I talk a lot in this space about being He Who Walks Through Walls, a five dimensional being, from the point of view of others. My mind moves in ways they just can’t grasp because it’s too different. And I step through the social and mental barriers that confine others, sometimes without even knowing I am doing it.

That’s not me bragging. That me explaining part of the genesis of my isolation. Because if I don’t know I am doing it, I have no idea why people are staring at me and I can’t understand why others don’t do as I do.

Hence, they look at me like I just grew a third arm out of my hest and used it to adjust my crotch. And I can’t see why.

I really can’t. From my point of view, what I say doesn’t seem to be markedly different from what others are saying. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t connect.

Maybe it’s how I say it. I’ve talked before about my realization that there’s an inherent pause before I speak because I am always thinking hard about what I say and I am not comfortable speaking from emotion or impulse.

I was gonna work on that. But it’s so hard to change the habit of a lifetime.

So it might just be an artifact of my being out of sync with others. But I don’t think so. I think there has to be more to it than that.

Because it’s not just that my timing is off. People literally don’t grasp what I am saying. They understand the notes but they can’t hear the melody. Something about the actual content of what I say is beyond people. I wish I knew what it was.

Other than it being a matter of intelligence. It’s not impossible that the problem is that what I say comes from an IQ far enough above a lot of people that communication on my terms is simply impossible for them. I hate this line of thinking and I have resisted it so far because not only does it make me feel like I am being an elitist prick but it suggests that my lack of connection with others is simply unsolvable.

Not without some kind of major paradigm shift in my head, anyhow. The kind that would allow me to view others as childlike inferiors and talk down to them. And I really do not want to do that.

But maybe I have to. I don’t know. Maybe I am beating my head bloody against a brick wall when I am trying to speak to others as equals. Maybe a certain recognition of my superiority would actually make me a better person.

But I don’t want to go there. I loathe the very idea of it. I don’t want to hold myself above, even if it’s justified. I want to be with people, not above them.

And it’s not like I am incomprehensible to everybody. There’s people who get me. People who run at my speed, I suppose, or at the very least, I can run at theirs.

Where was I going with this before I began to ramble? Oh right.

So I do walk through the walls of reality that hold a lot of people together. But then, what holds me together? What keeps lil old polymorphous me from oozing down the drain?

Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing at all holding me together. Nothing except a constant input of will and concentration. Mental muscles frozen in place by constant exertion holding together a barely viscous puddle of person, and the accompanying terror of letting go and having all that is inside me come out.

Maybe that would be the best thing for me, honestly. Here comes the flood. Let the river wash me clean and take my troubles away from me.

But I am so scared. Who would I become? What would be left of me? Would I have to start all over again from scratch, like V from V For Vendetta?  Would I even recognize the person I am when all the bad stuff is gone?

I keep picturing this smug sarcastic prick who is so totally convinced of his own effortless superiority that he doesn’t take anything serious and manipulates people for his own gain or even just his own amusement and who always seems to be three steps ahead of the consequences of his actions and doesn’t even care.

That’s a version of me that the world can do without.

But I do wonder sometimes if being that prick would work better for me.

And besides, it’s not like that’s all of me. It’s just a facet. The reality of the situation is that I am one complicated dude with a lot of facets to my personality and that’s why I have such a hard time integrating it all into one identity.

Back to walls. My lack of them seems, to me, to be both the key to all my powers and the reason I am so fucked up mentally. Or possibly the result of it.

It’s hard to sort out cause and effect in these kinds of things.

I look at people in their carefully cloistered lives and wonder what it would be like to have that kind of sense of security and safety. I’m such a creature of the trackless tundra that I honestly don’t know.

I find it very hard to imagine being so limited. I instinctively eschew limitation. Ironic for someone who has suffered from lack of structure, both internal and external, all his life.

But I automatically avoid limitations and so I end up standing apart, alone, looking in at that bright warm world where others prosper then picking up my bindle and moving on.

Is it even possible for me to come in from the cold? I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes I am afraid I would melt. Lose all sense of who I am.

Then again, who I am isn’t exactly working that well for me now. Maybe some melting would do me good, let me assume a new shape.

One that works better for this crazy world.

One where I can be happy.

And nothing is more important than that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry, but I feel compelled to talk politics tonight. I’ve held off for as long as I can but now I have thoughts and emotions that need to be expressed or I am going to lose my mind and wander the streets naked and filthy and preaching of the coming apocalypse.

And I’d have a point.

I still maintain that we don’t know what Trump will actually do. But we do know what he can do, and that’s a lot less than people think.

A lot of people are assuming that the Republican House and Senate will be all too eager to bend over and assume the position for Trump. But what they are missing is that half the party hates his stinking guts, especially the part owned by guys like the Koch brothers.

The Donald’s support is exclusively populist. The power structure doesn’t like him. He’s embarrassing, he’s unpredictable, he’s unstable, and he is interested in nobody’s interests but his own.

And they hate that kind of thing. King lizards like the Kochs don’t want sociopaths like themselves in positions of power. They want sycophantic toadies eager for their approval. Trump is their worst nightmare.

You can see this already by how the markets responded to a Trump victory. They dropped like a rock from space. Trump means uncertainty and uncertainty is always bad business. I am sure Trump will try to throw the financial class a bone of some sort, like a cut in corporate taxes, but they will only be happy with someone who does what they are told, and The Donald sees absolutely no reason why he should do that.

After all, in his mind, he’s basically King of the World now. He has less of a reason to care what the elites think of him than ever. Not only that, he can rightfully claim he has a populist mandate, and is therefore “doing the will of the people”.

So we at least can guarantee that the rich scumbags will remain Trump’s implacable foe and do whatever they can to shit on his parade.

Also, I don’t think Little Donnie’s populist halo is going to stay on for very long after he gets into office. He has promised things to his rabid masses that are physically impossible to deliver. And sooner or later, he is going to fuck them over.

Maybe not even intentionally. He will simply trip over his own dick and say the wrong thing and his people will feel like he is not a REAL conservative any more.

Especially if he does something only a dirty pinko commie America-hating flag-burning faggot liberal would do, like make decisions with common sense and restraint.

In a way, there is a potential silver lining to that turd salad. And it has to do with Trump’s dominant personality trait, his enormous ego.

Or rather, his vanity, which is not the same thing. He is intensely worried about what people are saying about him and what they think of him. He’s become the monster he is because he found a group of people that feed his ego like never before. They worship him. They adore him. They believe in him like he is the Second Coming, and have invested all their faith, hope, and dreams on their Great White Dope magically making everything as wonderful as it never was in the past.

A guy like Trump can’t resist that. It’s the drug he craves the most in the world and what’s more, it’s the primo uncut penthouse grade of it.

And that means he will do whatever he needs to do to stay in their good graces. He can bullshit off things like The Wall and rounding up all the Muslims and illegal aliens (because how would you even) but the minute he’s in office, they are going to expect something big and impressive from him.

Time for their hate-Jesus to turn some water into wine already.

And these people have been whipped into a rabid frenzy and THEN had their boy win, something that none of them thought would really happen. That makes his win a miraculous event in its own right to them, or at least, for those of them who voted for him wanting him to win.

As with Brexit, I am sure for a lot of them it was a protest vote. And there’s video evidence of the look on Trump’s face when it was announced he had won, and he did not look like he thought he was going to be king of the world.

He looked like he was going to throw up.

So who knows how long he will even last in the role? We’ve seen how rapidly the job ages a person and Trump is already 70. And there’s always a chance he will at least try to just run away and quit when he gets bored with the job.

Add that into the other factors, and Little Donnie might not have the job for long.

But that would leave the US of A in the hands of Mike Pence, and that seems far worse to me, because either he will remain the hate filled intolerant bigot he has been so far and thus do his best to turn the US into a fascist theocracy, or he will suddenly transform into exactly the kind of errand boy for the elite the Kochs want him to be.

We’d be better off with the later but not by much.

So in many ways, better the mad king Donnie, who is corrupt but incompetent and does have some good intentions, if only by chance, than a fully competent Nazi clone like Pence who looks like his idea of a good time is putting sinners to the rack.

Honestly, the old joke about Quayle become deadly serious when contemplating Pence :

I hope that the Secret Service has orders saying that if Trump dies, shoot Pence.

And maybe use a silver bullet dipped in holy water, just in case.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, because of all the cotton in my head.

OK, so I’m a fat Q-tip.

I have been pondering somkething I have never named before, not exactly. It’s this particular version of stress response and/or depression ^[1] that I have experienced many, many times in my life without really taking a look at it.

It’s the sort of thing that empties my mind and fills the empty space with a kind of thick, fluffy substance that blocks all complex reasoning and soaks up the negative emotions, leaving me in the state I have referred to previously as “slap-happy”.

But the thing is, that version of me can cope, sort of. It definitely can produce the minimum effort to convince people to go away and leave me alone when I am feeling intense social anxiety but I am too timid to confront the person or even just politely ask them to go.

It’s still an giddy idiot, however. It’s kind of like being drunk without the muscle relaxing portion of it. I feel dizzy and disconnected and an eerie kind of calm comes over me because my world has been narrowed down by all that cotton to a size I can handle, and nothing seems to be that big a deal.

I’ve turned into that person during job interviews, while talking to my GP, when I was dealing with very serious matters that require the very kind of thinking that is being suppressed, and even when just dealing with the people in my life.

There’s been times when even dealing with my roomies Joe and Julian seems like a massive challenge and makes me panic attack big time. And I love those guys and trust them more than any other non-relative in the world.

But depression doesn’t care. If my chemicals are fucked up enough, anything is possible. Like when I was living on Duchess Street in a bachelor apartment with a shared bathroom, and I would get too freaked out to use the communal bathroom (because someone might SEE me!) so I would pee out my ground-floor window.

And the thing is, the cotton was there big time. It’s not just something that flares up in times of stress then goes away. The more I think about it, the more I realize that in the long term, this “cotton” is the foundation of my depression.

It’s what sits there displacing my rational thoughts and draining me of vital energy. All the recovery I have ever done, since freaking 1999, has been a process of taking that long term cotton out for good, and thus getting my mental real estate back.

And I guess from there I am forced to conclude that the cotton is made of repressed memories and emotions. That the cotton is actually the “ice” I have been talking about with all my water metaphors over the years.

Only more cognitive than emotional.

I am not sure what happens now that I am fully cognizant of it. I would like to think that is is possible to clear that shit out as an act of cognition, but that’s probably just my overconfident ego thinking it is master of my mental domain.

It isn’t though. It is, at best, the keeper of the castle for my ice palace. The is so much more outside these walls than the cold dead world in which I live.

But it’s so quiet. And dark. So little stimulation. It keeps me calm.

And end up substituting mental stimulation for literally every other form of stimulation except for food.

Is that sad, or what?

Anyhow, back to the cotton-pickin’ topic.

The really deadly thing about the way I walk about with my head full of cotton is that, because I am too timid to attract attention to myself by letting my problems show, I have become extremely good at hiding my problems.

So when the world asks, “How are you doing?”, I smile and says “Just fine, thanks!”, even if I am dying inside and the rot is beginning to show.

It’s like when I was in the hospital for what turned out to be IBS when I was in my early twenties. I was not just in the midst of a terrible IBS attack, with my guts working hard every day to find new ways to tie themselves into knots and cramps so severe, I could see my stomach ripple like it was full of nervous ants.

I was also malnourished, dehydrated, and in a mental state best described as apocalyptic level depression. I was scared and weak and if I tried to sleep, I had nightmares right our of Revelation, with streets boiling like tar pits, blood red skies, and horrible insectoid creatures moving almost too fast for the eyes to see.

In short, it was the worst time of my life.

Then a couple of orderlies come in to fix up the room for my eventual roommate, and instantly I am smiling, being charming, cracking jokes, and palling around with them.

Then they leave, and I go right back to being miserable.

Now think about that. Think about how I became this totally different person while there were people there and I had an audience.

Think about how that was my response to the stress of them showing up. That was my instinctive reaction. Hide my pain completely under charm and wit.

Think about what those orderlies would have said if one of the nurses had asked them how I was doing. “That guy? Oh, he’s FINE! Funny, too!”

But most of all…. think about how, when I was in that mode, I actually felt a hell of a lot better. It wasn’t entirely an act. For that short time, I was every bit as happy and healthy as I was pretending to be.

But the moment they left, I was back to being myself.

Is it any wonder that some of us end up trying to become that person?

It doesn’t work and it never can.

But it’s a very nice idea to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Dunno what to write about tonight. I feel like I’m between moods.

This whole missing bus pass thing is really dragging down my mood. Should have talked about it in therapy today, come to think of it. Alert readers with good memories already know that for me, financial distress is the worst form of stress for me.

My financial situation is precarious enough as is without the addition of $40/week in transit fees to pay.

Of course, I could always buy a monthly pass…. for $124. I have 8 more days of school this month. I would be paying $18/day! Um, nerp.

Of course, this is the modern era of Compass cards. So presumably monthly passes last 30 days now. Or at least, they could.

I have a total of 16 days of class left before the Christmas break, so that would be… $7.75 a day. Hmmm. Might actually be worth it. I’d save a quarter a day plus I wouldn’t have to buy tickets over and over.

Not that I have the capital at the moment, mind you, but it’s an interesting thought.

Two problems I see, though :

1. I dare not buy an actual Compass Card for fear of completely confusing The System when it comes time to actually issue my new pass. Bureaucracy is a timid beast and things like that spook it. And when they get spooked, it’s always us mere mortals who end up suffering.
2. For all I know, my new bus pass might get to me way before the Xmas break, and that would ruin the math and make the whole thing a loss.

Wow, visual mode has neat formatting tricks!

Anyhow, the point is, this is all taking my money away and that makes me really stressed out and sad and feeling helpless before the cruel and unthinking ravages of fate.

It also bums me out a bit.

So I got that hanging over me, making my blues come home and stay. Plus there is the whole having to work on someone else’s script adjustment that I am still making. So I have some stuff bringing me down.

But I’m getting over it. The bus pass thing sucks but is not fatal. It just means fewer meals at Bob’s or Bon Chaz, and other treats. That’s not good but it won’t kill me.

And the school thing bummed me out for a little while, but I am adjusting to that too. Right now, I am just eager to tackle the project. I could use something to pour my energies into. Something that can use my organizational and motivational skills. I would be perfectly happy to be the one who keeps all the info straight, makes schedules, and so on.

In fact, that’s exactly the sort of thing I find fun. I know that sounds weird, but the world should be grateful that there are mental perverts like myself who enjoy doing what others would find tedious or even mind-crushing.

I like to organize things. Not in my own life, obviously, but as work. I would make a great librarian or archivist. I’d actively enjoy putting books away.

And I like organizing people, too. So maybe that will be my job. There’s going to be a lot of paperwork involved (way more than you’d think, times two) and while I don’t enjoy paperwork the way I enjoy info wrangling, I am not intimidated by it either.

It’s just like accounting. It looks like the problem is its complexity when you look at it all at once. But the answers are generally quite simple and the real problem is having the endurance, patience, and concentration to just keep going when you are so incredibly bored that you want to scream.

You honestly do not need to understand the whole thing. That’s the trick of it. You just have to keep answering the damned questions one at a time, concentrating fully on each one then going on to the next.

The form (or the ledger) holds the full picture together. So you can forget about it.

So maybe I will be That Guy on this production team. The one who does the boring stuff nobody else wants to do. It’s not exactly a creative role, but it would at least make me feel useful, and I don’t normally get to feel that way at all.

I’m that colorful and entertaining toy that you quickly get bored with and stick on a shelf and forget about till the next time you move. When you get it, you think “Wow, this is amazing, there’s no way I would ever get tired of this!”.

But you do, because I wear you out with my colorful, vibrant self, and it’s not long before dealing with me seems like a chore and you just don’t need that kind of draining experience in your life and so you forget me, make excuses, and disappear.

And there I am, on the shelf, waiting, always waiting, for someone to love me.

I suppose that was sort of a poem. Just needs more line breaks.

Anyhow, so the silver lining in this whole five minute film fiasco is that  it should at least provide me with a place where I can be of use. I’ve got all these skills and I am using only a tiny percentage of them.

I could be really useful! Honest! I just need the right situation.

And the mental health to find the situation and wiggle my way into it, I suppose.

Still, I feel my good spirits returning after a few rough days. I am bouncing back, and that feels good. I have always felt like I had the potential for soul elasticity and possibly even, dare I dream, irrepressible optimism, if I could get all my psychological bullshit out of the way and get on with things.

Well, this bull shits every day, and who knows, some day I might actually catch up to the backlog (ahem) and be able to stand tall and pure and strong, and embrace life.

An atheist amen to that!

I will talk with you nice people again tomorrow.

I forgot the most important thing when talking about my script getting rejected yesterday.

It’s really been a harsh blow to my self-confidence.

Not that it should be. It’s not like it not getting picked had anything to do with whether or not it was funny or good enough. It didn’t reflect on my talents as a writer at all.

At most, it reflects on my skill at pitching my own works, and to a certain extent my lack of focus because I forgot to keep my audience strictly in mind when writing and pitching the thing and if I had kept my eyes on the prize, I would have written exactly the kind of pretentious faux-deep script that film school type audiences like.

Instead, I pitched it like I was trying to get funding. Whoops.

And it’s not like my script was singled out as bad. Thirteen other scripts didn’t make the grade either. Beating myself up for not being in the top 4 out of 18 doesn’t make much sense. I really should cut myself some slack.

But this is not a logical thing. It’s emotional. It’s about my tragically low self-esteem and how fragile it makes any degree of belief in myself. It’s about ambition, and wanting something so badly that not getting it is simply unacceptable. It’s about holding myself to a high standard, maybe too high, but I just have to aim for the stars every time.

It’s about learning that wanting it and trying hard is not enough. Nobody gets a fucking “A for Effort”. It’s about learning to truly focus on what I want and not let myself get distracted by bullshit. It’s about learning to let ambition and desire drive me.

It’s about not being so goddamned heavy inside. I really need to lighten up. Go easier on myself, take a more relaxed attitude towards life.

I guess there’s a lot of things I have to let go first.

<HR>

Wrote the above while on break at school. Home now.

I think I am recovering from my downer period re : script non-winning okay. I am not sure why I was so sure my script would make it, but I am choosing not to see that as a mistake, Believing in yourself and your work is vital to success in entertainment. If that means enduring a lot of disappointment, so be it.

Beat the hell out of never trying. As long as I keep trying and keep believing in my own talents, there’s a chance I will succeed.

You can’t win if you don’t stay in the game.

I will just have to adapt to disappointment. Historically, I have not handled disappointment very well. It’s always crushed me.

But history is not destiny. I can change, I can learn, I can grow. I can toughen up my hide. My days of total emotional cowardice are over and I am going to start turning into the wind and facing it head on, instead of hiding underground.

I’m telling you, this little blog of mine is like weight training for metaphors.

Another thing I need to improve : I need to stop doing it all myself. If others seem stronger than me, it is because they are spreading the load by relying on others for support.

I don’t think I know how to do that. My trust issues run pretty damned deep. I am very reluctant to ask for anything or express my needs at all. I got in a lot of trouble when I did that as a kid, and that has lead to both fear of trying it and a very low sense of self-worth.

When you make it clear to a kid that they have no right to ever ask for anything and they are not even worth your attention, you get a pretty fucked up kid.

What I could really use right now is for someone to tell me that I am talented and funny and a good writer. It would hasten my recovery considerably.

Today was a decent day of school. Got my series proposal in on time. I enjoyed working on it, as I knew I would, because it involved developing and fleshing out a lot of the details of the series and I love doing that kind of imagination work.

I am becoming increasingly worried about the quality of my education, though. Specifically, I am worried that I am not going to the right place for a TV writing education.

Because I really thought I would be taking all or mostly TV related classes by now. After all, I am in the TV stream now. But half my classes and 2/3 of my courses are about film. I’m not here for film. I want to learn TV.

This struck me today during Producing for Writers class. We are learning a ton about the film business in it, and that’s pretty cool, I guess. And I am sure some of it also applies to TV production. But I am not looking to become a TV producer.

I want to be a TV writer.

I am increasingly convinced that this whole “Producing for Writers” course is just VFS saving money by giving us writers the same producing course as the film production people get and tacking “for writers” to the end.

I don’t need to know all this shit in order to write for TV. For the people in film, it at least makes a little bit of sense. They need to know this kind of thing if they want to produce their own indie films. They also need to know it for their writing, so their screenplays will take production considerations in mind.

But TV doesn’t work like that. It’s produced in a way that is quite radically different from film, and quite frankly, I don’t need to know most of this shit.

I would rather be learning about how TV shows are made. Not movies.

I guess the way VFS sees it, all we really want is the diploma so why try very hard to actually teach us?

After all, the less the spend on educating us, the more of that $20K/student they get to keep to themselves.

But maybe i am just being bitter.

And maybe I’m not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And my ride crashed.

The last two days have not been what you would call good.

Yesterday, I discovered that my Compass Card (or for us old-schoolers, my bus pass) was missing. And so I panicked and freaked out for a bit. That thing is KIND of important to me, seeing as it’s what gets me to school and back. Without it, I have to pay $3.75 each way, or 7.50 a day, and that kind of shit adds up really fast.

And I really can’t afford spending $30/week on transit. ^[1] So I am going to get that mofo back ASAP. But I have to call the ministry to do it, and that fills me with fear because if the government is involved, it will probably take two weeks or more for the damn thing to arrive. And that’s a lot of $ down the drain.

It’s a good thing that I won’t be needing lunch money any time soon. My classes are well spaced out (how appropriate, so am I) enough this term that I almost never have two classes on the same day, and I only need lunch money on those days, so I should be good for that for a week or two.

But still, $30/week is a bigass drain on my highly delicate financial status, so I will get the replacement process started ASAP.

Ironically, I have to wait until the precious snowflakes at the ministry get back from lunch because they can’t be bothered to have anyone answering the phones between noon and 1 pm. Plus, they close at 4, which means they work a truly grueling six hours a day.

And seriously, how hard a job can that be? They only serve us people with the special red Compass cards that we get via the ministry, and how many of those can there be? Plus most people don’t lose their card like, ALL the time. So I imagine they get like, maybe ten calls a day at peak. And for that, they get civil service wages. What a joke.

It occurs to me that I should not post this blog entry until I have transacted my business with these no doubt lovely and hard-working people.

Don’t take it too seriously, folks, I am just bitchin’. I’ve been having a rough time of it lately and I am in a bad mood. Please don’t do anything to wreck shit for me. I’m in a very delicate emotional state right now, and further setbacks would crush me.

It always freaks me out hard when I lose something and have no idea when or how it happened. My absentmindedness makes my personal reality unstable and treacherous, and when I lose important stuff, that increases my reality anxiety tenfold.

I can understand why old, senile people start accusing everybody of stealing from them. It’s a lot easier on the ego to imagine people are stealing from you than it is to admit to yourself that you have no idea what the fuck is happening any more.

And if you start from the assumption that you are fine, period, what other conclusion can you come to as to how things keep disappearing and moving around?

HOLY FUCK. I just called the ministry to replace my buss pass and the automated voice told me that the estimated wait time was AN HOUR AND 20 MINUTES.

WTF are they doing over there? Do they only have one person on the phones? And that department apparently handles a whole bunch of shit, like senior supplements, nutrition allowances, and the discounted event passes program.

I bet Christie Clark slashed their fucking budget.

But what really has me bummed out today is that my scrip was not one of the four chosen for production at school today. I went into it full of confidence and delivered my pitch well, but it just didn’t make the cut.

And I know why. Looking back, it was clear that I pitched what I thought was great about my script as a project and what I should have done was pitched at as the sort of thing my audience wanted to hear, which was apparently attention-grabbing avant garde filmmaking, whereas I just wanted to make something funny that was dead simple and very high in content.

Comedy always gets the shaft in the world of film, dammit.

Looking back, I wish I had written something with way more of a hook. I tried to sell it as a simple, fun project that would be easy to do and where there is loads of room for individual contribution and where everyone involves would have a rockin’ good time.

That failed to capture their imagination. I suppose they wanted more of a challenge.

And I was pretty freaking depressed right after it happened. It was such a big disappointment. I had tried so hard to pitch it but, nope. I just stared at the pattern of the carpet for a little while, just trying to process it.

I got cocky and didn’t keep my eye on the ball. That’s what happened.

What is important right now is that I do not listen to the depressive voice in my head telling me that this is what I get for hoping and trying and that I will never get a job in the industry because people just plain don’t want to be around me and all I will get out of my supposed education will be a $20 000 loan I can never pay back and the joy of being an even bigger loser for having a skill and not getting to use it.

Oh well. I can always go rogue and make my own content. And wait. Surely someone will be desperate enough to hire me some day!

Until then, all I can do is limp along and deal with the demon in my head one at a time.

I learned some important lessons today about how to get things done, and how not to. My pitch might have worked… if all my fellow students were comedy people.

Now, I wait for a phone call, and eat lunch. Then, it’s on to the ten page assignment I have to do more or less in one day.

So far I have one page.

Won’t this be fun!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry! No blog entry today, I have major homework.

I am painfully shy, and often feel completely lost and alienated in common social situations. I dread having to interact with people I don’t know without sufficient lead time. I need lots of lead-up time before I am ready to meet new people with something like a workable amount  of equanimity.

And I am all about the equanimity.

And yet, I can also be extremely charismatic, especially when I am possessed by an idea or feel the need to express an emotion. I am capable of putting out of a very warm, happy, soothing vibe, and if I could just get over myself enough for that side of me to become dominant, I could be one heck of a guy.

As it stands, usually it’s only the very sensitive (or the very patient) who can tune out the noise of my awkward, anxious nature and tune in on my good vibe station.

On a good day, I can see myself as a really wonderful person temporarily distorted by mental and physical illness into operating on a much lower level than that which is my normal, natural level, and any day now, I will rise from my own ashes and get back to living the life I was meant to lead.

On a bad day, I see myself as nothing but a toxic and obnoxious unlovable lump of disgusting putrid slime whose only contribution to the world is to make it a worse place by being in it and drawing good people down into my poisonous morass to choke and drown, a victim of their own pity.

Most days are somewhere in between.

I tried to get my blogging done in the afternoon so I could spend the whole evening working on my series proposal for TV Pilot class. Really I did.

But stuff happened. Like sleep. Turns out, I can fall into the black hole of sleep while dressed as well. All it takes is the slightest excuse – like the sleepiness I often get after a bowel movement, in this case – and off I go, hiding from reality in sleepy time land again.

It’s so easy just to turn off my jets and let gravity do the rest. I get so tired of fighting the flow. Tired of absolutely everything seeming like I’m fighting uphill in the freezing rain.

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn about opening myself up to the world and looking for what I need in it instead of being sealed off and starving all the fucking time.

Were my life a comedy, this would be the point where I would meet my manic pixie boy who teaches me to loosen up, be spontaneous, trust my instincts, and enjoy life. In return, I would teach him restraint, responsibility, and forethought.

Our “pushing apart” scene that must be in every rom-com would be a big argument where we both have second thoughts about the other person’s lessons. He’d accuse me of being a boring person trying to smother his spirit and I would accuse him of being an out of control lunatic trying to destroy my life. He’d run off, and I would realize just how much I love him and chase him down someplace cute and quirky , like at a cotton candy store or a hipster antique shop full of old typewriters and non-prescription glasses.

And seeing as this is a gay rom com, I see it ending with brunch with all our friends.

The strange thing is, writing that was very easy for me. The ideas flow from the origin point and click together like Lego pieces. It would be hard for me to write it any other way, which may become a problem in my professional life some day. Makes it hard to change my mind, at least at first.

Once I have some distance from the process of creation, I can see what does and does not work and make changes, though I still need a lot of outside help in order to get over the gumption swamp of self-evaluation.

Maybe I am just too softhearted to be my own editor. I don’t want to hurt myself by unleashing the brutal truth machine that is my analytical mind on something that will always feel very much like a part of me.

Which, when you think about it, is so fucked up it would require the invention of thirteen new dimensions just to describe it mathematically.

Apparently, I am terrified of what I will do to myself.

And it’s entirely justified. Like in Silence Of The Lambs, when Clarisse Starling asks Hannibal Lecter,  “Why don’t you turn that high-powered perception on yourself?”.

Because, of course, when you do it to yourself, it hurts. Plus you get all kinds of bizarre identity feedback events going on, and you are lost in the backwash almost before you start. Examining the thing you are examining with has always been tricky.

Something something quantum.

Plus, analyzing others is fun, especially if you can freak people out and display your eldritch might by diving things about them via a complex series of mostly-intuitive deductions. Call it the Sherlock Holmes trick.

Being an INTJ, though, I can’t always explain it like the INTP Holmes can. Like I said, it’s mostly intuitive and can seem a lot like I am reading people’s mind or futures when all I am doing is thinking on a higher level.

I suppose to the outside observer, that’s more or less the same thing. Either way, they don’t know how I am doing it and wouldn’t understand it if I try to explain it,

Ergo, it is magic. Magic is an emotion, a sense of wonder (and/or terror) in the presence of a power greater than you can comprehend. Our (thankfully) rational age means that an actual belief in magic – as a force that somehow has power in the world without having to follow its laws – is logically untenable.

But the feeling of magic will always survive.

All it takes is something to awake the sense of wonder in us, and all that requires is forces that have a powerful and impressive effect on the world coupled with our inability to fully encompass the emotional impact in the limited vessel of our reason.

And all you need is fireworks for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember this song?

Got reminded of it on Facebook recently, and just had to go download it as an MP3 for my collection because it freaking rocks.

And that got me thinking about the whole “if it hadn’t been for… ” way of looking at one’s life. A lot of people have a long list of points where their lives could have turned out so much better if it hasn’t been for this factor or that decision or whatever.

And I coud play that game. There’s certainly a lot of moments in my life where things might have gone a lot better if I had made a different choice. Like demanding my parents skip the whole early retirement bullshit and finish paying for my college degree. Or not fucking off to Portland when I did. Or realizing that there was this disease called depression way earlier,  and that it didn’t necessarily manifest itself as suicide attempts and other extreme behaviours… it could be something as simple as being scared of the world and an accompanying inability to grow as a person into full adulthood.

For like…. twenty years.

But none of that matters any more. Our choices come from who we are at the time we make them, and maybe those were the only choices I could have made. At every stage, I was doing my best. Of course it seems like those were bad decisions from the point of view of an older, wiser me who now knows the consequence of that decision.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t make the best decision based on what I knew at the time.

Besides, that’s all in the past, and the thing about the past, the most important thing about the past, is that it’s not here. It’s dead and gone. For those of us with strong intellects and great powers of recall, it can seem like this is true. Like everything that has ever happened to us is always with us because we can bring it back to us in great emotional depth and detail at a moment’s notice.

But it’s a pernicious lie, a toxic illusion. The past has passed and cannot be altered for it is a dead thing. We will never experience it again. All we have is the present. Our memories of the past are with us, but the past itself is not. Realizing and fully accepting this fundamental truth is the key to letting go of the past in order to live a better, healthier, happier life facing forward, which is the only direction that matters.

We can learn from our mistakes without dwelling on them, or worse, in them.

So no, I don’t care to plau the “what if” and “if only” game any more. It’s toxic. It destroys life. It pretends to be a way to avoid future mistakes but it’s really just a way to avoid dealing with the present by burying out heads in the past.

And that’s no way to find happiness in life. You can’t go through life in reverse gear.

Took a nap. Then, another nap. Doing that way too much.

It’s a clothing thing. I should be getting dressed the minute I get up. I know damned well that until I do, I will linger in this parasleep state, always sleepy or asleep, drifting through life in brief inter-nap interludes while time passes me by.

It’s a seductive trap, this soft and isolated state. I don’t have to worry about anything. Time slides past without conscious effort. Nothing can touch me when I am asleep. I can even tell myself that I must need the sleep if I am so sleepy all the time,.

But that’s utter bullshit. If I was to get dressed, I would wake up, and I would be ready to take on the day and get shit done. To excuse my blatant wallowing in sloth by telling myself I need to sleep or that I don’t want to get dressed until it’s time to go out otherwise I will have “wasted” a set of clothes^[1] is to give in to the exact kind of weak and self-betraying thinking that got me in this unholy mess of a life in the first place.

And I am better than that, dammit. I deserve better than that,. When I make the weak choice, I am giving up on myself just like everyone else has and tacitly justifying their neglect of me by acting like I deserve it.

And the thing is, that’s what is easiest for me to think. It’s a pattern already set down in my mind and reinforced by decades of repetition. Believing in myself takes an investment of effort, energy,and focus. Sinking into melting marshmallow oblivion requires none.

And depression is very good at draining your motivation and energy.

Ideally, I would have spent this afternoon working on the final draft of my short film. I have the basics down, I just need to give it all the polish and refinement that I can.

Instead, I slept. Now I will have time to finish this blog entry then shower and that’s it. Maybe play video games a little bit. What I really feel like doing is laying down for the seven time today and sleeping until my bladder wakes me up for the eighth time today.

It’s especially tempting because the sun had gone down and it’s all dark now and that makes me really want to hibernate. Good night folks. It’s been fun. See you in the spring.

But I have a life to live and things to do. I want to live, dammit, not sleep the sleep of the ancients. I’d like to think I’ve just been paying my sleep debt, but past a certain point, it is nothing but a low commitment form of death, and I want to be alive.

I want to feel the sun on my skin in the land of the living.

But I keep returning to the grave instead. It’s warm down there too.

Anyone know a good necromancer?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of between moods at the moment.

I know I am not exactly happy. I feel restless and irritable and like I want to scream and throw myself into battle. Or madness. Or hell. Whatever.

The point is, I feel like doing something crazy just to express the screaming gnawing seething id-rage  inside me that is desperately trying to claw its way to the surface so it can escape and run like the wind over the hills to far, far away.

So what is keeping it from doing so? Fear, of course. Fear is something the id can understand. Fear of losing what little sanity I retain. Fear of finally snapping like a dry twig and opening up the floodgates to all I have suppressed over the years.

And there’s ever so much of it.

So instead, I suppose I will lie down and wait for the feeling to pass. Like usual.

Made the mistake of checking my Facebook feed. Everyone freaking out over the US election. Um nope. Can not cope. Bye bye.

Wouldn’t it be weird if the Donald, by letting others do the hard stuff, ended up actually being a really good President? A lot of people will presumably be working very hard to get close to him and be (or own) the people who take those pesky Presidential burdens off his shoulders and keep his ego pumped up while making sure he doesn’t actually have to do anything or have the slightest bit of actual power.

It worked for Dubya. Granted, Dubya was dimwitted and childlike, whereas the Donald is senile and childlike, and thus far less predictable.

Basically, the Donald is Dubya if Dubya wasn’t basically a good-natured and well-intentioned, and with full (if compromised) intellectual capacity.

That could make him very dangerous. But I don’t think it will, because I feel like the Don will pass over the competency horizon between now and his inauguration day. By that, I mean he will pass between the phase of aging where people are angry and querulous and determined to make the world stop and listen to him into the age where people give up on the big world and concentrate on things like visits from children, board game tournaments, and trying to get an extra pudding.

In other words, when people pass through that last competency horizon, they regress to a child-like state and are willing to simply do what they are told as long as they get their little comforts and pleasures and their basic ego needs are met.

This is clearly what happened with Reagan. As his Alzheimer’s progressed, he became more simple-minded, and regressed to a childlike state where he was not at all concerned with the big picture, or even the medium picture. He left that all up to others, with largely disastrous results because when the leadership is soft and incompetent, the whole leadership structure is unstable because there is no competent leader to unite people in identity and purpose and that makes people very nervous and insecure.

And nervous and insecure people make very poor decisions, generally based on crass self-interest and half-baked ideology. They are too upset to really think things through, and when you have all these people pulling in different directions, the last thing on their minds is what is actually good for the people.

Only strong leadership can overcome petty personal politics. People really do need a strong leader in order to feel secure and relaxed. Authoritarian conservatives (and not just the fascists) are right about that.

They just have a very crude and emotion-based and primitive definition of “strong”, one that ignores the fact that strong leaders absolutely must demonstrate compassion and understanding as well as wisdom, judgment, patience, and benevolence.

Anyhow. The Donald is not going to be able to demonstrate that kind of leadership, which will disappoint his authoritarian fanbase. Being very low on specifics works great during an election as long as the people are angry (or whatever) enough not to be looking for policy answers, but once you are in power, people will expect you to do things, including but by no means limited to the things you said you were going to do, and if you don’t, they will be extremely pissed off.

So the Trumpening better have some way to convince people they don’t really want that wall he promised them, because there is no way it can actually happen.

I am more curious about his claims that he will put the boots to Wall Street. This is entirely doable for him. He’s never been part of the financial world anyhow, mostly because they never wanted him around because he is entirely the wrong kind of rich person for them,

They like people who are good at playing the respectability game where everyone tacitly agrees to keep up the facade of being solid citizens who are pillars of the community and exactly the sort of people you would trust with large amounts of money and power.

And they never, ever attract attention to themselves except in thoroughly respectable ways mostly consisting of public philanthropy in its various forms.

Trump is the exact opposite of that. So who knows, maybe he will reform Wall Street just to piss off people who never liked him or wanted him in their club anyway. People who might well remind Trump of his father, with whom I feel he has always had issues.

That’s pure intuition on my part, but I stand behind it.

And seeing as big business turned against him big time, I doubt he will feel any loyalty to them either. So who knows, maybe he will close a tax loophole or two.

That would certainly antagonize Fox News, assuming they are still the way the poor are sold to the rich with Roger Ailes gone.

I guess what I am really saying is that a Trump presidency might not be the nightmare holocaust we all fear it will be.

In some ways, it might actually be kind of okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.