Had one of my periods of intense dreaming, the kind that leaves me sweaty an exhausted and all messed up in the head, this morning.

In my dream, I was arguing with some woman – a pretty face ugly soul type – and at one point she turns to this other guy and says “Kick his ass!”.

Now this guy is small. Like, 5′ 6″ small. And round like a teddy bear. He’s wearing glasses and suspenders. Now he doesn’t want to do it at first, but Resting Bitch Life there shoves some money at him and says “Now I’m paying you this money, so you go and do it!”.

And I am like, “Aw, come on. I don’t wanna fight this guy. Be reasonable. ” But she is having none of it and pushes the little dude into fighting me.

Now this is where things split. Because on one level I am fighting him physically but on another I am fighting him in a rap battle.

Sadly, I wasn’t really rap battling him, it was more like the idea of it was happening and I was, naturement, winning. It;s too bad that it wasn’t really happening though, I bet I was totally dropping dope rhymes to a sick-ass beat at a mike-drop level.

I’m very white.

Anyhow, all the poor guy was doing was smiling a “don’t kill me” kind of smile at me as I held him by the lapels. I was not proud of what was going on but I felt helpless to stop it. Like it was a process that had to run its course before I had free will again.

That, sadly, is pretty much it. No denouement, unless “And then I woke up. ” counts. I really wish I had hung around long enough to give that bitch her comeuppance, possibly by turning her champion against her and teaming up on her.

Hopefully, in the rap battle sense only.

It would make a pretty cool scene, or maybe a short film. I’d have to actual write the battle raps, of course, but still. I could totally do that.

I might not be able to come up with hard hitting rap lyrics on the fly, but give me a minute.

After a dream like that, I can understand why so many religions put great significance on dreams. It still feels to me like something that actually happened, but not in the same sense as the rest of my life.

More like it happened in another realm. One that is no less powerful for being entirely subjective. It’s an emotional reality rather than a physical one, and one where the emotions are raw and on the surface and being expressed as rapidly as they can be expressed given the limits of my mental aperture.

Which is the point, I imagine. I have these intense dreams when I need to express deep emotions that I suppress when conscious. It’s far from fun, but it generally cleanses as it burns away a lot of mental debris.

So it works out for the better in the long run.

In the meantime, however, it makes me want to freaking hibernate. I’ve slept for nine hours today and I still need more. I guess I am entering one of my sleepy phases, more’s the pity. I have things I want to get done today!

Instead, I am going to end up spending still more time in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hopefully, if I lean in hard enough, I will pop out the other side soon enough to actually get that beatsheet done before class tomorrow.

Oh fuck, I just realized : class is Monday, which means it was actually due yesterday. Saturday, I’ve gone and fucked up again.

I get so damned sick of myself sometimes.

Oh well, I will have to finish it this afternoon and pray that it won’t invalidate things that I am a day late. How can I keep forgetting this little rule? People need to have at least two days to read the thing and prepare notes before class. I fell into thinking that things were due in class again. God, I am such a space case!

Well, then, that’s the plan. I am going to take a short nap then I am going to work like hell to get the damned thing done ASAP. I might not get the marks but I will at least get the workshopping. And that means something.

Oh, and I am supposed to have a list of five production-relevant people and their contact info for Producing for Writers on Tuesday.

That is just plain not going to happen. I don’t know anybody. I am not friends with any of my classmates, so I can’t get anything that way. I don’t know anyone in the industry, so I can’t get things that way. And I have been told there is no place online I can go to look.

And I can’t just cold class people. My social anxiety precludes it. In fact, this whole thing is driving my social anxiety level through the roof. And that’s compounded by the fact that I feel like I am about to be punished for being an involuntary loner and there is nothing I can do about it.

Maybe that dream of mine was my attempt to wrestle with the issue. I dunno.

Oh, and to top it all off, we already have all the people we need, or at least the rest of my film group thinks we do. I have my serious doubts but I am clearly not going to convince them to take this shit more seriously and not just assume it will be easy.

They want to shoot in someone’s tiny apartment even though this is a movie made up of a memory montage made of many, many short scenes? Sure, what the fuck.

Oh, and each scene will require a change of clothes (where will the actors change? dunno) and a new setup, and possibly an entirely new camera angle.

What could possibly be wrong?

What do I care? I won’t even be there!

Worst case scenario, I refuse my producer credit. Fuck it. As desperate as I am to get credits at this point in my life, a credit on a real stinker can be worse than no credit at all.

I will continue to try to get them to focus, but if it all goes to hell, it ain’t my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now.

Not in a bad way, mind you. It’s just one of those points in the juggling act that is my life where all the balls are in the air at the same time without my hand touching any of them.

Like when you’re on the swings as a kid and there’s that moment between swings when you are weightless and motionless.

That was always my favorite part of the swings when I was a kid. Those little moments when you aren’t swinging in either direction, you’re just… suspended.

That’s how I feel right now. And it’s kind of nice. It’s a little stressful because I am in the middle of a major piece of homework – the beatsheet for the pilot for my animated sitcom Sam – and I have done the plotline for the one story I have totally fleshed out in my head, and now I have to think of two more. ^[1]

I have two more from back in term 2, but one of them is a “Sam gets a new friend” episode and I don’t want two of those in my pilot episode. He meets his best friend in the first segment and I want to add to the cast slowly so I have time to develop Sam further.

Originally, I thought the format for my show was going to be two 11 minute stories. Then my teacher and classmates helped me decide that I should do the show as fifteen minute episodes and aim it at kids a la Adventure Time.

It will make it a lot more marketable than the strange hybrid beast I had in mind, and it would allow me to have tightly focused episodes without subplots, which is what I want.

But now I sit down to do the beatsheet, and I do what I think will be the first half of the first episode, only to realize it’s only seven beats long.

That suggests that what I will actually end up with is a standard three act half-hour sitcom structure and while there is nothing wrong with that, it’s so far from where I started out that I am left a little dazed by the transition.

But what the heck, a familiar format will help sell it too.

So that’s one thing I am in the middle of, and the biggest of them. But I kind of feel that way about the time of year we are in too. It’s not quite the Xmas season yet, despite what retailers are trying to tell us^[2], but the days are getting very short and there’s a feeling of transition in the air as fall inevitably shades into winter.

And it’s kind of nice, in a way. Certainly, it gives me things to look forward to, and those are vital to my mental health. It should be a very good Xmas for me, for various reasons, and until then I have school to keep me busy.

And I have learned to enjoy that feeling of accelerated time that comes with age. I know it’s an illusion and that the minutes are passing at a minute per minute just like always, and so I don’t get upset and feel like yelling at everything to slow the fuck down.

At least, not yet.

And the great thing about accelerated time sense is that it never feels like I have all that long to wait for stuff. When I was younger, Xmas would seem like it’s a long way off from right now, despite it being less than a month until.

But now, it truly feels like it’s just around the corner. And the same goes for my education. I can’t believe that I am more than half way through my fourth term already. The weeks seem to go past like pages in a book and when I graduate on April 30, it will truly seem like the whole thing was a pleasant interlude on the way to becoming a real life adult.

That’s quite cool.

So while I am not exactly thrilled about being over the hill and gaining speed and I am really not keen on accelerating ever faster towards the grave, it has its advantages.

Of course, there’s another important transition taking place. Trump “transitioning” into being the Preside of the U S of A.

It’s not going well. His future cabinet is shaping up to be a basket full of losers. There’s not a one of them that seems like an A-List type. They are all lightweights without a thing going for them. I mean, when the smartest person in the group is Newt Gingrich, you have some serious fucking problems.

Then again, brains were never the issue with Newt. It was his weak and unstable personality that makes him trip over his own dick over and over again.

I hope Trump’s collection of assholes realizes that he won’t listen to them. If they think that being one of his “advisors” will give them power, they are tragically mistaken. He doesn’t listen to anyone because age has made him too stupid (where it counts) to take in new information and his ego convinces him that he knows “enough” at all times.

Sadly, they will still be the heads of various parts of the US government, but I am pretty sure that an agile bureaucrat will be able to keep them from actually doing damage to the country while leaving them free to damage themselves and the government they are part of with what they say as much as they want.

Never thought I would be rooting for the Sir Humphreys of the world to win!

A lot of the doom and gloom being forecast by hysterical liberals presumes competence and intention. I don’t think Trump’s monkey show will have either.

They can still do a lot of damage accidentally, Dubya’s regime taught us that. so I am not saying it is sunny skies ahead for the US and the world.

I am just saying we would be far worse off if that clown car of cabinet cronies had someone competent as ringleader.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.