Today has been…. semi-productive.

Fucked around in the morning. Played video games, read some Terry Pratchett, masturbated, laid in bed, stretched. The usual.

And. NSFW TMI warning, I am very glad that I can masturbate to completion lately. For a while I could not. I just wouldn’t get there. I chalk it up to a combination of stress from school and the goddamned “sexual side effect” of adjusting to my higher dose of Paxil.

When I first started on Paxil, the sexual side effect didn’t bother me because it suppressed my libido almost completely. Which, from a detached clinical point of view, was sort of interesting. I remember being horny, I remembered what turned me on, and I remembered how fun my menage a un used to be.

But all that was left of my actual desire was an abstract and highly intellectual sensation of stimulation. Other than that, I was practically asexual.

The problem came (so to speak) when I started getting my libido back after around 18 months on Paxil. At first, it was nice to feel it again. It was like reuniting with an old friend. But the lack of completion issue made any attempt to act on the urges an exercise in futility and frustration.

That’s what it’s like when you are male. Women’s sex drives don’t seem to be as focused and driven as men’s. They don’t have this insane drive towards The Moment that we have. They can have fun with themselves without orgasming and walk away happy.

There is no female equivalent to blue balls. I am so jealous.

Eventually that goddamned side effect let up enough that I could masturbate maybe once or twice a week. And that’s how it’s been for a long time.

But my psychiatrist upped the dosage on both my antidepressants, Wellbutrin and Paxil, and so, just as I had found a treasure trove of my kind of porn (furry, gay, with a plot), I found myself unable to reach my destination.

I am so glad that shit is done with for now.

Anyhow, that’s not what I set out to talk about tonight, I just sidetracked myself like usual.

So you can stop wondering what “The fight for the center” has to do with masturbation now. They are not related.

No, what I am talking about with that title is nothing less than the battle for my immortal soul and the very pith and marrow of my existence.

In one corner, we have our all too familiar reigning champion, The Jagoff. If he wins, I will go back to just letting the days go by after I graduate. His greatest desire is to have me back in his clutches 24/7 again, and for there to be no more of this pushing and striving and (ick) ambition, just day after day of video games and hanging with the fuzzies and very little else. Just sleepwalking through life without resistance.

But he faces a challenger which we will call The Living Fru. TLF has sworn to destroy the Jagoff, then burn it, then jump up and down on the ashes. Its greatest desire is to drive me into the light and warmth where I can truly live. It represents the life-drive of the id and is therefore the opposite of the Jagoff. Where the Jagoff wants me to sleep peacefully and painlessly, TLF wants me fighting, kicking, and screaming until I force myself into a place in the world instead of staying outside of it.

It’s motto is “pain is better than death”.

Today’s battle had mixed results. I implemented a bunch of notes into my Episode Three but part way through I thought “I can hang with the fuzzies and revise at the same time!”.

But no, I can’t. I ended up in the other mode instead, and that’s not good. My policy of not doing anything else when I am writing is the only way to go. It takes up too much of my mind power to allow for my usual scattered mode of being, with mental tabs open in my browser, my chat window, my email, and everywhere else as well.

All that crap takes up space in my brain that I need for writing. So, no distractions. Not even music playing unless it’s all things that I have had forever and that therefore can be mere audio wallpaper and not distract me at all.

I have, of course, been pondering my post-VFS lifestyle. I am tentatively planning for a daily schedule where I mess around and be lazy in the morning, job-hunt in the afternoon, and write at night.

But that’s written in sand, not stone, so things may change.

The post-graduation period is when the battle for the center will begin in earnest. I am determined to eschew the embrace of my previous easy (but deathlike) depressive lifestyle and instead fill my days with work and purpose and all the other things that keep me awake and alert and alive.

It’s good that I have employment as a fixed goal. It gives me a focal point for my energies. My ideal situation is always “fixed goal, variable method”. I consider that to be the best way to get things done in general and in my life in particular.

And I have thought of lots of different ways to raise my online profile and lots of little angles via which I could seek some form of employment.

Anything that I get paid for will be appreciated. Even if it’s just little bits of piecework that gets me ten bucks here and twenty bucks there would do wonders for my self-esteem and my self-worth. That is worth far more to me than the money itself, which would likely go to things like getting me a better wardrobe, paying entry fees to prestigious writing contests, and pay expenses for attending open industry events.

I am going to make this work somehow.

It’s high time I took my place in the sun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

This major motion in my major emotions is continuing apace.

On one level, I am actually quite enjoying it, because whether the emotions are positive or negative, I feel more alive now than I have in years. Simply being able to feel things is a huge relief. Like I have said before, the human mind knows what is supposed to be going on and when a vital stimulus is missing, things get screwy.

And like with having a limb fall asleep, this lack of stimulus often expresses itself as a sense of coldness and lack, along with the panicky feeling of something being terribly wrong. And when you try to wake it back up, it really hurts and/or feels weird.

But I am solidly determined to live again. I have made contact with my primal will to survive, tapped into the rage I have been suppressing for so long, and found the bloody minded determination to never give up until I succeed.

And I don’t give a fuck how much it hurts. I don’t even care if it causes me to be suicidal now and then. It’s awful but I can survive it. I know not to listen to that evil voice whispering in my ear about how to escape from all the pain forever.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

What matters is that I blast out all the useless fucking garbage in my soul and purify myself with blood and fire until my light burns clear and bright through the night.

I don’t even care about how much more of this I have to take any more. I am learning how to no longer be bound by such seemingly logical constraints. The secret is to put your hopes not in blind endurance as you stagger toward some imagined goal and instead to put your faith in a method, or a way of life, or something similarly essentialist that lets you forget about whether you are “there yet” and instead concentrate on the here and now of keeping your engine maintained and fueled.

Sometimes, it’s not just okay to assume that as long as you are doing the right thing as you see it, everything will work out… it’s mandatory. I can see that very clearly now. It is just plain impossible to survive on thoughts and ideas and other cold circuit inputs alone. A naked, starving ego accomplishes nothing. You need a good solid robust connection with the id that exists beyond the reach of the ego’s lies and delusions.

Cold comfort doesn’t.

Accepting your id means accepting that you are an animal like any other and that there is nothing wrong with that. Instincts are your friends, not the enemy. Passion is to be embraced, not avoided. Acting on strong emotions is not the worst thing in the world.

We need to rid ourselves of all this British-derived “act calm so you won’t upset all the other people who are acting calm” bullshit.

And stop being afraid of being alive. Stop trying to always be “in control of yourself”. Express your id on a regular basis and you will find you are far less anxious and neurotic.

This extends even into the desire to always do the “smart” thing. Sometimes seemingly stupid actions serve a deep and abiding purpose. This is something that seemingly uncivilized people get and us ice cold intellectuals do not. Sure, they may act in ways that seem to contradict their own self-interest sometimes, but in return they maintain a very strong connection to their primal id that is the source of all life.

We are not human beings hampered by the lingering vestiges of our animal selves. We are goddamned monkeys with some extra hardware that allows us to pretend to be human beings for a while.

This is why I consider the long struggle away from the false morality that suppresses all our natural desires to be one of the most important struggles humanity faces, at least on a spiritual level. Every generation removes another layer of arbitrary superstition passing itself off as morality. It is a project towards which I am deeply devoted.

Because of the nature of modern society,  this mostly has to do with sex. Our libidos are powerful and strong – we are one of a very few species that has sex for pleasure at all times of the year with no regard to mating, fertility, or season.

As far as I know, there’s us, dolphins, pigs, and the bonobos. That’s it.

From that point of view, one can see that this powerful drive should be allowed to express itself as fully as possible in order to maintain the health of the species. Cats need to stalk things, dogs need to chase things, and human beings need to fuck.

And in all three cases, the animal suffers if this urge is blocked and the repression does great psychological harm as all that primal energy is left with nowhere to go and ends up either rushing though the tiniest of openings in your suppression dike at enormous and unstoppable power, or the whole system swells and floods, damaging everything inside you and causing you massive mental stress.

One would think, given this reality, that a smart species like ours would arrange its society in such a way that suppression is kept to an absolute minimum so that we do not suffer from its negative side effects  unduly.

But no. Time and time again, societies and their religions have approached sexual freedom but reacted against its power and the decadence that sometimes gets attached to it. After all, when people find the sexual release they need, the relief is so intense that it is like a religious experience, and people are likely to try to use this new joy to solve all of their problems. And that leads to decadence.

But if human sexual expression was allowed to flourish in its expression and all the pointless taboos were washed away in a wave of joyous freedom, it would be free to find its own level and the decadence would vanish as sexual expression became just another fact of life like eating or excreting.

In my ideal future, the rule would be simple :anything with consent, nothing without. No judgment, no shame, no suppression, no senseless taboos. There would be buildings dedicated to fucking all over the place. They would be as common as restaurants, and like restaurants, they would come in many different varieties to suit individual tastes.

“Hey, have you tried that new gay BDSM place on the corner of Birch and Palmer?”
“No, but I’ve heard good things about it. I just don’t get a lot of time to go places these days. I usually just pick up some sodomy roleplaying on the way home. ”
“Oh, I didn’t know you could get that via Drive-Scru…”

And the excesses of the child/sex barrier would be reduced. Children would, of course, still be protected from predatory adults, but we would stop pretending that it somehow hurts a child to see a nude person and nobody would be trying to stop them from exploring their own bodies and each other’s.

I really wonder what would be possible in such an enlightened era. With sexuality finally integrated into our daily lives like everything else, who knows how happy we could be?

And who knows what a sexually satisfied humanity could achieve?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Today, what I knew was going to happen happened. My sentimentality mode kicked in, and I realized just how much I am going to miss the school, the teachers,. but most of all, my fellow students.

And while I never did manage to join their social group (unless Facebook counts… and it doesn’t), I still feel close to these bright and talented people. We have been through a lot together and I love and respect all my classmates, and I will proud to cross the finish line with them a week from tomorrow.

This always happens with me. It happened at the end of high school, it happened when I was leaving Kwantlen, and it is going to happen in staggering amounts for VFS because I know these people. I’ve read their work and made suggestions. They’ve read my work and made suggestions. We have praised and criticized one another. We have laughed together. We’ve lunched together. I feel like I know my classmates like I know my family.

And a week from tomorrow, our little family will go our separate ways. And that fills me with a deep sadness that I, quite honestly, treasure.

Why? Because it’s the closest I get to feeling connected to people. Sad, I know, but it’s the truth of my lonely little world. The nearness of the moment of separation brings out a tidal wave of emotion that smashes through the dam of my depression and for a short time, I feel almost like a real human being.

I’ve been really feeling my isolation lately. Somehow, it was high-quality gay furry porn that did it. Because the kind I like have a story to them, and it turns out that emotional context makes porn a zillion times hotter.

Which is exactly what women have been saying for ages.

And while I enjoy the smut as much as any other fag, it was the other stuff that brought about the sea change. Males in love with one another. Males being tender with one another. Men being close and intimate with one another.

Men caring about and for each other.

Let me repeat that : men caring for one another.

That made me realize just what an enormous toll the lack of acceptable father figures on my life has caused. In general, I associate my fellow men (especially the straight ones) with harsh judgment, abuse, exclusion, and a lot of territory that men claims and which I understand but can never visit.

What can I say, I’m a man’s man. Or I will be, once I find me a man.

I really need some companionship. A good man that I can love and trust and share intimate moments with. Someone who values me, and cares for me, and in return I shower him with my love and devotion.

A man I can build a life with.

Like I have said before, my romantic ambitions are highly domestic. I want someone with whom I can put down roots and make a life. Big romantic gestures and wild adventures and exotic seductions are all very nice and I would certainly enjoy them if I was with the right man, but what would truly impress me is buying a house together.

I have a deep, deep desire to own real estate.

That’s also why I am rock solid certain that I want to get married to my Man of Life. Anything else would be insufficient in the long run. I need that level of commitment in order to feel secure in the relationship.

And I need that feeling of security. I’m a Taurus and us bulls do not invest ourselves in risky propositions. I can imagine being in a relationship with a wonderful man who is fab in many ways, but he can’t make that kind of commitment, and that means that sooner or later I am going to stop sending good money after bad, and leave.

That probably seems cruel and/or cold to some, but I don’t care. I want to build a future with a man. There is only so much “taking it day by day” I can take.

I am the sort of person who needs to know where this relationship is going

I am such a chick.

.But these rules are not set in stone. I can imagine myself enjoying short term love for a while, especially with a man I think is worth it. I can imagine spending one special night with someone and never seeing them again.

But the truth is, if you spend enough time with someone, you are eventually going to have to deal with each other. Mundane reality will seep in and you will see what the person is like in their everyday life and you will have to deal with one another’s emotions,moods, gross personal realities, and odors.

I think that’s why so many people leave in the morning and never come back. They can’t face the part where you have to come back down to reality and deal with one another. They are addicted to that early phase when you are horny and into each other and swept up in the bud of romance as well as the lust of the moment.

I would imagine that those special nights might actually be the closest to intimacy these people get. The short term spell of being hot for one another creates a kind of intimacy, or at the very least, the illusion of intimacy.

And for the fear of intimacy folk, that’s as close as they can get without freaking out. It’s very sad, really. I picture such people as delicate butterflies afraid to land for long.

One thing’s for sure : even if I had the gay sex filled life I crave, I would still want to settle down, and every guy I fucked would get weighed on that scale.

Is this the guy for me? Or is he just a guy for tonight?

Or maybe he’s just a guy with a cock I’d like to suck.

For now, it’s just nice to be able to feel solid, strong lust.

It makes me feel more alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Yup. More fire imagery. And no, I am not going to link to the video. I am a free man and I can choose my course of action free from the dominance of petty compulsions.

Oh, who am I kidding?

I am on this fire kick because a) the sun is in Aries and that’s a fire sign, but mostly b) because in my soul, it’s autumn, and a time of burning away the old dead wood so that fresh new sprouts can grow and take root.

Fucked up yet another thing. I was supposed to have a presentation ready for my last Writing for Video Games class, which was today. Totally forgot. Spaced on it completely.

So yay, more failure. This does not help with the depression clinging to me like an icy fog that poisons the soul with every breath you take.

My recent depression has made me very aware of the problems I have. A lifetime of easy academic excellence has trained me not to take things seriously if they are easy. And for the most part, VFS has been easy for me.

Just like all the other forms of education I have taken.

It’s only been in this last month, with all the projects due, that I have really felt the strain on my abilities. And I love it. I wish every semester had been like this one. Coming into the VFS Writing for TV and Film program, and having read in many places that it was a super intensive program that pushes people to the breaking point, I expected that I would be instantly put to work and worked hard and I would finally have something that challenged me. That’s what I was hoping for here.

But no. Things started out retarded easy (for me) and got tougher so slowly that I ended up falling into my old pattern of half-assing my way through everything because I knew my natural talent would see me through.

I even thought I was getting away with it. But um, nope. Teachers noticed. Burned my bridges there quite thoroughly. There’s nothing I can do about that now.

I fucked up badly. Exactly how much of a choice I had is a matter of debate, however.

I know what brings out that side of me that I call The Jagoff, and the number one thing to bring him out is boredom. When I am in a class that neither challenges me nor interests me, I tend to tune the class out, leaving only as much of my consciousness as is needed to understand what I am being taught behind to mind the store.

This does not promote a productive attitude.

The trickier question is : what, exactly, made it so hard for me to remember assignments? Why was I constantly stumbling through the courses, forgetting tons of stuff and making a fool of myself (as well as alienating my classmates and teachers)?

It’s a complex question. I think, at the core, the problem was my need for this very relaxed low-strain state of mind in order to deal with my massive insecurities, and while I can be quite brilliant in that mode, it is hostile to doing things like writing things down as a form of future commitment to do that thing.

Having to go into administrative mode when I am so comfortably relaxed in lazy genius mode is a drag, man.

Plus there are the practical issues I have talked to before. Like, If I am writing down an assignment, I am not listening to the teacher. I can’t do both at the same time. I only have one verbal circuit. Introducing technology to the process only makes it worse because technology is inherently more distracting and stimulating than paper and pencil and therefore takes up even more of my mind.

The last thing I need when trying to write something down quickly is having to get out my tablet, power it up, find the note taking program, open the note taking program, tell it to start a new note, and then…. nothing, because I am already lost in the class and I have also forgotten the details of the assignment.

But there are ways around this, I am sure. I could find a really good scheduling app that lets me add stuff smoothly and quickly. I could develop my own form of shorthand for due dates so I can jot them down super fast.

Hell, I could write them on my arm if that is what it takes.

Another factor in the Jagoff’s victory of self-destruction is my hidden and shameful desire to go back to the mode I was in before Kwantlen. To return to being a formless puddle who plays video games and talks to the fuzzies online and that’s about it.

This desire was so strong that it would empty my mind of all contents, including when I am supposed to be doing things, in order to facilitate returning to my liquid form as quickly and smoothly as possible. Especially on weekends. Are there things I should be worrying about and/or getting done over the weekend? I dunno. My head is empty!

So from one point of view, an argument could be made that I was not, in fact, ready to take a program like this because I was still so dependent on this empty headed childlike state that ran contrary to my taking my education seriously.

But the other thing that brings out the Jagoff is stress. Dozens of times in my life I have ended up in a state of mind I call stunned, stupid, and smiling as a response to stress. My body overcompensates for the stress by filling me with happy juice that definitely makes it easier to function but robs me of focus, will, or the ability to really care about things.

It’s a lot like being a junkie, really. I’m just addicted to a drug my body produces anyway.

And the sickening part is how happy I am in that state. All worry, care, and pressure is gone and I am a little kid, waving at them from behind that wall and enjoying being free of them like people enjoy looking at people in the rain when they are inside, warm, and dry.

And that state lasts until I stumble over yet another thing I forgot. And then, for a while, I feel bad about myself. I might even hate myself. Heck, I might even get suicidal.

But nothing changes.

I go right back to being a Jagoff and floating through life and I might write stuff down for a while but I will inevitably stop and the stage is set for the next failure.

And all because I never felt challenged by the work. Despite my constant fucking up, I never really felt like I was in any danger of losing something of value. I never had a sense that I had better get my shit together or else I was fucked. I never feared the disapproval of my teachers. I never worried about the impression I was making.

It was all I could do to keep going to class and enduring that stress. I did not have the energy or focus to worry about external realities. My overdeveloped inner reality was too goddamned busy. There were days when I felt like I was ripping open an old wound just to get my ass on the bus in the morning.

So one might say that, relative to my state of mental illness, I did a great job. And it would be so easy to convince myself that there was nothing I could have done, that my teachers were all being unfair to me, that VFS just didn’t “get” me, and so forth and so on.

And that would instantly resolve the depression I have been struggling with and put me back into a mental state where I feel confident and optimistic.

But nothing would change.

So I am taking the hard road instead. I am using this state of mental flux to drive out as much of this unworthy bullshit as I can. To free myself from my loser state of mind and shift myself towards a winner attitude that tolerates no fucking around and fucking up.

Instead, it takes on the world with vigor and determination, and conquers all problems that dare to challenge it. No more wimping out when things get scary or hard. No more running away from my problems by delving into my inner world like a rabbit down its hole. No more playing the omega male who has given up on the struggle for dominance and instantly gives in to any challenger in order to facilitate escape and engender mercy via not threatening the other at all.

That’s loser thinking. The type-A jocks of the world have it partly right. You do have a choice  as to whether to be a loser or a winner, and it all depends on attitude.

Sometimes,you have stay and fight. Whether you win or not, you will feel a lot better about yourself. And people will respect you more. Including yourself.

People will not like hearing that message because, to them,  it means that they are responsible for all the failure in their life and their being on the bottom of the totem pole in all walks of life.

It is possible to change that. All it takes is finding the red hot passion in your life and letting it drive you forward no matter what.

That means less of a sense of absolute self-control. You have to trust that – and stop me if you have heard this one before – as long as you are true to yourself, everything will work out fine in the end.

And that kind of faith in things unproven and unknowable does not come easily to us overly intellectual types. It is very hard to give up the illusion of always being able to control outcomes and instead trust something as irrational as a strong emotion.

But it’s the only way. You have to embrace passion and let it drive you forward. You have to prioritize that which keeps your flame burning hot and fast and ignore that which makes you feel cold and dead inside.

You have to choose pain over numbness. Fight over flight. Emotion over logic. Faith over control. Life over death.

You can’t always follow your emotions, but neither can you always follow reason. Your emotions aren’t noise, they are important signals as to what is going on inside you and if you listen, they will tell you what course will lead to happiness.

It’s exactly like how a doctor listens to your physical symptoms in order to reach a diagnosis and come up with a treatment plan. You have to see to your emotional needs the same way instead of ignoring them like they do not matter.

That’s a recipe for loss of self-control, and as futile as thinking you can conquer your need for food by the power of prayer. Ignoring a need can fool you into thinking you are exercising self-control when in fact you are surrendering it.

Those Zen guys are right about a lot of shit.

Well I better get lunch. Sorry this entry is almost twice the length of the usual one already, and I will likely add more to it over lunch.

But for now, adieu.

Yup. I am back. I have tasty Mediterranean food and I am munching.

In the end, it all boils down to growing up. And for reals, not just “knows the right answers but is still fundamentally a child” growing up.

That doesn’t have to mean putting down childish things. But means giving up on giving up at the first sign of trouble. It means resisting the urge to flee and staying in the game. It means taking things on from a position of strength instead of reaching out a single slender trembling tendril that jerks back at the slightest touch and then tells itself that what it was trying to do is obviously “impossible” for it.

Bullshit. It’s totally possible. You can totally do it. It just means enduring a little pain.

Or confusion. Or fear. Or uncertainty. Or whatever.

When you take a real hard look at it, a lot of the bad cognition that underwrites depression boils down to “I wanted to get that check for a million bucks, but it would have meant having to cross the street during heavy traffic, so obviously it was impossible. ”

And then you go back and, tears in eyes, write about how unfair the world is for demanding you do the impossible in order to get what you want, and how the people with the check did this on purpose just to hurt you, and how blah blah capitalism blah blah blah work is slavery blah blah people are so mean to me when they have invested their hopes in me and I give up for pathetically minor reasons blah blah I hate the world and none of this is my fault blah blah BLAH.

That’s loser thinking. It can only lead to failure and the resulting rock bottom self esteem. You will only turn your life around when you decide it’s time to turn and fight.

And your first opponent is, of course, yourself. You and all that bullshit you have been hiding behind in order to avoid having to grow up. Blaming others for your own failings. refusing to take responsibility for your own life, pretending things are impossible whhen they are merely uncomfortable or unpleasant for you…. it all has to go.

And there is no royal road to recovery. The process will be a long one, and may require you to dig deep to find the wellspring of your soul and clear a path for it. You might have to slap a harness on emotions you have previously ignored, suppressed, and denied in order to power that process. You might even have to drill so deep that the emotions are raw, unpredictable, and primal – more like animal than human.

But if you harness that emotion…. whether it’s rage, lust, or even fear… you will never want for energy and determination to see things through.

And then you, too, can climb the highest mountain, stack your sins around its crown, and use the spark of passion to light the fire that will burn your sins away forever.

And in the end, you are reborn… fresh and strong and new.

And that’s worth all the pain it took to get there, and then some.

Because now…. you can live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

On a distant and obscure mountaintop, a fire burns. Its smoke is foul and the flame is sickly. It is white hot only at the center. The local fauna eschew this mountaintop because not even a skunk can stand the smell, and the air is redolent with the smell of deep deep decay. The fire’s crackles and snaps flow together to form a stuttering sussuration, the air is greasy and toxic, and within the flames, filthy shadows flicker and die, only to be reborn again in a new and even more offensive form.

 

And yet, from a distance, the fire is so, so pretty.

 

Almost like a star.

I don’t feel too good right now.

I had a talk with Ita after class. I was nice. She was nice. But she had no comfort for me. She confirmed that all the teachers who had worked with me in a workshop class thought I was difficult and resisted taking notes.

It’s a bum rap, but that makes no difference. With my tendency to forget to follow notes people gave me in good faith and to submit half-assed work when everyone else worked super hard, I gave the perfect impression of a difficult person who could not take notes.

And sure, it’s tempting to blame it all on mental illness but today’s talk with Ita revealed the cold hard truth :

I never took my VFS education seriously enough.

Instead, I fell into my academic smugness mode. I thought I could sail through on talent and strength alone. The work wasn’t challenging me, so I didn’t take it seriously.

And I got good marks academically. But I get low marks for getting it done and that’s all that matters in the long run. Instead, I fucked around, let my brain empty on the weekends so that I didn’t even think about what I had to get done until Monday, submitted stuff late like it was no big deal or at the very least like I was not learning anything, just being visibly sorry about it, and in general making a very poor impression on my teachers.

And that really hurts.

And not because none of them would give me a reference. I know I don’t absolutely need one. I can build a writing career in tons of ways. That’s not the problem.

The problem is the disapproval.  Knowing that these authority figures in my life don’t think much of me makes me feel like I let them down after coming on so strong at first.

They must think of me as squandered potential. Story of my life, really.

The Jagoff won.

And I can go on and on about how awesome I would be in the writer’s room, but nobody hires you straight out of school unless you are pretty damned impressive, and while I think I am a terrific writer, I am going up against people who are just as good who have glowing recommendations and do not have twenty year gaps in their work history.

So I have a lot to overcome if I I want to make it into the TV biz.

But I am still leaving VFS with a diploma from the toughest writing for TV/film program around and the vastly improved writing skills I got from doing it. So it’s not out of the question that I would get work.

It’s just that I am going to have to prove that I can hold down a job first. Not easy… my inability to handle job interviews is what led me to stop looking a long, long time ago. Especially that part of the job interview where they ask me why I have a huge gap of time since my last bit of actual job history.

I can tell them I was sick and I am getting better. But they are still going to shitcan my resume because lots of candidates do not have my liabilities.

So I dunno how I get a job under those conditions. Maybe apply at some local fast food place that has a huge turnover rate and thus pretty low standards.

Otherwise, I will simply have to invent my own job.

When I was talking with Ita, I went in and out of feeling suicidal(NOT HER FAULT). More waves of suicidal mood hit me after I left, especially after I accidentally broke my beautiful headphones right outside the school.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like there is no hope for me : all it took was my not realizing that my headphones were trapped under the strap of my bag and SNAP. right hand speaker has a broken stem.

I just can’t keep up. When I look after thing A, thing B bites me in the the ass. When I am doing well on front X, front Y falls the fuck apart. I can’t win. I can’t even get ahead.

And today’s’ depression is only a small part of something much, much bigger happening inside me. There is an enormous shift of some sort taking place and I have no idea where it will all end up.

But I know it all started when I found a source for high quality gay furry manga, and that led me to a strip called BroGulls. (WARNING : Tons of NSFW content. )

It’s about two brothers who become more than brothers Despite the incest (brother/brother doesn’t squick me much as long as it’s someone else’s family), the writing is very good and the relationship between the brothers is so sweet and so strong and it stirred up something inside me that had long lain dormant.

That is just what a lonely person I am in the romance department. I have this vast unmet need for romantic love that I have never felt because because everything in me was so repressed. But now, it seems, the beast awakens.

I have never been part of the romantic world. I’ve never been in a relationship. I’ve bever had a breakup. I have never yearned for someone from afar. Or anear. I have never been a part of that world at all.

And that’s because when I was a teenager, I gave up on the whole thing. I was a gay kid in small town Canada and I didn’t think my sort of sex – let alone romance – was ever going to be a possibility, so I just… closed off that area of my mind.

It seemed like a logical decision at the time.

And I have never recovered from that. It chills me to think of what madness that is. That others were driven by their hormones to try, at least, to find a mate, or at least a date, and there I was, feeling nothing and acting like none of that could ever apply to me.

Like the whole human pair-bonding thing was for other people. Not me.

And now just how lonely I am. Yay recovery.

Oh well, the first part is always hard, when that which was frozen and numb comes back to painful life like when your foot falls asleep.

And I honestly don’t know what to do with the loneliness. How can I get a man when my issues (and standards) keep me so tied up? Going to night clubs ain’t my thang. Dating sites always leave me depressed. The intellectual standards I need in a mate are high, and that limits the pool considerably.

Oh well. At least now I know to start looking.

The creatures of the valley watched the flame burn every night. They knew that as long as that fire burned, the Pact was in full force and there would be peace in the valley.

 

But if that fire should ever go out…

 

There would be war.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

Last night, I was suicidal.

What happened was this : in a moment of weakness when I was feeling really down on myself, I stupidly sent out an email to a bunch of my teachers asking them if there was any chance I could get a recommendation from any of them,

I didn’t mean to ask specifically for a recommendation. What I was really looking for was confirmation from a teacher that I had not totally fucked myself over by being such an absentminded flake during my time at VFS.

But I phrased it like a request for a recommendation, and that was not good.

Anyhow, one of the profs who replied was Ita Margalit, and she doesn’t like me. Her response, in retrospect, was not that harsh, just a little brusque.

But it hit me where I live, and sent me into a deep deep depression. Well, that and the other response I got, which was much nicer but still confirmed (to my diseased mind) that I was a massive idiot who had fucked up his entire education to the point where the whole year had been for nothing and I would never get work in the industry and it was all my fault. It felt like the world was falling down around me.

And in the midst of that sea of depression, I would have done anything to escape.

And that scared me, because I knew what that meant. It meant I was in danger and I had to be very, very careful or I might harm myself out of intense self-loathing and despair.

So I just hung in there and played my video games with compulsive fervor in order to keep my mind too busy to plan anything or do anything.

I’m glad that there was a stubborn little spark in me that remembered that this too shall pass and I would feel better later and that it was all just chemicals.

So I hung in there, and after a couple of hours on the edge of self-destruction, I  started to feel better. The depression began to drain away and reason returned and I realized that all that was at steak was teacher recommendations and I could live without those. They would have been a great start to my career, but no matter what, I was going to graduate on the 21st, I would have my diploma stating that I had passed what is largely considered to be the toughest writing program around, and I could go forward with my portfolio of writing samples and my impressive personal history of writing so many things, as well as this blog, and so forth and so on.

And I write really funny dialogue. That has to be worth someone to someone.

I can still feel the echoes of that depressive episode. It’s very painful. It will take some time for me to go back to my usual level of functioning.

I think part of the reason I crashed so hard is that I had been feeling pretty good about myself, on average, and that meant I had a long way to fall,. Until Friday’s Episode 2 class, I was feeling pretty good about my chances out there in the big bad world of entertainment. I imagined myself charming people in job interviews, delighting them with my samples, and getting in at the shit-job level that way some day.

Like it says in my resume, I will work wherever they will let me in. I am not some foolish Millennial who just assumes they will go right from school into a high paying, high status job in my field and will feel shocked and betrayed when they find out that work is like… so much work, guys!

I am happy to work long hours and do a ton of writing. It sounds like a good way to spend my days, to be honest. I like writing and I am happier doing it than doing anything else in the world. So hard work does not frighten me.

Nor does time in the writer’s room helping my colleagues with their stuff or coming up with the beats of an episode or whatever frighten me. I love Writer’s Room class, and I am perfectly content to be one person amongst many working towards a common goal.

And I am still learning, Amidst the tragic wreckage of recent depressive bouts, I have learned some harsh truths about my own cluelessness and the underlying assumption that if I screw up, I will be forgiven. I will get away with it.

So why change?

That means I will be taking a good long hard look at myself and hunting down these unworthy assumptions that can only hold me back, and replacing them with a more realistic results-based view of my place in the world.

Nobody owes me forgiveness for getting things wrong. I am lucky that I get away with it in some circumstances, but the cost is too high because it means both jettisoning my self worth and any respect people might have for me, and staying in his whiny, childlike state instead of taking control, taking responsibility, and hence taking things seriously.

Some of my mental confusion I can chalk up to my depression and the meds I take for it. Like I’ve said,. I was going around in a fog for a very long time without realizing it. It made it hard to really focus on the here and now.

But a lot of it was a choice I didn’t realize I was making. The choice to stay wide-eyed and stupid rather than focusing down on the important stuff and leaving the bullshit behind.

Growing up is like the measles : it’s painful and difficult and the older you get it, the worse it’s going to be for you.

Okay, so that’s not a perfect metaphor. But you get the gist.

Still, this whole thing has left me worried about my mental health state. If all it takes is a brusque email to send me to Suicide Island, I might need a lot more therapy before I am truly ready to face the world.

But whatever it takes, I will do it.

Because I want to feel the sun on my skin at long last.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

I graduate on the 21st.

The very next day, the 22nd, I will begin my massive mission of getting myself some god damned work. I have decided that I will heretofore refer to that date as Launch Day.

And it is exactly two weeks from today… L minus 14.

I had my first little attempt this afternoon. One of the bits of business I still have to do for Career Launch class is enter something I wrote during my time at VFS to some kind of competition and send some kind of proof to Kat, my prof.

Usually, that only entails forwarding the email the contest sends to confirm your entry into the contest to Kat. So really, no big deal.

Except that there’s zillions of contests out there and I have to choose among them.

Not easy, and the fact that I have no money for contest entry fees doesn’t help either. So far, I have not figured out the magic combination of words to compel Google to show me only contests which a) have no entry fee, b) are open right now, and c) which are open to television scripts, not just screenplays.

So that’s something I will have to work out over time.

But the real roadblock today happened when I signed up for a kickass website called InkTip. It’s a site that allows writers to post scripts (with loglines)  to their site, and producers to find said scripts when they are looking for something to produce.

So I signed up, thinking that sounded pretty smart, and then I was faced with a  screen telling me to upload a script.

And I had a complete emotional breakdown. The idea of actually exposing my work to the public made me suddenly doubt that anything I had ever written was worth anyone’s attention and I had to stop right there and do something else while I worked through the emotions it brought up.

It was basically a social anxiety attack, but with virtual exposure instead of real world.

This was unexpected but not inexplicable. There’s a pretty good reason why I am one of those writers who has written a ton of stuff without submitting it to anyone, anywhere. Like my fellow introverted scribners, I have very deep issues with people judging me, and that ties directly into with my deep feeling of worthlessness and toxicity.

That’s what the socially anxious people like myself fear exposure. To us, being seen means people knowing what a worthless and pathetic piece of shit we are and thinking that people like us should stay out of sight for the public good.

And that’s what we do. We stay out of sight. Home. Alone.

It’s the only way we can calm down.

It’s the only way we can make it through the day.

It’s the only way we can feel safe.

And even then, the fear is always there, lurking, waiting to flare up at the slightest stimulus. It’s like a really painful sunburn. The slightest things hurt.

Luckily, therapy works.  Slowly but surely, the underlying traumas are unearthed, aired, and allowed to finally express themselves fully and then fade away.

Like Nietzsche said : Reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts you.

Thanks to therapy, I know that my breakdown this afternoon is not fatal. I will get through it and probably be a little stronger for having had it. These things pass, and you don’t need to panic because you’re not “happy”.

You’re not supposed to be happy all the time. Life is supposed to have a broader emotional range than that. Accepting that life is going to suck sometimes is one of the great gifts of age. Being unhappy isn’t an emergency. All it means is that you are experiencing the proper emotion for what is happening in your life, or perhaps you are getting signals from somewhere deep into your psyche telling you that you need to work through some old stuff. The best attitude is to simply let these things pass through you, unhindered.

So I will feel kinda down and rather verklempt for a while. Then I will reach the end of that emotion, and be done with it.  And my inner burden will get just a little bit lighter.

It’s emotional emesis – puking up your poisons.

Yesterday was more than a bummer. It was also intensely frustrating. Get this :

1. We’re on break during Adaptation class. I haven’t printed out my piece yet. I have ten minutes, that should be plenty of time. But I forgot one thing : the printer at school hates me. So when I try to print my thing, the print job would just disappear from the queue. Then when I finally got it through, the printer was out of paper. Then when that got solved, it printed out my document…. in landscape mode, and in a font so big the pages of my document didn’t fit on the paper. I checked all the relevant settings – I know a little about this kind of thing – and they were all correct. Paper 8.5 X 11. Portrait mode. Right printer tray. Right printing mode. Everything was perfect. So I tried it again. Still sideways! Argh! I finally had to go get Steve, the academic assistant and master of technology, on the case. He told me to forward the document to him and he’d print it. Fine, I thought to myself. But I had forgotten something else : the school’s email system is evilly stupid. So just to forward an email, I had to find the “block pop-ups” setting and turn it off. Then it finally let me send the document to Steve, who printed it out properly. By then, break had been over for fifteen minutes and I was a nervous wreck.
2. As you know from yesterday’s blog post, when I left school I was feeling really depressed. So I decided I would go to my fave sandwich shop and get myself some of the big ginger cookies they have there that I love so much. But they didn’t have any. I really hadn’t expected that, because they had been out of them the previous day and surely they would have gotten more by the next day. But no. I hate to say it, but that place is really going down the drain lately. I get a very strong sense that there is no competent leadership and that leaves the seeming never-ending parade of twentysomethings that work there on their own. Not good.
3. I had one more task, Pick up a couple of bottles of diet cola for the weekend. No problem, I would just stop into the little convenience store I pass every day when I am coming home from school. SURPRISE! They not only don’t have the Coke Zero I usually get from there, they have absolutely nothing diet at all. Not even in cans.

So society and/or the universe was really letting me down yesterday!

Oh, and here’s that thing I did for Adaptation.

Glengarry Glen Ross Redux

God, I hate that movie.

Today’s been…. okay, apart from the emotional meltdown. But seeing as I have no work I need to be doing now (I think…. god I hope I am right), I had the spend the afternoon in the existential void that was my life before I had a ton of work to do.

So I was bored. And frustrated. I played video games, but it didn’t really make me happy. It just made the time go by faster. I even caught myself looking at my watch and calculating how much longer it would be until suppertime. Because at least that’s an event.

That’s simply not acceptable any more. It’s time I leveled up and learned how to generate my own work. Tell the Jagoff to fuck off for good, remember that I am happier working, and reject the cult of death that is depression.

I don’t want to slip through life as easily as possible any more. That route leads to death because it requires you to stifle all that would stir you to action. In other words, you have to kill your passion. But that’s not good enough any more. I want to embrace life and live. To shake off the winter chill of icy reason and get my frozen ass out into the sun where it’s warm and dry and I can feel more alive.

It’s a slow and difficult journey…. but it gets warmer with every step I take,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am again, eating my lunch by myself as I blog into one of the school’s computers instead of socializing in the lunch room/lounge with my other writers.

Because socializing is hard on me. Partly, it’s my social anxiety, but decibel level is a big factors as well. A bunch of people talking in a small space overloads my senses and makes me anxious, even if I am otherwise having fun.

It’s what drove me out of the local furry scene I founded. It’s a real problem, and one I am going to have to come to grips with when I launch myself into the entertainment biz. I imagine I will have to attend many loud parties in small spaces. I dread the thought of a densely packed apartment where I can’t move around and there is nowhere for me to sit down and the musics is super loud.

That shit would make me reveal state secrets. I just can’t.

So I might need to seek out a chemical solution. Something stronger than my antidepressants. Something that can knock out my claustrophobia and sensory issues long enough for me to make the deal or meet the producer or whatever.

I am heartened by the fact that people are way more aware of anxiety issues these days and therefore I can convey the issue without having to explain it all and sound like a deranged professor on the nod.

But I am worried about potential chemical solutions. Because that sounds like someone’s story of addiction. “At first it was just a little, just to steady my nerves….”

And I am a little worried about what I might say when I am that relaxed. I say enough weird or inappropriate things while being my usual self. God knows what I would  be like if my anxieties magically went away and I felt really, really good.

It could go two ways : I might feel so good that I end up sitting in a chair talking to nobody in particular all night, and thus not meet or deal with anyone, or…

I might feel so good that I am absolutely fearless and filterless and completely convinced that everything I say is hilarious and everyone agrees and I am charming the heck out of everybody and they will all want to know, “Who is this fascinating man?”

While in reality, I would be incoherently rambling and not only are the people not laughing or charmed, I am actually scaring the shit out of them and a visit from like, three burly security guards with tasers is in the cards for me real real soon.

It’s one of the burdens of being a big guy. Things that would seem relatively harmless on someone of normal size become super scary when multiplied by my size.

That’s why we tend to be gentle giants. We’re compensating for the fact that people might be scared of us by being really gentle and sweet and sending out all the signals of harmlessness that we can.

This is all subconscious, of course. For the most part.

We did a table read of my “adaptation” of Glengarry Glen Ross. I will post it to this space when I have the time. I basically set out to destroy that fucking Alec Baldwin scene from the movie by having Al Pacino’s character tell a bunch of fellow salesmen a hilarious story about what a loser Blake (the Baldwin role) really is.

Call it revenge on Mamet. Because I fucking hate that play/movie. Not because of lack of merit, purely because it makes me so angry I wanna kill someone.

Home now. I will get to regular blogging in a moment, but I have to share this first :

I’ve been watching the Iron Fist series. It’s OK. Anyhow,  I noticed a completely awesome name in the credits : MATT FRACTION.

I heart that name! It’s the perfect name for a tough as nails heroic mathematician.in a cartoon meant to get kids interested in math.

Matt Fraction : Looks like you picked the wrong day to take the wrong derivative of pi, Doctor Leibniz Calculus!

Doctor Calculus : That’s impossible! The computer said my calculations were perfect!

Matt Fraction : Computers can only do math, Doctor. And you, you miscalculating miscreant, you can try to understand math. But me…

A bolt of lightning splits the night and as it illuminates his scarred and pitted face…

Matt Fraction : I AM MATH!

I have such fun.

But today was not fun. Not after lunch, anyhow.

In the afternoon, I had Episode Two class, with Ita, the teacher I seem to be doomed to disappoint. Or maybe she’s given up on me by now, I dunno.

Anyhow, the first blow was that, because I submitted my last set of revisions late (like, 11 hours late, which is a millennium in TV time), nobody was obligated to have notes for me and Ita herself only had sketchy notes for me. Nobody else had read my stuff except for my buddy Aash, who is awesome.

So there I was, feeling incredibly stupid and guilty, when I got my notes and both Ita and Aash said they had the same notes as last time because I hadn’t implemented any of their notes from the previous round of revisions.

So now I felt even worse. In fact, I became quite depressed. I started questioning whether there was a single teacher there who would recommend me for a job. All my time at VFS, I have been confused, unreliable, and for all appearances did not take notes well either.

At moments like this, I have to cling as hard as I can to the one thing I know I can do :

Write really funny dialogue.

When I was going through my notes (and apparently missing a ton of stuff), I came across lots of comments about how funny my stuff was. And my Sam stuff is also heartwarming, and secretly didactic. So I know I can do these things.

And in an actual writing job, I would not have a half dozen classes taking up room in my head. I would just have to write what I am told to write and attend the meetings I am told to attend. So I would not be quite as organizationally challenged.

Plus I love to write so I will work really hard. And I have lived on $12K/year for decades so I come cheap, too.

Minimum wage would double my income.

So I am not a total reject as a writer. I just have problems.

And really, doesn’t everybody?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.