You know what I’m talking about.

Normally, when something terrible happens, I wait for a while before I talk about it so I have time to sort through my feelings and figure out what I want to say.

But this election bullshit is too big for me to wait. I have to jump in on my feelings about it right away before the darkness of it all becomes too big for me to handle. Maybe that sounds like I am being melodramatic, I don’t know, but I don’t care.

I can tell the whole thing will take me a long time to process. So might as well get started.

So. Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States of America. There, I’ve said it. It’s true and it’s going to stay true for four fucking years. America stood at the biggest crossroads it has faced in my lifetime and it chose the unthinkable over the unlikable. Trump is going to be President and Mike Pence will be his Cheney. And God only knows what they will get up to.

And I mean that. Like I said before, we honestly have no idea what a Trump/Pence (or “Truppence”) presidency will be like. Sure, Trump said a lot of horrible shit, but he’s a sociopath, and that means he feels absolutely no reason to mean what he says or to do what he said he would do. Literally anything could happen now.

What is worse is that the Republicans still control the House and the Senate, too, which means that, in theory, there is no resistance to Trump’s agenda. In theory. In practice, it may well be that at least some of the Republican politicians who were cussing him out will stick to their guns and keep right on hating him and fighting him tooth and nail.

After all, they are quite used to fighting the President on every little thing. They’ve been doing it to Obama for eight fucking years. It’s nice to think they will keep doing it.

But conservatives are very susceptible to herd-think, and it might just be that they will not be able to resist the momentum of Trump’s ascendancy, being worshipers of power, and even the most virulently anti-Trump of them will be eager to roll over and beg and present their asses to be ritually mounted by the New Alpha in order to avoid the impossible task of actually deciding for themselves what to think.

I keep thinking about Brexit, and wondering how many Trump voters are feeling intense voter’s remorse right now because theirs was a protest vote and they, like a lot of people, never thought Trump could actually win.

And now that he has, these people are waking up to the consequences of what they have done and realizing they never actually wanted the guy to be President, they just liked the idea of voting for him as a way of raising a mighty middle finger to the world they feel has turned against them and shit all over them.

Only now are they thinking about whether that was a smart move or not. That’s what happens when people get angry enough, though. They lose all ability to ponder the consequences of their actions because of their burning need to express their rage in the most potent form available to them.

Bernie understood that rage, and knew how to articulate it for people. Hillary never got it,. not even slightly. Like a lot of liberals, she can’t handle actual strong emotion, and reflexively rejects things like anger and passion out of some wrongheaded desire to be “above” all that.

And that would be fine in an era of peace and prosperity, because the people will be on your side in that case. People who try to stir up anger amongst the contented, rightly or wrongly, will always be doomed to failure. But in a time of anger, when people have a lot of very good reasons for being upset with how things are going, the people need someone who will express that anger not just in words but in emotion as well.

An ice queen like Hillary was never going to get the job done. I am absolutely convinced that there are millions of people who would have voted for Bernie but voted for Trump again because at least Trump spoke to their anger.

Hillary could have done it. She could have used her reputation for being ruthless and cold to transform herself into an Elizabeth Warren writ large. She could have scared the shit out of the forces of evil if she had quit pretending to be a warm human being and instead gone for the fucking jugular like the bitch she is.

But no, she kept on trying to convince us she’s regular folk. And she lost. She lost because she was incapable of inspiring people like Bernie could, and so all she had going for her was Not Being Trump.

And that’s not enough, apparently.

I can only assume that Trump is having a sober awakening right now too as he realizes he actually has the job now and faces four years of having to do what he is told and take it seriously to boot. That he has to leave the bubble of his wealth and actually deal with reality. We saw what they did to Dubya, and he was not nearly as senile and spoiled as Trump. I get the feeling that the White House will become a battlefield the minute he takes office, and he will fire a lot of advisers before they finally get a team in there that can handle him right.

Or maybe that’s already happened. Trump was very well behaved in the last four days of the election. It could be that now that he has won, Trump will be all too happy to go the Reagan route and do whatever the people around him want him to do as long as he gets to pretend to be President in public.

That would, of course, leave Mike Pence, America’s Angry Punishing Dad, in charge.

And quite frankly, I am a lot more worried about him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No blog entry, I got homeworks to do.

Here I am, sitting at my favorite terminal at school^[1], blogging away to you nice people because my morning class ended crazy early and I figured I might as well get as much of my blogging done now so that I will have more time to work on my short film script tonight.

I have tonight and tomorrow night to work on the second draft, and the third draft is due this Saturday, I think, so it’s a pretty rapid turnaround.

But what the fuck, it’s only five pages/minutes and I now have full license from my instructor to go past five pages because my skit short film is very rapid-fire so five pages will be nowhere near five minutes.

And I was like, phew, because I wanted this thing to be jam packed with high density humour and in my atrocious first draft, I ended up with like, three jokes.

So the second draft is going to practically be a full rewrite. A lot of superfluous garbage is going to be ripped out like it was bad wiring and replaced with solid comedy.

I am looking forward to that. Heck, if I had my game on, I would go dig up the first draft right here and get cracking on that comedy instead of blogging.

But I don’t quite have my poop in a pile at the moment so I will keep on blogging for as long as I can before it’s time to go get lunch.

That will be, like, 45 minutes from now.

One wonderful thing about the class ended crazy early, besides just not being in class right now, is that I will get the jump on the rush lunch by leaving at 11:45. That will make up for last Thursday, when Sci Fi class went long and I ended up getting completely caught in the worst of the lunch rush and had to wait for 20 minutes in the line at Subway.

Today, I think I will go to Meat and Bread. I’ve been there once before and the sandwich I got was amazing. Definitely an entire meal in a sandwich. Literally, because it was their Thanksgiving special, so it was a turkey sandwich with stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and REAL turkey, and holy Hannah was it tasty.

Normally, I don’t trust that kind of sandwich. I’ve gotten burned before. Restaurants just slap the things together without a thought as to whether it will actually taste good, just so long as it has the right ingredients.

But everyone said Meat and Bread sandwiches are amazing works of art, so I went for it, and man was I not disappointed.

And seeing as their sandwiches are $9.50, they had a lot to live up to!

I am worried about my ankle. I get the feeling it might not be mending on its own. I spent the weekend off it for the most part, and I thought it was getting better, but the moment I put my shoes on Sunday night, it started to hurt and now my ankle is rubbing against the side of the shoe in a weird way.

And I know from painful and bitter experience that if I ignore that, it will rub away the skin there and cause a very bad situation.

Like, large section of flesh gouged out bad. Shudder.

So I might have to go to the doctor on Wednesday and get him to look at it. It didn’t seem like a major injury at the time but it’s not going away on its own and it might be getting worse. So I better look after it.

That reminds me, I need to call Doctor Costin to confirm m Thursday appointment.

Not really sure where my mental health is at right now. I feel like I am not exactly well but I am doing well enough to get by. But I don’t know how long that will last, so therapy seems like a very good idea right now.

Anything that speeds up the healing process.

I think I am current with my homework. I did the character grid for my TV Pilot class later today. That was laborious. Five characters, four connections each, equals 20 relationships to describe. I think I did a good job, but it was a lot of work.

And I have my three short films described in terms of production for Producing for Writers tomorrow. I almost fucked that one up. I was going into a lot of analytical detail (like I do) and was treating it like the analyses for the genre courses I have taken before, but then I read the assignment description again and realized it said “two or three sentences each”.

By then, I had most of a page on the first one. Woops.

So I had to start over. But it didn’t exactly take long to bang our three sentence about three films. I wish I had been allowed more space, but I get the feeling production type people like our instructor are super busy and not long on patience for long-winded analysis from us word obsessed writer types.

I can learn concision. In fact, I feel like I am doing it already. But it will take time. Going from working to wordcount to minimizing wordcount is like going from marathons to sprints.

You use different moves.

Right now, I am feeling relaxed and positive. Got some good stretching in this morning, something I should do far more often, so I am feeling relatively relaxed in this big bulky bulbous body of mine.

I look forward to getting lunch and maybe a sweet treat (I am so weak) and enjoying it, then going to TV Pilot class this afternoon.

It’s true that part of me really wants to stretch out for a good nap right now, but that’s par for the course with my messed up lifestyle.

Some day, I will get my shit together.

And after that… watch the fuck out!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still kind of sleepy. But the day begins.

What ended up happening last night : As you know, I took my sleepy pills around six hours too early. Duh. Turned out, I was able to resist their effects long enough to finish half the blog entry, then finished it later.

In between was a nap of around 2 hours. I wish I had that time back, but whatcha gonna do. I have this blog entry plus an exercise where I find three low budget shorts to do today, plus whatever the homework for Production for Writers : Story is.

Surely I am not expected to have a second draft yet. I only presented my first draft Thursday. I can’t be expected to have a new draft already. Can I?

Besides, holy Hannah does that thing need a lot of work.

Right now, what I want is to go back to bed. I think I have reached the point where I have caught up on sleep enough to get sleepy in a healthy way, and it is very tempting to use the extra hour we all got by the clocks “falling back” last night for naptime.

That rarely works out how I want to to work out, though. Usually I end up not sleeping all THAT well. But sometimes….

Oh, what the fuck. We probably won’t eat till 8 o’clock. I got time.

Napped. It was no big deal. I think it was the warmth from the radiator that made me feel extra warm and cozy and sleepy. I imagine it will happen again, then.

Ain’t that just ducky.

Dunno what to write about now though. I watched the Disney/Pixar flick “The Good Dinosaur” today, and it was very good. Really tugged at the ol’ heartstrings. Dunno what the deal is with the title, though. It in no sense is about a dinosaur whose goodness is a distinguishing feature. The title makes it sound like it’s about a dinosaur that, unlike all the other dinosaurs, is good.

Nope. The main character is a nice dinosaur, but he’s not the only one.  He’s not even especially good, just a nice kid. The title makes no sense.

The movie makes it very clear from the beginning that we are not to take science into account with this movie. The opening scene features an asteroid heading towards Earth intercut with shots of dinosaurs quietly munching on grass.

Then it’s asteroid. Dinosaurs. Asteroid. Dinosaurs. Each time the asteroid getting closer to Earth. Finally the asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere. Cut back to the oblivious dinosaurs… who see a white streak across the sky then go back to grazing.

Perhaps that wasn’t just a gag, but a way to set up what comes next, because the first thing we see in the move after that is a dinosaur… farming.

Which is a tad boggling for the scientifically minded of us because, well, that definitely didn’t happen. So maybe the movie, in a gentle way, was saying this is a universe where the big asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs in our universe never happened, or at the very least, only grazed the atmosphere.

That would potentially allow the dinosaurs to continue to evolve to the point where they could learn agriculture and other Stone Age technologies without, intriguingly enough, developing hands. In fact, one of the most interesting visual elements of the movie, at least for me, is how they show how these long-necked four-legged could do all kind of things we might assume only humans can do by using their mouths to grip and crudely manipulate things. They clearly put a lot of thought into it, and it all seems quite plausible.

Whether the dinosaurs we know could have gotten that far in only, as the movie says, “a few million years”, is quite another thing.

Not much else has happened since I talked to you last. That’s the way of weekends, and thank goodness for that. I still feel kind of weak and disassociated, but that’s just life for me I guess.

Part of me wishes I could sneak away to an alternate dimension where time does not exist and just hang out there for a while. Get caught up on sleep and homework, take a breather from school, get my shit together maybe. Shouldn’t take more than a week.

Who am I kidding? I would never come back. Not until I got bored, anyhow. If I could bring food, a bathroom, and my computer along, I could be gone quite a while, even sans Internet. And when I decided to come back, I would return to time at the exact moment I left it, all rested up and ready to go.

Just think of all the masturbation I could get done.

Of course, then you have the whole slew of issues related to non-time. My scenario assumes time would keep going for me, because if it didn’t, not only would the whole thing be pointless, from the point of view of normal time I would be gone forever.

After all, there can be no changes of state, or changes of any kind at all, without there being time over which these changes could happen. So once you were in the no-time dimension, you would be there forever.

Totally not worth it, then.

Or it could be like Vonneguy’s Tralfalmadore from Slaughterhouse Five, which is inhabited by creatures for whom there is no time and everything happens at once. Even within the main character’s life, everything that happened to him in his life is always happening, and once he realizes this, it allows him to achieve an inner peace so strong that he doesn’t even do anything to prevent his own assassination.

Because the assassination has always happened and always will happen and is, in fact, always happening. Trippy, no? Shows how fundamental time is to human understanding.

That scenario is as unimaginable to us as infinity. In both cases, we can easily imagine the concept, but not what it actually would be like.

Science fiction has such fun toys to play with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

t did a dumb thing.

So it’s Saturday. Usually, every Saturday, my roomies Joe and Julian (aka J&J) go to Joe’s parents place to play board games and hang out.

But this time, they did not, because Joe’s parents are traveling. This meant that we could try to get caught up on our watching of the Daily Show and Colbert over supper.

Here’s the thing about that, though. Usually, when we sit down to watch stuff, it’s after Joe gets off work at midnight and that means it’s nearish to bedtime for yours truly.

Now as you know, I need pills to help me sleep. ^[1] They take around half an hour to kick in, so I have developed the habit of taking my pills around half an hour before we are finished watching our shows.

Some of you have already figured out where this is going.

So there I was, watching stuff with J&J, and it was totally dark out, and I was distracted by the TV, and that opened the door for situational memory to take over, and well..

I just took my goddamned sleeping pills at 7 PM.

Ergo, tonight’s blog entry will be written in at least two segments. When they kick in hard, I am going to take a nap. Possibly a very long one, seeing as the sleeping pills generally allow me to sleep around five hours minimum. Longer on a good night.

And dammit, I have things I want to do tonight. I was planning on getting down to some serious homework and instead I am going to sleep the night away. After which it will be around 1:30 in the morning, which is not far from when I would be going to bed.

Part of me wants to react to that by staying up all night. But sleep doesn’t really work like that. Our circadian rhythms get in the way. So I will probably end up getting up for at most a couple of hours so I can have my “midnight” snack, then go back to sleep.

After all, I have a high density week ahead of me. Two classes Monday, another two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday. That means I have to get as much of the homework as I can done before the week starts because I will not have a lot of time/energy during the week. Just the evenings.

That’s why having to sleep now pisses me off so much. Fuck.

And I am so sick and tired of tripping over myself so much. No matter how hard I try, I just keep fucking up left right and center. I am seriously beginning to wonder if I have a clinically definable brain disorder. Something that makes it impossible for my to get my mental game together. I am tired of being clueless, clumsy, and crazy.

I want to be able to think straight, move well, and escape this world of madness and complication in which I live.

In short, I wish I was normal.

Well, here comes sleep. I will come back when I am done.

I’m back. Only slept a couple of hours. So thanks for that. Still kinda sleepy though.

Anyhow, yeah, I am so over being such a spazz Maybe it’s my meds that are making me slow. Or maybe my mind is just too soft.

It’s certainly possible that school’s demands on my creative energies encourage me to stay in an internally focused state of mind. One that is soft and dreamlike. I often think of my creativity as being like dreaming on the page.

That would explain the disassociative nature of how I feel much of the time. I  always feel sort of dizzy and distant. I have a hard time focusing on what is right in front of me. When I try, it’s like trying to play the piano when your hands are covered in concrete.

A lot of things could be causing that feeling. Like my sleep apnea, for instance. Kind of hard to feel sharp and alert when your brain isn’t getting enough O2 for a third of your life. Maybe if I could get my oxygen game together, the rest would fall into place.

But it’s so hard to focus enough to handle things most of the time. Even relatively simple things, like trying my CPAP machine again, feel like trying to skate uphill. Everything slips through my fingers and I continuously fuck up and can’t even explain why.

Not even to myself.

It’s that whole path of least resistance thing all over again. Sometimes it feels like all I can do is slide down the hill of life under the force of gravity without any real choice in the matter. To do anything else is so hard and letting go is so easy.

I don’t want to be that way. Passive and oblivious. Disconnected and distraught. Doomed to helplessly watch things fall apart over and over again as I stumble into walls with my pants down around my ankles in a never-ending blooper reel of clueless catastrophes.

And what if I literally cannot pull myself together? Maybe I have truly fucked myself up so bad that all I can do is limp along while I fall apart. I am plagued by the feeling that even operating at my current minimal level, I am losing ground.

And my absolute worst nightmare is that one day I will dissociate so strongly that I lose all contact with reality and get lost inside my own mind. That possibility seems very real some days. All it would take is some major emotional blow and I would instinctively withdraw from reality so hard that I would never come back again.

Yet still, I will not cease my battle against the inward tide. Some day, I will be a real live human being, and my internal exile will end, and I will fell the full warmth of the sun penetrate my icy tomb, and I will live again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am very glad I don’t have to go back to school till Monday.

Not because of any one thing. Just feeling drained. I will do my best to rest and relax and recharge, while also getting some homework done.

I’m getting bored of my current game anyway.

I’m going to have to fill out a relationship grid for my show, Sam. That’s where, character by character, you describe that character’s relationship to each of the other characters in the grid. And I will do it, but I find it to be very lame.

That kind of shit is far too mechanical and artificial for me. That’s the kind of thing I will keep track of in my mind far better than I could in some grid. I am sure for the bottom-up thinkers of the world, that kind of thing is a huge help, but I ain’t one of them.

In fact, it’s sort of amazing and kind of bewildering to imagine that some people can even do that. They do a bunch of research, makes character notes, do a bunch of that “creative workbook” kind of thing, and only THEN do they have an idea for story.

These people need to know what they are doing before they do it. Weird. When it comes to my creative life, I tend to jump out the window assuming I will learn to fly.

I think that leads to a more organic, natural kind of writing that makes sense in a way that a manufactured storyline usually cannot. One of the things we covered last semester was “how to make sure the events in the story follow one another in a logical, “cause and effect” way. And I was like…. how else could they happen?

Apparently, some people have story ideas that need help that way. For me, my story ideas tend to start from a point then crystallize from there. I can’t quite say the whole thing is there, because I do need to come up with a little connective tissue now and then, but for the most part, the sequence of events flows logically from one thing to another.

But we’ve been over this before. I am not a planner when it comes to writing. Plans require you to know where you are going before you go there, and to me, one of the joys of writing is finding that out as I go.

Or rather, slowly unpacking the incredibly dense info packet that is the idea. Sometimes the ideas come in pieces but other times it’s a whole story all at once.

I am not sure which way yields better results. My romantic and/or mystic side would prefer to think that the instant story ones are better because they are more organic and inspired.

But if all I wanted to do was write straight from my soul, I would be a poet. Instead, I am a storyteller, a jester, an entertainer, a prophet, a soothsayer, a hermit, and a clown.

And a human being. I sometimes forget that. The other parts are so much more interesting. The temptation is always there to follow the siren song of the ego and live ignoring the physical reality of life in favour of an entirely cerebral existence.

But no matter how deeply you get into matters of the mind (and I have been in so deep that I felt like I could die), you are still a living being in a physical world and neglecting that fact will only cause your mental world to go to pieces as the physical reality that underlies it does the same.

That’s the false promise of transcendentalism : that you can transcend the flesh and enter some mystic realm where you are only mind, or only spirit, or “pure energy”, or the like.

Pure meaning untainted by the physical, presumably. Never trust purity, that’s my motto. Reality is mixed and the purest water has no fish.

And you’re a fish in that metaphor. A living creature. Purity is poison, and purity ethics always lead to an attempt to kill the humanity in us. It is the ego trying to assassinate the id, and it’s far more dangerous than when the id tries to kill the ego.

So maybe what I really suffer from, in Freudian terms, is an overindulged ego, rather than an overpowered superego. Probably some of both, to be honest.

Of one thing I am sure : my id is in lousy shape. Poor thing has been starved, neglected, ignored, and abused for a long time. I am trying to nurse it back to life so that I can finally feel fully alive, like a real person, and have an intimate connect with The Source Of All, which is of course the id.

That’s where energy, motivation, inspiration, joy, and everything else than lives comes from, and when we deny the animal within ourselves, our souls wither away and die.

I am not exactly sure what to do to revive mine. A lot of the traditional sorts of things one does when one is indulging the id, like pursuing physical excess, require a lot more money than I will have any time soon.

Plus, I am too old to abuse my body with liquor, drugs, and other wild stuff. So while I definitely think I need a lot more pleasure/reward in my life. But it will have to come my way in a gentler form than the usual.

It would have to be in a form that means something to me as well. I would love to explore my tastes while getting that pleasure/reward. In many important ways, I have no freaking idea who I am. And I have lacked the funds, opportunities, and sanity to find out.

Hopefully, when I get work after school, I will at least have the finds to say, find out what getting drunk at a gay bar is like, or be able to afford to hang out at the baths, or make the right connections to get invited to the really fun kind of party.

Or maybe all I need is to get the fuck over myself.

One day at a time, sweet Jesus.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pondering my inability to fit in today.

On the floor of the Granville Street Skytrain Station (Canada Line), which is the one I get off at in order to get to school, there is a massive ad for Vancouver Film School. The ad is covered in Tetris blocks, and says “Vancouver Film School : Where You Fit.”

I want to set it on fire. ^[1]

Because fuck you, ad. Turns out I don’t fit in there, either. I try so hard but I always end up with people blinking at me and then going on as though I hadn’t said anything. I still feel like a total outsider. And I am getting sick of it.

And I am sick of it all being my fault, too. Not that I have any rational basis for blaming anyone else for my pain. But try telling that to my wounded id.

At least the problem is limited to when I am in class. On those days where I have two classes and hence end up eating my Subway lunch in the student lounge, I usually do kind of okay. There’s been days when I felt really bad, all lonely and isolated and excluded and like I am some kind of monster, but for the most part I can chat with folks.

But in class… sigh. I don’t know what to do. I can’t seem to bridge the gap between me and the others. And I so desperately want to feel included.

Which is probably part of the problem, as I have discussed before.

And I can’t figure out what it is about what I say that doesn’t click with people. Maybe it’s a matter of presence, not phrasing. My words are fine but I don’t back them up with force of personality and so they don’t make an impression in people’s minds.

Or maybe I am just on a totally different level from people and I might as well be trying to communicate with ants.

Or maybe it’s a generational thing. I seem to get on okay with the teachers. They are all my age. Brian, one of the teachers I had today, is 45. That’s only two years older than me. I have a lot more in common with them.

And I suppose they will be the people I am depending upon for leads and recommendations. So there’s that.

Or maybe I am just a fucked up freak.

The thing is, I know I am a good writer. So technically, none of this shit matters. I could go through the course as a total hermit, ignoring my fellow students till I graduate then disappearing over yon horizon with my degree, never to look back again ever.

Might cost me some recommendations from my fellow students, with whom I am supposed to have forged a deep bond by now. when we all get out in the industry, but I could probably survive that.

But I like my fellow students. And it’s not like they dislike me. I don’t know exactly what they think of me, but I know they don’t hate me or anything. They just don’t know how to handle me, and that just make them the same as nearly everybody else.

Including me. Trust me, if I could hand people a manual to dealing with me, I would.

Were I a saner man, I would simply accept that I have it okay with a friendly but detached relationship with my fellow students, and be content with that.

But I see them hanging out together and laughing and having fun, and it looks like they are a lot closer to each other than they are to me, and it tears me apart. Because it just proves that I am the odd one out, like usual.

And being alone in a crowd full of happy people is far, far worse than being alone. It makes me want to scream. There it is, the warm and accepting world that has always effortlessly excluded me, right in front of me but no matter how hard I reach out, I can’t be part of it.

Part of the problem was that, in that first part of my first term, they invited me to things and I turned them down because I was not healthy enough at that point to attend. So they stopped asking, and so I fell off the social calendar forever.

Because when people don’t succeed at something, eventually they stop trying.

And I am far too shy to ask to be included now. Besides, it would just come across as creepy and awkward and very very lame.

“Um, can I please be invited to all your COOL PARTIES? *drool*”

I don’t think so. So that’s not a possibility. And it’s not like I can think of a more subtle way to get the message out that wouldn’t be just as weird and sad.

All this makes my dark side whisper into my ear. It says “So what? Fuck them. If all that’s left to you is to be a prick, be a prick. Use your force of personality and verbal skills to get your way. Manipulate people. Forget about being liked and worry about being respected. Throw all that mental weight around. Give people the clear message that fucking with you is a very bad idea. Stop being so restraining and careful, stop walking on eggshells around the pygmies, and use all that power you know you have to get what you want and fuck anyone who gets in your way. JUST. FUCKING. TAKE. WHAT. YOU. WANT. ”

And I am not sure whether it’s morality or cowardice that holds me back. It’s true that I don’t want to be yet another self-centered asshole in the entertainment industry.

But maybe people are like that because that’s what WORKS.

Right now, I would sell my soul for a higher standard of living, with more cash and  autonomy and a car and driver.

Or hell. I would sell it for a minimum wage income.

Is that sad, or what?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least, that’s how it is for me.

Got started on my funny film festival script. It’s half way done. Had to wade through several deep and freezing lakes of neurosis and anxiety to get to the point where I could start. Turns out I was not nearly as ready to write the fucking thing as I thought I was.

When will I learn that having the idea of a thing clear and easy in my mind does not actually mean it will be easy to write? I probably would have been better off doing a basic outline first, just to get the sequence of gags down.

So far, I have “guy whose entire pitch is ‘Die Hard with dinosaurs'”, “seemingly meek little woman whose pitch starts off like Bridges of Madison County then turns into a story of violence and gore”, and “guy with the most convoluted character descriptions ever”.

Possible future pitchers include “person with the most unshootable movie ever”, “person failing badly at concealing that his movie is basically very freaky porn”, “person who thinks someone will read their thousand page script” and the key to the ending of the bit,. “the person whose pitch starts off lame but ends up being so good it makes the execs cry”.

That way, our protagonists get what they want, the short film ends on a feel-good note, and the plot is neatly wrapped up.

It’s a rough draft, the first of many I suppose, so it doesn’t have to be perfect. I will have the entire term to get it right. But still, it stresses me because I care so much about it.

As any decent writer would, I suppose. I suppose it was not reasonable to hope that I could pull off being the calm and confident genius approach when it came to real work. That routine might have worked in school, but then again, in school there was never anything I wanted really badly at stake when I was at regular school. Just grades, and as faithful readers know, I have always taken them for granted.

It’s hard to value that which comes easily to you. And when you can pull shit like completely forgetting there’s a test until you show up and the teacher says “As you all know, we’re having a test today… “, and STILL get 85 percent, there’s not exactly a lot of pressure to try as hard as I can.

Plus, I honestly believe that remaining calm about things like tests and assignments improves performance. But that’s neither here nor there.

I had today off, so no school for me today. It’s nice. From what I can see, I will usually have Wednesdays off, which is very groovy. I like the idea of my week being split into two sections, with Monday and Tuesday in one part and Thursday and Friday in the other.

Sure, it might double the number of days when I have two classes in one day and therefore need to allocate lunch money for said days, but I think a day off in the middle of the week is worth the extra dough.

Tomorrow will be one of those days. I imagine I will conserve cash by going to Subway. Last time this came up, last Monday, I went to the Donair Dude next door to the school (formerly a Mediterranean place) to try them out, and what I could get at the previous place for $10 cost me $13, so I remain unimpressed.

But I haven’t had an actual donair from them yet, so the jury is out on that. One of their donairs touts itself as being “Halifax style”, and as someone who is from the Maritimes and has actually had donairs in Halifax, I remain skeptical.

Especially since the one in the picture looks like it involves tomato sauce, and I am like, WTF? This isn’t a goddamned pizza, it’s a DONAIR.

Which I should explain, seeing as I am pretty sure the only person who reads this that knows what they are found them to be extremely gross.

They are basically just pita wraps with meat cut into strips in them along with Donair Sauce (don’t ask, dunno) and whatever veggies you want in there.

So it’s more or less just Greek Subway.

They are tasty and good. And a very big deal back in the Maritimes. So big that our biggest native pizza chain started off as a string of donair shops that eventually added pizza to the mix.

For most of my life, they were called Greco Pizza And Donair. And their pizzas are pretty good. All their pizzas are square, so you get more pizza that with round ones.

That led to one of the most obnoxious ad campaigns ever :

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0JmKNjoqxo” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Nobody’s eating my fucking corners, bitch!

That felt good.

Anyhoo, after a brief break, I will finish my little script. I think I have calmed down enough to give it a decent try. I have also looked up how to do a rapid cut montage with dialogue, so that big hurdle has been potentially cleared.

Makes me wish I had come up with something that wasn’t a rapid series of intercut scenes at the same camera angle in the same room. Dang me and my sophisticated knowledge of how to make high density content!

In fact, I am kind of worried because I know we will be doing a table read of it tomorrow and I am pretty sure it will just seem super confusing then. It relies heavily on the visual continuity of a fixed camera and the fact that intercut scenes are telling a story in multiple parts that are sequential in that they go in linear order, but are intercut with other stories.

Even I know that made no sense to you, gentle reader. Talk about things that are clear in my head and very complicated to explain!

Anyhoo, time to take a short break then finish the fucking thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First off, sorry there was no blog entry and no message of why yesterday. I was out of the house all day and I did not think to compose said message before I left.

In my defense, I was AFK from 8 am to 11:30 pm. I got up, as usual, at 7 am, so there WAS an hour in which I could easily have dashed off a message, but who the heck can think that clearly at 7 am?

Certainly not me. At that hour, I can complete rote actions like getting dressed and packing my bag from school, but such executive functions as planning and forethought are not present at all.

It’s always been that way with me. On the one hand, I don’t wake up angry from the pain of low blood sugar like my father and my brother. On the other hand, it takes me a long time to fully wake up and that causes me to make all kinds of hilarious mistakes when life demands I think before I am truly awake.

Speaking of the morning, I had a bad spill this afternoon. ^[1] My right ankle did that fun thing where it randomly buckled for no reason, and I fell down on my prat.

But I wasn’t worried about my poor bum. It’s very well padded. My coccyx is a little tender, but that’s it.

No, I was worried about the ankle, because it got wrenched around pretty hard. I sat there feeling all over it to see if anything felt disastrously wrong. Nothing did, nor did I experience serious pain when I flexed it, so I got up.

I could walk on it, but it was swollen stiff, so I have been limping all day. And there’s some pain, but not much. At least, nothing worse than the usual daily agonies from the abuse my poor feet take from walking around in shoes with zero arch support.

But that’s another story.

I feel like I have my stuff that needs to come out. So I am trying to make myself still like I did the other day when I went on about The Tunnel. But I think it’s not the sort of thing one can force. It’s going to happen when the tectonic forces of my psyche subduct the toxic waste to the surface and who knows when that will be?

Might as well try predicting the next earthquake.

But I can feel things a-stirring. They will no doubt rear their ugly heads so I can deal with them soon. Large, undigested hunks of childhood trauma waiting to be chewed like cud and sent down to where it can become part of me again, complete.

And yes, even I get weirded out my by elaborate yet cogent metaphors sometimes. Trust me, that one could have been way grosser. Be glad I restrained myself.

Right now, the primary stressor in my life is that I have to write my five page script soon, and that means I have to decide what the fuck is going to go into it.

My current idea is the film festival one I described before. I am pretty sure I can make it quite funny. I have all kinds of ideas for wacky people with funny pitches. I am developing some ideas for the plot involving the producer and director who have to listen to all these terrible pitches. Certainly, I am going to give them a fair number of reaction shots.

But now I am worried that my idea is not visual enough. We watched some short films by previous classes today and I can not get over how good they looked.

I mean, check this shit out :

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/3TXWZS6O46c” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

That credit sequence is too damned long.

But other than that, it’s great. Granted, that was made back in the good old days, when every student got their script made by a hand working group of professionals. Now, we have to produce the whole thing ourselves and only four scripts get made.

So we are broken into four groups. There’s 18 of us left, so that means two groups of five and two groups of four. I hope I get put into one of the groups of four because that means I only have to out-compete three people to get my script made, and I need to get mine made. The high production values for today’s shorts whetted my appetite all the more. I desperately want something I wrote to get made and look that slick and professional.

So I am going to have to make my script shine. I am gonna pack that sumbitch with so much comedy that people will feel like they watched a whole movie when it’s done. Laughs from beginning to finish. And if I can pull it off (and I can), some good warm happy feelings too. I am going to kick some serious ass.

And luckily, I don’t have to get it perfect the first time out of the gate. In face, I will have this entire term to get it right because shooting doesn’t happen till January. That means it will spend two months in development.

I am not that fond of development. It’s a hard thing for someone like me, who isn’t very certain of himself and who has trouble processing a lot of input. Clearly, I will need to get used to it, as I imagine even TV scripts go through a development phase.

It’s just really really fast.

But at school, we don’t have a story editor to thumbs up or thumbs down what we have done so far. It’s all on us. Teachers advise, but they don’t guide.

Story of my fucking life, really.

So there is no fixed target. I am a goal oriented person, I need a goal. Otherwise I get all neurotic and panicky and self-doubting.

Give me some kind of clue whether I am doing it right, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.