Been pondering my interdimensional powers lately.

It started when I suddenly realized that I truly did move on a plane perpendicular to most people because when the herd is going south, I am cutting across it to the east ir the west in order to get a clear look at whatever scared the herd in the first place.

I’d love to say that my ability to do this arises solely from my towring mental integrity and a rough and ready individualism that refuses to back down EVER, but.. no.

The truth is that I am so poorly socialized that I don’t even see the herd most of the time. And when I do, I don’t exactly give its activity a lot of weight.

I love reading about trends and such but it would never occur to me to apply said trend to myself unless it happened to match something I like doing anyway.

I am the sort of person who is a lot more likely to lead a trend than to follow it.  Trends are started by people who are just doing their own thing in a genuine manner that just happens to appeal to the public because they want to be like said genuine person.

Obviously, not all of us independent types start trends. When it happens, it’s more or less a fluke. A meeting of individual lifestyle connected with the zeitgeist and with the sheer luck of crossing paths with a Second Adopter type person.

That’s the kind of person who is extremely keen on spotting the Next Big Thing before everyone else does so they can be the one who introduces it to their friends and then basks in their fascination and kudos.

This person is not necessarily as shallow as I am making them sound. It takes some very sensitive antennae to tune in to the public wavelength that way.

Anyhoo, back to me crossing streams. I have known for a long time that my mind automatically seeks the places nobody else is looking. It’s not a conscious process at all. It’s entirely pre-conscious, which is kind of nice.

Pre-conscious processes don’t feel like work at all!

I am also the sort of person who has to exert himself in order to see the social reality that the rest of the human race lives in. I can do it, but I have to abandon my own perspective to do so.

And even then, I tend to deduce it logically more often than I just “feel” it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have extraordinary intuitions sometimes. And not just the “logical leap” type that is basically intellectual, or the “you develop a feeling for this kind of thing after a while” type either.

I mean sure and certain knowledge popping into my head fully formed without the intervention of the conscious mind at all.

I just suddenly know things.

Now being the rationalist scientist type of guy I am, I don’t make any announcements or decisions based on that intuition until I have worked it out logically. The startling thing about it is how often it does.

The intuition turns out to be correct. For a rational type like me, that’s astounding. It’s like magic. Watch me pull this knowledge out of my hat. How could I have possibly known that? It’s a mystery.

Sometimes, I will at least get a sense of it being the product of a long chain of logical deductions that went too fast for the conscious mind to register. I can’t remember them in detauil, of course, but sometimes I get a feeling of something in my mind using the new information as the last piece in a pattern I had no idea was even there.

And once that last piece is there, the circuit is complete and powers on, which I think accounts for the euphoric feeling such activity brings to me. Something that I was unconsciously straining to make fuit together finally does and the sheer relief of it floods my mind with happy floaty feelings.

And then the pattern collapses as the new knowledge is kept but the pattern cleared, and the new knowledge is always much smaller than the pattern, so I also get the pleasure associated with freeing up a chunk of mind space for other tasks.

It’s friggin’ awesome.

Part of my struggle with coping with reality and life and so forth stems from being extremely internally driven. By this, I mean that my mind is constantly, but subconsciously, full of internal processes working on various problems I have “set and forget” style posed it.

And it is towards these problems that my mind is strongly prioritized. The deep processes come before everything else.

And if I was some supercomputer chugging away somewhere, that would be fine.

But as a human being, this means that the amount of mental bandwidth left over for my conscious mind varies wildly. The subconcious problems can grab as much memory and mind power as they want at all times, and so one second I might have 12 percent of my mind free for dealing with reality. and the next second I have 2 percent.

This explains my “getting lost” sometimes. For my whole life. I have experienced moments when I completely lose the thread of what is going on, and plunged into confusion and a feeling of helpless weakness and stupidity.

All because some process took a big chunk of my working resources away and everything I was storing in that space is deleted and I find myself in an all too familiar hell where it’s like someone stole my mind.

As it turns out, that someone was my subconscious mind.

Now clearly I have benefitted from this system. It brings me the sorts of deep insights into things normally associated with the word “genius”. It lets me make the sort of unique connections needed for creativity. And it processes some kind of information in such a way that I can remember it decades later.

But it would be nice if I could reserve a section of my mind for the conscious mind’s use exclusively and therefore make my reality more consistent and reliable.

Until then, I am stuck dealing with all the fluctuations.

It can be very, very disheartening.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fucked if I know.

I find that to be a very hard question to answer, at least for myself. It’s one I am never prepared to answer. When someone asks me that – even if it’s me doing the asking – my mind immediately plunges into the roiling chaos of infinite possibilities and is torn apart.

But it’s more than that. I react to the question almost like it’s an attack. Like someone pulled me into a dark alley and said “We’re going to rip you away from your warm safe place and drag you into the world. CHOOSE HOW. ”

That’s clearly not a healthy response. Not only is it maladaptive, it’s also delusional. The person asking – even if it’s me – just wants to know my desire so they can help me act on it. They are actually being very nice.

And it is a question that would not induce panic in a healthy person. In fact, I assume that most people, more often than not, would like being asked what they want to do.

But not me. Because I never have an answer. Either I have no plans or intentions whatsoever or I have some and I am in the middle of putting them into action by myself.

The idea of involving other people in the process is foreign and alien to me. All my life, whatever I have done I have done alone, and so I have never learned to collaborate and cooperate on coordinated actions.

The only group thing I have done and enjoyed that I can think of is take part in a theatrical production. I liked that because it’s exciting being part of something while also being given a clear task and role and being left alone (in a sense) to do it.

Otherwise, my lack of kindergarten experience leaves me in a state very similar to those poor monkeys that were raised in captivity way back when. I treat other people as a threat and freak out around them.

Not all the time, of course. But it’s always there. It’s something I have to actively suppress in order to act in a more or less normal way around people I don’t know.

And that takes its toll.

So I can’t answer the damned question. And I get the feeling I am going to have to dig deep down through many layers of dirty ugly scar tissue in order to fine the spark of will necessary to be able to answer it some day.

I’ve tried gettting around the question by imagining that I have infinite money and therefore do not have to worry about expense at all.

What would I do if I was a billionaire?

You know the first thing that comes to mind? Getting a massage. I store a hell of a lot of tension in my muscles and I would love to find out what happens when all that tension goes away. Plus, of course, massages feel wonderful.

Now that I am thinking about it, I am pretty sure a good deep massage would do wonders for me psychologically. I should ask my therapist if that’s the sort of thing the province would pay for if he referred me to a massage clinic.

After that? Sex. My god, sex. SO MUCH SEX. A very luxurious hotel room, room service done buffet style, and so much the sexing times.

I would get me a half dozen super hot male prostitutes and spend an entire long weekend fulfilling my wildest desires.

The legal ones, anyway.

After that? Real estate. I have a deep desire to own some. I would get myself a grand, cozy house with lots of room for guests and facilities for my entertainment etc. It would be out in the country both because it will need the room and because I want peace and quiet away from the rest of humanity almost as much as I want sex.

Then I would buy a luxury apartment in the city for when I want to go into town and be urban for a while. Someplace on Commercial Drive or maybe the Davie Street area.

Then, travel. Luxury travel. I’d see the world.

Although, my idea of luxury travel has a lot more to do with freedom and autonomy than opulence or overt displays of wealth.

As long as I am reasonably comfortable and relaxed, I would be just as happy hitching a ride in someone’s beat up old van with some college aged backpackers as I would riding in a private jet that’s like a luxury apartment on the inside.

The money would be there to make me feel secure, not to inflate my pretensions. If I knew I could get myself out of whatever mess I get myself into, I would be far more willing to take risks and have wild adventures and be spontaneous.

Remember, it’s the performers with safety nets that do the best high wire acts.

Once I had thoroughly exhausted my travel bug, I would go home and work on building a life for myself. Go husband hunting. Set up a home studio for making the kinds of wacky funny videos I want to make…. written, directed, and produced by yours truly, of course. And possibly starring me some of the time too.

But to be honest, I don’t see myself as broadly castable.

I would love to develop my own little troupe of hilarious people who crack each other up constantly and who would have a grand old time working hard at making amazing stuff.

Now at this point, one might ask, “Couldn’t you do some of these things right now?”.

Yes I could. But without the money to aid in my feeling of security, it’s just not gonna happen. It’s truly amazing what cash can do for one’s confidence and self-esteem.

If only my therapist could refer me to a whole lot of money.

That would really aid my recovery.

In fact, it would probably cure me.

But that just ain’t gonna happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is time for me to  to give birth to all that’s ugly and horrible in me so that I can, at long last, be clean.

Don’t worry. It’s won’t be like, all at once, like explosive diarrhea.

But that is what it is going to take for me to become who I really am. I can see that very clearly now. There will have to be a very big purge of negative thoughts, old tapes, personal demons, ghosts of the past, and deathly chill of the grave.

So less of a purge and more of an exorcism. Hey, it’s almost Halloween, I’m allowed to get a little ghoulish.

Isn’t that right, Vincent Von Ghoul?

I’ll that that as a yes.

Anyhow, it has occurred to me that I will need to go through a lot of emotional emesis ^[1] in the next little while if I am to disinter me true self from under all the accumulated rubble of the last forty years or so.

And, like actual emesis, no matter how necessary it may be and how much better I will feel afterwards, it will still be a painful and disgusting and disturbing experience.

But I am ready. I am sick and tired of my depression and I am good and mad enough to do something about it. A large portion of my energies are being directed into shoring up and inflating my self-worth to at least normal healthy dimensions, and anything that gets in the way of that has got to go.

Not sure exactly what form that will take, but you can be fairly sure writing will be involved, and therefore, so will you, my dear and patient readers.

That’s nothing new, I suppose. I’ve been coughing up the badness on these pages since 2011, after all. But it might increase in intensity and vividness, and might come in the form of fiction.

Probably horror via some easy metaphor.

Exorcism and such.

Had therapy today. Another Therapy Thursday. Session went reasonably well. I did most of the talking, which is usually a good-ish sign, because it means I had both a lot on my mind and the energy to spit it out.

My therapist has trouble keeping up with me when I am like that, sadly. But so would most people. And I wasn’t even going at full speed.

If I expressed myself at full speed and maximum density, people would think I was insane. Or possibly that they were.

Either way, not good.

I told him about my recent uptick and explained some of the stuff I have written about it in this space to him as well. And of course, by talking out loud to a sympathetic audience about it, a bunch more stuff that I hadn’t thought of before came up.

I have so many issues that they pop up like tissues from a box of Kleenex. Take oneout and up pops another, and another, and another…. till the box is empty, I suppose.

I have no idea what having that box be empty for the first time in my adult life would be like, but I am keen to find out.

The most important thing is to remember that I am awesome. I am an amazing dude with boatload of talents both general and specific, and I have a lot – and I mean a LOT – to offer the world.

And I am confident that, sooner or later, I will hook up with some way to unleash my talents upon the world, especially after getting rid of all that dirty ugly scar tissue.

See how I brought it back to the topic like that? Classic.

Because the thing is, none of that garbage is me. It’s just stuff that has happened to me. I’ve made the mistake of thinking its dirty and disgusting nature means I too am dirty and disgusting for far too long and it is high time I flushed it out of my system.

With some kind of…. soul laxative.

And to that end, I am now, at last, to accept my own awesomeness as an a priori fact which requires no proof. In fact, I am shifting the burden of proof entirely onto reality.

It’s up to the world to prove I am not awesome. And the evidence to do so will have to be pretty thorough and complete.

As in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” level thorough and complete.

As far as I am concerned, all the evidence points to my being a great guy. Not perfect by any means, but high in awesome things like kindness, morality, empathy, sympathy, nurturing, and the urge to shelter and protect people.

And that’s just my “nice guy” assets.

It’s possible that, in the past, one of the things people liked about me was my humility. That’s going to change, sorry. It’s not going to go away – I will always be someone who believes in keeping it real and not being a dick to people no matter what.

But I might come across as more brash and confident now and that is sure to distress some people who know me.

Sucks to be them! Because I sincerely do not care. Life’s too short to cater to people who preferred the sick version of you.

I was sick. Now I’m better. This is the real me. Deal with it.

I am also done with worrying so much about whether I will become an egotistical asshole. If it happens, it happens. I will do my best to avoid it or at least to keep it within reasonable, tolerable levels, but if that’s the price I pay for my happiness, fine.

Because the truth is that I am amazing. A big ego is justified. I haven’t had one before now because I was sick, but now I am ready to claim my throne at last.

This is my kingdom and I shall rule it as I see fit.

Bring on the dancing boys!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, my wallet went through the washer today.

Totally my fault. Didn’t check the pockets like I should. Also, put my pants in hamper with wallet still in the pocket.

And I can feel that old familiar chasm opening up inside me, ready to stuff my self esteem in its cavernous mouth, chew on it messily, swallows, then poop out depression so fast that it’s universally hailed as a triumph of metabolism

But I’m not going to let that happen this time. This time I’m going to put a stick in that mean ol alligator’s mouth so that he can’t bite down on me.  And then I am going to pull myself out of its jaws and walk away unscathed.

Because really, it’s no big deal. These things happen. To everybody.  Maybe they happen to me slightly more others, and maybe they don’t.

The body of evidence is wildly insufficient to support either claim.

And so it is my choice whether I want to see this as yet another example of behaviour that fits into an overall, damning pattern of unwise actions.

In other words, I can see this as me being a dumbass again and having that spiral into an all encompassing self-loathing that makes me question my right to live.

Or I can see it as one of life’s speedbumps and gaily motor onwards.

Because really, how much does a thing like this really matter? My money is fine. I take back every bad thing I have ever said about Canada’s switch to plastic money. It’s saved my ass two or three times now.

However, I am keeping the smack I talked about Stephen Harper. Fuck that guy.^[1]

And my ID seems to be fine too. Once again, yay plastic. The stamp that won me that Xbox One S looks a little worse for wear, but the website said I probably won’t need it anyway. And that makes sense, seeing as they are taking 6 to 8 weeks to verify my identity for some reason.

Surely in that amount of time they can get all the information they will ever need in order to prove that I am, indeed, that guy that entered the winning code into the website and that said code is, indeed, a winning code and the odds against me having just made a lucky guess are astronomical.

The actual game piece is merely the delivery mechanism for the all important code.

So really, no harm done. Yeah, it made me feel kinda stupid, but that’s as far as it needs to go. I did it, it was dumb, but no harm was done, so it’s over.

Conclusions drawn from this data point about my fitness for being alive and other negative extractions from the date are neither warranted nor justified.

And really, what do incidents like that matter compared to the beauty and magnitude of my abilities? It’s not like a prediliction for certain kinds of mistakes invalidates anything else I can do.

I mean, think of any person known to have an extraordinary talent. As an example, I choose Tiger Woods. He’s arguably the best golfer there has ever been. Sure, his career ended on an embarrassing note, but nobody really gives a shit about that in the long run. He will always be the greatest.

But for all I know, he’s even more absentminded and clueless than I am,. I don’t know what he’s like at home. I don’t know what kind of shenanigans his loved ones and servants have to put up with. I don’t know if his personal assistant has to juggle like a madman just to keep him from wandering into traffic.

And the thing is, it doesn’t matter. He’s an extraordinarily talented golfer and made a lot of money for a lot of people, including himself, with his skills.

Compared to that, whether or not he has top notch life skills is so trivial it barely exists.

So yeah, I’m a bit of a goof because I’m a head in the clouds thinker and dreamer who is too absorbed by the world inside his head to pay sufficient attention to the world outside it. So what?

So was Sir Isaac Newton, and he practically invented modern science.

So really, what is needed here is perspective. One of the many ways depression fucks with you is that is shrinks your perspective down to a pinhole size, and that can’t help but make small problems look very large and keep you trapped in a world where the simplest of things are enormous challenges.

And it is possible to fight that, but only when you are ready. It’s not a step the average depressive can take until they are quite a long way down the road to recovery like I am.

But me, I am crazy for perspective. I want to see things from all the angles so that I can get a sense of what is really going on and, most importantly, get a sense of the true scale of things so that I can prioritize.

And so it is good for me to gain some perspective at this point on my journey. These little errors of mine are not important enough to even count against my self-esteem, let alone devour the whole thing.

I will continue to be my sweet and  funny self no matter what, and in view of thing, my error prone nature is merely a charming eccentricity.

Nobody cares if a person of great talent can balance their checkbook.

So who cares if I launder my money now and then?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least, I assume so. I usually do.

Still developing this new path of radical individuality and artistic purity. It feels good, and it feels right. But I am also scared.

This was to be expected. It’s a much braver path than any I have taken before. And I don’t know where it will lead. It might lead to disaster.

But at least it would be my disaster. I would finally be living my life instead of hiding from it I’ve reached the point in my life where I would rather die trying than live merely surviving until I reach my meaningless end.

I’ve realized that I have been living my life curled up in ball with my eyes squeezed shut and my hands over my ears to shut out the world. More importantly, I have, by doing so, endorsed all the harm and deprivation that would come to me as a result.

The rule, as it were, is that it doesn’t matter what happens to me (or more importantly, utterly fails to happen to me) as long as I don’t have to break my fetal-position self-hypnosis that makes all the bad things go away… in my mind, that is.

In reality, they’re running the joint.

Once more, I find myself telling myself that it’s okay to do something purely because you can do it and you want to do it. That the world is not boobytrapped, nor is it malign, and there are no bullies waiting for an opportunity to make you suffer any more.

And even if there were, I would freaking devastate them if they tried anything. I am not the scared wimpy little fat kid I was back in the Very Very Bad Old Days. I have iron in my soul, raw molten steel in my heart. and a mind full of lightning and spiders. ^[1]

And it would not take much for me to unleash fifty different layers of hell on someone for daring to fuck with me.

A certain person who teaches standup to people with mental health issues learned that the hard way.

I feel kind of bad about that now. But he failed me. And my best friend.

So I tore him apart with my mind. So to speak.

Anyhow, the point is that I have no reason to be afraid. I am more than capable of protecting myself. If anything, I should worry on behalf of others.

But my deep timidity has very little to do with reason and everything to do with having been brutally violated when I was barely out of diapers.

That leaves a mark.

But fuck all that. I am going to make working hard on being myself my full time job. I’m going to pump out the voltage 24/7 and deal with the result.

It could be great. It’s not like the real me is a raging arsehole. Back before the trauma, I was a very charming, personable, and lovable kid. If I can go back to that state, I would be doing fine.

Sure, a lot of people would find me to be somewhat obnoxious. But fuck’m. The cool people will get me. Some people can handle a megawatt personality, some can’t.

And I have been practicing for this shit for decades now by being Fruvous. He’s basically an idealized version of myself and when I am RPing him, I am not at all shy and I am not ashamed to be my outrageous and amazing self. As Fruvous I’m flamboyant, adorable, hilarious, and most importantly, loved.

People love Fruvous because he’s so vibrant and funny and sweet and cute. I have every reason to believe that the same thing would happen in real life if I gave it a chance. I have seen how people light up on those rare occasions when I am feeling up enough to let the heavy wattage flow.

I hqave the power of charisma. I can make people feel good just by paying attention to them. What’s more, I am a sensitive dude who is a good listener and who has enough flexibility of ego to be perfectly happy praising others when I feel it is due.

And they will believe my praise because I am also a very sincere and honest dude who truly cares about others. It makes me happy to make others happy, and I sincerely want to help people find a way out of their own personal hells.

After all, I have spent a looooong time in one of my own.

So my mission now is to go out in the world and be powerfully myself. To hell with caution, hesitancy, timidity, and self-doubt.

There is great wisdom in learning by running into the walls instead of simply assuming the walls are there and hiding from them in a prison of your own making.

I’m through with apologizing for being alive. Like it or not, world, I am here, and you are going to have to deal with me.  And the real me, not the shy critter who does his level best to act like he thinks people want him to act. namely that he does not exist.

I’m sorry, Mom, Dad, Anne, Catherine, and Dave, but I am here now, wanted or not, and I am going to fight as hard as I can to be treated as equal to the other kids and not some unwanted afterthought whom you would prefer to pretend never existed.

And that’s true for the goddamned school system too. I’m going to insist on my right to exist there as well. I don’t give a shit whether you know how to deal with a kid like me. You’re going to have to learn real fast.

But that shouldn’ be a problem for you. After all, you’re educators, right?

I am here, IU have a right to be here, I have the same right to exist as myself as everyone else, and I am through living according to the convenience of others.

This little light of mine is going to be let shine like a million stars.

And if people don’t like it, they can put on some fucking sunglasses.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One day in Generic Fantasy Setting, the mighty heroes of A Number Of Characters Banded Together To Defeat Evil came upon a touching scene.

The mightiest and noblest hero of them all. Nerd Back Home, was giving a rousing and inspirational speech to a Grebling, a small creature known mostly for it timidity.

“… so you see, Little One, there is nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it, work hard, and never., EVER, give up on your dreams. ”

“Aww… ” said Self Insertion Character, the wizard. “See how noble of spirit he is? He shares his wisdom with even the lowliest Grebling. ”

“You’re right, as always, ” said Thinly Disguised Chick the Author Has The Hots For. “And your esoteric knowledge and academic excellence really turns me on. ”

“Duh,. ” said Hot Chick’s Dumb Jock Boyfriend. “I I suck my thumb after putting it up my bum because I’m so dumb. ”

Everybody laughed uproariously at the Jock’s blatant stupidity and viewed him with nothing but pity and contempt. Mostly contempt.

“Quiet, everyone!” said Authors Bicuriousity Elf. “I want to hear the rest of what that GORGEOUS man is saying. ”

“So take heart, Little Grebling. Some day you WILL lick the horizon. ”

“Say what now? ” said SIC, and watched as Nerd Back Home patted the Grebling on its tiny slimy shoulder, then strode off, fulfilled and inspired by the exchange.

“That’s…. not possible, is it? ” said the Hot Chick, looking to SIC with a wide-eyed, trusting look that spoke of her total faith in SIC’s intelligence and wisdom’s ability to make the world make sense again for her,

“No, it’s not. ” said SIC in a strong male voice that was clearly the product of his getting LOTS of puberty. “The horizon is not a physical object, and therefore cannot be licked. ”

“Me try now! ” said the Dumb Jock. He immediately began hopping and licking at the air with great intensity and enthusiasm.

“Wow. ” said the Hot Chick. ” Once more, he has proven how worthless all that muscle and height and handsomeness is in the real world, and how therefore anyone who found him even slightly sexually attractive is undoubtedly a mentally feeble primitive ruled by their glandular secretions and not logic and reason like YOU. ”

“That’s something that should be obvious to everyone. ” said SIC. “Oh god, now the Grebling is doing it. ”

The Grebling was, indeed, hopping and slurping just like the Dumb Jock, for Greblings, like Jocks, are a species know for their stupidity.

“Shouldn’t we, I don’t know. Stop them, or something?” said the maddeningly pretty and ladylike Bicuriousity Elf. “It’s sad to see them trying to do something that’s impossible. ”

“But they seem so happy!” said the Hot Chick in a voice overflowing with the strongly femine virtue of compassion. “Why ruin their fun?”.

SIC stroked his long thick very masculine beard thoughtfully, knowing his very wise and grownupo wisdom and judgement could resolve this conflict.

“I agree with you, Hot Chick. We should leave these poor fools to wallow in their own empty headed joys while we grown up adult people go do important, adult things. ”

Everyone, even the Dumb Jock and the Grebling, nodded in deference to SIC’s clearly superior wisdsom and maturity.

“After all,” said SIC, “there’s more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe. ”

Everyone laughed at this clearly completely original and brilliant joke, then the Quantity of Heroes strode off into the sunset, and went on to do many exciting and important things, some of which even involved their bathing suit parts in some way.

(——————————————————————————————————————)

Well that was a heck of a lot of fun to write. My original gag – the lick the horizon thing – kind of got lost in the forest of my comedic indulgences, but whatever.

As I was writing it, I realized that I have been a rather timid writer, in a sense. Practically a Grebling. Because as I wrote, I found myself thinking of this kind of writing as something I am surprised that I can “get away” with.

Like I was doing something shocking and embarrassing by stuffing my prose with so much of the sort of writing I enjoy and thereby putting so much of me into it.

As if writing like that is somehow equivalent to parading around naked screaming “look at me! LOOK AT ME DAMMIT. ”

Mental note : new Halloween costume idea.

But why shouldn’t I write like that? What do I have to be ashamed of? I think I have been limiting myself by what the audience will “get”. I have such a strong desire to communicate and connect with people that I subconsciously installed a governor to keep me from being TOO weird.

But fuck it. I’m going to draw with all my goddamned crayons from now on, and if the world can’t handle it, it can go fuck itself.

I will make better art being true to myself and writing what I enjoy writing than I ever will being a timid populist anyway.

I choose the artist’s path over the entertainer’s path. That means I am prioritizing my artistic enjoyment and integrity over my very strong desire to make the audience happy, whatever it takes.

So, from this point on, I am a writer in a garret working on powerful and unique art that could rewrite the rulebook if it ever caught on, but probably won’t be appreciated in my lifetime unless I somehow get an agent who is very, very patient and persistent.

Or even better, a patron.

I will never lose my desire to entertain and get the love I seek via laughter and applause, but I am going to pursue that goal through artistic purity and the full expression of my authorial voice rather than trying to learn how to get through to people, like I have been doing.

Screw that. I’m a unqiue individual, with my own idiosyncratic way of doing things. If I achieve success, it will be by being boldly and defiantly myself and thus creating original, vibrant, living art o such power and heft that it defines its own reality as it creates it, then fill said reality with amazement and magic.

And if people don’t get it, they don’t deserve it. The sharp people with get it, and that’s enough for me.

I’m going to have fun, god dammit.  If the product of that fun appeals to others, that’s great and all.

But no matter what, I will have had a good time writing it.

And that’s the bottom line.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty sure it’s around here somewhere.

I’ve been trying to teach myself to cope lately. To internalize a list of steps I can take when I feel terrible that stand a good chance of fixing the problem, or at least lessening the agony for a spell.

It started last night. I was feeling really wretched, but somehow I got it together enough to get up and get myself some water.

Then, once I took a drink, I realized just how thuirsty I was, and drank the rest pretty fast. And in a little while later, I was feeling so much better that I did the same again.

This will seem simple to healthy people, but for me it’s revolutionary because my deeply ingrained emotional response to pain is to retreat into myself and endure.

It’s like despair is my basic coping mechanism.

So the idea that there are positive steps I can take to actually fix the situation is a novel and exciting one from an emotional point of view.

Logically, of course, it’s blindingly obvious.

But I am a very sick man, and what makes sense does not always work for me. That’s the nature of mental illness. By its very nature, it leads to illogical actions based on distortedr perceptions and deranged thought processes.

It’s weird how logical and crazy I am at the same time. Weird, and amusing.

Was reading some stuff about us INTJ types recently. It’s something I do on a regular-ish basis in order to remind myself that I am not the only person like me in the world, at least on that level.

The feeling of connection I get when I read sometghing written by a total stranger that describes me so perfectly, and in ways I have never seen anywhere but writing about INTJs, does my strange alien heart a lot of good.

And yet, I am so much more than that. And I am glad for that. When you read about us INTJ types it makes it sound like we’re all emotionally repressed scholars and scientists who are brilliant about everything but emotions and who approach relationships with good intentions but clinical methodologies.

I am glad, therefore, that I am a sensitive and dynamic kind of guy with an overflowing creativity and a wacky and weird sense of humour. A lot of the writing about us INTJs goes on at length about how relationships are our Achilles’ heel and, while I can’t claim to be brilliant at them, at least I don’t approach them as puzzles alone.

The archetypical INTJ does not spend hours pretending to be a cute little fox every day.

It’s part of that useful but false dichotomy between my massive mental machine and the rest of me. It’s false in that there is no real divison, it’s all me, But useful in that by thinking about it through that filter, I can make progress in unifying those different aspects of myself.

When I think about my warm side. I think of the joy I get from connecting with people and undersanding them and offering them my wamrth and wit and loving understanding. It’s the side of me that desperately wants to help people and make them happy. The part that feels so very right when I can help peopkle by listening to them, truly listening, and understanding them in a way only possible when you open yourself up to their truth and their perspective.

The cold said’s joys are more about feeling swift and powerful and masterful. It’s where my strength lies. When my mind is ticking oiver rapidly and I am “in the zone” in an INTJ way, I feel strong and decisive and activated. And it leads to such a dizzying capacity for insight and deduction that sometimes I am in awe of my own capacities.

This started off as being about fixing myself when I feel bad, didn’t it?

I’ve been assembling a checklist of steps to take. So far, I have :

1. Clear my lungs.  My sleep apnea leads to a buildup of CO2 in my lungs, and that CO2 sits there in the bottom of my lungs taking up lung capacity and reducing the amount of oxygen I am getting with each breath. So I have learned to fix that by breathing out the usual amount and then just keeping going until there is nothing left in my lungs, period. It’s an unnatural feeling act and it makes the most awful sounds – like some kind of extended death rattle. And the benefits are not immediately felt. But before long I feel a lot better because, waddaya know, I am getting enough oxygen.
2. Hydrate. AKA remembering that there’s worse things than having to pee once an hour or so. My diabetes needs lots of water to work with when my blood sugar is too high, which is often. So I will learn to obey my thirst and keep on drinking water until my body tells me it’s had enough. Dehydration ruins everything.
3. Clean my skin. My pores clog easily. So it’s worth my while to see if the problem I am facing is that my skin can’t breathe and my sweat isn’t making it to the surface of my skin. Gross, I know, but that’s life in this body of mine.
4. Check my ears for clogging. An oldie but a goodie. My sinus issues lead to clogged ears, which in turn leads to enormous sinus pressure as the sinal fluid no longer can escape. So it’s always worth checking to see if I need to cleanse.
5. Move and stretch. At least a little. My sedentary lifestyle coupled with playing mentally engaging video games(s) all day means I build up muscular and emoltional tension. Getting up and getting something done, or even just pacing till I don’t feel so wound up, can do me a lot of good.

Ideally, I will internalize these steps to the point where theyh feel natural, even instinctual, to me. Feel bad, take steps, no need to think it over. Like scratching an itch or brushing the hair pout of my eyes. Voluntary, and subject to situational appropriateness, but still very close to a reflex.

More important than any checklist, though, is the idea that when I feel bad, I can do things to fix it.

All I have to do is learn to take responsibility for my own care instead of withdrawing into myself and my distractions and ignoring the situation.

And I am… getting there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m also a genius.

Been pondering the eternal question of how do I accept my own awesomeness lately.

As you patient readers know, it’s an issue that I have been struggling with my whole life.

From tge age of three I knew I was something special. Ever since the moment when I suddenly started reading the instructions for adults in Sesame Street magazine to my babysitterr Betty and it produces a really huge result.

But even back then, I didn’t really know what to do with this information.

if I has an ounce of natural ambition in my soul, it would have been obvious what to do : milk it for all it was worth,. Use it to get all the attention, affection, praise, and all other forms of ego food I could get from it. Use it to become a star,. at least locally.

Something. But I was born with a far more relaxed, easygoing, happy go lucky personality than that. So alll I did was go “This seems good. ” and that was about it.

It would never have occurred to me that this was something I was supposed to use to advance my personal station in life, or move ahead in some fashion, or use it to “get what I want” or “have things my way”.

I feel the prickly sweat oif anxiety forming on the back of my neckl just trying to imagine being that ambitious.

It seems like so much work. And so stressful!

So I just went on my merry way, not doing a thing with my gifts. Like I have said many times before. it is really hard to value something that comes very easily to you. I knew I was gifted but it didn’t really seem to mean much in concrete terms. So I didn’t think aboit it very much.

Then, when I went to school, it rapidly became the villain in my story of boredom and terror. I was bored most of the time in class because I was too smart for the work. I was terrigied out of class because my IQ made me stand out from the others and attracted their negative attention because I did not fit in.

Not even a little.

Teachers would occasionally try to get me into contests and such. But I was on another planet, as usual,  and didn’t relate to the challenge. so they could see that I was not really into it. So neither were they.

It really makes me wonder when I look back at my life and see all the times when I was in a very incoherent mental state and yet somehow made it through without anyone realizing what an outright lunatic I was.

It’s that “just keep going” thing again. Somehow, I always manage to keep going, and do just enough to show the world that I am okay (which is a lie) and that it’s okay for it to go away and leave me alone because I will be just fine (and I totally won’t).

I guess it was attention I was afraid of (and also craving). But the bad kind of attention, the kind where it feels like you are in trouble and people are panicking and you gerel exposed and out of place and want nothing more but to crawl back into your hole and hide from the world as the alkarms go off in your head.

And underneath it all is a terrible guilt at having caused such a fuss.

There is no room in this complex for me to have a legimiate problem that deserves attention. It’s possible, of course, but it’s hard to imagine anything short of the sort of thing that requires a trip to the hospital that would do it.

And this puts pressure on others because they are left to guess how you area really doing. They can’t rely on you to tell tghem when something is wrong. I would find that very stressful to deal with. Someone tyou love and care about who can’t tell you what the problem is and so you have to guess.

It’s a lot like having a pet, come to think of it.

Anyhowm my point is that I have never known what to do with my extraordinary gifts. I am not totally in the woods any more because, this late in life, I have finally developed some ambions, but they are really just dreams and dreams don’t get me anywhere.

Some say that I’m a dreamer. Well I’m not the only one. There’s lots of losers in the world. The Internet is full of us.

I’ve been trying to find and connect with my natural ambition level. Because it’s not like there’s nothing I want and I have no dreams.

And while I don’t have a lot of ambition, I do have plenty of greed. Green for all the things I have never had, like money, recognition, love, sex, and the respect of my peers. Greed that makes me want to reach out and grab the world and shake it till it tgives me everything I deserve, and whole lot more too.

But OI am scared. Scared of where that leads. It would take me pout of my comfort zone and force me to mix it up with the buig bad world and maybe even grow up.

At the very least, IU would have to finally go out and get hurt.

And worst of all… it would mean turning to face reality instead of of turning my back to it and ignoring it as much as possible.

And that scares the sheep dip out of me. I have spent so long hiding out in my bunkerf that the normalk light of day frightens me. I’m like one of those escaped POWs wgi wander out of the woods decades aftger escaping with no idea how the war turned out,

My war is on the inside, though. And it’s been raging for 40 years.

I wish someone would njust win already,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And that’s no accident.

So first up, an update : I have officially ended my job with Prasad. He has ninety high quality scripts from me and that’s gonna be it. I am moving on.

It did not go as well as I would have liked. You see, I have this problem. I have such a hard time asserting myself that sometimes, when I finally get the courage to do so, I have done it by sort of pumping myself up likie an athelete before a game and as a result, I end up issuing tight, terse demands instead of actually dealing the with person.

The result is that some poor person is suddenly bearing the brunt (because really, what else there to do with a brunt) of az suddenly outburst of basically the exact opposite of my usual personality in every way.

And they are left shellshocked and wondering WTF just happened. It’s like all of a sudden there’s a volcano in your living room.

And it is PISSED. OFF.

This has been a pattern in my life, one I thought I had resolved way back when I was in my late teens and realized that I had the problem and that the solution was that I had to assert myself before the unexpressed anger caused an emotional meltdown.

But it still happens from time to time, and it happened with Prasad.

I gave him my three demands : more money, better communication, and a much higher quality end product. And that’s how they came out – as hostile demands.

He rightly pointed out that he had given me a raise from $10/episode to $15/episode just six weeks ago. And he had a point there.

He also reminded me that he had given me the email addresses for the two other peoiple, the voiceover person and the animator, in the project and so communications was really up to me.

One might argue that it’s his job as a producer to bring people together, but whatever.

The truth is, this project was never going to work. Not with a small-business type budget. Live action might have been doable. A bright young well spoken dude (petite sassy blondes preferred), a green screen, a decent webcam with decent audio, and yours truly to write the script  and do the editing, and the whole thing might have been a success despite a no-string budget.

So, after alienating and hurting a man who had been nothoing but nice to me,  I apologized to him and smoothed things out and we have now parted ways.

He was even nice enough to give me a five star review on UpWork, which will come in handy when I am looking for new work.

Speaking of new work, that Skype meeting went well…. weird, but well.

The guy starts off the whole thing by giving me this whole long sales pitch about some supposed miracle medical powder that cured his wife’s cancer AND his son’s Tourette’s and he’s already a tech millionaire and he’s only selling this stuff because he really believes in the product and wants to heal the world and jesus fucking christ on a cracker, this guy is more full of shit than a fertilizer factory.

I can see your hotel room, dude. That’s no Presidential Suite. That’s the same kind of tightly pakced but more or less comfortable hotel room *I* could afford.

And so I am listening and nodding and on the inside I have a sinking feeling that this asshole set up this whole thing just to sell me on this bullshit and the UpWork posting was just a scam to lure me in.

And if that had been the case, I would have given him a piece of my mind served red hot overhand with a live grenade and a rattlesnake provided free.of charge.

But either because he sensed how non-receptive to this crapfest I was or because he just ran out of material, he eventually segued through a bunch of other ideas of dubious viability and verisimilitudfe to the one we actually talked to via text chat, the idea of a service that connects big time YouTube stars with the kinds of writers who can help them make tgheir awesome shows even better.

It could work,.

And even if it’s a total non-starter,  I could make some money from it before it crashes and craters, and even better, I might get my work in front of people with connections and influence and money, and that could be my ticket to the big time.

So I am happy to go along with the whole thing at least until he asks me for money.

Also a bonus : he seems genuinely impressed with me. My wit, my personality, my confidence. He said I was interesting and funny and that he thought I could be a YouTube star myself.

So like… yay! Validation!

The kind that leads me to think that I might just be able to pull this whole show biz thing off. And that maybe, just maybe, I have been ashamed of myself for no good reason for way, way too long.

Sure, I’m a goof who forgets basic things and manages to screw up simple tasks on a regular basis and is, oin general, a starry-eyed dreamer who is not that great at everyday life, but who cares?

It wouldn’t take a huge amount of success to make the whole thing moot anyhow. A decent assistant could take care of all of that for me and leave me to do what I do best, which is to create hilarious things.

That’s way more important as to whether I am “good at life” or not.

Fuck life. I’m good at art DAMN good at art. I truly believe that I don’t just have great comedy writing skills, I have a sort of generalized artistic talent that could be applied to damn near everything from a high-toned presentation of sculpture and found art to a the world’s raunchiest, most lewd porno flick.

Obviously, the latter would be WAY more fun.  And I would love for it to say “pornographer” on my resume.

It’s a noble art that brings great enjoyment to millions, and it deserves respect.

Now excuse me whilst I take a nap becausxe I am not good at sleeping and therefore need to sleep at 8:20 at night.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it’s pretty amazing.

First off : tou know how McDonald’s is doing the Monopoly thing right now? ^[1] Well I won something from it recently and it’s a bit more than a burger or a muffin.

It’s a gaming console, namely the Xbox One S.

Something like this, but with a different game.

And the thing is, and this speaks entire encyclopedias about me, I am have trouble believing it. I keep wating for there to be a catch, despite all evidence pointing to the fact that I won the damned thing.

When I first saw the instant-win thing, I couldn’t believe it. And trust me, that speaks an entire wing of a library about my negative tendencies. I thought it couldn’t possibly be that easy. I told myself that it must be that the little ticket just gives you the right to enter a sweepstakes for one. or some other scam.

So when I got home, I logged on to the website on the ticket and put in the code and low and behold, it looked like I had really won the darned thing.

But there was a problem. The skill-testing question^[2] had this asterisk type symbol at the beginning and I had no idea what that meant.

Oh great, I thought to myself. This must be some new mathematical symbol that i did not know. Something they are teaching the kiddies in their new new math.

So I tried to google it. But the only answers I found were part of some pretty advanced relational equation stuff, so that seemed pretty unlikely.

And of course, * means multiplication in many places because unlike an x, a * can’t be mistaken as a variable.

I didn”t know that was the reason till I was trying to solve my problem. Pretty cool, eh?

Anyhow, so I decide that my best course of action is to consult my furry friends, because almost all furries are nerds and a significant percentage of nerds are the mathy kind of nerd.

I was a mathy type nerd… until calculus.

So I copy and paste the equation to them, and they all pore over it, and eventually come to the conclusion that they don’t know WTF is going on either.

So I emailed McD’s about it. And they replied around a day later.

Turns out, that asterisk wasn’t part of the equation at all.

It was there to denote a required field on the form!

Can you imagine? I find the whole thing hilarious.

Armed with this information, I solved the question with ease, submitted the form, and now, AFAIK, I will be getting my Xbox One S at some point.

But get this : for Mysterious Reasons, it wil take them 6-8 weeks to “verify” my identity!

They could verify my identity on foot faster than that. Literally. They could send someone to walk all the way to my apartment,. knock on my door, take a DNA sample, then walk the sample to a lab and have it checked, and it still wouldn’t take 6-8 weeks.

But that’s no big deal. It’s not like I am eager to have the thing. I don’t intend to even open the box. I am a PC gamer and that’s that. I have no desire to add console gaming to my life. My PC gives me more than enough gaming.

With a console, I would have to get a TV to plug it into, then find someplace to put the TV and the console, and then use a completely different device to play games instead of the same device where I do all my work.

And speakoing of work….

Just as I am deciding that I am pretty much done with my first gig, I get a couple of nibbles of interest from others on UpWork who are interested in my comedy writing skills. I text-chat with one of them, and now he wants to Skype-meet with me tonight, and says I am really interesting.

So now I have to comehow get Skype working despite the fact that my webcam appears to have died since the last time I used it.

So now I have to try to get one of my tablets working. I’d rather have used my laptop, but it’s now a craptop because its battery is dead.

Or possibly something worse, because it doesn’t work when it’s plugged in, either.

And I have to make myself presentable, at least from the shoulders up. I am, of course, not at all keen to up the ante from text to video, but I will not let that slow me down.

The job, in and of itself, it just a punch-up of a sort of script this guy has written for a “launch video” for his startup. Pays $40 American.

But the business model is all about connecting brilliant writers with people who need them, and I hope to charm my want into being one of those writers.

So wish me luck. This might actually turn out to be my next gig.

And if not, it’s still extremely affirming. Two people so far have seen my profile and how many hours I have worked for PRasad and decided that they would like to see more from lil ol me.

Heck, I’m just happy that someone is noticing me. I’d be happty to get verbal abuse at this point because it would at least mean I had had an effect on someone.

But praise is, obviously, way better.

So it seems like things might be turning around for me.

It scared the shit out of me to even type that sentence.

And that speaks entire writing systems about me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[{1]] For my American friends : here in Canada, McDonald’s does this big Monopoly themed contest where you can collect stamps or win stuff instantly. I am sure they have the same sort of thing in the USA. only with a more exciting theme. [[1]]