steadily deteriorating, which explains why the number of academic errors per week kept escalating. I was increasingly mentally checked out because I was just not getting enough of the right kinds of rest.

So I will have to guard against this in the future. Luckily, next term I am only taking five courses, so there’s in theory more free time, but from what we have been told, a lot of that free time will be taken up with production meetings and such.

I hope there’s still some extra time left over, though. I would love to be able to go back to getting to therapy once a week. I think I could use someone to talk to, to be honest. I think things have been building up inside me that need releasing if I am going to be capable of pulling myself together and going in to Term 4 as the competent, organized, alert adult I know damn well I am capable of being.

I know it because that’s who I was at the beginning of last term!

The same thing happened at Kwantlen, too. I would start strong, all organized and ready and determined to not let things slide out of control, then as the semester wore on, I would become increasingly incoherent and all those little “oops” moments started to pile up pretty fast. And so I ended up with way lower marks simply because the mental drain was building up and rendering me exceptionally clueless.

So how do I keep that from happening again?

The first step is to pay close attention to how alert and awake I am feeling. My mind tends to push that sort of thing into the background in order to maintain the illusion that everything is fine and there’s no need to worry.

It’s a nauseating and unworthy state of mind when observed dispassionately. The ship is sinking and I am sitting there pretending nothing is wrong because from where I am sitting,  I can’t see the water rising, and all those potentially upsetting noises, like people screaming and the ship groaning as it is torn apart by the tide, can be ignored as the meaningless static it surely is.

And sure, sometimes terrible things happen “suddenly” and then I have to shout for help and get rescued, but the moment that is over, I go right back to my Happy Place, not having learned a god damned thing.

That’s what it has been like in school. I keep flaking out entirely then going to my classmates to bail me out. It’s patently absurd, and things need not be this way. I am perfectly capable of doing all the things I need to do to keep on track.

But the center does not hold.

Even right now, after having a day where I could sleep all I liked, I don’t feel like I am really here. This disconnected feeling makes it very hard to concentrate and interferes with my executive function, and without that, I am a total fuckup.

Like I have said before, what saves my ass is that I am very good at the actual writing part of the equation. Just like how at Kwantlen, what saved me was actually being good at the academics themselves and so I scraped by.

That’s just plain not good enough.

So I have to start taking this sleep apnea shit seriously, and make a strong effort to get back to using the CPAP machine. If I keep my goal of being well rested and clear headed in mind, I should be able to find the motivation to overcome my psychological block and get back to being able to breathe in my sleep.

I am also pondering getting those Breathe-Rite strips to see if that helps. I know that my sleep apnea is of the obstructive kind, and I am hoping the obstruction is happening in or near my nose. That way, the strips would clear up the problem, especially if I made sure to clean out my nose before I go to bed.

hat’s not the usual kind of fat-guy sleep apnea, though. Usually it’s the kind that involves part of your throat relaxing in your sleep and when it relaxes, it obstructs your airway.

Or something like that.

Oh well. Point is, it’s worth a try. This bad sleep thing is a huge drain on my life and it’s high time I did something about it.

It’s getting to the point where I don’t feeling like I am breathing entirely right when I am awake, either. I think the CO2 builds up in the bottom of my lungs overnight, and  normal breathing does not get it out of there.

So I have to purposefully empty my lungs if I want to breathe properly. And I don’t always remember to do so, so I go around in a fog.

And the fog, of course, makes it harder to remember to do things you should do, like for instance, empty the CO2 out of my lungs.

And let me tell you, I make some god awful noises when I do it. Sounds like I am dying, or possibly that I am already dead and my ghost is trying to haunt someone but can’t seem to get enough breath for a good unearthly scream.

No wonder I am so afraid of suffocating.

It happens to me every time I sleep!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But I’ll get over it.

Today was the day my feature script for my movie (which is linked here) was workshopped by my Feature Script class, and it was nasty.

Not that anyone was mean to me. Mean is easy to deal with, especially for someone with highly combative nature that is always bubbling just below the surface like me.

So there was no battle, no war damage, and no coup de grace. Instead, it was the death of a thousand cuts as my prof and my classmates listed all the flaws they could find in the darn thing. And that takes its toll.

But that’s how this thing works. I have scads of notes for the eventual day I rewrite the darn thing and actually produce a SECOND draft. I am thinking I might type them all into a text file in bulleted form so I can go through one by one and decide which ones have the highest priority versus which ones deal with something I just plain don’t care about.

That would go a long way towards alleviating the enormous amount of anxiety that I feel at the prospect of trying to apply all those notes. While I know I could apply them one by one, in order, if I wanted to, my brain insists on trying to assemble them into a logical plan of action despite their being simply too many variables for conscious thought.

That reminds me of an issue that came up today. The fact that people give me a ton of highly useful notes but I never use them,. Many of my classmates have complained that they have told me about something over and over again with no result. Teachers too. It’s like nothing they say penetrates, and I think the above is why.

I just can’t face a ton of notes. And I don’t seem to retain instructions. It’s a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it.

I have been having trouble concentrating lately, and I know why. I don’t get nearly enough sleep. I give maybe five hours a night, and that’s just plain not enough. The reason we sleep for around eight hours a day is that it takes that long for our minds to reach the really deep kind of sleep which restores and refreshes us. Add in my sleep apnea, currently untreated. That insures that the sleep I do get is of poor quality and quite low in the kind of sleep that leads to alertness and codifies memories.

So no wonder I can’t remember anything. My brain is full!

I will try to catch up over the break. I have tried getting back into the habit of taking naps, which would at least be a kind of solution. But it’s hard for me now, at least on a school day. I find it very hard to relax. I want to be doing stuff, and yet, I get caught between that and depression’s fucking inertia so I end up just depressed.

Al least while I’m awake, I’m breathing properly. More or less.

It would be amazing to have a clear head for once. I think I have forgotten what that is even like. I feel like I have been fighting to focus for my entire life, in all senses of the world. I have always known what it would take to get my excrement in formation. I know the steps. I know what’s wrong.

But I am starting to think that I may not be able to fix it due to the nature of the problem itself. Hard to fix a broken mind with that selfsame mind.

But there are simple things to try. Like finding a quiet spot and just letting my mind go slack. Give myself permission to do nothing but process that big backlog of mental processes that need to be run in order for me to finish processing things.

That’s what meditation is all about, by the way. Most people are walking around with a high persistent cognitive load from incomplete thoughts, repressed emotions, and other mental garbage. Meditation lets you clean that stuff out of your mind by stilling your conscious mind in order to leave as much mental CPU as possible for processing what is already in there, just waiting for a chance to finish.

Most meditation experts make it sound like something complex and mystical, when really you can skip the mystic bullshit and just train yourself to relax the mental muscles that hold all that stuff in, and finally let your poor mind dump its waste processes.

I think it’s especially bad in this heavy stimulation era. That adds a kind of sensory exhaustion to the mix. With the Internet at our fingertips, we all can feast on an unnaturally rich amount of stimulation and I think that has long term effects we don’t even perceive yet, let alone understand.

And the thing about stimulation in complex mammals is that we hate any sudden change. Especially us introverts. So when you go from the unnaturally high stimulation level of the Internet to the much lower stimulation level of real life, you will instantly want to go back to the higher stimulation level as fast as you can.

And that, children, is why the Internet is addictive. Now you know.

So far, I have found no ideal cure for this. Obviously, the solution is to taper off your stimulation levels. But it’s not like there’s a pre-made series of gradually decreasing stimulation level tasks.

Incidentally, I am pretty sure the stimulation level issue is why so many people I know bitch about not getting enough sleep because they keep staying up till the wee hours of the morning even though they know they have work early in the morning.

If you want to get to sleep at a decent time, you have to unplug, as hard as that will be.  And do it two hours before your bed time.

That sucks, but it’s worth it for decent sleep.

And now, I need a NAP.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the last day of my third term at the good ol’ VFS.

That means that after class tomorrow, I will be exactly half way through my education at VFS. It feels amazing to have come this far. Each new term has brought a higher level of tension and challenge, but it didn’t take me long to adapt.

So while I am rather intimidated by the increase in responsibility that the whole production deal next term, I am sure I will be able to rise to the challenge.

The whole “get my thing made” thing does add a lot of tension. But I am learning to turn tension and anxiety into ambition. So I am equipped there.

More importantly, I am learning to let myself care. I have suppressed my desires and ambitions for a very long time. Under the fascist regime of depression, desires and ambitions are subversive and must be suppressed lest the security of the nation be threatened. After all, desires lead to want to do things, and doing things means leaving the inner fortress of depression, and that cannot be tolerated.

One day, I will write a whole story based on that metaphor.  And I hope it resonates with other people who suffer from depression.

Right now, I don’t feel that great. I have been having IBS issues, and that has lead me to do dumb shit like skip meals because I have no appetite, and that only makes things worse. So I am not doing great.

No severe attacks yet, thank goodness, but I have had this bullshit going on for 23 years and I have learned its ways. I am trying to think of a way to restore balance to the force, but usually, all I can do is wait this kind of thing  out.

At least I got my checks cashed today. One was my GST cheque, which as usual will go to saving my ass in this five week month. And other was… my second check for the sale of one of my stories to Polar Borealis!

It is, of course, a very VERY small publication, and I do happen to know it’s editor, publisher, and president personally (they’re all the same person) , but the point is that I got paid $10 for a short story and to me, that makes me a professional writer.

Or at least, semi-professional. Like a farm team recruit.

So I got $121 to see me through the next week. Boffo. Maybe I will even gather the will to go do something fun over my four day inter-term vacation.

Speaking of which : it says something about how my education is progressing that in at the end of my first term, I was like “4 days? Fine! I’ll probably get bored, and after my second term, I was like “10 days? Fine! I’ll probably get bored (and depressed)” and now, at the end of my third term, I am like “4 days? Oh God, that’s not nearly enough. ”

But I knew this was a marathon long before the starter’s pistol went off.

So in the precious space in between the terms, a glorious space where I can be absolutely guaranteed that there is nothing I am supposed to be doing,  I will have to make sure to relax and be good to myself.

No pressure, no ambitions, no plans, just real, genuine, honest to goodness rest and relaxation, whatever that might entail.

Historically, I have not been good at this. When I have time off, I just sink back into the exact same kind of depression that I had before Kwantlen.

That’s not exactly restorative. True, I often get a lot of rest, in that I sleep a lot (one symptom of depression), but it’s not a healthy sleep that leaves you feeling refreshed. It’s a sick sleep that leaves you feeling worse and leads to tertiary effects like feeling disconnected from reality and trapped in your own mind.

That’s nobody’s idea of fun. I hope.

Maybe Germans. I guess.

The thing is, I can feel a great ambition and enthusiasm rising deep inside of me. But it’s weighted down by my depression and what depression whispers in my ear. It says “Wouldn’t it be so much easier to let go of wanting, to just squash that desire and sink back into my embrace, with its false optimism and misty minded feebleness?”.

Well, it doesn’t use those exact words, but you get the idea.

The mist is the enemy. I want it to go away. I want to finally be fully awake after all these years, But it will only go away if I stop needing it.

And that’s a tricky proposition.

Everything I want is on the other side of that fog bank. Love, acceptance, vitality, connection, affection, and everything else. I know it’s all out there but I don’t feel it. And without being able to feel it, it’s hard to summon the ambition to pursue it. It’s like a blind man trying to find a light source. If it doesn’t feel it on his face, he’s stumped.

But how do you hammer away at a numbing fog? I suppose one visual metaphor would be a strong, gentle wind generated from within blowing the fog away.

Or a sunrise, I suppose, that burns away the fog like so much dew.

For now, though, it seems like the forces that want to get rid of it are not stronger than the forces that cling to it, so for now, it stays.

At least I have a therapist’s appointment on Friday. Maybe he will help me nudge myself in the right direction for further growth. I feel rootbound and restless and trapped, and I need to get my poop in a group and start getting rid of all this fucking emotional ballast.

That’s the Maritimes version of emotional baggage.

Plus I need to pull myself together and be more organized. Like last term, I have lost a ton of marks for simply not remembering to do stuff that I totally could have just looked up.

But the fog, and the fatuous vapidity it can produce, keeps getting in the way.

Anyone got a really big fan?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But there will be no blog entry today due to poor time management on my part.

The skit show with my jokes and my skit in it happened last night, and it was fab.

The audience laughed like hell. The performers were frigging brilliant. They got every bit of comedy out of the skits, plus some they came up with themselves. Everyone had a great time and the whole thing was a smashing success.

Got lots of laughs with my skit, which is linked here.

Still wish I could have rewritten it one more time. Make it less verbose. I think I get carried away with the fun of playing with words and forget that these are things actual live human beings are going to have to say.

Oh, and here are the desk jokes of mine that got used in the “News” skit :

3. Hundreds of people are coming forth saying Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills. Top psychologists agree this is because Trump suffers from a psychological condition known as “being an asshole”.

 

14. A Russian charity was horrified that the pamphlets they ordered did not say “Do good!”, as intended, but instead said “Exterminate Beavers”. The charity is refusing to distribute the pamphlets out of fear of sparking a war with Canada.

 

18. The city of Montreal has recently enacted a ban on pit bulls, sparking international outrage. The organization behind the ban released the following statement : “Meow. “

I thought that we were all getting five of our jokes into the skit, not three, but I am guessing that seeing as 5 jokes times 18 students equals 90 jokes total, the number of jokes per student had to be lowered in order to make the skit a more manageable size (54 jokes).

Actually, that still seems like too many jokes. I mean sure, the jokes are very short, but to me it feels more like there were around 30 jokes.

Hmmm. I hope that doesn’t mean some people had none of their jokes make it.

Anyhow, the point is, people laughed at the jokes, and that’s a good thing. I am one funny dude. It was a very affirming to know that I can write desk jokes as well as skits. From what Jackie says, there’s a lot of work in that field because talk shows need to have roomfuls of writers to come up with enough good jokes for a monologue.

And that kind of work sounds pretty fun, but pretty competitive too. I would really have to hone my skills if I wanted my jokes to make it into to monologue.

And I would very. very much want that.

Come to think of it, it’s like how badly I want my short film (whatever teh fuck it ends up being) to be one of the ones that gets produced.

I have never considered myself to be a highly competitive person, but then again, there has never been something I really wanted on the line either.

So I am not competitive so much as I am very, very greedy, and when there is something I want bad enough, I am determined to be the first little piggy at the trough.

Plus, I might not be competitive but I am definitely ambitious. The sky is the limit as far as I am concerned, and seeing as my ultimate dream is to be the next Disney, I think it is safe to say that I am aiming for the stars.

Which means the sky is not the limit after all. Hmm.

Anyhow, that brings us to the sticky question of just what I am willing to do in order to get what I want. It’s a question that is easy to ignore when you are not in direct competition with others. It’s very easy to imagine that you would be a saint and never do anything even remotely unethical in order to get your way.

But most people’s lives to include the sort of competition that we in the entertainment arts have to face. The sad truth is that it’s a buyer’s market for writers, actors, and so on. For every opening there are a hundred or more people with stars in their eyes and dreams in their hearts ready to do whatever it takes to make those dreams come true.

So I have to ponder the issue of what I will do to get ahead. I know, without a doubt, that will compete as hard as I can by making my stuff as good as I can, no problem. I don’t care if that means I outshine others to the point where they disappear from view. Tough titties, losers. I win.

And I am pretty certain I would be willing to use at least a portion of my power of diabolical deviousness to get ahead. Figure out ways to get close to decision makers and ingratiate myself with them. Maybe figure out the competition’s creative weaknesses and make sure my stuff is good in those areas.

But when it comes to actively hurting others by trying to sabotage them… I dunno. I think I could only do it if it had been done to me first by the person. If that was the case, I would say to myself “Oh, so that’s how you want to play” and then it’s freaking ON.

And I am pretty sure that I can be crazy dangerous if my ire is aroused. I am one of those people for whom anger does not necessary cloud the mind. In fact, it can focus it into a deadly laser that strikes the heart of my enemies as if their defenses weren’t even there.

But I don’t want to have to go to such dark places. I don’t like that side of myself and I would rather not encourage it. I would prefer to be a nice, sunshiny, happy dude who gets ahead via charm, talent, and carefully applied sycophanty.

The idea is to support other people’s egos, but not in a way that makes you seem weak, servile, or grossly dependent.

In other words, support their ego without losing their respect.

I think I can handle that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, and P.S. : looks like there’s a lot more of you out there than I thought. I checked the stats for this blog and it looks like I am getting 90 visitors a day, mostly via Google.

So um…. hi everybody! Don’t forget, if you like this entry, you can always read all the previous entries via the calendar on the right hand of the screen.

And thank you!

Tonight’s the night when the VFS sketch show with my skit in it happens. I’m kind of nervous about it.

Not that I am really worried it will suck and everyone will hate it. I know it’s a decent skit. I know it’s a tad wordy and I wish I could have rewritten it before it was too late, but it’s funny and weird and definitely not the sort of skit one normally sees, so… it will do.

No, what makes me nervous is that I know I will be struggling hard with my own issues. A lot of emotions are gonna come up when I am watching the skit. I will undoubtedly have to fight me way through waves of crippling self-doubt and anxiety, and that won’t be fun.

But that’s the price we pay for being artists. I was hanging out in the writer’s lounge last week, and one of the new students was talking about something he had submitted and how he didn’t like it and thought it sucked and wished he could take it back.

And I said “And now you know the price of being a good writer : gnawing self doubt!”

In retrospect, that was a tad cynical. That’s not the sort of trip I should be laying on the young ones. I don’t want to rain on their parade. I couldn’t lie to him and say the self-doubt goes away, because I don’t think it does. But it is what drives us to greatness. It goads us into trying fanatically hard to get it right.

And that means we are destined to forever walk the razor’s edge between overconfidence making us poor artists and self-doubt overcoming us and making us unable to be artists at all. It’s a tricky ride and one of the reasons why writers tend to drink.

It helps us relax enough to believe we can write something worth reading.

I don’t have that problem, obviously. I have never made liquor a part of my life. All my drinking has been social, and I am not very social, so not much drinking. I would never take that fatal first step by starting to drink alone.

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Still, I understand why it happens. The internal pressures that lead to my writing are extremely intense. I sometimes feel like I live in a steel mill with very little regard for safety measures. So everywhere around me, molten steel flows, enormous presses flatten red-hot steel into flat sheets, and enormous dump trucks dump thousands of tons of slag without any regard for the safety of those below.

None of this shows on the outside, of course, except possibly to those who know me well. As far as the outside world is concerned, this steel mill of mine is a pleasant, harmless looking park with green grass and comfy benches and a fountain or two.

The only giveaway that something’s not quite right is the humming high tension wires nearby that gives you a feeling of power and danger when you get too close.

But in the deep dark factory below, mighty forces are tamed to produce the products that I desperately want people to buy and like, despite how unusual they are.

Now if only I had a marketing department….

Vast elaborate metaphors aside, today is going to be quite the day. Felicity is very worried that we are going to run into nightmare traffic on the way there (it has happened before) and so we will likely be leaving Richmond at 3:30 pm in order to make it to VFS by 7:30, which is when the doors open for the show.

That’s a four hour gap, but part of that will be taken up by us going out to eat.

This puts me under a significant amount of unexpected time pressure. I figured we would be leaving at 5, not 3:30, so I didn’t have lunch till 1 pm, and now she is gonna want to eat at maybe 4 o’clock.

Oh well, what must be, must be. I just hate feeling rushed.

Honesty, what I could use right now is a nap. I have not been getting enough sleep during the week, and I would really like to be able to snooze enough to catch up.

And I am lucky in that I am feeling healthy enough to experience healthy sleepiness. A lot of the time, I am too messed up for that and that means I only get the sort of weak, sick sleepiness which is like the kind that comes when you have the flu.

I like the healthy kind a lot more. It’s soothing.

But no, no more sleep for me! When I finish blogging, I have to shower, then get dressed and ready, then wait for Felicty to message me.

After that, I might, if I am lucky, have half an hour to do with as I please.

(When you read this, Felicity, know that I am not blaming you for or accusing you of anything. I am just bitching about the situation in general. )

I am kinda worried about the shower. I can get sleepy after a shower, and I am already sleepy right now, so I am worried that the shower will make me SUPER sleepy.

Why am I always sleepy at the worst possible time? I went to bed at 2 am last night and had all the time I wanted to sleep after that.

Instead, I wake up at 10 am, go bacl to sleep at 11 am,  wake up at 1 pm, eat lunch, and then sit down to blog, STILL sleepy after like ten hours or sleep.

I guess when you’re in sleep debt deep enough, all that deferred sleepiness grabs you at the first possible opportunity and wants payment in full, NOW.

It’s like owing money to the mob.

Makes me wish someone would invent the Instant Shower. Some kind of high tech gizmo that completely washes and sanitizes you in one second.

Like, with a fine tune energy beam that just vaporizes everything within a millimeter of your skin, including bacteria, viruses, loose skin cells, sweat, and pore goblins.

Oh wait, you’re not supposed to know about those. Forget I told you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, some alternatives to “basket of deplorables” that I wrote in reply to a Facebook post earlier today :

• A handcart of troglodytes.
• A busload of pussy farts.
• A shopping bag of degenerates.
• A potato sack of crotch leeches.
• A infestation of eyeball weevils.
• A gallon and a half of supersaturated manure.
• A truckload of chucklefucks.
• A steamload of inbreds.
• The exact opposite of America.
• A Republican Convention full of the morally retarded unfit to even call themselves adults.
• A Trump rally full of the kind of people who go to Trump rallies.
• A hearse full of the nearly dead and the poorly bred,.
• A diaper full of turds with mouths.
•  An example of what happens when you have people who will believe absolutely anything as long as it means they don’t ever ever ever ever EVER had to admit they were wrong or change their minds.
• A graveyard full of victims of history.
• A stupid thing full of stupid people.
• A bumper car full of evil clowns.
• A Taco Bell wrapper full of puke burritos.
• An overcast day where it rains stupid.
• A cataclysm of crapulence.
• A decorative chess set of moronic pawns and nothing else.
• A bucket of whale droppings.
• A Voltron made of five different colors to be racist against.
• A bunch of sheeplike, submissive, anti-democratic, traitorous, anti-freedom authoritarian Statists who make Jesus weep for how little of His message they have learned and yet they still say they worship Him.
• Or worst of all : Trump supporters.

Fun things happen when I get the right creative stimulus.

In a perfect world, that (to me) hilarious post would attract a buttload (OMG, I forgot to use buitload) of new Facebook friends and I would become Internet famous overnight.

But I guess I will have to wait.

Whee, I don’t have class tomorrow! The only people that do have class is two of the Feature Film classes. The rest of us get the day off.

And then, after the weekend, I have three more days of classes and then the term is officially over and I have four days off before term 4 (!) starts on the 24th.

I’ve already checked out a little. For example, it was very freeing to realize that my Feature Film class no longer matters because I am going into TV. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that next Feature Film class will be the one where we FINALLY get around to my feature script, I probably would have lost interest entirely.

Actually, that’s not true. I would still be mentally there to help my classmates by contributing to workshopping THEIR scripts. I could never let down the team by failing to contribute to the group endeavour.

How very Canadian of me. Letting people down by not doing my share is unthinkable to me. Even if I was stuck in some kind of group work situation where I hate my partners because they aren’t doing any of the work and I end up having to do everything myself and they are total dicks about it, it would still be unthinkable for me to not do at least my part of the job.

And the highly driven, goal-oriented, compulsive-completer, secret keener part of me would ensure that I do the rest of the work too.

Besides, the control freak part of me would LOVE to get to do the whole thing without having to deal with input from others.

It would makes things so much simpler.

I wish I had been able to get my shit together enough to make an appointment with my therapist for tomorrow. It’s way too late now. I will probably see him next Thursday or Friday for my  “end of term” visit.

Come to think of it, I have my schedule for next term now, and there is a LOT of free time in it. Sort of. Next term is where this TV shit starts in earnest (yay!) aaand that means I will be knee deep in producing a short, five minute film.

And there’s roughly a 1 in 4 chance it will be one I will write.

Being the creativity freak that I am, I really don’t want to work on someone else’s project if I can possibly avoid it. My overflowing creativity needs an outlet, plus I plan on using this as an opportunity to test out my obvious intelligence/natural leadership superpowers and I am just gonna assume that the person whose script is chosen get to be the leader of that particular group of students.

4 films will be produced and there’s eighteen of us left (and we started with 34!), so I imagine it will be two groups of four and two groups of five.

Hope I am in one of the groups of 4. Less competition.

The idea is that everyone will pitch their idea for the film, and then the whole class votes on which ones they like, and the top 4 get produced.

I want, no, I NEED to be in that magic 4. Which means I have to come up with a skit whose pitch will have great popular appeal. I am not sure what that might be yet, but I am sure I will think of something.

And of course, once I have the right idea I am just going to write the fucking thing. I mean, we’re only talking five pages here. I’m already written a 73 page movie and a 58 page episode of Bob’s Burgers. Five pages is nothing.

There’s a few of my better skit ideas that I would LIKE to do. But there’s no point in writing them if they are not going to win. And I know my sense of humour is a tad “out there”. So unless I figured out a way to give them a KILLER pitch, they are out of the running.

It will have to be something that appeals to Millennials. Something that expresses my rage at the people shitting all over the young generation. Fuck you, assholes, you had it easy compared to these kids who were raised like veal then thrown to the wolves.

That’s good, I should use that.

More immediately, I will have to come up with a five minute pitch for an original series over the (for me) long weekend. Which means I need an idea for one.

I am pondering something along the lines of a fresh angle on a proven formula type thing. That’s what sells. I definitely would like to write some kind of “secret war” type show, where there is a massive power struggle going on that most people don’t know about. And with a sci fi or supernatural angle.

Wait… I just remembered an idea I had a while ago that would fit the bill perfectly.

Mua ha ha… I might just have a SHOW.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about the fog I live in lately.

Because it really is at the root of all my problems. It’s the reason I am absentminded, because things I am supposed to remember disappear into the fog. It’s the reason I am so clumsy, because it’s hard to be precise when you are suffused through and through with a depressive fog. It’s the reason behind my general helplessness and cluelessness, because the fog interferes with my executive function and makes it hard to pull myself together and concentrate, as well as sapping my confidence in my ability to handle things.

All my major person hurdles stem from this ice cold clinging fog. And I have no idea what would happen if it was gone.

Because the main function of this fog is to protect me. It keeps life at a safe difference and cools down my emotions and allows me to take a detached and intellectual attitude towards life, one based almost entirely on mental stimulation alone.

And smart but stupefied is no way to go through life, son.

Life is real. Life is present. Life is hot. Life is NOW. My only hope lies in refusing to be seduced by the fog’s siren song which tells me that all emotions can be escaped by freezing them in their tracks and then pretending they don’t exist any more.

But it’s hard to do because I have lived my life in the cold and dark for so long that I can’t remember anything else. I don’t even know how to feed anything but my mind. My soul cries out for nourishment but I honestly don’t know what to feed it, or how.

Because of this, it tends to get nourishment at random intervals, and never on purpose. The best I can say for myself is that sometimes, the fog thins enough for something I watch or read to get through to me and truly touch me. And in those moments, I feel warm and alive and connected, and I want those moments to last forever.

And I get real healing in those moments. Warmth has reached my frozen emotions and, for an all too brief time, I am a living, feeling, real human being and not the walking dead.

It’s a lot like Anne Rice’s description of what a vampire feels like right after they have fed. But I’m no vampire. Baby, I’m the walking dead.

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I don’t have it in me to feed on others. What right do I have to deprive them of their life just to sustain my own? Where is the net gain in that?

Still, in those brief times when I am alive, the ice pack around my heart melts some and I get that little bit closer to being able to feeling the sun on my soul.

I can imagine the fog going away in the abstract. I can dream a dreamy dream of the fog lifting and my standing naked and whole before the world, wet like I was freshly born but rapidly drying in the sun’s warmth, free and proud and strong.

But when I try to imagine it actually happening, I freeze up. How appropriate!

Is it just fear of the unknown? Perhaps. It’s certainly the case that I have no idea what life would be like without it. It would be greater to have the increased mental clarity, active memory, coordination, and competence, but at what cost?

I have no idea.

As far as I can tell, the fog has always been there. Maybe I was born with it. Or maybe it’s just been there for so long that I can’t even conceive of it not being there, whether it was there during a certain memory or not.

So I can’t tell you when it arrived. Maybe that day I laid down in the snowbank and willed myself to die. It would make sense on a metaphorical level, anyhow. Ice and snow on the outside, ice and snow on the inside.

I guess I should be glad I was too young to think of suicide. Imagine a seven year old contemplating suicide because he feels like he has no way out of his pain.

Jesus fuck, that’s tragic. My childhood is almost unbearably poignant. I wonder what would happen if I wrote it all down in an autobiography. Would anyone want to read it? Would it be too sad for anyone to enjoy? Would people even believe me?

Some day, maybe I will do exactly that. But right now, I have too many stories left to tell.

At this point, I don’t know how much of the fog is my illness and how much is my medication. It might very well be that I am overdue for a reduction in my meds in order to enable me to have more access to my emotions and speed up the healing/thawing process. But that would be too risky for me right now.

After all, I am in the middle of getting myself a practical education.

Today we went over the last bit of my Bob’s Burgers script, and the substitute teacher said there was a lot of really funny stuff in it. Bonus! I am slowly gathering evidence that I am a very funny writer.

So I have that going for me, at least. Makes me wish print wasn’t dying so that I could be a funny columnist like Dave Barry. All he had to do in life was to write one 750 word column a week. I could totally handle that.

Then again, what would I do with the rest of my time? What I really want is a job that pays well and keeps me busy. I have read about the hard driving pace of television,and it sounds fab to me.

I would love to have the luxury of getting really, honestly tired. Not fat-guy tired. Not depression tired. Not messed up blood sugar tired.

Well and truly tired from working hard all day.

To some people, that would be a nightmare, but for me, it’s the dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hell if I know.

Yeah, I am going to talk about the intellectual minority versus the average majority again. What can I say, I’m on a kick.

I have tried, may times, to put myself in the shoes of a perfectly average person of perfectly average intelligence, and I have never succeeded, at least not to my satisfaction. ^[1] I can get glimpses and I can understand them from an analyst’s point of view, but I just can’t seem to imagine what it is like to be them.

It’s a hard limit. When I try to imagine what it’s like to be them, all I can think of is to imagine thinking like a child. Not in the sense of IQ, but in the sense of their being no hard division between the objective and the subjective, and therefore life being more a mix of emotion, instinct, and reasoning than it is in the rare air beneath my hair.

I am not saying that these people are childish, primitive, or stupid. I am saying that it’s the only frame of reference I have to understanding them.

I think the problem lies in my over-intellectualized fear of surrendering to emotion. My intellectualism is the main mechanism by which I enable a sense of being “in control”, and leaving that cool parlor of intellect and opening the door to unreasoned action seems like chaos, madness, and death to me.

So my mind just won’t go there. The wall between emotion and reason is foundational to my adult personality. I see people acting directly out of emotion and I just shake my head because I can’t believe someone can do that and get away with it.

That speaks volumes about me, I know.

Because I also envy them. It seems like life would be so much simpler if one just acts directly on emotion. Maybe not better, exactly, but simpler.

I mean, obviously these people are making it as adults in modern society. So it’s not like they are savages. They are, in fact, way better at life than I am precisely because they have had to learn to cope and adapt without being able to escape into abstraction, and therefore developed naturally and healthily.

So just to make it crystal clear : if I can’t truly understand them, the problem lies in me, not them. I am a broken person. They are whole.

It all comes down to one of the  fundamental questions that I wrestle with : who would I be if I didn’t have all this intellect? Who is the person inside the machine?

I’d be average, of course. But beyond that, who can tell? I feel like my high IQ has dominated my life (and me, in a sense) ever since that day when I suddenly figured out how to read, like, all at once.

That’s when people started talking about how bright I was, understandably, and when I started to get attention and praise for being so gosh darn smart.

It’s also the thing that lead to my not going to kindergarten, and that was likely the dominating factor in why I was so bad at socialization. And that led to me being bullied and ostracized, and that led to everything else about me.

This all makes it hard for me to truly, deeply relate to the average majority. It also causes me to fear them because they are, to me, unpredictable. Not only that, at any moment I might find myself in a social situation full of unspoken expectations where I am clearly supposed to know what to do, but I don’t. Then snap! goes my tenuous connection with them, and they look at me like I’m an alien, and I feel humiliated and ostracized and far colder than I ever did when I was alone in the dark.

Somehow, with my fellow brainiacs, that doesn’t happen. It’s like we’re all playing by the same hidden rules and there is a deeply subconscious mutual agreement that we all behave reasonably and with a certain amount of thought.

No doubt we have our own unspoken rules, assumptions, and taboos that would seem just as random, arbitrary, and confusing to an outsider as the usual rules seem to us.

The difference is that somehow, most of us have developed the same rulebook in relative social isolation from society and from one another. I can meet a nerd from Texas and find I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the average folk next door to me. There is a mutual recognition and we can be more relaxed with one another than we ever are amongst the “mundanes”.

How is this possible? It makes me think that this naturally occurring intellectual class that I go on about is built into our DNA and our hardwired social programming, and part of that is being able to recognize and communicate with one another instinctively.

Perhaps some of us are born to be wizards, or fighters, or clerics, or thieves. Maybe the classic D&D character classes are actually a representation of the naturally occurring roles a human society needs in order to function.

It needs people to fight, someone to heal, someone to think and plan, someone to explore and patrol, someone to be clever and good with their hands, and someone has to be the one who deals with what is going on inside people’s souls and who tends to the more abstract needs of the people.

Societies that had this job differentiation distribution would succeed over others that did not because they would always produce people suited for the necessary roles.

It makes me wonder if other archetypes recognize and relate to one another. I have definitely met people who seem like they were born to play the solider/fighter/guardian role. And of course, we nerds are the thinkers, the philosophers, the planners, the designers, and so forth and so on.

Some of us are also the clever ones who can make things.

I can’t say I can think of anyone who seems destined to be a healer, at least, not in the real world. Ditto for a spiritual calling, except for people like me who are drawn to being a therapist. But I might be unsuited to recognizing such.

Oh, and then there’s leadership as well. All societies need leaders. Hmmmm.

OK, so I am still working on this theory.

Anyhoo, what I am really trying to say is, I don’t get normal people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We all agree on most things. Nobody is going to tell you that water isn’t wet, that the sun comes up in the West, or that getting run over by a truck is a lot of fun.

We all agree on these kinds of things because being wrong about them could harm us. It’s functional knowledge,  the kind you need just to make it as a human being on planet Earth. It’s also true that most of this knowledge is also immediately demonstrable. All you have to do to prove the existence of gravity is to drop something.

So there’s not a lot of room for disagreement.

But that only goes so far. Civilization requires more abstract forms of knowledge, and that’s where humanity’s unity of opinion. becomes diversity. Something as simple as the best way to chop down a tree or the most efficient route from A to B can support a wide variety opinion. These are questions for which an objective answer theoretically exists, but so do many different solutions of roughly equal merit.

Still, these are functional questions, and their answers have a direct impact on people’s lives. Therefore, people inherently seek the answer closest to the truth.

But when you go further into the abstract, the answers mean less in terms of coping with day to day life, and it is on these questions that the average folk and the naturally occurring intellectual class part ways.

It is we the intellectuals who concern themselves with Truth with a capital T. For average folk, it doesn’t really matter. Not when you really get down to the nuts and bolts of things. Of course, one cannot believe something to be true without believing it to be True, but when the issue lies outside one’s everyday life, there’s very little penalty for getting it wrong. Thus, belief can be shaped by other forces, such as one’s preferences, one’s moral outlook, one’s presuppositions about the world, and most importantly, by whatever is needed in order to meet the individual’s emotional needs.

And it doesn’t matter how loudly we, the scouts who explore the world outside of Plato’s Cave, shout at them that they should THINK about things. They don’t want to, and arguably, they can’t. Not in the way we mean it.

It’s like a gym teacher yelling at a fat kid to do a pull-up. Maybe the kid just plain can’t. Or maybe they can do it once and at great cost. But expecting them to do it as often and as well as the fit kids is not only unrealistic, it’s cruel.

Our brains are inherently efficient in a way that can seem like laziness to the uninformed. So to an above-average person, the sort of magical and/or emotional thinking that average  people use to derive their beliefs seems like laziness.

But these people are not lazy any more than the fat kid is lazy. The truth is that the task is objectively harder for them. And it is unfair and prejudicial for the above average to hold the average to their standards.

And odds are, the average person is devoting the exact same percentage of their mental resources to figuring things out as even the most high-flying intellectual, its just that the intellectually blessed have more of those resources to start with.

Where that leaves us in the naturally occurring intellectual class remains unclear, however. The problem with facing the fact that some people are just plain smarter than the majority is that a fundamental egalitarianism is built into the very pith and marrow of modern society. One of the main things that keeps the free world functioning is the reality equality, and one rule of that reality states that all people, no matter what, have a fundamental and unalienable status and worth and that therefore no person’s opinion is privileged and therefore considered a priori superior.

This deep rooted assumption is vitally necessary for a free society because it soothes our status/worth needs enough for us to cohabitate without bloodshed. Only when we are thus becalmed that we can be citizens of a free society and satisfy our need for status via peaceful and civilized (i.e. nonviolent) means.

Trying to come to grips with the notion that some people actually are born smarter and therefore “better” in one sense than others flies in the face of that assumption.

Which is odd, in a way. We readily accept that some people are more talented than others in areas like the arts or athletics. We can handle that some people are born better at math or writing or any number of other fields.

I think this is because none of those fields of natural ability violate fundamental egalitarianism like intellect does. The assumption underlying the notion of natural talents is that everyone has some kind of natural talent or talents, and therefore in sum total we remain equal. John is good at A, Jane is good at B, Will is good at C, and society needs people to do A B and C, so we all have a place and a role and a value.

But intelligence, like I have said before, is the ultimate advantage one can have over another human  being. Intelligence, at least in the abstract, makes one better at understanding and thus controlling reality.

To people of average intellect, we are wizards, and not to be trusted because we can do things and know things they cannot.

Therefore, a true recognition of the cognitive gap between the intellectual minority and the average majority would be to force people to recognize this frightening inequality, and I am fairly sure that would not go well for us brainy types.

Our safety, as it were, lies in blending in and making ourselves useful. To be good wizards, and use our powers for good, like the Disney version of Merlin.

Otherwise, they will see us as less Harry Potter and more Voldemort.

And nobody likes Voldemort.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.