Patient readers know of what I speak when I talk about The Jagoff.

It’s the part of myself that convinces me to do stupid, lazy, shortsighted, immediate gratification leading to long term consequences type things by saying that it’s no big deal, no stress, just relax, surely you can put if off a little longer, and so forth and so on.

And that’s how I have traditionally seen it : as the devil on my shoulder that talks me into doing things that are not in my long term interest at all.

And of course, when things blow up in my face and I find that I have, once more, fucked up largely and not only hurt others but thoroughly humiliated myself,  he is nowhere to be seen and I am kicking myself – savagely – for listening to him yet again.

But after an interesting if mildly frustrating discussion with friends last night where I tried (and failed)  to convey to them the folly of the point of view that sees acting on impulse as the enemy (as opposed to acting on them poorly), it’s occurred to me that I have been far too hard on the Jagoff.

After all, he’s only trying to make me happy.

And if I am being honest, he’s been my greatest ally because he has been there in my darkest hours trying to keep me amused and distracted so that I don’t get too sad.

In that sense, he’s the wellspring of my comedic talents. He’s the voice that led me to my love of comedy and my desire to understand all there is about it. If I am, in any sense, a jester and a clown, it’s because that is what that part of me had done for me.

So he’s been the one looking out for me when nobody else would. Kind of the fun uncle whose job it was to keep me entertained that I never had.

Nobody gave a damn whether I was happy or not. How could they?

They had no idea how miserable I was as a kid.

And to be fair, neither did I. Like all kids, I did what I thought was expected of me. I went to school, got excellent marks, came home, retreated to my room, and spent my time with my beloved distractions of comics, books, and video games.

And, later on, porn.  Thanks, internet!

So it’s unfair to only associate the Jagoff with the bad results. That’s a clear cut case of selection bias. Most of the time, he’s been my only friend, and while his brand of comfort often leads me down the wrong path, he always means well.

He’s just not that good with the long term thinking.

And as for my own salvation, he might just lead me there if I let him. He’s more or less the voice of my id., inasmuch as the the id can have a voice, and while mindlessly doing what your emotions are telling you to do is obviously a bad idea, never doing what your impulses are telling you is almost as bad.

For one thing, they will get tired of being ignored and force you to listen to them one way or another. Like the man who doesn’t even remember stealing the loaf of bread when he was starving because his id simply took over and got things done.

Or all those people say their infidelity “just happened”, because their unmet need got so strong that it also took over.

This is why I think the only true path to inner peace and harmony with the universe is to satiate one’s desires.

It is only when a man has a full belly and empty balls that he can truly be patient, wise, and a good citizen.

I’m sure Plato said something like that at one point.

To the ego-dominated mind, acting on impulse can only lead to disaster. Again, this is selection bias at work. You don’t notice all the times when acting on impulse worked out just fine. Why? Because nothing unusual or noteworthy happened.

But when things go cattywampus, the ego-biased mind immediately blames it on letting the id decide something. We kick ourselves (savagely) and say things like “If I’d only thought about it for two fucking seconds.,… “.

But that’s not how life works. We can’t spend two seconds on every single decision we make. Life happens too fast for that. We have no choice but to make a lot of decisions quickly and in realtime and so to blame ourselves (and worse, our ids) for not thinking things through is absurd and unjustified.

Life is not a chess game, where there is always plenty of time to contemplate our next move. Decisions have to be made quickly, and only the fast circuit of the brain can do that. And the fast circuit is, as the name implies, very fast, but it’s not nearly as smart as the slow circuit of the brain.

So yeah. If you’d thought about it for two seconds, you would have made a better choice. No doubt about it.

But that was never going to happen. Ever.

It’s going to take me a long time to process this.

So all those mistakes you kick yourself over? You literally made the best decision you could at the time. Sure, in retrospect, the slow circuit of your brain can easily see what the right decision for the best outcome was, but it wasn’t there.

The quick circuit was. And it did what it could.

I’m not saying that there is no situation in which pausing for a few moments would be a bad idea. People make rash decisions unnecessarily all the time. The world could use more thoughtful pauses.

But by the same token, there are times when pausing to think things over would be a very bad idea.

The ideal solution, then, is to build a smarter fast circuit. And you do that by trusting it over and over again and evaluating the results.

Luckily, life forces you to do that anyway.

All you have to do is open your mind to the idea that sometimes, it’s right.

Then it will all fall into place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m in a very irritating state right now.

I am sleepy, yet I can’t actually get to sleep. Call it daytime insomnia. Given the vampire’s hours I keep these days, it would be highly appropriate.

Normally, when I feel like this, I just take a nap. But something or other is keeping me from being able to relax enough.

Maybe something is bugging me and I’m not aware of it.

I can’t think of any worries I might have. My life is pretty sweet right now. I have around as much work as I can handle. It brings me a little extra income, which is very nice. Recently my boss, Prasad, thanked me for my patience in continuing to write the scripts even though I hadn’t heard from him in a while. And he swears he’s had three episodes animated and will upload them real soon now.

That would be nice.

But the thing is, I am actually enjoying the work. For the most part. I mean, work’s work and there will always be times when you have to do it even though you don’t feel like it at all. But for the most part, I am getting a hell of a lot more out of it than money.

I’m getting a ton of highly valuable experience. My writing skill and confidence grows with every script, and at five scripts a weak, that’s really something. As I develop, I find myself using the instrument that is animation in a more strong and inventive fashion.

I have even, spontaneously, started writing cutaways. And that’s magical. And not just because that’s what the big boys like Seth Macfarlane do.

It’s because I write to pagecount/time, and cutaways fill that space quite easily, even with my trying to get them across in as few words as possible.

Tat’s because I have realized that we were told in Writing for Animation class that the animators don’t want us doing their jobs for them by visualizing in the script. They want us writers to tell us, in detail, what happens, but how it looks and how it’s actually is execute is their job.

I probably shouldn’t be using an inline markup system I pulled out of my ass in order to figure out how to write this stuff in order to tell them where the punchline is and where the visuals go and when they should go there.

But as a comedy writer, I feel like I have to control the timing of the gags. I can’t do that without pointing the animators at the right parts.

I realize that this is one of those control/trust issues I have. I should just trust that they know what they are doing and will not butcher my script with their own ideas.

Unless they’re funny. People are free to make it funnier. It has to be funnier to me, but I am always open to making things better. The play’s the thing… the show.

If other people’s ideas can make the show better, then I will take ther advice and I will thank them for it and I will use their ideas and it will still be only my name on the script.

After all, for the most part, people just wanted to contribute. They want to feel like they are doing their part to further the group objective. They want to feel lijke what they think and say matters.. They want to feel like a part of something.

I would be happy to give them that.

Compared to that, matters of who gets credit for what pales in comparison.  Myself, I am scrupulous about such things. Mostly, that is due to my own moral code.

But it’s also because, on a purely selfish level, taking credit for someone else’s work is gross to me. My work flows from myself into the world as a living, organic part of me.

Other people’s work is not part of that, and hence foreign and alien to me.

The only solution is to make sure everyone gets full credit for their ideas and thus make it very clear where their body of work ends and mine begins.

God, it sucks to be this sleepy. It must be the heat that’s doing it. Just pounding the life out of me, like it does. I am trying to stay hydrated, but it’s tough.

Mainly because the heat is making me too lazy to get up and get more water.

Summer is like that, at least for a fat old tubbalard like me.

I wonder if I will make it to the beach this summer. Odds are against it. There’s too much social anxiety in the way. Plus, I have never been to a beach all alone. It’s always been with friends and/or family and/or neighbours.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

I’ve never even been in the ocean without there being someone around to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t drown.

I’m not sure if being on the beach by myself would make me feel really lonely or really free. Probably both, and in that order. I know that I would not be able to stop myself from looking around at all the happy families (and all the normal ones too) having fun in the sun, relaxed, taking the close bond they have with one another for granted because it has always been there.

And that would give me that deep feeling of being locked out of life, able to watch it but not to be a part of it. The sad boy alone at night looking into the window of a house where everything seems warm and happy and loving.

I wish I’d known what that meant back then. I wish I’d realized that I had a problem and it was up to me to solve it. That how I lived – lonely and isolated and miserable – was not normal and something should be done about it.

But like I would do for the rest of my life, I did nothing about it, and just kept on trudging forward because I was too timid to ask for help.

And I am still that way at 44.

But I am getting better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.