I have amazing news.

Yesterday, I met with someone about a TV show they are developing, and the quick version is, I am the dude who will be writing it. And probably a lot more.

I can’t exactly say I was hired, because to be honest, right now this project is just me and four energetic young people and a very good idea for a TV show and/or web series. We have a lot of the needed equipment. We have developed the idea behind the projects a fair bit. But for the most part, at this moment in time, it’s just a dream.

But that’s pretty food for someone like me who graduated nine days ago!

And I am perfectly content to be part of something like this. Heck,I am just amazed that I am part of a band of crazy people determined to make good television without having to create and run the project myself.

The project will take up some of my time but not nearly all of it. I will still be looking for freelance work and working on other projects, like Paragon.

But I am so happy to be part of something, and it’s even something where I can use many of my skills that are not writing as well as being the main creative on the whole project.

And it will get me what all people starting out in show biz desperately need : a CREDIT. Having a credit – any credit – to your name makes a huge difference in show biz. It proves that you actually can do a job. and that means you have passed the all-important “shows up, does their job, is not an axe murderer” test.

Not that different from the normal world in that sense. Nobody wants to be the first one to trust someone. That’s the catch-22 that all new workers face.

It’s cruel but unavoidable, I am afraid.

And the fellow who I met with (and had a very fun and productive three hour conversation with) is an amazing fellow. Very energetic and focused, with natural leadership skills and a lot of charisma when he talks.

He will be both the producer of the show and the host, and I think he is an excellent pick for both jobs. I can’t wait to see him really selling the show in meetings. He has an extremely valuable skill – contagious enthusiasm.

Plus, he’s got an amazing CV. I mean, he got his MBA at CAMBRIDGE. The one in England. That’s amazing right off the top. He’s currently a full time Human Resources manager, which show potential investors/funding agencies that he has what it takes to do a project like this.

In fact, he really impresses me as someone who can get things done

And if that’s not enough, two of the other members of our crazy group are, in his words, “highly executable”, which does not mean what it sounds like.

It sounds like it means they are really asking to be executed. Like saying someone is “so very very smackable”. But it actually means that they’re very good at getting things done.

That, to my personal point of view, sounds so amazing that I am afraid to believe it. I could very well be in the position I have always longed for : a place where all I have to do is take care of the stuff I am good at (like writing and administration) and other people take care of the rest of it.

Super impressive : when I mentioned doing a technology test with the equipment the producer has purchased, where we play around with the equipment to familiarize ourselves with it, it turned out that they had already done it.

The next step will be to take the equipment out to try to film the sort of thing we will need for the show. I think we need this expedition because the show will be shot entirely on location and I know enough about the biz to know that shooting on location is way trickier than in-studio work, so we might as well make all our stupid mistakes ASAP and learn to get what we want before we start shooting.

The producer even told me that his executable friends (who were not at the meeting) would do research for me. RESEARCH.

I hate doing research. But I love the results of other people’s research. Consequently, having people do it for me is bliss.

So I have a pretty good feeling about this project. I can’ talk about specifics because (possibly stupidly) I am worried someone will steal the concept. It’s a brilliant take on the foodie travel show, and the best part of it is, this is a massively multicultural city with many ethnic neighborhoods, so we can take people on a food based trip around the world without having to leave the GVRD.

I mean, I know of a place where you can find  Russian, Malaysian, and Afghani restaurants within  blocks of each other.

This is also a position in which I feel needed. The producer told me over and over that he felt very lucky to have found someone like me.

I haven’t heard that much in my life. It’s highly gratifying.

And like I said earlier, I will be doing things beyond simply writing. I will also be giving the project the benefit of my age and wisdom. I get the feeling that a project like this, full of energetic young people, needs an older guy like me to keep them on track and keep an eye on the big picture.

Plus, there’s just the five of us, so we will all end up wearing many hats anyhow. And that is exactly how I like it. I want experience in TV making as a whole, and I have a lot of talents to explore, like leadership and production design. I want to come out of this thing with a well-rounded skill set and the confidence to be able to say “I can do that!” and back it up with experience.

I think that this is the sort of thing we can pull off ourselves, at least to the pilot stage. On the other hand, with our producer’s charisma and the inherent genius of the concept, I don’t think we will have trouble attracting funding, either.

And if we got enough funding, we might be to afford to actually hire ourselves and turn this from a project to a job.

Employment. What a concept.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just finished watching a documentary called  Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, and it’s given me a lot to think about.

The basic underlying message of the doc is one of paring down one’s possessions to only the things that actually are useful to your life and to your happiness. It’s about stepping off of the consumer treadmill and taking a good look at your life and what you are doing, and why. It’s about recognizing that consumerism can, very briefly, treat the symptoms of spiritual malaise, but in the long run, it only makes things worse.

It’s like trying to live on junk food alone. Sure, you might be full…. but you’re still starving because what you really need is nutrition.

Note that official, scientific word for starvation is “malnutrition”, not “hungry”.

Much of what was said in the documentary intersects with a lot of the things that I have been saying over the years. It certainly connects with the things I have been saying about how everything that you own, owns a piece of you, and that getting rid of possessions can help you take back all those little pieces of you and make you a happier, more whole, more spiritually fulfilled person.

It also connects with what I have been saying about the absurdity of modern consumerist life. How I find it insane how we all end up with this massive amount of material possessions – so much that we have to rent storage for it – and for what purpose?

If something is in off-site storage and it would take finding the keys and driving across town to get something from it… is it even still yours really? What are the odds you are going to be motivated enough to go get something? What are the odds you will even remember what you have in there?

This is why I hate the thought of “shopping” as a leisure activity. To me, that stands for buying things not because you have any need of the thing but simply for the pleasure you get from buying it. You end up with a massive burden of functionally useless possessions that you have to transport whenever you move and that take up space in your brain without any return in pleasure or happiness.

In other words – they are a liability.

When you talk about things like this, people tend to have a very strong reaction because it feels to them like you are trying to take something away from them.

Which is absurd. I don’t have the power or the inclination to take anything from you. All I am doing is questioning the real worth of your possessions. If that makes you get rid of something, that is your decision, not mine.

But I think the reaction itself is very telling. Materialist values are so deeply ingrained in us that the idea of losing what we own puts us in a blind panic. On some level, even fairly spiritual people feel like their possessions are part of themselves and that to own less things would diminish them.

One of the problems in tackling this issue is that the materialist treadmill does work… for a while. Science backs me up on this. When you are young and poor and building a home and a life with your spouse, everything you buy genuinely adds to your life. Now I have an iron and can iron things. Look, we have a vacuum now and can clean up the place. We finally got some cookware so that we don’t have to rely on the microwave for everything.

The problem comes when we try to keep getting that pleasure when we have everything that we need.

Let me guess… when you read the words “when you have everything that you need”, your immediate thought was “Who are you to tell me what I do and do not need?”, or something along those lines.

But again… I am not actually involved in your life and I am not dictating a single thing to you.  It’s up to you to decide what you need. I am just questioning certain things.

Anyhow, there comes a time when the pleasure of acquisition tapers off because we are no longer getting something we need and can use. But people stubbornly persist in trying to get that same high. So they end up buying things they don’t need and will never use and that can only act as a burden in their lives trying to recapture that feeling.

And that is inherently futile. All they are doing is getting tiny doses of the pleasure of acquisition which fade rapidly and, like all addictions, hollow the person out as the addiction takes over more and more of their lives.

But it’s not hard to see why the consumerist disease runs rampant amongst citizens of the modern era. The sad truth is that people get trapped in the consumer/success hellhole because it gives their life purpose.

As long as they are pursuing the next material thing, their lives have a direction and purpose. They know what they are doing and why their are doing it. Each consumer craving carries with it a sense of quest or mission. And as long as you are never satisfied (and how could you be, with such little spiritual nutrition in your life), you don’t have to think about where you are doing and why.

This works especially well for the quest for the next promotion. We tell ourselves that the next promotion will be the one that makes us happy. even though we know, deep inside, that the next one won’t make you any happier than the last one.

However, consciously realizing that would throw the person into the existential void of purposelessness, so those thoughts get buried so deep they become part of a pre-Cambrian layer of soil.

All this stems from the massive spiritual deficit of modern life. Modern society is very good at giving us amusements and distractions but very very bad at giving us a sense of meaning, purpose, or even a basic sense of self-worth. That’s why we cling to consumerist and/or success oriented ideals.

Even people of faith feel this lack. Often they try to fill the void with fervent adherence to their religion, to the point of almost fetishizing it. They surround themselves with reminders of their faith and do their best to make their lives entirely about their religion because that is their addiction and their substitute for true spiritual fulfillment.

They have decided that their religion equals good and that therefore making things more connected with their religion always makes them better.

I consider modern society to be in a state of spiritual crisis that we cannot see or even acknowledge because that would shatter our faith in our existing methods of coping and we need to convince ourselves that we are happy.

The closest we get to acknowledging the issue is to mumble vague things about feeling “empty inside”. Millions of us feel this way but nobody stops to ask themselves why.

The emptiness is simply taken as a given, and we talk about ways to fix it, but rarely do we ask ourselves why it is there in the first place.

It’s because we are all starving in a society that denies the existence of food.

Maybe the solution comes in ridding ourselves of most of our stuff.

Maybe all we really need is permission to say we have enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am, in my favourite seat a\on my favorite White Spot, writing a blog entry onthe laptop Ross gave me.

I have used the laptop a bunch since I got it, but that mostly for, shall we say, private browsing. The kind that happens behind closed doors.

By the way, if anyone is offended by my talking about my sex life, I am sorry. But it is not going to change any time soon.In fact, I will likely get far more explicit in the future. I am a gay man going through the sort of sexual awakening that most people have as teens or at the latest in their early 20’s (yay college), and I have a lot of catching up to do.

Heck, I am even considering “hooking up” online. That is huge for me.

The laptop’s keyboard behaves mysteriously sometimes.Ross warned me about that, though. And a lot of the mysterious bahaviour is caused by my big fat fingers using an ALMOST full sized keybaord.

Adjusting to a new keyboard is always tricky at first, and the fact that this one is basically what you would get if you took a standard keyboard and removed 99 percent of the space between keys does not help.

corBut I will persist and adapt. e

Today has been pretty meh. Between sleep and, Internet at home going down for an hour and a half during my most productive hours, then coming out to cash my check and get a meal and do some shopping, my work report for today is going to be pretty dismal.

I hope to compensate for that in the evening.

I am pondering getting a “normal” job. It would give me current job experience and that would assure prospective employers that I have passed the vital “shows up and does the \\that job and doesn’t murder people” test.

That assumes I can get hired. I would have to target places with a high turnover rate and hence fairly low standards.I have a twenty year gap in my job history and that is something that would give any hirer pause.

My dream job would be to man the till at a small bookshop with a cat.

Or maybe I will try to start some sort of home based business. I could really enjoy being a writer for hire, writing whatever ground-level people need written. Letters to landlords, family biographies, wedding vows… you name it, I will write it.  It would bring me some income as well as a variety of fun challenges to my skills. It would also help me fulfill my desire to stand up for the inarticulate and keep them from being pushed around by highly intelligent and articulate people like myself.

Kinda  of like being a white hat hacker, but for words.

Mental note : try to get the term “word hacker” adopted by popular culture.

So who know, maybe I will hang my shingle out as a public pen. It could be a lot of fun.

Well that is half my words, which was my goal.Time to go shop.

Man, will this need proofreading when I get home.

Back home now. Did my shopping and called a cab, like I usually do.  Sure it’s only four or five blocks between the supermarket at home, but I nearly always buy some type of frozen foods and I want to get home before they melt.

Of course, I am also lazy. I mean, I took a bus to get there!

Anyhoo, my food ending up melting some anyway because I waited in the hot sun for twenty minutes before a cab showed up.

Bonus points for me, though, because I I did call back and complain when it had been fifteen minutes, and I didn’t complain meekly and apologetically either. I let the frustration come through in my voice, and I that, for me, is a major assertiveness achievement.

Some weird shit happened while I was waiting. This teenager with the mandatory sleeve tattoos and snotty attitude apparently backed into someone’s car in the Price Mart parking lot…. then came back. So I got to watch some security guard grab the kid and harangue him tough guy style. He actually said, “I find chunks of bigger guys than you in my stool! ”

I did not know people actually said things like that.

This incident brought back memories of being a smartass teen myself. I didn’t drive or anything, but I remember getting hassled by the security guards at the mall and feeling like I was being unfairly discriminated against just because I was a teenager.

They never harassed me directly, though. It was always a “you people get out of here” type of thing. So I never got into a direct altercation with any of them.

I will give them this, though : we did look pretty disreputable. I mean, what did the bad guys look like in the 80’s once they stopped being punks?

Metalheads. Which is what we were.

Still, I am glad that it wasn’t the me of today that had to deal with teen hating rent-a-cops. I was far meeker back then. The me of today would have given that supermarket security guard the razzing of his life.

“Wait, so you spend a long time looking at your poo? That’s gross, dude. What are you, some kind of poo sniffing pervert? And if you’re finding chunks of people in your shit, that means you’re a cannibal too. You’re a fucking cannibal shit freak, and you think you have the authority to tell US what to do? Get real!”.

If I had actually been a teenager at the time (instead of stopping the growing up process at like age 12), I would have been incredibly insufferable. It would have been me with the big ego and the smug assurance that he was always the smartest guy in the room and the ability to prove it at the drop of a hat as well.

Instead, I am only getting started with that stage of my development right now, and there is no way for a 44 year old to get away with acting like that.

Still, I think I will try to learn a thing or two from that utterly insufferable imaginary version of me. I often am the smartest guy in the room, and there has to be a way for me to make that work for me.

Maybe it’s time I started using my powers for my own gain.

I want my piece of the pie.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what I have figured out about the winner mindset so far :

1. Winners are not overly concerned with objective reality. To them, everything is either a stepping stone to their success or irrelevant. This keeps them focused and driven, and it’s that drive that powers them through obstacles that would stop a loser.
2. Winners don’t quit. This seems obvious on the surface of it, but a lot of people waste a lot of time ignoring this basic truth. Winners take the attitude that they will never quit pursuing their goals unless the universe forces their hand. Otherwise, it’s eternal striving, and the joy it brings by making you feel alive.
3. That means winners do not make excuses. They recognize that hiding behind excuses – especially flimsy ones – is loser thinking and refuse to go there. If they don’t succeed at something, they don’t make excuses. They don’t assign blame. They know that no matter what, their response will be the same : get up and try again. Excuses and blame only get in the way of that.
4. Winners are brutally honest with themselves when it comes to performance. You either make it or you don’t. They will scrutinize themselves after every failure, find the weakness or lack that led to the failure, then attack it with great ferocity.
5. Winners see obstacles as challenges, not roadblocks. Winners believe that the greater the obstacle, the more glory there is in overcoming it, and they know that when they overcome it that it will only make them feel stronger.
6. Winners believe in strength.They know that strength is the key to success and they strive to become stronger all the time. They are attracted to anything they can use to become stronger : stronger body, stronger will, stronger character, stronger mind, stronger everything. They know that the stronger you are, the easier life gets, and the more they can take on. They cherish the feeling of strength and will do what it takes to preserve and expand it.
7. Winners are not afraid of pain or hard work. They don’t relish pain but they do not let the fear of pain keep them from getting what they want. They know that pain is temporary and success can last a lifetime. So they are willing to work hard to get what they want and the fact that this makes life harder doesn’t bother them.
8.  Winners are deeply connected to their id. They feel the inner fire that drives them and they intuitively grasp that it is this fire which will power them to victory as they define it. Instead of trying to kill it off, they give it all the freedom they can, and only suppress it when it gets in the way of their goals or does not conform to their sense of themselves. If it registers to them as weakness, they will drive it out of themselves. But otherwise, they let their inner fire burn freely, and this is the source of their seemingly limitless energy.
9. Winners have a high opinion of themselves. This is often seen as a weakness, but it is vitally important to success. You can’t succeed unless you believe you deserve to succeed, and unless your definition of success is extremely modest, that is going to require going quite a bit beyond the ordinary world into the realm of high achievement. Their self-esteem is the same size as their goals. It has to be.
10. Finally, winners act on their emotions guided by their reason. They act on impulses and accept the consequences. They understand, deep down, that acting on their impulses strengthens their will, and that things which seem stupid in the short term can pay off on a personal level, at least as a visceral lesson of what NOT to do.

That’s what I have so far. But know this : this does not mean that if you do not think that way, you are doomed to being a loser forever.

You are only a loser if you refuse to even consider the idea that they know things you don’t and you could learn a lot from their example. If you want what others have, you have to think about how they got it and what part their mindset played in that.

If you are willing to learn, and open yourself to change, you can move from loser to winner. Not instantly, of course, but over time. You can dig deep and find your id connection – here’s a hint, it’s located near your lust and ambition – and learn to open it up and harness its raw power to your dreams, and ride it fearlessly to your destination.

You also can start catching yourself employing loser thinking – like “that’s too hard, I could never do that” or “someone like me could never do that” – and replacing them with winner thoughts – like “this is going to be an amazing challenge” and “there is nothing wrong with me and I deserve success as much as anyone else does”.

I am just starting out on this journey myself, so don’t think I am coming at this from a place of smug security I have been the victim of loser thinking for a long long time, and it is not going to be easy to reprogram myself to shake the loser dust off myself and learn to think like a winner.

But I know it can be done. I have seen the results of my small efforts in that direction and they are amazing. I have full confidence that as long as I stay on this path, I will be able to transform myself into the person I have always wanted to be : charming, confident, decisive, easygoing, and primed for success.

So no more excuses. I am going to spend my days kicking ass and my nights taking names. I want to succeed so bad I can taste it, and instead of suppressing that feeling, I am giving it a blank check to take me there.

I am not saying that I will become a famous television writer some day – that’s a contradiction in terms.

But I will be a highly respected and very well paid one.

And to think, you all knew me from Way Back When!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Is very little, as it turns out.

I have been pondering the question of my eyesight ever since I mentioned it in yesterday’s blog post. And I have reached a difficult but inarguable conclusion.

I’m a high functioning visually impaired person.

I don’t think my vision has ever been corrected properly. My glasses just get me to the function range. But there are still lots of occasions where I run into difficulties due to my visual difficulties and that’s been so true that I bullshit to compensate without even thinking about it. It’s second nature to me.

The big locus for this in my life is noticing things. Thousands of times in my life I have faced the question “How could you not notice that?”, and I never have a satisfactory answer for the person who is asking, often quite angrily.

I’ve passed this off as my just not paying much attention to my environment – and that’s true as far as it goes. I am a deeply interior oriented person. I always have a lot on my mind, both consciously and unconsciously, and that means I do not have much room on my cognitive pathway for input from my senses.

Basically, I think so hard that it blocks my sensory input. I will notice the thing I am paying attention to and little else. It’s rare that I spontaneously notice things in my environment. There needs to be a reason for me to start paying attention to what I see.

Otherwise, I get enough information to enable what I am doing, and that’s it.

.That’s why there is no point in honking at me as you drive by. By the time I pull my head out of clouds and look, you’ll be long gone.

Even as I sit here typing away at my computer, I have most of reality tuned out. I can read the screen and hear my music and that’s it. My bed is right behind me and it could be on fire for all I know. That’s how deep focused I get.

OK, the light and the smoke of a burning bed would likely get my attention. But you know what I mean.

Now when I say I am visually impaired, I am not claiming to meet the legal definition of it. I can function perfectly well in society and that means I am not, strictly speaking, impaired. My problems are more subtle than bumping into things.

But speaking of that, I think my visual acuity issues are behind my lifelong clumsiness. If I find myself unable to do what others find very simple, it’s because I am working with far less information than they are.

For instance, for me, the edges of things have always been blurry, and they have always wavered. To me, there is no such thing as a straight line, at least not subjectively. What others say is a straight line, I have to take on faith.

It’s like I am constantly trying to see things through a thin layer of heat distortion. Must be from my fiery passionate nature and burning desire for success.

Well, okay, that’s only recently come to light. I am working on it.

I think I suppressed it for so long because of the intellectual folly of trying to control outcomes with the power of your mind. That places far too large a burden on your “self control”, or at least what you think it is.

It means that you can never fly off the handle, never directly vent your emotions, never let emotions get in the way of clear and logical thought, and above all, you can never include raw emotion in any of your “logical” decisions.

Well if you’re so logical, why aren’t you happy?

This suppression is at the heart of much of what is wrong with Western culture. At some point (probably the Greek Revival period), the culture embraced this emotion-denying, soul-numbing, life force suppressing rationalist bullshit about how we should suppress our “lower” animal selves and force ourselves into the ignorant ego’s idea of the “higher” self.

As if you can build a tower while destroying the foundation! If we manage to be human, it is on top of (and at the mercy of) our “lower” selves. Those “higher” selves can only exist if the rest of our hierarchy of needs is taken care of, from the bottom up.

A person who desperately needs to use the bathroom is highly unlikely to be thinking thoughts of a deep and spiritual nature or pondering the eternal verities.

The Athenians understood that. That’s why they had “body slaves” whose job it was to look after all those “lower” needs so that their master would be free to think lofty (dare I say Olympian?) thoughts.

I would keep mine SO BUSY.

But no, the West got stupid again and began promoting the lunacy of asceticism as the most holy way of life and even something towards which the average person should aspire in order to be “closer to God”.

You know, the same God that created humans to have those “lower” emotions like lust and hunger and such. Apparently, the life-deniers of Christianity’s death cult (got that one from Nietzsche) think God is the sort of being who does things just to make doing what He wants you to do harder.

Either that, or they think God screwed up when he made us.

And while we have survived generation after generation of progressive reform, we’re still not ready to simply accept ourselves as the complex beings we are. We still wall emotion off from reason and create this inane split in people’s mind where they feel shame for simply being live animals on Planet Earth.

We will not truly be enlightened until we can accept our whole and integrated selves without any unnecessary divisions or mindless shame.

The same creatures that build skyscrapers make sure to put bathrooms in them. The same great people of history who created cities, circuses, and symphonies also masturbated. Human beings have stepped onto the surface of the Moon, but they never would have made it if they hadn’t brought their own oxygen.

We are not purely animals. We are not purely human.

We are animals who know how to be human.

And that’s all we’ll ever be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.