(This is going to be very rough, nice people. You have been warned.)

Worst. Birthday. EVER.

I had a date lined up. A furry I have know like forever. He wanted to see me. He wanted to meet me. He was actually showing interest in me – the real me, not the fox.

And this after that insane freelance assignment that took me working 12 hours a day at semi-mindless rephrasing. It took over my life. It cut me off from my usual pleasures. It drained the fucking life force out of me.

But hey,…. at least I got paid,. US : 72 bucks. Canadian : at the moment, $97 and change. So around a hundred bucks for 50 hours of drudgery.

It almost makes me want to change my mind about fixed payments. I usually like them because I like the clear sense of what I am working toward. It helps keep me motivated. And reduces uncertainty – always a big plus for me.

But I see the other side of the coin now. If I agree to a fixed payment and it turns out that the job is way, way harder than I thought it would be, I get screwed. Badly.

So, lesson learned.

The job took so much out of me that barely felt a sense of triumph when I completed it.

And if the client says one negative thing about my work, I am going to snap like a dry twig and give them a percent of my mind.

And my mind is huuuuuuuuge.

So after a soul destroying week, I was really, really, REALLY looking forward to this date.

But I fucked up. Like I always do. Like I did last Sunday. The Translink website made it sound so easy. Take the Skytrain to Waterfront station. Take the 6 from there to Davie. What could be easier?

What I didn’t count on was there being absolutely no signage telling me where to go to get the 6. Nothing. I can’t fucking believe it. There were plenty of diagrams. But none that actually told me where the stop for the 6 was.

So I was fucked.

No cell phone. Don’t even have his number. Don’t even know what he looks like or what his real name is. Told him I would be the big fat dude in a shirt that says “The Next Big Thing” on it. Thought that was enough.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Asked half a dozen people if they knew where to catch the 6. None of them had any idea. I might as well have been asking them if they knew God’s phone number.

So that was out.

All I had to go on was that Seymour street starts at a point across the street from Waterfront. And I knew Seymour crosses Davie. So I thought that if I walked up Seymour, I would eventually have to hit Davie.

Davie is where the date was. 8:30. Outside the Pumpjack, a bear bar. Me the guy with the T-shirt. So many happy imaginings of what meeting him would be like. Looking forward to this date all week.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

So I start walking up Seymour, and while my feet aren’t happy for me, it’s downtown on a Friday night and the vibe is pretty groovy. I am not anxious or sad. Yet.

I come to the Granville Skytrain station. Awesome! I totally know where to catch a 6 bus from there. Soi I thought.

But no, that information was very out of date. As in, from before they extended the Skytrain to Richmond and did a massive reorg. So nope, hopes dashed, fuck me.

So I just keep walking. Eventually I reach Davie… great! I walk eight blocks or so and…. no Pumpjack. I had to ask someone where it was because there is zero signage on it. I had to ask the bouncer outside it whether I had found it.

But I had found it all right. But I was 40 minutes late. And he wasn’t there.

He’d given up.

I was devastated.

Because all that time I was walking, it never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there. All this effort would surely pay off. And he’d have a funny story to tell when he finally made it there.

Nope. I was 40 minutes late. He waited 20. I’d fucked up so bad that I hurt him and I was not going to be rewarded and there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it.

It was like a shot through the heart. I walked around the Davie Strip, trying to figure out what I could do. And cried. A lot. It hurt so bad and I couldn’t do anything about it and I was an idiot and a loser and a permanent non stop fuckup who shouldn’t be allowed to leave the apartment without a handler.

The pain just got worse and worse.

The kicker? I was approached by like four dudes tonight. At any other moment, I would have been flattered. I might even have taken them up on an invitation. I’ve never done that before. Could be fun.

But no. Fuck off and stay off.

Eventually I settle at a bus stop for the 6. Eventually, a bus comes and I get in. I hear the bus driver say he doesn’t stop at the Granville Skytrain station any more. Uh oh.

Luckily, he does stop at the Yaletown/Roundhouse stop, he says.

So I relax and wait. Until I see a huge building with an actual fucking steam locomotive inside that says ROUNDHOUSE on it. And we drive right past it.

The name of the stop is Yaletown/Roundhouse.

Panicking, I ask the driver where I should get off to get the Skytrain.

He shrugs and says “That was it. ”

He was too busy talking with his friend with the Quebec accent to tell me. Apparently, I was wrong to trust him. I thought that when you asked a bus driver for a stop, they understood that they should tell you when they make that stop.

But apparently not.

And the Quebec accent makes me homesick and confused and the Acadian part of my brain surges into action and I just get worse.

Great, I thought. Now I’m depressed in French.

He stops at the next stop and gives me directions to the Skytrain station and I am not good with directions, especially when I am very depressed. So I end up lost AGAIN.

And that’s when things get really bad. I had to work very hard to suppress the suicidal thoughts in my head. I never got as far as the “contemplating” phase, but I was in a very bad state and thought dark thoughts would not go away.

And a song kept playing in my head. This one :

But I changed the lyrics a little. My chorus goes like this :

And suicide is easy
The car will never see me
And life is so much better when you die

All those cars going past me. All those distracted people looking at their smartphones and getting confused by downtown Vancouver. All that brutal energy wrapped in a river of steel just a few feet away from me.

Time it right and there’s no chance you’ll make it to the hospital alive.

These were the thoughts I was fighting.

I guess I won, because I found the Skytrain station and came home and started to blog.

And i feel somewhat better now that I have done so.

Oh, the cherry on the cake?

Today’s my birthday. I am  now 44.

There should be some kinds of psychological emergency ward. I know I am sick right now. But there’s nothing I can do about it. If I went to the emergency room, they would think I was trying to score some drugs.

Or worse, they would admit me and strap me down so I can’t hurt myself.

Then I really would go crazy.

I keep trying to imagine what would make me feel better but I can’t think of a thing. Someone could give me a million dollars and I would be all, “Thank you very much. I will feel happy about this at a later date. ”

So I wish there was an emotional trauma ER. I have been told that I could go to any psych ward, tell them I have a long history of depression and I am feeling suicidal, and they would admit me and keep me safe.

I find that hard to believe. They would refuse to take me seriously and tell me to go home.

And then the screech, then the sickening thud, then the crash, then the screaming, then the siren, then the city employee hosing the blood off the pavement because people do not need to see that.

Besides, I am terrified that if I enter a psych ward, I will never leave. Admittedly, that is a lot less likely now that I have things going on in my life that would give me a reason to want to get the fuck out of there. But still.

Besides, there’s people in the Richmond Hospital psych department that hate me because I called them on their bullshit and failed to get healthy on their schedule so they kicked me out of the therapy group.

Life is such a funny thing.

Well I guess I am out of words. I am going to go to bed now. I will feel a million times better when I have had time to rest and heal.

I will definitely see you nice people again tomorrow.

Usually, I save the best for last. It’s something I have done all my life. It’s because I seem to have born with an acute sense of how things are trending. Maybe it’s a primitive form of forethought. I don’t know. I just know I really want things to get better as they go, and then end on a high note.

I mean, if you eat dessert first, the rest of the meal will be a huge letdown.

But today I will start with the most exciting\impactful thing going on in my life and then do the less exciting journaling second because something very good (and kinda bad) has happened to me and I can express it in three words :

I got hired!

Someone on Upwork hired me to rephrase a bunch of information to summarize a whole whack of information, and to do it withing four paragraphs.

So yay! The seal is broken! If I can pull this off, I will be an EXPERIENCED freelancer and I will seem far more attractive to future clients.

That would totally level up my career!

The problem is…. I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.

I thought I was just going to be rephrasing a lot of paragraphs. No problem. I could do that in my sleep. So I talked myself up to the client, saying that I could do that so well that I might even be able to do a second batch of 100.

But what I didn’t know was that it would be WAY harder than that. Because what I missed was that I would be summarizing enormous amounts of information in those four little paragraphs. That’s a much, much higher level mental operation, and I really wish I hadn’t talked big on it because this is way way harder,.

I mean, the first one of these (which I have yet to complete), asks me to summarize 21 paragraphs of  historical in four paragraphs.

And once I do that, I got 99 more of the things before late Friday night.

The Friday night that is also my birthday and on which I have a date. ^[1]

And that is going to be a lot of work. All for 90 cents each (of which I get 72^[2]). Oh well, I guess it’s time to pay my dues!

Obviously, I will be working super hard for the next five days. I am sure that it is not as hard as it seems to me right now, and that once I have a bunch of them under my belt I will get into the rhythm of it. That’s just how things go.

But right now, I feel like I just confidently jumped into the deep end of the pool without having any idea how deep it was.

Oh, and I can’t swim.

Now for the Burnaby part of the blog entry. First off, I am not talking about this guy :

That is totally the clip they would play on a late night talk show to humiliate me.

No, I am talking about his namesake, the suburb of Vancouver. I was there yesterday for a meeting but my trip to said meeting became quite the adventure.

Like most of my adventures, it begins with me fucking up. I did all that I was supposed to do (so I thought) to get to the meeting. I let the Translink website do the transit part of my planning and wrote that down, then figured out the walking part of the trip and wrote that down.

Well, almost. I missed one little thing.

So I went out with my notes, full of hope and confidence, on a quite lovely day. And I did the transit part of the journey without much of a problem, and let me tell you, it was quite the journey. And not just because it was the Skytrain and two buses.

It was also because that part of Burnaby is freaking gorgeous. There’s pine trees (and softwood trees) everywhere, and as we know, we monkeys love to be surrounded by trees. And there was this lovely Sunday afternoon vibe going on, at least for me. The trees, the sunshine, the smell of pine, and the time of the week all combined to both make me feel relaxed and make me feel like I was on a pleasant summer trip on the way to do something fun and family oriented^[3].

Which is probably why I took the looming disaster so well.

It began as I stepped off the second bus. I suddenly had a terrible thought. As the bus (with a very nice driver) drove away, I confirmed it.

I had forgotten Step 1 of a 3 step plan. I knew where to turn on Prenter Street, and where to turn on THAT street to get to Hawthorn Crescent.

But I had forgotten to ascertain how to get from the bus stop to Prenter Street.

So I was totally lost. I walked a ways down the street I was on, and I came upon a very nice public park and rec center. You know, the standard park, soccer field, baseball diamond, pool, and tennis court arrangement. And I saw people down there, so I decided I would ask them for directions. First challenge to my social anxiety accepted.

But I talked to a couple walking their lovely mutt of a dog and to a bunch of teen and tween boys practicing swearing at each other, and nobody had the slightest idea. I don’t blame them. That part of Burnaby is a labyrinth of charming subdivisions, and the sheer amount of information involved is too much for any one person.

So then I walked through one of those charming subdivisions for lack of a superior solution, and when you have no idea where you are, it doesn’t matter which way you go, so you might as well go in the direction that is downhill.

And it was a very nice walk past very nice houses and lots of lovely trees and enjoyed the sunshine and mild temperature. My thinking was that if I went downhill long enough, I would reach the water and therefore some civilization.

After a while, I came out onto a main road. As I was going downhill on it, I spotted someone standing in their yard and having a smoke while using their smartphone. That meant it was time for Social Anxiety Challenge 2 : Plan Hack From Outer Space.

In other words, I asked the dude to call me a cab. And he did. It’s a good thing that, despite my fears, I have a harmless, affable kind of charm.

The cab was totally my Gordian Knot solution. Fuck trying to find the place myself. At this point, I was more than willing to pay someone to do that for me. The cabbie was a great guy, and it turned out I was only six or seven blocks from where I should be, so the cab ride only cost me six bucks (eight with tip).

I arrived at the meeting (an hour late, oy) and Part 1 of my adventure was over. Part 2 is short but this entry is already way too long, so I will punt it to the next entry.

The great thing is that, whether because of my improved mental health or the wonderful surroundings or both, I never freaked out. There was a bad moment when I thought I had reached the gravitational bottom of the subdivision and would now have to climb up the very steep streets, but I realized I was wrong after I talked to a nice lady who was working on her yard.

So all in all, it was an adventure. I am no worse for wear, it only cost me eight bucks, I had a nice walk, and it ended well.

All my fuckups should go so well!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The last few days have really illustrated just how muich of my self-discipline I have lost since I left school.

See, I wanted to write what I am calling the “dummy” script for SI.  What i mean by that is that it’s a script for a webisode but without the things we don’t have, like content. After all, we don’t have an actual Secret Informant yet, and I am not inclined to go to a bunch of research just for a document that is only meant to give people the general idea of what an episode of the show might look like.

In general, I wrote it for the group, but I really wrote it for me. There’s two reasons for that. One, I really wanted to advance my thinking on the show. To make it a step more real so I could clear my mind of the general things and start thinking about the specific details. By writing this script, I worked out some ideas in my head and now I can think more clearly on doing a full script for an actual pilot webisode.

The other reason is that I wanted something to show the group at the meeting today, Sunday. It’s out in Burnaby, at the home of Andy, the producer/host. I want to show the group that I am working on stuff too, and that I will continue to be an asset.

This is especially important because as we have developed things, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the show doesn’t need a writer per se. We plan on getting as much of our content from conversation with the expert Informant and various others as we can. That kind of limits the need for an actual script. So I need to prove my worth.

So I am doing my best to find another role for myself. I know I can help in a zillion other ways, so I am not worried. Plus, if I have my way, there will be two segments per webisode that do require a writer as they are comprised of a pleasant female voiceover sharing “fun facts” over appropriate (hopefully public domain) video clips.

And someone’s got to write what our pleasant female voiceover artist is going to say!

Plus I will pull more than my own considerable weight as a top-level creative contributor. I have tons of ideas about how to make the show great and what we need to do in order to get it there. I am pondering angling for a job title such as “creative producer” or “head of development” or something like that to reflect my role.

And I really need a role. I have spent far too long in the general pool for Central Casting. I have a chance to write a part for myself and I am damned well going to try.

Today’s going to be a busy day for me. I have the meeting, plus getting to and from Burnaby via mass transit, so that is going to take pretty much my entire afternoon. Then, when I get home, it won’t’ be long before I am heading out again to have supper with Joe and Julian and Felicity (aka La Gang) before going to this month’s BCSFA meeting.

To be honest, there is about a 15 percent chance that I won’t be up for going to the BCSFA meeting. I usually love them, but I might be too tired and socially depleted to do it. I will have to weigh that against the probable depression caused by knowing my friends are out there and having fun without me when I am making my decision.

So I will probably go. But, maybe not.

Anyhow, back to the point I presumably have. I have lost so much mental discipline that writing this “dummy” episode, which back when I was in school would have been a very minor assignment I could knock out in about half an hour, has taken me something like six hours to complete because my mind kept jumping around to various other things I had going on my computer and the amount of time I spent actually writing kept getting smaller and smaller, and my video games starting calling out to me, and it was a real (and unnecessary) battle to get anything done.

Hence the twitchy bunny brain. I’ve gone back to having a mind like an overcaffeinated rabbit compulsively hopping from one thing to the next, never staying on one thing long enough to truly concentrate it.

In my previous life, pre-Kwantlen, this was how I kept my mind busy. The net effect puts me into a somewhat Zone type state, where my mind is fully engaged and that gives me a kind of mentally full feeling that drains off some of that hyperactive energy that, left undrained, turns into anxiety and depression.

It’s not a good solution, though, because it lacks focus and sets a hard limit as to how mentally demanding a task I can work on in the brief times between hops. That’s a big part of why I was so unproductive for so many years. Good writing requires focus and self-discipline. You have to free your mind of distractions that drain your mental capital so you can invest it all in your work.

Ideally, that ideal amount of mental energy drain should come from the writing, and that should be what motivates you to keep on writing.

It helps when you are inspired by what you are writing, of course. The “dummy” script, while helpful to me, was not exactly the product of passion. When I am writing the more usual form of fiction, the pleasure of creating the story (and sometimes also the plot) as I go draws me forward. I get great joy from the feeling of the chaos in my head being directed into the writing instead and feeling my mind get calmer as some of the tornado of words and ideas always swirling in my head get expressed.

It’s crazy living in the heart of a hurricane, but it is that chaos that fuels my creativity.

Like my man Nietzsche said, “You must have chaos withing your heart in order to give birth to a dancing star.”

Amen, brother. Amen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to go to that most unstable and dangerous of places, the ego of a brainy depressive.

All my life, people have told me how smart I am. And not necessarily people who have seen me do or heard me say something really intelligent.

In fact, sometimes it’s people who have only seen me fuck up and be pathetic and lame.

Like a therapist who ran a group therapy group I was in. All she’d seen me do was oscillate between being too shy to say much and spilling as much of my guts out as I could manage. She’d never seen me in my element.

Back then, I didn’t think I had one.

And yet she commented more than once about how I am obviously really intelligent. ^[1]

And that makes me wonder : what, exactly, makes me so obviously intelligent, even to people who have zero evidence of it? What is this vibe I put out?

I mean, it’s certainly true that I want people to think I am brilliant. I don’t know if that’s a fundamental quality of my character or something that comes from being a broken person who invests their very small and fragile amount of self-worth in the thing he is positive he has, namely intellect. But it’s always been so.

But I also want people to think I am funny, lovable, and a sexy, sexy beast, and that has not always worked out in my life. So it can’t just be desire.

I feel like there must be some sort of electricity to me that comes out in the look in my eyes and how I carry myself and so on. Some cluster of of nonverbal cues adds up to “really smart” in people’s minds, and I worry that sometimes, it intimidates people, or worse, makes them feel stupid and that I think they are stupid.

Now, full disclosure, I am keenly aware that I am smarter than most of the population. But that’s how I see it. Not that people without my gifts are stupid. They’re normal. I am the one who is the outlier.

So I don’t look down on people for having average intelligence. In fact, I don’t look down on people at all, if I can help it. Like I have said before in this space, I require equality. I am too stubbornly independent to look up to people in an authoritarian way and I am too kindhearted to look down on them. I want to relate to people on their own level.

Anything else is kinda gross to me.

But I digress.

This electricity of mine is a mystery to me. I can deduce that I have it, but it’s not something I know how to control and use. Not yet, anyhow.

In fact, it’s clear to me that I have never learned to turn it off, and how I am driven to try to prove how smart I am in literally every single social interaction. I don’t think I do it in a dickish way, like some others of my disposition do. But it’s still not good.

It is, in fact, childish. Like I am still a little kid eager for attention and desperate to get back that moment in time when everyone was wowed by how precociously intelligent I was and I got a lot of attention and affirmation just for that,.

Thinking about my childhood (so what else is new), in my preschool years (of course), my mother always praised me when I did something smart. From a super early age, learning and thinking and such were the ways I got my mother’s approval.

Like I have said before, my mother did a wonderful job of stimulating my young mind and guiding my intellectual growth. And it must have been wonderful for a teacher like her to see me flourish so rapidly. I think that must be what channeled me into the intellectual side of things as opposed to being a somewhat more rounded person.

Because my mother didn’t teach me any social skills. She didn’t have them either. She didn’t teach me complex motor skills for the same reason. She gave me what she had, which was wonderful things like intelligence, curiosity, a love of books, and a great and all encompassing compassion and love for all the critters of the world.

But with it came her shyness, and her lack of the ability to make/have friends, and a few other things I could do without. That, coupled with the fact that in the same year my two best friends went off to elementary school and I was opted out of kindergarten, and the fact that my siblings and I were on different planets, and I had a very poor social starting position when I went to school the next year.

Add in the natural isolating factor of high IQ, and it’s no wonder I never fit in.

It honestly never occurred to me that I would have to change in order to fit in. Maybe some vital social instinct had never been activated, I don’t know. Nobody was asking me to change at home. I never learned how to adapt.

And part of me still stubbornly refuses to act dumber than I am. It’s a profoundly immature attitude and one I hope to overcome some day because it severely impairs my ability to get the sort of social connection I so desperately want.

Why should I think that it’s the world that has to bend, not me?

What makes me so special?

Why can’t I compromise on this one important thing?

Maybe I am still trying to please my mother.

If so…. I think I need to create an entirely new life strategy. Start from scratch, learn to value different things.

Or maybe I just need to ease up on myself a little.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.