This weekend is VancouFur, the local furry convention, and that means that my blogging may end up being rather spotty as I consider myself to be officially en vacance now and, if I am lucky, I will be too busy for the bloggening.

This year, just like last year, the convention is extremely local to me, as it’s happening in our living room.

Just kidding. It’s happening at a hotel just six blocks from my home, and that is dang convenient as it means there is absolutely no need for a hotel room and I can get there via a quick bus ride or an even quicker cab ride.

That makes the whole deal a lot less expensive and time consuming, and best of all. I get to come home and sleep in my own bed when the day’s festivities are done.

I’ve already done one thing, namely the Eye of Argon panel. For those of you who are blessedly ignorant of this phenomenon, The Eye Of Argon is widely consider to be one of the worst fantasy stories ever published.

Here’s a link to it. 

But be warned : it is truly terrible. It starts off bad and only gets worse from there. It commits every literary crime in the book.

But it reserves a special spot in its heart for the wholesale abuse of adjectives. In fact, it’s writing like the Eye of Argon that makes writing teachers declare a fatwa on adjectives and ruthlessly hunt them down in their students’ prose.

Not only does the novella use far too many adjectives in a way that seems almost compulsive, it uses them in bafflingly inappropriate ways that suggest that the author only has a vague sense of what these words mean but likes to use them anyhow because they make him feel smart.

I mean, at one point, the hero, Grignr, admires a woman’s opaque nose. Opaque.

I guess he has a “things which fully reflect light” fetish.

Anyhow, the idea of doing this monstrosity as a panel is that people take turns reading the blasted thing out loud and their turn ends either when they reach the end of the page or when they laugh.

SImple, effective, and goddamn fun. Reading it out without laughing is a real challenge, and the frigging thing is so badly written that reading it out at all is hilarious.

So I had a lot of fun doing that last night. It’s a bit of a marathon, as the thing IS a novella, and what with all the laughing and riffing and whatnot, it takes around three hours to get through.

But man, is it fun.

Today, I will be going to a Writers Meet n’ Greet. Not sure exactly what that will entail, but it sounds like my kind of thing.

I will also be attending Carthage’s “Furries in the Media” panel, which started off small in the first year of the convention and now has grown to such epic proportions that last year, it took place in the biggest room in the hotel and it was standing room only.

Apparently, this year, Carthage was unable to sufficiently convey the magnitude of the event to the programming coordinator, and the event will take place in a much smaller room than last year.

So that should be fun. I plan to get there as early as possible so I can be sure to get a seat, hopefully up front so I can more effectively annoy Carthage.

Annoy in the most affectionate possible way, of course.

The first thing he said to me this year was how good I looked. And that kind of fkloored me because I don’t get that a lot.

Anyhow. after that will be supper with tout la gang, plus hopefully a few bonus furries we have stolen from the convention.

Preferably, it will be furries we know, but I have roofies.

After dinner, I plan on going to the How To Draw Naughty Bits panel. I went to it last year and had a lot of fun. Didn’t learn a thing, as I am not an artist, but it’s still ten tons of fun to be in the room with a bunch of people giggling and making dirty jokes as someone tries to teach us how to draw furry genitals etc.

Then at 11:30 pm there is something called “Bad Fanfiction : The Movie”, and there is no way I can miss something that so perfectly fits my interests.

So its going to be a long, full day.

Right now, that Rock Crab voice in my head is trying to convince me that it’s all too much and I should stay in my hole here at home instead.

I suppose that’s one downside to the whole being able to go home every night thing. If I was at a convention far from home and staying in a hotel room, I would not have to produce the willpower to leave home every morning.

Sheer boredom alone would get me out of the hotel room and off to panels.

But whatever. I will get showered and dressed and out the door, and once I am at the convention, it will be easy for me to keep the momentum going.

So I will ignore the Rock Crab as it tries to convince me to just crawl back into bed and sleep until it’s all over.

If I did that, I would only end up hating myself for being too much of a pussy to take advantage of all the awesomeness a furry convention has to offer.

Instead, I will get a shower, get dressed, throw a few things I think I might need into my backpack, and take a cab to the hotel.

And verily, I shall romp and frisk and frolic with my own kind, and bask in the company of like-minded individuals, and bond with my tribe.

I will try to make people laugh, and sometimes succeed.

I will contribute to discussions and learn from neato panels.

I will hang out in the games room and, for the first time ever, visit the dealer’s room with actual money to spend there.

And when it is all done, I will come home, sleep, and be well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday, and in the course of today’s session, we ended up talking a lot about my inability to accept my life as it is now.

Why can’t I relax and accept my current circumstances and, like my brother told me a long time ago, just try to build some kind of life for myself?

Short answer : dreams. .

Specifically, the dreams of a future in which I am gainfully employed and contributing my substantial talents to a worthy endeavour. A future where my life finally begins and I become a contributing and fully intergrated member of society instead of being a socially isolated burden on it. A future where I am worthy of respect.

Right now, I am nearly impossible to respect. I’m easy to like and to appreciate and to admire for my gifts and things like that. But none of those things are respect.

Because respect comes from doing things. Substantial things. It comes from having a way to justify your existence. From having a real answer when someone asks what you “do”. From having accomplishments and achievements. From being somebody.

And it does not come from being a home-bound invalid who plays Skyrim all day and can only justify his existence by pointing to a blog only friends and family read. ^[1] It doesn’t come from having a VFS degree but being too timid to look for work. It doesn’t come from being so damaged that it often takes me half an hour just to work up the willpower to go get a drink of water or get up and go to the bathroom.

So in a very literal sense, I am not respectable. I am lovable. I am admirable. I am even, on a good day, enviable.

But respectable? Hardly. Nobody truly respect an invalid unless they are productive in some substantial way, like say being a novelist.

In which case they are not, in my books, an invalid. They are merely disabled.

I explained ot my therapist that if I met someone just like me, I would not respect me either. I’d be sympathetic to my plight and wish nothing less than a swift and total recovery for myself.

But respect? :Like, real respect, like the kind people who can actually do things get?

Forget about it. When a full acount is taken. I am,. in fact, a loser. A 44 year old man who has never been in a relationship, held down a job, made any kind of name for himself, and who barely has the competence to keep himself alive even though he is in a situation where 90 percent of the work of life is done by others. Someone who, despite a prodiguous intellect and substantial creative gifts, still finds himself needing to pathetically turn to others for help in the simplest of situations.

Nobody could have true respect for someone like that. Not the kind that counts.

So I need my dreams of a better life. A decent and respectable life. Not this deadening doldrums of media consumption and bathos.

And to keep those dreams alive requires that I refuse to accept that my curent situation is the best that I can hope for. If I truly believed that. I would kill myself, because I would see no point in going on with life.

So sure, I can see how it might seem like the best course of action is to accept everything about my life as it is right now.. .but only if you ignore the need to have some reason to go on living.

Healthy people have life momentum. They get it from their jobs, their families, their relationships, and even their hobbies. They don’t know what it is like to have your life come to a full stop.

Even if they have been unemployed for a long time, they don’t get it, because they still had the rest of their lives to keep them going.

I do not.

So to keep myself going and maintain my will to live, I have to stay restless and ambitious no matter how much it hurts.

And make no mistake, it mostly causes me pain. Wanting so much when you can do so little is brutally painful. Staring across the existential void at all that you have even dreamed of sitting there. waiting for you to reach out and grab it, but knowing that your arms are far too short and too weak to hold onto them, is horrible.

But it also reminds me that I am still alive. I haven’t died inside yet. I haven’t given up. I am still kicking and screaming and biting and scratching and trying to escape this prison of my own devising.

I suppose that’s why my inner conflict is eternal. I cannot and will not accept that I should just give in and make the most of being worthless.

And it’s not like my dreams are unattainably ambitious. I just want what most other people already have. A job I can do, the ability to support myself, a decent wardrobe, a boyfriend, maybe some self-initiated social activities, close tied with family. Nothing outrageous or unrealistic. Just a normal life.

And I am going to keep fighting myself for as long as it takes.

I think the great and mighty Al says it best :

On a good day, I can accept the facts about my life.  That I have serious mental and physical issues, that I have a long ways to go before I can finally be a part of the world instead of always being on the outside looking in, that I have suffered a great deal because of things that were beyond my control in my childhood.

I I will never be able to say “Well I guess this is it. Better make the best of it. ”

If I did that, I would want to die.

Because it would mean I have already died inside anyhow.

So why not finish the job?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.