I did something today that made me proud of myself : I wrote something that was bouncing around in my head instead of just letting it die and rejoin the primordial substance of my creativity like I usually do.

I called it Be You Later, and it is a translation of some of my ideas about procrastination into a kind of screenplay form.

It’s quite rough, naturally, and would have to be seriously worked over before it was actually produced. But that was never the point. The point was to actually follow my inspiration for once and actually give vent to my thoughts shortly after they occurred to me for a change.

Before I wrote it, most of the elements were already there in my head. That’s how my creativity works a lot of the time. It’s all there but the connective tissue and writing the thing is just a matter of putting the ideas into actual words and adding the necessary connections to make it into a whole.

That’s not always the case. Sometimes I have no idea what is going to happen until I write it. That’s how it’s been with my novels, and I have to admit, it can be pretty fun. And this might be idealistic or self-serving of me, but I figure that if I don’t know what is going to happen next, neither will the reader.

But for shorter things, I usually have a basic outline of it in my head before I write. It’s not in words, exactly, although scraps of dialogue will likely be in there somewhere. It’s more like a sequence of connected ideas in the stage right before being translated into actual words. Pre-words, if you like.

And you do, right?

So anyhow, I wrote the thing. I won’t say I hope that kind of thing will happen more in the future, because who knows? It would be nice, but putting pressure on myself to do it more will result in it not happening at all so why worry? It won’t accomplish anything.

That kind of philosophical attitude towards things does not come easy for me. I am a goal-oriented passionate person who tends to accomplish things through focus and drive, not via letting everything hang loose and seeing what happens.

And focus and drive can get you pretty far. But when it turns into pressure, I, for one, have to bow the fuck out because for me, pressure achieves the opposite of its goal.

I often think of myself as being like water. And water does not compress.

Following my passions and desires is a far more healthy and effective method for getting things done, and that means I have to surrender control to unconscious forces, and as we all know, I find that a very hard thing to do.

I mean, I am highly creative, and that involves letting unwilled mental events (colloquially know as “inspirations”) occur in your mind. So I am not that much of a control freak. Quite frankly,. an entirely predictable mind sounds like death itself to me.

But I don’t let those inspirations move me. They pass through my mind to no effect, like a a comet shooting by. And I just watch it go, and nothing happens.

Were I the classic artist type, my inspirations would inspire me to rush to the nearest computer type device and bang out the script or story or whatever in a fevered passion before falling, weeping, to the floor from the beauty of it all.

Admittedly, I am pretty sure there’s no writers that operate like that. Maybe poets. I have thought of being a poet, but it doesn’t seem like it would lead to my kind of life.

You know, one where you can earn enough money to eat.

Besides, I want to be around fun people, and poets do not strike me as a fun bunch. I want to be around bright, funny, wacky, intelligent people. Not mopey poets in love with how deep and mysterious they are.

That’s why I want to work in TV comedy. It’s full of people like that, or at least I hope it is. For me, the ultimate would be to be a Simpsons writer,and not just because they make money like rain makes puddles.

It’s also that from what I know about them, they are a gaggle of comedy nerds just like me and I feel like that’s a place where I might just fit in. And I hope the writer’s room of any kind of comedy is at least somewhat like that.

But comedy is my main thing, and that’s where I hope to work in TV. I will, of course, write literally anything people will pay me to write in the beginning. But I will be aiming to write for a comedy of some sort. Sitcom, sketch comedy, desk jokes, dirty limericks, jokes for executives to make them appear more human, graffiti, whatever.

And if that doesn’t work, maybe I will try to figure out how David Sedaris makes huge money writing tiny books of comedy about animals, and do that.

I saw this thing about him and he’s kind of cute and the little excerpts I have heard seem witty enough. But, quite irrationally, I resented him for not being any happier now that he is rich. Or at least pretending he isn’t any happier.

It’s the same way I feel about Douglas Coupland. How dare you still be unhappy when you have everything I want out of life! That’s almost like saying money and success don’t buy happiness, and if that’s true, what hope do I have?

And yet, if I did have all he has, and someone told me I had no right to be unhappy, I would tell them to go fuck themselves.

It’s funny how we react when a very deep bit of societal programming – like, say, the kind that tells you wealth equals happiness – is seriously called into question.

That’s why nobody ever really believes that they, themselves, are truly rich.

Because if they were rich, they’d be happy!

Obviously, the solution is to get more money!  Surely, eventually, we will reach the right amount of wealth, status, and success to be happy forever!

I know the problem….. it’s taxes! I would be rich enough if it wasn’t for taxes!

A surprisingly large amount of politics amounts to exactly that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am so fucking angry right now.

I am so angry that I could pull the head off ten chickens and still be mad at the end. I am so mad that I wish I was the Incredible Hulk so I could punch something into the Sun. I am so mad that I could kick a hole in the side of a battleship and not even feel it.

I am telling you, I am quite put out.

To tell you why. I have to start with a funny little thing that happened to me this morning. Namely, that I found my fucking bus pass.

You know, the same bus pass that has been missing for two weeks and whose absence has cost me $8 per school day in transit fees, severely straining both my finances and my nerves the whole time?

Well, it turns out that it was sitting on my floor, right under my computer chair, inches away from me the whole fucking time.

If I had only thought to look there when I first noticed it missing, I would have saved myself all this heartache, stress, guilt, frustration, rage, confusion, and expense.

I am out at least $64 because I am too stupid to be standing up when I am looking around for something that has gone missing. The goddamned fucking piece of shit card was right there all this time.

Oh, but that’s just where this day started.

See, I reported the card missing. The person at the ministry then told me that I had to wait for a letter to arrive, then pay a $10 fee, then I would have my new card.

So when I found my beloved card, I called them up to tell them I found it and that they could cancel the cancellation of it and the sending of a new one as well.

I honestly didn’t expect this to work, but I figured it was worth a shot.

And yup. that was no longer an option. Oh well. But while I was on the line, I asked the person there whether I was doing things right by doing what I was told to do, which is wait for the letter THEN pay the fee.

That had never made sense to me.

And lo and behold, it turns out I could have paid the money immediately and that if I had done so, I would have had my new card way sooner because they don’t send out the fucking card until you pay the fucking fee.

So, not what I was told the first time at all. This whole thing could have been over ages ago and I could have saved a lot of money if the person I talked to  the first time hadn’t completely misinformed me about how this shit works.

Oh, but we are still not done. According to the person on the phone today, now that I have paid the fee (I did it right after I hung up), I will probably get it before the end of December.

Get it? I might get it before the new year, I might not. That’s how long it takes these people to just stick a fucking card in an envelope and mail it to me.

That means there is zero chance I will be able to avoid paying $8 a day for the remaining 7 days of school, bringing the total number of days sans bus pass to 15 and my financial loss to a staggering $120, or around 13 percent of my monthly income, 25 percent of my monthly disposable income. ^[1]

And according to the person I talked to today, there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it. I’m the one living on $975/month due to being disabled. They are the ones with billions of dollars in the budget. They are the ones who fucked up, not me. But I am the one who has to pay for their error.

And all at Christmastime! Merry Christmas, everyone!

I truly feel like the universe owes me that goddamned money. I know I will never get it, but I still feel that way. None of this should have happened.

I mean, I know losing the card in the first place was my fault, but everything after that happened because some cocksucker at the ministry didn’t know WTF he was talking about. This from the the same part of the ministry whose phone line has wait times of over an hour, because apparently the whole section has like three people working there.

Or they are all just a bunch of lazy assholes. Pick your poison.

And I know that I will get over this. That in time, I will shrug this all off and eat the loss and move on with my life having learning a harsh and painful lesson in the casual callous cruelty of bloodless bureaucracy and the total lack of accountability thereof.

But that doesn’t make me any less mad now. I have been fucked over by the system and nobody even gives a shit. I have lost a lot of money because of some dumbfuck dipwad turd gargler at the ministry and there’s not a damned thing I can do to get it back.

For my entire life, I have been at the mercy of other people’s fuckups, and I am sick and tired of it. I deserve better than that,. I don’t deserve to get stepped on my every goddamned idiot who couldn’t find their dick with both hands and a hard-on. I don’t deserve to be treated like I don’t exist or that I don’t matter. I don’t deserve to be smacked around by fate. And I sure as hell don’t deserve to lose my precious cash over a petty bureaucratic error that I just plain can’t afford.

So while there is nothing I can do to get my money back, I can at least express me rage at how I am being treated.

I refuse to suffer in silence any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got called into the office after class today. Hygiene issues. People have complained. I can’t say I am surprised. I knew I had been letting things slip lately.

For whatever reason, my old difficulty with the shower came back. So for a while there, I was only showering once a week. Sundays. Normally I shower a minimum of three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday nights – aka my social nights.

But it got hard to talk myself into the shower for a while there. Very not good. I don’t want some future employment opportunity to pass me by because someone thought, “Michael Bertrand would be perfect for this job, but man, does he smell bad. ”

So I will up my game back to at least presentable levels. I will probably never be the sort of person who showers every morning. I just can’t even. But I can at least get myself back to the level I was at before.

That’s the thing about depression. It can make even the simplest of things much, much harder to do. Like taking a shower.

I suppose I was telling myself that as long as I wore deodorant and my clothes were clean, I could slip by unnoticed. But clearly, that is not enough to get the job done. The body itself gets dirtier and the only cure for that is a shower.

Ironically, if I was going to school in France, this would not even be a thing. Apparently the French only shower for special occasions. And you can really tell.

I could not adapt to that. Not at my age. I get the feeling that if I lived in France, I would have to live someplace way out of the way, where the trains are never crowded and there is lots of fresh air to be had at all times.

But lest we in North America get to feeling all high and mighty about not being like the smelly French, we should remind ourselves that by Dutch or Japanese standards, we’re all a bunch of filthy pigs.

Anyhow, the hygiene thing will be taken care of. The small talk before the intervention was more interesting, because I got to tell the head of the Writing Department, Michael Baser, about the problems I am having in my film group.

I told him how one person is doing all the jobs, we’re not hiring anyone, and how I didn’t feel like I was learning anything from the experience. He said he would talk to the teacher of the class about it. So that will presumably start something happening.

Not the way I would have preferred to handle the situation. I was working up the nerve to post something about it on Facebook. Just lay it all on the line : how I’m not happy with my limited role, how I didn’t feel like people were taking things seriously, about how I don’t feel like I am learning anything if we’re not casting or hiring or any of that.

If things go the way they are going now, I will end the class knowing no more than I knew going in about how to do a short film. And I want to make those so I can showcase my writing talent and show TV people what I can do.

One nap later…

However, because I did end up telling Baser all about my issues, that puts me in the awkward position of waiting for the hammer to drop on my group when I am the one who set it in motion in the first place.

Not that I think any punishment will happen. VFS doesn’t operate like that unless it has to. Presumably Baser will talk to Bob Woolsey, the instructor of my Production for Writers course, and Bob will talk to us, and hopefully things will be rejiggered so that we all get something to do and we’re actually doing things like hiring and managing and such.

If not, I may have accidentally screwed our group dynamic for good. Then again, we don’t have much of a group dynamic now anyhow. Part of what convinced me that I had to do something about the situation instead of suffering in silence is that I don’t think any of the other members of the group are super happy either. Our last meeting had all the joie de vie of a depression support group. I think we have stumbled into this situation with very good intentions and a plan that sounds good on paper, but that did not take into account things like morale, motivation, and most of all, that we are all supposed to be learning from the experience, and we aren’t learning anything.

It would be nice if we ended up hiring a few pros. I would feel a lot better if we had someone with a lot of experience on the team. Hiring a good director would be a great start, because honestly, this group needs an executive and yet none of us have any sort of standing to take over.

Theoretically, the person who wrote the script is in charge, and that’s the same person who wants to be the director, editor, sound person, lighting person, and damn near everything else. Plus we’ll be using her apartment.

But that person does not seem to me to be the right fit for director. The project needs someone to organize things, assign tasks, and most importantly of all, keep people fired up and excited about the project.

Instead, we have a diffident director with extremely low affect and who wants to do everything themselves, leaving little for the rest of us.

I would do the job myself if I thought I could get them to follow me. I would love to take on that role. I guess I would be the producer in that case. It was what I had planned for myself before reality set in.

I really feel like I was born to organize and lead.

I just lack the self-confidence to believe anyone would follow.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Well I finally gone and did it. Thanks to financial assistance from an interested party, I was finally able to go to the mall and get my cell phone activated.

Meaning my smartphone is no longer a smartnothing. I have finally crawled out of the primordial ooze and fought my way up the evolutionary ladder to become a Modern Human, homo wirelessicus, user of cellular technology.

Number available by request.

It feels good, this cellphone-having thing. I feel like I have finally managed to eliminate one of the things which puts me in a tiny minority.

It’s not as good as being young, rich, and/or thin, but it’s a start.

I’m kinda tired right now, which sucks. I was hoping to complete my daily blog entry in this sitting so I could devote the entire evening to getting at least half of my pilot episode outlines done. They are due Friday, and I want enough time to do them properly instead of my usual slapdash dumbass last minute bullshit.

As is, I imagine I will be lucky to finish half of this durn thing before having to slip into silvered slumber for a little while at least.

The radiator under/behind my desk is part of the problem. It puts out such lovely toasty warm radiant heat. And it feels great but it makes me sleepy too.

The result of that is that I am stuck in a (hilariously small) moral bind, where I know that I could solve the problem by turning down the heat in my room, but then I would lose all the lovely warmth and I don’t want that, so I remain, as it were, compromised.

If that was about sex and not warmth, it could be the outline of an Anais Nin story. Or, I suppose, one of those moralizing stories about the inevitable outcome of living a life of sin and blasphemy which were always very careful to explicitly describe said sins, sometimes with illustrations.

Puritanism was such a scam.

So yes, I have gone cellular. my legs are nice and warm, and a friend sent me a code for two new (to me) games. Which is a mixed blessing, because while I love my video game time, I need to get things done and I don’t need the extra temptation.

Plus, I already have a game on the go, Fallout 3. I played Fallout 4 so much that I can’t stand to play it any more, but I wanted something along those lines.

And then I remembered there’s two whole Fallout games I have not played, Fallout 3 and Fallout : New Vegas, and Fallout 3 was on sale for like $10, so I figured, what the hell.

So far, the game is much tougher and has much less in the way of plot than Fallout 4. It’s taken me a lot of game time just to get to the point where I am doing sort of okay. Before that, it was super hard and I had to run away from a lot of fights.

And that sucks.

And the thing is, it’s not like the greater difficulty is based in a desire to be realistic. I had to shoot a guy in the head five times to kill him, and he wasn’t even wearing a helmet. How realistic is that?

Um…. he was a bad guy. In the video game. Just to keep things clear.

I am always worried that someone will think I am crazy. Even though I am crazy. But my kind of crazy doesn’t lead me to strip naked on the Skytrain or think pink hippos are flying or makes me do something deeply “disgruntled”, so I am not dangerously crazy.

No, I have the highly unobtrusive kind of insanity that stays out of everybody’s way, doesn’t attract anyone’s way, and can go undiagnosed and untreated for years on end without anyone even knowing anything is wrong!

And the only person I am a danger to is myself! It’s such a tidy and convenient form of madness that it’s a wonder it hasn’t caught on big time.

O wait it has, that’s why there’s so many depressed people out there. Society should thank us for for being such low maintenance loonies.

Preferably in cash.

I’ve been struggling with my anger lately. There’s such bitterness and rage inside me and I need to find a healthy way to express it. I have talked before about maybe writing horror stories, but I know what kind of nightmares I keep and I guess I am still too worried about what people think of me to let those thoughts step out onto the page.

I wonder what Clive Barker’s friends thought of him when they started reading his stories. It must have given then pause, at least a little, to read about all this extremely graphic and elaborately symbolic violence and depraved sexuality. I wonder if any of them pulled away from him at that time, unable to handle his nightmares.

Stephen King’s wife, I am sure, was just fine with what he wrote. And not just because of the money. She was his first editor and it was she who fished a partial manuscript for Carrie out of the trash and started reading it, and then took it back to him because she wanted to know what happened next.

And, you know, there are worse lives to have than his.

Maybe the truth is that I am afraid to open up that part of my mind at all. Intellectually, I know that setting one’s demons loose can be the best thing for you,but emotionally I am still too scared of myself and what I might become if I open that particular door.

Same with BDSM. I can imagine being dominant to someone. I have the right kind of controlling, dominating personality. All I would have to do would be to imagine the person had done something really horrible and had to punished for it.

But I am terrified that if I let that side of me out, it would never go back in.

And then where would I be?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.