And so has Ross.

And life is good. He showed up this morning around 11, We had a chat, we had lunch, we ran some errands, and thne we came back to the apartment and had a cuddle.

And I have been cuddle deficient for a long time. Cuddles are good.

Otherwise, life goes on. Trump approaches the White House as we speak. I bet things are goig to get really interested in the new year as Inauguration Day (or as Trump refers to it, Doomsday) looms ever closer. I predict that he will begin to panic once there is no longer a set of holidays and a change of year in between him and a job he never really wanted and certainly never dreamed he could actually get.

And I think he is still trying to sabotage himself. He has mroe or less told his supporters that “lock her up” and “build a wall” were just words that “played well” with the rubes… in other words, them.

And he’s doing it in this creepy way, like he’s saying “You guys knew all that was bullshit, right? You knew I didn’t mean it. Sure, it worked on those other people… you know, the morons and hicks… but not on us cool, smart people, right?”

I honestly think he is doing that to assuage his conscience. Yes, he does have one, albeit a primitive and stultified one. Now that he has won the election, he is beginning to feel bad about all the lies he told and now he has to convince himself that nobody really believed them and therefore he is not going to be building a kingdom on lies or anything.

I also think that, like anyone going into a job for which they feel woefully unqualified, his strongest desire is to lower expectations as fast and as far as he can.

However, one thing troubles me about the Old Mad King To Be : he has been talking about how important it is for America to maintain and expand its nuclear arsenal, and by what can only be sheer coincidence , Vladimir Putin said the same thing a couple hours later.

Now I know that for a lot of people who are younger than me, and to a lot of idiots my age or older, the Cold War era was the good old days, when you knew who the enemy was and Kindly Uncle Reagan was in charge.

Of course, he’s the one who ended the cold war first place. But these people value nostalgia over reality every single time, so those things don’t matter, any more than the fact that it’s Republicans who spend like sailors and Democrats who balance the budget matters to them,.

They love their Imaginary Reagan, and that’s all that matters.

But I was around for the end of the Cold War. I was around when the threat of a nuclear holocaust hung over everything like the smoke from a crematorium. I remember what it was like to know that thick-necked narrow-minded hawks and little boys in men;s suits playing games were in control of the life or death of the entire planet, and there being absolutely nothing I or anyone seemed to be able to do to change that.

When I celebrated the Berlin Wall going down, I was mostly celebrating the end of that.

And I do not want that back. Even knowing what I know now, that the whole thing was a giant boondoggle designed to keep people scared while the Military Industrial Complex stole the public’s money by the fistful, and that it was never very likely that Reagan or Bush would have pushed the button… I still do not want it back.

The world was far stupider back then. Stupid enough to think that the world could be divided into the good people and the bad people that easily, that the other side was nothin but mindless and implacable evil,and that anything was justified as long as you could claim it contributed to the fight against the apparently infinite evil of The Other Guys.

And to be honest, I don’t trust Trump with the nuclear codes. He might unleash Armageddon just to get back at a reporter who pissed him off by reporting the actual truth instead of Trump Brand Truth.

I can only assume that they will do with him what they did with Reagan when the senile dementia really started kicking in, and that’s add a few technically illegal complications to the launch process in order to keep the President from being…. hasty.

I don’t think Trump will have the moral authority to start an actual war, however. Not even with some big terrorist attack that oh so conveniently happens at exactly the right moment to justify what they wanted to do anyway. The vast majority of people know that the last War in Iraq was a total disaster and people are going to be asking a lot of very pointed questions as to the bona fides of any and all justifications for war.

That doesn’t mean he can’t do it, of course. Thanks to all the executive order nonsense the Americans tolerate, the President can do that shit without even asking Congress. Heck, without even telling them.

Because, of course, when going to war, the last thing you want getting in the way is the will of the people.

But without popular support from the people or the military, it would be met with great resistance and possibly even outright defiance.

And Dick Cheney has emerged as a top Trump adviser, so he might just be able to talk Baby Donnie into doing it. That could lead to a cultural standoff between the federal government and damned near everyone else.

I don’t know what happens then. Riots? Revolution? Assassination? Violent suppression of dissent? What happens if even the Supreme Court is against the sitting President?

I am betting on impeachment. I don’t think Donnie is nearly as smart as Reagan, nor is he as willing to listen as Dubya, and so he will not be able to shield himself from it.

And that trial should be a hell of a show.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As my wonderful dear boyfriend Ross wends his way north to Seattle, where he will stay overnight and then make the rest of the trip in the morning, I can truly say that I have done it at last.

I have initiated major change in my life, the kind that will take me far out of my comfort zone and into the unknown territory of romance. I am finally going to be in a relationship, and that is going to change everything, no matter how things turn out.

An d I have to admit, the universe met me more than halfway. I didn’t even have to date. Someone I already know and love reached out to reconnect with me, and all I had to do was say yes.

Makes me wish I had a God or other religious entity to thank. Being thanked and/or blamed is one of the most important jobs for any religious entity, whether it’s God, the Gods, karma, the music of the spheres, or Elvis.

It’s also a good example of getting on the damned bus. That’s what I call it when you make one decision that takes you a long way without having to make any more. like when I decided to go back to school, first Kwantlen, then VFS.

After that decisions was made, all I had to do was follow through. The momentum of the thing itself would carry me along, and that’s a godsend for someone who has problems generating their own momentum and then preserving it.

I have a lot of inertia and friction within me, and a very deep preference for inaction and invisibility that I have to fight against in order to get anything done. There is a very ill part of me that would prefer I did almost nothing at all, and sometimes. even less.

That’s basically what depression does to a person.

So having Ross show up for Xmas is a perfect way to take that to the next level. I don’t have to cross the no man’s land of online dating profiles, target selection, attempt and rejection, and so forth and so on to get to where I want to be.

I just have to tag along. And as the youngest of four, I am very good at that.

I am doing a pretty decent job of withholding expectation. I have no idea what it is going to happen when Ross and I reunite tomorrow morning. And that’s fine.

In fact, it’s better than fine, it’s great. I have this wonderful feeling of possibility. No predictions needed… or wanted. No matter what, my life changes tomorrow. Whatever happens, it will help me evolve, and I desperately need to evolve.

I have a whole lot of maturing to catch up on. And that’s the kind of thing that can only be done via experience. No amount of virtual experience through the consumption of media can help you grow the hell up. You have to get out there and live.

And that means exploring. And I have never been much of an explorer.

Even as a preschooler, I was more likely to stay where I was than to go exploring. That was partly because that is how I was being raised – to always be where I was left, so to speak. But mostly it was because I am, fundamentally, someone who needs a reason to explore. Exploring for its own sake never had much appeal to me.

I would wander around places I felt safe, but at first, those were few and far between. And I was always struggling with being, by nature, a very timid and sensitive soul, and rather high strung, so it didn’t take much to scare me into going and hiding. both figuratively and literally. So the exploratory urge was up against stiff competition from the very beginning.

And yet, I have also thrived (throve?) on attention as well. This being pulled forward and backward is characteristic of the astrological sign Cancer, which is my rising sign. Ambition and the desire for positive emotional energy drives the Crab forward, timidity and shyness drives it backward. Hence, it walks sideways.

Crabs don’t really walk like that, but that’s besides the point.

Of course, as I have said countless times before, my lack of explorative instinct only pertains to the physical kind of exploration. When it comes to the mental realm, I am an eternally restless wanderer who always has to know what lies beyond yonder horizon.

My mind is constantly probing, searching, developing, integrating, and synthesizing new worlds from what I already know. And I am always adding new things to the mix, so it’s really a never ending, ever-unfolding, eternally blossoming flower of the mind.

No wonder I have trouble sleeping. That shit doesn’t have an off button.

So maybe that’s where all my exploratory urge went : like everything else, it turned inward when I was abused. Instead of exploring my environment, to which I was somewhat indifferent as long as I was comfortable, I explored my mind. Not in any weird psychomachea way, just by thinking about things both consciously and unconsciously and trying to figure the world out.

And in that way, I am quite the rugged explorer. I instinctively go where other minds fear to tread because that’s where the most interesting answers will lie. I especially like going where my own mind fears to treat, because what’s the deal with that?

Plus, following my own resistance to the source always yields truly good answers, the kind like help me grow as a person. They are not always fun, but they are always worth the pain and suffering because I rate personal growth very, very highly.

I feel like I have resisted the evolutionary instinct that runs deep in my bones because depression made me feel like I I was just barely holding together and any change would cause me to fall apart like a wet paper airplane.

But I am not so fragile now, and more importantly, strength lies in change, not stasis.

You have to grow up to grow stronger.

You have to be strong to be happy.

And you don’t have to do anything to grow up.

You just have to step out of the way.

I will (probably) talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I kind of feel like I am the most extreme example of whatever it is that is wrong with my family. Somehow, I got the worst, strongest dose of it, and that makes me, in an not very logical way, make me feel like it is my job to figure out what the hell it is.

Well, I could certainly say I have the strongest incentive, I suppose.

Let me explain what I mean. You see, all my siblings and I have problems. We’re in my ways not a healthy bunch. Every single one of us has struggled with depression/anxiety, we all have some fairly dark demons to struggle with, and there is some majorly fucked up shit in all of our childhoods.

I can’t help but feel that this is because we all inherited the same vulnerability. I am not sure exactly what it is, but it definitely has something to do with us all ending up as highly intelligent and intellectual as well. ^[1]

I have spoken before about the significant imbalance that is connected to high IQ. How it seems like in order to be very good at the intellectual, ego-driven side of thing, one must also have a very poor connection to the id side of things.

And as much as the arrogant ego likes to pretend otherwise, the id is vitally important to psychological well being. It is the life source, the engine, the lifeblood of the soul, the source of all being within us. To banish it to a locked cage shoved into the background of the mind to rot and starve just so the ego can play around at being “in control” (whatever that means) is to make yourself defenseless against the beast you refuse to admit exists and risks it damaging you deeply enough so you can no longer function as it tries to get out and be heard.

I think we all inherited that particular flaw. We’re a brainy bunch and brainy people tend to “lead with their heads” like that. We’re all very sharp and clever and can do all kinds of tricks with these good brains of ours. But we’re also kind of fragile.

And me most of all, of course. All of us struggled with mental illness, but I am the only one that got it so bad that he could not function at all. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in a purely raw IQ sense, I might be the smartest.

Mine, it seems, was the greatest imbalance. And while I do my best to enjoy and acknowledge my mental gifts, I can’t help but wonder what I would have been like if I had been just a little less bright and a little more whole.

Instead, here I am at 43 years of age and only just now trying to drag my way through a Cole’s Notes version of adolescence so that I can try to balance myself out and learnt he lessons of the spirit that I was always too “smart” to learn before.

All those things which seemed so pointless to me, from playing in the sandbox to hanging around outside the liquor store looking for someone to buy for us, had enormous importance and significance that I, in my arrogant ignorance, missed entirely. The people doing those things were far smarter than I because they followed their very wise and purposeful instincts without questioning why, and thus they learned what they needed to learn about themselves and who they really are, as well as exploring their sexuality, learning how to date, mate, and be in a relationship, and even how to work for a living.

Meanwhile, I read book, played video games, watched TV,  and, eventually, hung out online. Learning absolutely nothing about life in the process. My head got stuffed with information but my social education was nonexistent.  All my experiences were virtual and third hand, and often not based on anything real at all, and meanwhile, my soul died a little every day and I was too ignorant to understand what I was losing.

As far as I knew, I wasn’t losing anything. And yet I knew I was deeply, deeply sad. From the point of view of 30 years later, it seems insane that I did not grasp that I was sad because I had a lot of unmet needs,. or that I treated said needs as noise, as optional, and ignored them in favour of my mental merry-go-round.

My other siblings are all more functional than I am. I assume that this is because they were strong enough (and smart enough) to make friends, the friends stimulated their social growth, and they grew up to be far less unbalanced than I.

And after all, they had each other. Not all the time, but certainly at the beginning. I was off in my own little world, with nobody looking out for me.

The rub, though, is that I know I was super bright right from the start. Before any of the bad things happened to me, I was already precocious as hell, to the point of it being kind of eerie, I would imagine.

I mean, if I met a four year old who talked like an adult and could read and write and knew basic math up to long division, I would be kind of freaked out by the kid.

Our sense of age-appropriate behaviour runs very deep and starts the minute we learn to sit up straight as infants.

And those kinds of words and thoughts and such sound weird and wrong coming out of a preschooler. I think I must have come across as pretty weird to a lot of people.

It’s lucky for me that I was also fairly charming… to adults, anyhow.

And you know what? I still am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, I should warn : I don’t know how much I will blog while Ross is here, so I might not be your daily correspondent for the next ten days or so.

I will do my best, but you know….stuff happens.

It;s been another day in the doldrums of ennui. I’m not depressed, or even sad. I haven;t gotten to that stage yet. But I am beginning to miss school, which is a good sign that said stage is not too far away.

Then again, Ross arrives either Thursday night or Friday morning, and then I will be busy with him a lot of the time. And part of my mind insists that there are things I “should” be doing, and for the most part, there is not.

The only thing I should be doing is cleaning my room, and I am, in a fashion, working on it. Anxiety has attached to that task for me and I have decided to simply let the cycle of anxiety, avoidance, reconciliation, and resolution to get the damned thing done play itself out ion my psyche, unmolested, in hopes of having it over with sooner.

Trying to force things only adds energy to the system, which in turn pumps up the anxiety level and makes the blockage all the more painful, and hence, makes me even more avoidant. At the right moment, when the energy is aligned, I might be able to overcome the blockage by sheer force of will, but until that moment comes, I wait, and I watch.

It’s amazing how rapidly I panic. It’s like panic is never more than a step and a half away, waiting for the slightest opening to gun me from zero to freakout in 0.2 seconds. On a bad day, I panic over completely every day things, like the four seconds or so the screen goes blank when my computer is booting up. Happens every time, but now, because of difficulties I had yesterday, I panic and think the computer is broken.

Ah, yesterday. I should commit that to “paper”.

It began when I accidentally rebooted my computer. This happens a lot because all you have to do is touch the power cable and the damn thing loses power for a moment, and then, reboot city.

When it booted up again, everything was fine for a little while. All my programs were loading and everything was normal. But then, this message pops up telling me that Win 10 couldn’t complete an update and it needs me to input my product key.

The first thing that made me suspicious is that when I try to do so, it doesn’t allow for enough characters. My product key is 5 groups of 5 alphanumeric characters, and it only allowed 16. That makes no sense.

Then I noticed it had a “if this doesn’t work, call this tech support line” number on it, and it suddenly clicked : this was clearly a scam.

The idea would be that no matter what you inputted, it would not work, and then the victim would call the “tech support” line and some scammer would listen to the problem sympathetically and then offer to fix the problem… for a fee.

You know, “if you buy our upgraded security pack” or “I can connect you with an Internet security company that specializes in this sort or thing BEEP BOOP BEEP Hi, I am a toally different person from a very prestigious Internet security company, can I help you? ” or “I can solve this problem…. but only if you gather the four stones of the Orgatron and bring them to the Penultimate Hill before midnight!”.

You know…. typical scam stuff.

So then it became a matter of getting rid of the fucking thing because without it, I could not use my computer. And the usual tricks, like closing the program in Task Manager or using Windows key and R to open a Run window (also known as a command prompt by us old school types) did not work.

Luckily, I remembered Safe Mode. So I looked up how to boot Windows 10 in Safe Mode via my smartphone, and after a couple of methods that did not work but showed up on a whole whack of websites, I found our that all I have to do is hold shift when I select “reboot” from the Power menu and voila, the next time the machine resets, I will get an option screen that will let me boot in a variety of ways.

So I reboot in Safe Mode With Networking, and I run Malwarebyte’s anti-malware program, and it finds a ton of stuff, removes it, and I reboot.

Nope! Did not work. Screen of Doom still there.

So I reboot in Safe Mode With Networking, and I run Spybot Search and Destroy’s anti-malware program, and it finds a ton of stuff, removes it, and I reboot.

Nope! Did not work. Screen of Doom still there.

By this point I am super stressed out and panicky, sO I take a nap. It’s not a healthy way to deal with that kind of thing but it’s what I’ve got.

I get up, and sit there in Safe Mode, wanting my computer back. Then I can an idea. It’s a very simple idea, surely too simple to work, but I had to try it.

And it worked. Turns out, all I had to do was go to the menu that shows all the stuff that runs upon booting and disable the program that generated the popup. Next time I booted, no Screen of Doom.

I guess the scammers figured their marks are too stupid to know that was even a thing. Wish I could go back in time and tell myself what to do before it happened, so when it happened I wouldn’t be freaking out and making insane contingency plans involving wipe my hard drive and starting over from scratch.

Hey, some people cope with bad situations by drinking or eating. Me, I plan.

So all ended well, and I now know some more tricks to pull if something like that ever happens again. Still,  I could have done without the afternoon full of panic, self-recrimination, depression, and stress.

Makes me appreciate days like today, when I merely sleepy a lot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I realized recently that I have over 400 videos on my YouTube channel, representing the last 8 freaking years of my life.

Yes, I uploaded my very first video on August 4, 2008.

Here it is, and while not mine, it is freaking hilarious.

It’s the kind of comedy that is so unique that it defies definition. Why is this man man saying the word “chicken” over and over again while switching between slides featuring the same word over and over again so goddamned funny?

Is it the fact that chicken is a funny word? It has the famous comedy K sound in it. Is it the calm, dull, everyday way the author of this “article” says the word? Or is it (post-modernism warning) because by making the content silly and repetitive, it draws attention to the delivery method and mocks it?

Probably all of that and more.

My first original  video on Aug 11 of that same year :

I had so much fun making those vids.

And yes, that’s the first one, even though it’s the 5th in a series. The previous ones were uploaded to my other YouTube channel, which got nuked because I kept ignoring trademarked content warnings.

Yeah, it was dumb.

Music’s by me, too. Damn, I be funky fresh. Oh, and I never liked doing the captions for the pictures in the slideshows in text. It’s too clumsy. Comedy is all about that ignition point where the joke comes together, and boom, laffs. But having caption and content be on different slides makes that nearly impossible.

Then I discovered a magic site called XtraNormal, and I ended up making things like this :

Don’t worry, you didn’t just have a negative brain event. It’s simply what happens when I say “What happens if I really let my inner lunatic loose, and tap directly into the roaring spinning exploding star of my maniac creativity?

Now you know the answer.

Then I tried to think of what would sound the most hilarious in the dead-robot voice of Xtranormal actors, and I came up with this :

But as you can see, I then had to somehow dig myself out of the racist hole I had dug, and that was not easy. Had to make a pretty big leap out of the box.

This one is the closest I have to something normal :

I love that I used the British voice for that.

Then there was the stuff I did with a bunch of fellow nutbars who called themselves The Mobeus Society. Like this gem :

I wrote the skit, directed it, and edited it. Because I am multi-talented! Looking at it now, I am surprised at how good it looks considering how none of us knew what the hell were were doing. And hey, it’s something that I wrote.

Not sure I will include it in the demo reel for my TV writer resume, but still.

Then I decided it was time to get back into doing a video a day. I had done it once before, with “the 30 30”, thirty days of posting at least 30 seconds of video a day, which, as it turns out, is an absurdly short amount of video.

So the second time, I decided to double down :

And at first, a lot of my videos were “talkers”, where all I did was stare at the camera and talk about whatever subject was on my mind at the time.

Here is a representative sample :

Potentially interesting stuff… for a podcast, maybe. But not exactly a new sensation in video entertainment. Still, I often did those talks off the top of my head with no script or teleprompter, and that takes some form of talent.

I particularly like that one because it’s me striking out at the anti-religious bigots and other pseudo-intellectual neckbeard bullies who somehow have deluded themselves into thinking they are somehow better than all the religious sheeple.

Fuck you, You’re just as superstitious as the rest of us.

I got a little more ambitious with my Don’t Say That series :

Riffing on a simple setup. It’s a great, high density form of comedy. My inspiration came from A) funny list articles, but moreso B) one of my favorite games from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the British one.

Oh, and I can’t stress this enough : I am NOT naked in that video. It’s just summer and I am wearing nothing but shorts.

Then I decided to do funny fake phonecalls from celebrities, with the celebrity voices provided by my collection of audio clips from movies and TV.

I have no idea if that is funny to literally anybody else but me, but I sure had a lot of fun pretending that I was the guy who had celebrities calling him all the time. And I find the way I build my comments around the audio clips I had quite funny.

Inspiration : something Robin Williams did in Good Morning Vietnam.

Then I really got ambitious and decided to have fun adding my own silly comments as a loose form of re-dubbing to a clip from a foreign movie.

Warning : the following is chock full o’ penises.

Well that’s it for the first two Youtube pages of my videos, starting with the oldest. It’s been a fun look back for me, as well as an excuse to look for whatever might actually be usable in my future as a comedy writer.

I honestly don’t think I will find anything much because the point of the project was to give me a daily activity that let me express myself besides this blog. So while some of the vides you will see in the future are impressive for something done by one dude, a computer, and a camcorder, and I definitely learned all I know about video editing while doing them. And I will always be grateful for that.

But there is a world of difference between “Impressive considering… ” and actually depressive, because for one, nobody gives a fuck about the first one.

You either deliver or you don’t. And that’s the bottom line, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just finished watching an episode of the British show “Black Mirror” and it was so thought provoking that I thought I would share some of those thoughts with you nice people.

I will try to be brief. The episode takes place in a future where everyone has a “grain”, which is a little chip implant behind your right ear that stores all your memories and lets you review them or delete them whenever you like.

The plot revolves about a man who, after seeing how his wife interacts with a fellow named Jonas at a (godawful) cocktail party becomes consumed with jealousy and suspicion and goes down a fairly typical path of drinking, getting angrier and angrier, and finally confronts Jonas in a drunken rage and makes Jonas delete all the grain memories he has of his wife under threat of violence.

The twist is that it turns out the guy’s suspicions were well founded. Turns out that not only did his wife fuck Jonas back in the days before our protagonist met her, but she fucked him again, in the marital bed our hero sleeps in with his wife, and they didn’t even use a condom, and whoops, turns out Jonas is the real father of their 18 month old baby.

It’s an effective twist because I totally did not see that coming. I thought this was all going to end with him murdering his wife out of the bitter male jealousy that kills a lot of women every year. I had nothing but contempt for this guy up until that point.

But after that, while I don’t share straight people’s rather extreme attitudes towards monogamy, I certainly could understand how our hero might feel a tad betrayed.

That’s no mere cuckolding. That’s cuckooing. ^[1]

And along the way, the episode touches on some interesting aspects of the technology. There’s a character who had her grain stolen, gouged right out of her head, to presumably be sold to some rich pervert who wanted her sexual memories. In order to get on a plane, the protagonist must have the last 24 hours of his memories scanned to make sure he hasn’t stuck a bomb in his suitcase or whatever. In order to keep his job at a big law firm, the protagonist has to subject his memories to a two year review.

They even mention handling cases where adult children sue their parents over emotional neglect and so on during their childhoods, which presumably they can prove by showing the memories in court.

That is a concept I find equally horrifying (what a fucked up self-devouring way that would be to try to live a life!) and exultantly just (hey guess what? ACCOUNTABILITY!).

But I would not want a grain of my own. Sure, if I had one, I might be less absentminded, but probably not. After all, you still have to remember you have something to remember, and the technology wouldn’t help with that. It’s pretty much just video.

More than that, though, I simply don’t want that much memory at my disposal. I already feel like I remember too much of my past hurts and traumas. That high powered, high def memory of mine keeps them crisp and fresh in Ultra HD in my mind.

With every second of my life at my disposal, I would never be able to get over anything. I have mentioned before how I think high def memory makes it hard to fully process traumatic events because to even tangentially think about them is to bring them back in such vivid detail it’s almost like they are happening again.

I am grateful that in my case, that’s as far as it goes. I have never had a full on flashback and I hope I never do, My sense of reality in the here and now is shaky enough without having memories recur.

So no grain for me, please. That would only make things worse.

I wonder what teaching would be like in such a world. I can only imagine that it would be deeply unrewarding because the students would know they only had to pay a minimal amount of attention in order to have the whole lecture available to them at a moment’s notice. That would not be the same as learning it – any more than having a series of lectures on DVD teaches you. You would have to go through and pay attention and take notes at some point to actually learn it.

That’s the advantage, in science fiction writing, of a technology that merely records the sensory inputs from the person. That’s a big enough kettle of fish to deal with without dealing with the recording of emotions, thoughts, associations, ideas, and so on.

But the fact that these memories are stored in a file-like form that can be access by others in some form (even if it’s just on a screen), brings up the intriguing possibility of truly seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. And ears, and skin, and so on.

And yup, the episode made it clear that this includes sexual feelings too. So right there you have a huge amount of demand built in.

And what about fictional scenarios? If you can load memories that aren’t your own, who says those memories can’t be created artificially so that you can experience doing things that aren’t even physically possible in the real world.

Surf marshmallow clouds over a valley filled with unicorns and manticores. Give a stirring and passionate speech about human rights to assembled heads of state. Punch Cthulhu in the taint. Anything is possible!

And of course, it need not be passive either. It could be fully interactive, like those old CD-ROM games, or even like modern video games.

And all realer than real, baby!

Actually, maybe we’re better off without that, says the guy who spend 10 of the last 24 hours playing video games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had plans for today, but…. they didn’t happen.

Specifically, I had been planning to walk the two block to my local Shopper’s Drug Mart, buy Xmas cards for my family, then buy the postage and send it them off. ^[1]

I have already foot-dragged far too much on this by being so school-focused that I forgot that I still have a life independent of school.

People always tell you to get a life, but as it turns out, they are very high-maintenance.

I got into my Good Pants (I have two pairs!) and was getting ready to go, but then the Jagoff stepped in and convinced me to play my current video game (Darksiders) “for just a little while”. Three hours later, it’s getting dark, and I have lost all will to mount my expedition, instead opting to stay home and order KFC.

It’s like I don’t even know who I am any more.

This choice makes this point in my life extremely important, because how one deals with failing to live up to your expectations is a crucial pivot point in deciding what kind of life you are going to lead.

On the one hand, approbation. This has been my go-to for decades. It would be very easy to excoriate myself over this. Rake myself over the coals, unleash all my self-hatred, tell myself I am a pathetic loser, I suck, I’m a blight on the world who can only hurt those who come near him, yadda yadda yadda, sis boom bah.

On the other hand, forgiveness. Eh, big deal, I will do it later. And that’s the direction pop psychology would dictate. Forgive yourself. Be nice to yourself. Allow yourself to be human. Accept that you are flawed.

The problem with that is that if you take THAT attitude, you better watch the fuck out, because the next thing you know, 20 years of your life have gone by while you were excusing yourself for everything, and surprise, you hate yourself.

You hate yourself like you would hate anyone who keeps making promises to you without ever intending to keep them and who fails you time and time again, and blocks your personal growth in favour of laziness and lassitude.

Both extremes are terrible, and can really destroy you when they work together. The answer, as always, is to strike some kind of balance between them.

But that’s a lot trickier than merely computing an average.  This is a whole new equilibrium, and finding and stabilizing one of those is a lot less like math and a lot more like trying to walk a tightrope during an earthquake.

So how does one find that blessed isle of stability and sanity in between the two extremes? So far, all I know how to do is to let the string continue to vibrate at smaller and smaller amplitudes till it falls silent.

And by that somewhat abstruse metaphor, I mean that if I don’t try to force the outcome, and instead just watch it, I will vacillate between the two extremes by an ever decreasing amount, and when that runs out of juice entirely, well, that’s where I set up shop, I guess.

It’s not a complete method, and while it may be wise it’s hard to argue that it is rational. It deals with things far below the level of mere rationality. And like I like to say, when you travel outside the light of reason into the darkness of the subconscious, subrational mind, you have no choice but to feel your way around.

See what I did that? Feel your way around. Like how in the dark you might feel around for a light switch, but also how the subconscious mind is a realm of irrationality where the only way to navigate is to follow your emotions, or feelings.

OK, so it needs work.

I think that’s been one of the hardest parts of my quest to become less rigidly rational and more emotionally integrated and hence a lot more mentally healthy : learning to let go of rationality not just as an inner sense but as a method.

It’s futile to try to rationally examine one’s irrational mind. I try, because I can’t help myself, it’s all I know. But I recognize the absurdity of it all. The only “system” that applies to the subconscious is its own. Rational referents will only produce garbage output.

See, even when I try to talk about my subconscious mind, it all comes out in overtly rational language. I analyze, therefore I am. This means that I unconsciously project (an expect) order in whatever I perceive and I am always looking for a pattern by comparing input to what I already know.

That’s no good for the irrational world of the subconscious. Comparing things to what is known in one’s subconscious is like trying to sculpt with water. To examine one’s subconscious mind is to do the opposite : to wait, and watch, and listen, and see what emerges, without judgment, categorization, or analysis.

It is what it is, and any logic in it is entirely self-referential.

Wow, I just mentally wandered away from doing this blog for like, an hour. Two days out of school and already my mental discipline is slipping!

Aw, who am I kidding? I never had a lot to begin with. Never needed it. Everything came easy. at least school-wise. In some ways, I feel like I have been conning my way through school all these years.

Not in the sense of not doing the work. Just in the sense of it being way less work than others put into it for the same (or better) result.

But if it’s a con, I hope it keeps paying out at least to the point of my acquiring full time employment. I suppose it’s not impossible that I will land a line of work I also find easy.

Which would be cool in a Jagoff sense but bad in an “actual personal growth” sense.

Super excited that Ross is coming. 6 days!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear, the biggest and most popular lie I tell myself is that “I will remember that later”.

Like hell I will. It’s use it or lose it. I am the kind of person who has a lot of ideas but the only way to save the good ones is to record them in some fashion. Otherwise, they will disappear back into the roiling chaos of the creativity which gave them birth.

Like I have said many times before, I have a very busy mind. I always have a ton of processes running at the same time and at varying levels of consciousness. Ideas I am developing, emotions I am (slowly) processing, issues I am contemplating, and so much more.. This taxes my mental resources and it especially taxes the harried little dynamic load balancer that has to keep everything going while avoiding a total mental breakdown.

It works so hard. I honestly wish I could give it a vacation sometimes. Shut down the shop and let the whole complex apparatus cool off for a while.

I dunno, maybe that is what I do when I almost-sleep. I just relax my mind and let it zero out for a while, let processes complete and emotions come through.

It’s not that I have stopped thinking and achieved a kind of Zen-like oneness, though that sounds like it would be awesome. It’s that I stop trying to control my thoughts and kind of just relax and watch the show.

It’s a tad like lucid dreaming, in the sense that I am part asleep and part awake. Like I have said before, I can’t find the words to express how it is not actual sleep. It’s very close to it, but I never actually enter the dream state. It’s the state right before actual sleep, where you are totally relaxed but still very dimly aware if your surroundings.

In some ways it’s better than sleep, because I get some of the benefits of sleep without having to deal with my as of this moment untreated sleep apnea.

I suppose that I should make it one of my missions for this downtime to get back into using my CPAP machine. If I can get re-acclimated to it, I will probably have a lot more energy and get a much higher quality of life as a result.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

But it;s really hard to do in practice. It’s such a crazy and unnatural thing to do, to put this mask over my face and turn on this machine that makes sounds like Darth Vader enjoying phone sex and then try to sleep.

I did it for a while, and I am proud of that. But the results weren’t exactly dramatic, and I stuck with it for at least three months, so you would think by then I would be feeling something at least.

But no, nothing drastic. I felt a bit better, that’s all. Maybe it needed adjusting and I would have gotten the dramatic results if the settings were right, I dunno. Or maybe my real problem is depression and no machine can help me with that.

Not even Doctor Vibe’s Orgasmatron.

It never writes, it never calls.

So the problem with me versus CPAP is that the results do not justify the effort of will it takes to ignore all the weirdness. Trust me, if I had experienced the sort of quality of life boost that I had been promised, not only would I have never stopped using it, I would have built an altar around it and worshiped it, and sung its praises for all to hear.

But nope. So you can see why one scare where I woke up gasping for air was all it took for me to give up on the goddamned thing.

The fact that smothering is one of my all time worst fears didn’t help either. Although now that I am thinking of it, maybe I got that fear from apneic sleep. They say that sleep apnea reduce lung capacity over time, and I can believe it, because I personally have concluded that carbon dioxide pools in the bottom of my lungs and I have to regularly force it out in order to get back the lung capacity it displaced.

It’s sad that the previous sentence is the most cogent and understandable explanation of the problem that I have come up with yet.

If I am right and my issue is carbon dioxide, then the problem is one of insufficient exhalation, and blowing air down my throat with CPAP isn’t going to help with that. In fact, what I would need then is the opposite sort of machine… one that help draw air OUT of my lungs with a finely tuned kind of suction.

Even if that’s not possible for sleeping, it would be a wonderful thing to have when I first wake up in the morning. Wake up, yawn, stretch, vacuum my lungs and replace all the bad, used up air with refreshing fully oxygenated air in the ideal nitrogen/oxygen ratio.

It sounds like a joke, but if there really was a machine like that, I would do whatever it took to get myself one.

Given my near-constant state of mild oxygen starvation, I suppose I should be easier on myself for being absentminded and easily confused. For all I know, I might be sharp as hell if I was getting enough air.

But it’s a self-feeding thing. I am always tired so I have low activity levels. Low activity levels are ideal for lowering metabolic demand for oxygen. When my activity level increases, demand exceeds supply and I feel like I am dying. So activity levels stay low.

Which brings up another issue : exercise. I am used to walking twelve blocks a day, four days a week, in order to get to school and back. Now that I am on vacation, there is nothing forcing me to get out and walk.

Which means I will lose my precious conditioning and it will take some time to get it back when school starts again. Unless I somehow develop the self-discipline to get myself to take walks on entirely my own volition.

I will try that out tomorrow. I under-shopped when getting my food and pop supplies on Wednesday, which means a two block and back trip to the local 7-11 is in order.

And while I walk, I will be quashing all negative thoughts and replacing them with positive thoughts about how nice it is to be outside and get a little exercise.

And if the weather is not too awful, that might even work.

I suppose I could write this whole idea about exercise and CPAP down.

But I am sure I will remember it later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had kind of an amazing day.

Now I have been depressed the last few days. What with the fiasco of a day I had Monday and Tuesday making me feel like a stumbling fool who never had the slightest idea what the fuck he was doing, I was feeling very low.

And things did not improve today. I got up at 9 and barely managed to bang out the beat sheets I had due in today’s class in time before having to eat and then go to school.

And the trip was no fucking fun. I am officially well and truly sick of Real Winter and would be more than happy for a normal Wet Coast winter of rain and darkness to happen if it means it isn’t so fucking cold.

Then I got to class, and realized that once more, I had forgotten to read my classmates’ work before coming in, so I would be commenting blind. I handled it okay, but for their sakes’, I hope I did a good enough job to fool them into thinking I had totally done the reading, because then they won’t feel insulted by my inattention and lack of reciprocity.

Why am I suck a fuckup? I wondered as class progressed. My mood was further bleakened by watching all the bright young things in the class come up with cogent and actionable analysis of the beat sheets of their fellow students’ work on the fly when I just plain could not even digest the stuff that fast, let alone comment on it.

It made me wonder what I am really learning. Even if I could solve my speed issue, I am not sure I could perceive my classmates’ work the way they can. It shames me to admit it, they see more of the big picture than I do. Or rather, they are better able to articulate what, for me, is merely a hazy intuition. Either way, it is a blow to the ego to have revealed to you that young people can do things – analyze and articulate – better than me when I thought those were my particular specialties.

This feeling is sharpened by the fact that another person in my class is a goddamned good writer. So good, in fact, that what he submitted Monday was judged by the class to be impossible to improve. It was Done. Even the teacher agreed.

Meanwhile, I am still half-assing and jerking off each assignment at the last minute and getting the same criticisms on each assignment. Do I even belong here, or are they just letting me go forward out of pity? Is there really a chance I will work in TV?

Then it comes my turn to have my morning’s work analyzed. My show has fifteen minute episodes, and so I had to do beat sheets for two episodes. My first episode did okay. But I was still missing the vital ingredient of a vital reason for the protagonist to move forward.

Here it is.

1. An angry teacher tells Sam he has detention. We don’t know why yet. Sam asks what detention is.

2. Sam shows up at the detention room. There’s only one other kid there, a tough looking kid named Rod. Sam asks Rod what detention is. Rod tells Sam you have to sit still, be quiet, and read or study. Sam blinks a few times and says “That’s it?”. Sam then sits, takes out a book, and reads happily.

3. Mister Petitfour arrives. He is there to watch over the detention room. He sighs and rolls his eyes when he sees Sam. He doesn’t like how happy Sam looks to be in detention. He sits down and immediately falls asleep.

4. Later : A restless Rod asks Sam what “a nerd like him” did to get detention. Sam says he told a teacher they were wrong in front of the whole class. Rod is impressed.

5. Later : Sam finally thinks to ask Rod how he landed in detention. Rod shrugs and says “fighting” like it was the sort of thing that happens to everyone. Sam is scandalized.

6. Later : A confused looking second grader named Jack shows up late for detention. Sam asks what he did. Jack says he showed up late for class. Sam asks Jack if he has a problem with time. Jack doesn’t understand the question. Sam goes back to reading.

7. Later : Rod gets up and starts pacing. Detention is very hard for him. Sam offers to lend him a book. He looks at Sam like he’s insane.

8. Later : Sam asks Rod how he ended up in a fight. Rod shrugs and says it was probably because someone said something that made him angry. Sam can’t believe that Rod doesn’t know.

9. Later : Jack asks Sam and Rod what time his mother is going to pick him up. Sam and Rod remind him that it’s lunch time. Jack says “But my piano lesson is over. “ Rod and Sam move away from Jack.

10. Later : Rod is extremely agitated, to the point of panic. Sam asks him why. Rod says it’s because he doesn’t like confined spaces. Sam ask why Rod doesn’t just stop getting into fights then. Rod stops pacing and hmms, having never considered this option before.

11. Later : The bell rings, indicating that lunch time is over. Rod is out of the door like a shot. Sam tries to wake up Mister Petitfour, but has to give up because he doesn’t want to be late for class. Petitfour wakes up to find Jack staring up at him. Jacks asks Petitfour if he is his Mommy. Petitfour wonders aloud what the heck he missed.

Not bad work for something I bodged together this morning. But it really makes me appreciate the long development process we have been putting out shows through. Compared to the outlines I submitted recently, that’s a load of undigested crap.

I know that I have the stuff of genius. All the right ingredients are there. I have full faith in my creativity and funniness. But it’s not good enough to just be the mine, producing the raw ore of greatness. I have to be the refinery and the jeweler as well.

I am so totally down with the earth imagery lately. I am off the water imagery, apparently. I choose to view this as spiritual progress.

I was a little hurt that nobody liked Jack, I thought he was cute and funny.

And then we get to the second of the episodes, which goes like this :

1, Sam gets hurt, is sent to school nurse

2. Sam explains symptoms to nurse, who doesn’t understand his terminology. Sam is shocked that such a charlatan is employed in his school.

3. Sam asks a school crossing guard what qualifications he has. Crossing guard explains that he’s a volunteer and his only qualification was that he already had the vest. Sam is shocked.

4. Sam asks the lunch lady for her qualifications. She says she took a three week food safety course and that was it. Sam asks her how much biochemistry that involved. She looks at him blankly and tells him they learned how a lot of foods look and smell when they are rotten. Sam is beginning to panic.

5. Sam asks a school janitor what her qualifications are. She tells him she had to take a three month course then do a long apprenticeship. Sam is reassured that at least one adult in his life is actually qualified for their job until he learns how little microbiology it involved. And how can you keep the school free of germs if you don’t know microbiology? Sam is freaking out.

6. A freaked out Sam tells Ann and Leon how unqualified everyone at school is. They ask him whether these people can do their jobs or not. Sam can’t see how they could when they don’t know the basic science involved. They tell him that knowing the science and knowing how things work well enough to do your work are two very different things. Sam is dubious.

7. The next day at school, Sam is explaining his concerns to Edgar during recess when some roughhousing kids accidentally shove Edgar, causing him to take a nasty fall. The roughhousing kids are panicking and Sam is frozen in place, not knowing what to do.

8. The school nurse swoops in, and in a quick montage, calms everyone down, examines Edgar, tells everyone he will be fine because he just has a sprain and some cuts and bruises, and whisks Edgar off to her office to bandage him up and put his arm in a sling for the sprain.

9. A dazed and confused Edgar asks Sam what the heck happened. Sam explains that the school nurse saved Edgar after he took a fall. Edgar, remembering their previous conversation, says “You mean that quack patched me up? It’s a wonder that I am still alive!”. Sam looks guilty and thoughtful.

10. Back home, Sam admits to his parents that it looks like they were right but he still doesn’t understand it. They explain that a child learns to walk without understanding physicals and learns to talk without understanding linguistics. Ergo, you don’t have to understand the theory to be good at the practice. Sam agrees.

11. Montage of Sam apologizing to the crossing guard and the janitor and giving them small gifts, ending with the school nurse, whom he gives a box of candy thermometers “for the little kids. “ She smiles, thanks him for his thoughtful gift, and sends him on his way.

And to my shock and very lovely surprise, it’s declared  by all to be pretty much perfect.

Apparently, when I wrote that one, I got it right. Everyone found the story charming and engaging and loved the lesson it taught. This time, my main character had a clear goal and pursued it, and that made all the difference.

And that’s where the day ended : with me having finally got it right, so to speak. I now have a perfect(ish) episode to use as a template for further episodes, and I can finally unleash Sam’s true potential to charm the socks out of everyone and make everyone fall in love with that lovable little egghead.

Just imagine the merchandising opportunities! ^[1]

I am going to go over that beatsheet with a fine toothed comb and try to figure out what makes it tick so I can do it again. I finally get what the teacher has been trying to tell me all this term, the same thing I argued with her about in a way I now see as purely reactive.

And reflexively arguing to defend your work instead of actually listening to the people trying to teach you something is the exact opposite of what you should do.

At some point, I am going to have to make peace with my fiery side and find a way to harness its vast energies for positive, life-affirming, non-destructive ends. Instead of suppressing it only to have it make me argumentative, arrogant, and stubborn.

Well I get it now. My plots were lacking vitality. I didn’t understand it as it was explained to me, but now that I have an example, it finally clicks. It’s not exactly that every character has to have a clear goal in mind, it’s just that stories are way better when they do. So while it is true that in real life people don’t always have clear goals – in fact, often our goal is merely to make it through the day – in fiction, where the object is to entertain, those clear, easily understood driving goals make everything work better.

I also learned that I need to do what all of pop culture has been telling me to do for my whole life, which is to learn to stop comparing myself to others.I need to forget the other students and concentrate on being the best version of myself I can.

That’s a lot easier to do when you have achievements, and now I have one.

I wrote a really good (beat sheet for an) episode. I could see in my teacher’s eyes the kind of warm, bemused, amused look that is the exact kind of thing I am looking for, and that meant more to me than even the compliments she had given me.

Because it meant I had gotten it right.

And that’s the best feeling of all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.