Man, afternoons suck sometimes.

Namely, on days when I have nothing in particular to do besides blog. Right now, I don’t have any big projects to work on and so I am kind of at loose ends. And for some reason, that has led me to feeling very blah in the afternoon. both yesterday and today.  I end up all sleepy and overheated and listless and lazy.

Part of that is nudity, admittedly. Yesterday I was hanging about naked because all my clothes were in the wash. Today. it’s because I will just be getting into fresh clothes after I shower before going out later so why waste a change of clothes?

Although considering how craptastic I feel right now, I am considering revising that estimation. I just woke up from a nap and already, I feel like going back to sleep. Pull a siesta and sleep the whole afternoon away. I feel drained and listless and vaguely cranky. That’s no way to pass one’s Sunday.

I mean, sure, technically, it’s a day of rest in the Christian tradition, but there’s rest and then there estivation  (the summer equivalent of hibernation).

And it’s not like it’s a good kind of sleep either. It’s lousy sleepy, all sweaty and smothering and full of too-intense dreaming that sometimes borders on the nightmarish.

Like, I just had a dream where I was exploring a haunted house set up for a movie, but it quickly turned real. So I was really getting into the whole thing, getting scared and tense like I was in real danger while also experiencing it like a horror movie and hoping for some really good scares.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, just scraps. Like moving slowly through dark rooms, looking into mirrors to see if anything cool would happen, and one confusing sequence where some kind of malign spirit that was after me went through this whole elaborate powering up sequence which I suppose was meant to scare me into thinking it would be this powerful demon at the end but nothing it did seem to really change anything.

Perhaps I was really exploring my own subconscious mind. You know, that dark forest of the mind outside the strong, clear light of the reasoning mind that I fear and that, in my more delusional moments, I like to pretend does not exist.

After all, if one defines one’s mind as everything one’s inner eye can see, then there can be nothing outside the light, right?

Especially when you are as “bright” as I am. I can do a lot of things with this powerful mind of mine, and that circle of light illuminates much that is dark to others.

It’s kind of funny. Normal, healthy people of average intelligence see and understand a lot less of the world than I do. And yet they get along in life a lot better than I do. They clearly do not need the sort of understanding I posses, at least in most things.

But I do. I search constantly for understanding because I only feel safe once I have figured things out. Once I have, in a sense, conquered them with my mind. I have so little faith in my ability to handle things in realtime that I can only relax when I can fully understand and predict things.

Maybe not predict them in detail, because that would make life incredibly dull. But I need to understand the range of variables or I get freaked out. That’s not a good way to go through life. Far better to have the totally unpredictable happen and build up your confidence in your ability to deal with it, or at least, to survive it.

But I don’t wanna.

I definitely feel like my horizons need expanding. But I spend so much time merely coping. It’s hard to build up the confidence to face the unknown when you feel like you are just barely holding your guts in most of the time.

I wish I could escape that feeling and feel whole and hearty and ready for the world instead. It happens now and then but not nearly often enough. Most of the time I feel tired and dull. I manage, but I am not exactly attacking life with great zeal.

Plus I think the change in the weather is affecting my mood. Less sunshine means less happiness. Maybe this is the year when I will finally get around to getting full spectrum bulbs for all the lights in my room. Hopefully that will help. Plus I still, in theory, have that light therapy device in my possession…. somewhere.

I definitely feel more cheerful on sunny days. Whether it would qualify as actual Seasonal Affective Disorder is debatable. A lot of people find sunny days cheerful. I would go as far as to say that if you live someplace where sunshine is rare (like most of the Northern Hemisphere), the association between sunshine and happiness is so strong as to be nearly universal. All our visions of paradise or “our happy place” are sunny.

Perhaps it’s cultural, perhaps it’s seasonal, perhaps it’s our bodies getting really excited about producing some freaking vitamin D.

My own vision of basic happiness is, shockingly enough, not much different than other naked beach apes. A sun-dappled meadow, a light breeze, happy animals wandering about, and happy families soaking it all in.

Oddly enough, the beach is only in there at the periphery. I love the beach but I have never imagined it as paradise, possibly because I grew up around beaches and so they are earthy, mundane (but lovely) things to me.

I imagine the visions of peoples that have a surfeit of sunshine are different, and involve a lot of shade and water. Or during the rainy season, their happy place is indoors, warm, and dry, like on Ray Bradbury’s Venus.

But here’s the thing : almost nobody has a vision of paradise where it’s night.

We’re creatures of daylight, after all. Diurnal. And our visions of paradise are really visions of our long lost ideal habitats.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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.