So the plan was that I would go to my bank, Vancity, and talk to them about a new credit card to replace the shitty one with their name on it that aided and abetted thieves taking $120 from me, then I would walk to PriceMart and get some shopping done, then take a cab home from there.

Phase 1 was disappointing. Turns out that Vancity has nothing else that even vaguely resembles my shitty reloadable VISA. There’s such a thing as a VISA Debit card, which sounds like exactly what I was looking for, but Vancity doesn’t offer one.

So apparently, if i want an actual trustworthy secured VISA, I have to go to a real bank and not a credit union.

Well if that’s the case, I might as well move my bank account to a real bank too, and tell Vancity to go fuck themselves.

I mean, what I want is something that lets me pay with VISA and have the money come directly from my bank account. And that kind of only works if your VISA card and your bank account are from the same place.

I will brood a while over whether I am mad enough to switch banks.

In the meantime, I got my new card for the old shitty reloadable VISA in the mail yesterday and I put $100 on it today so I have some way to pay my bills with some money left over to buy myself a new video game some time soonish.

I’m not quite done with Skyrim, but I am pretty sure this latest character, my customized Orc, will be my last.

I’m getting just plain burned out on the game. There’s still whole galaxies of content for me to try out there but meh.

I am sure that in a couple of years I will come back to it. I only hope that I retain enough memory of what I have already done to let me pick up where I left off.

This time through, I did mostly stuff I had done before because it had been long enough that I didn’t remember any of it particularly well.

Anyhow. On to Phase 2, and that’s when all the trouble began.

Because I hadn’t gotten far in the surprisingly and shockingly epic trip between Vancity and Pricemart when I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.

The walk was killing me. I felt so weak. Within seconds, my leg muscles were screaming and my heart was pounding and my head felt like it was going to explode.

It was all I could do to actually make it across the parking lot to PriceMart, where I immediately began looking for somewhere to sit.

But nerp. There is literally absolutely nowhere to sit down there now. The outside bench is gone. The inside bench is gone. Even the shitty folding chairs in Customer Service are gone. Sitting is just not a thing there any more.

And this doesn’t just affect me. There are lots of old people who need a place to sit worse than I do, as well as other sickly types like myself.

Apparently, none of us are welcome at that store.

I tried to rally. I stood there trying to get enough strength back to go do my shopping, but I just couldn’t.

So I didn’t. I just called a cab and went home, no shopping done.

If there had been one lousy chair for me to sit on, they would have gotten $20-$30 of my money, but nope.

More importantly, I got a shocking revelation about just how much I have deteriorated over the last couple of months.

I mean, I knew I wasn’t feeling so great lately, but I had no idea that walking less than a block would damn near kill me,.

But as I stood there waiting for my taxi, blinking at the spots in my eyes and swaying like a tree in an inconstant breeze with dizziness and feeling like I might die, it occurred to me that I am not feeling very good.

So I am going to make an appointment with my GP so I can tell him all about it. He might well tell me to go to the hospital.

And to be honest, right now, that feels like a wonderful place to be.

More after the break,

---

Than to fade away

So this is it. Looks like I’m dying.

And I’m scared. Terrified. I feel like death drove past my house today, and pointed at its watch then laughed at me.

And I don’t want to die. I want to hang around.

For fuck’s sake, I am a pussy hair away from having my dreams come true,. I might actually write for television, For animation, even.

Dying now would be so goddamned unfair.

But I am clearly quite sick. Right now, I am keeping it at the GP level because I don’t quite see my symptoms as being worth a trip to the ER, but it wouldn’t take much to push my illness into that category.

I mean, it’s 7:30 pm and I still feel tired and weak from the walk from Vancity to Pricemart. Two parking lots worth of walking, and I feel like the walking dead.

Won’t be long before I can only get around in one of those electric scooters.

And for a fat guy like me, ending up in one of those scooters is like a woman ending up with a house full of cats – it’s the nightmare scenario you’ve been dreading, and having it actually happen makes you feel like a total failure,

And the thing is, the warning signs were there. Each week, getting my groceries was taking more and more out of me. Looking back, my decline was clear.

But it took something like today to shock me out of my denial.

Because that’s what I have been in. Denial. I think that somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought that I was just being a wimp and that if I really wanted to, I could shake it off and go back to normal.

Nerp. I am quite fucked up. I need medical attention pronto or my long suppressed nightmare will come true and my pilot light will go out like a snuffed candle.

And I just plain won’t be here any more.

And I really, really don’t want to die.

Which is progress of a sort, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I guess summer is truly over.

I just had to close the window in my bathroom because it was too damned cold in here.

And on a pleasantly sunny day, no less.

Oh well. At least that means the sweltering heat is gone, too. I will not miss those hot afternoons that were so hard on me.

And what the hell, if it gets cold enough I can always turn on the heat. Or put on some clothes for a change.

Sorry if you didn’t know I usually blog nude until now. I’m almost always naked, to be honest. I only get dressed when I am going to leave the apartment, and I do not leave the apartment much these days,

Especially now that Joe’s shift has changed. He is working 3 pm to 11 pm now, and that means he gets off work way too late for us to go to dinner in the McD’s parking lot during the week, and so that’s not been happening.

We meet on Zoom instead. And that, in turn, means I only leave the apartment once a week, on Sunday night.

And it’s beginning to bother me. I have started feeling a tad cooper up. Stir crazy. Which you can appreciate is a rare thing when you are agoraphobic.

So I am going to do my best to get dressed and go shopping tomorrow, just to get the hell out of the apartment.

The money I am saving by not having to pay for McD’s twice a week will pay for the cab rides. And I can pick up some things I don’t have the time or energy to get when I am doing my usual Sunday shopping.

Like sugar free jam, There’s a number of good ones out there. Maybe some cans of soup or the like.

Normally I would be looking for microwavable convenience foods like burritos or pot pies, but they come with carbs and so I am leery,.

It’s bad enough that I get things like pizza when I order in, and fries with my McD’s. I really don’t need to add more carb laden foods to my diet.

Been missing the chips and pretzels and such lately. I think my body craves simple carbs. It’s tired of all the nuts and berries and such I eat.

They are so much work to digest.

Well, too bad, body. That crap is not coming back into my diet. You are just going to have to learn to live without it.

Part of the problem is that, as I predicted, I have been super hungry lately.

I knew this would happen when I finished my course of antibiotics. They were suppressing my appetite, and I knew that when that stopped, my appetite would come back with a vengeance,.

And so it has. And it can be quite annoying being really freaking hungry all the time. Really wears on my nerves.

Oh well, if it gets bad enough, I will take some insulin. That usually helps.

More after the break.

---

The harsh bite of cruel deprivation

Truly, we live in the inky shadow of our own dooms.

When I went to do my shopping last night, they were COMPLETELT OUT of Diet Coke.

THEY WERE EVEN out of generic diet cola.

I WAS FORCED to get Diet Pepsi, and now, every sip of it tastes like the cruel whip of desperate deprivation and poverty.

Surely, this is what it was like in London during the Blitz.

Seriously though, I do wonder what the deal is with Coke products being in short supply. I can only assume that the issue is not enough labour.

Because clearly, the demand is there. And I guess we know who is winning the cola wars, because the Diet Coke shelves were bare and the Diet Pepsi shelves were fully stocked. Not a single bottle missing.

Then again, maybe Coke products are stuck in a scarcity cycle. People feel like Coke products are scarce, so the minute they go on the shelves, people buy all they can and hoard it like crazy.

And then, whaddaya know, people see bare shelves and that affirms that it is indeed scarce, and the cycle continues.

Luckily, I don’t. like, hate Diet Pepsi. It’s not my preferred beverage but it’s okay.

I never checked to see if Coke Zero was available. But I don’t really regret it. Truth be told, I think I like Diet Pepsi just a hair more than Coke Zero.

Coke Zero tastes weird. Like cinnamon and mint and unhappiness.

Whereas Diet Pepsi, while nowhere near as good as Diet Coke, at least tastes “normal”. It’s a recognizable flavour. Nothing in it surprises me.

I even have pleasant childhood memories of when my father kept cans of Diet Pepsi in the fridge for when he came home after working out at The Spa, and I would do errands for him in order to get one.

I’m sure I was being a huge pain in the ass to him at the time, but I was happy.

FINALLY finished Wheels of Lull. Christ, what an irritating mod. Very “innovative” in the most annoying sense of the word.

Maybe I’m just getting old and crusty, but I want my quest mods to stick with recognizable objects and locations instead of throwing me into whatever geometrical wet dream their maker had the night before.

That seems to be the sort of thing that impresses people, though. Judging by how much of that bullshit shows up in the top rated mods, that is.

Oh well. I finished the stupid thing, and now I am playing a new character. An Orc, created using a mod called Character Creation Overhaul. which adds things like character classes and specializations to Skyrim.

Oh, and the latest from Mystery Project is that D left a bunch of comments on my character profile, the main gist of which is “show, don’t tell’.

So I am going to add a ton more sample dialogues that illustrate the points I am making about the character’s personality.

See, I can take notes! Not a problem. I’m there to give the bosses what they want, after all, not the other way around.

What can I say, I’m eager to please.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve mentioned this before in the long distant past, but now I want to really tee off on it and see if I can shake some pain loose in the process.

So here it is : video games are my substitute for productivity.

They fake it so well. When I am beavering away in Skyrim, I am accomplishing things. I am completing goals, acquiring loot, gaining experience points, leveling up, and progressing towards a goal.

And all in a nice safe imaginary environment where I fell relaxed and comfortable and competent. One that for all the pixels and noise is actually far, far less stimulating and scary than the real world, and nothing is actually at stake.

So that’s where all my energy and ambition goes. It all gets expressed doing something which soothes and relaxes me, but accomplishes nothing, and is the main cause of my living to the age of 47 without having even become a grownup yet.

Clearly, if I could give up the video games, or even just cut back enough to give myself a few productive hours a day, I would be able to do the things I truly want to do with my life and maybe at long last actually get somewhere and be someone.

But it’s so hard to fight the addiction. So much easier to keep fleeing from reality and letting video games fill my mind and keep it too full for any neurotic thoughts of anxiety and self-loathing and existential terror to creep in.

So I continue to suck at the teat of false accomplishment. It’s a satisfying substitute, especially if you have none of the real thing to compare it to.

At least I have the secret project with E as a prospect now. If I get hired, I will have to travel to Nanaimo to thank the person who dropped this opportunity into my lap personally, and take him to dinner to express my gratitude.

Just think : if I land this gig, I will finally have the money to do full on grownup things like travel and rent hotel rooms and eat at fancy restaurants and such.

Ya know, once that shit is possible again.

Maybe I will even treat myself to one of those fancy schmancy VR rigs. Wouldn’t that by a trip. Be able to visit Skyrim in person, so to speak.

My perverted sex mods would be so much more stimulating that way.

But I have to land the gig first. Things are looking good. My main competition turned out to be boring AF and way too expensive and demanding and slow.

And I am proud of the work I have submitted so far. I think it’s good stuff that really shows how I think very deeply about these things and know a lot about what makes a show works and what makes it flop.

So right now, I am waiting to hear from E. I hope he liked the character thing I sent him, I’d be happy to do more of them, one for each character.

Hopefully, for money this time.

More after the break.

---

Update : E and D like my character profile, but want something that shows the characters’ personalities rather than just telling us about them.

No problem. I have already started framing up a sort of “a day in the life of our team” kind of scene which will give us a snapshot of each character’s personality as well as their place on the team in my mind.

Or if they wants me to stick with one character, I can do that too. Nolo problemo.

All in all, I am happy to do whatever they ask. I am theirs to command. This is a dream opportunity for me and I will dance on fire if that’s what it takes to get the gig.

And it feels so good to finally be using my powers for something. I have all this untapped creative energy just waiting to strut its stuff for the right people and show off just what an amazing mind wizard I truly am, but it needs someone to rub the lamp first.

I can’t rub my own lamp. Believe me, I’ve tried.

So having a receptive audience for my gifts is a real treat for me.

Heck, just writing something knowing it will be read is a treat for me.

Not that I don’t adore you nice people for reading this blog of mine. Like I always say, if nobody read it, I couldn’t do it. I have a strong need to communicate, and that kind of implies someone on the other end of that line of communication.

I’ve tried talking to myself, and while I am, of course, fascinating to listen to^[1], I almost always know exactly what I am going to say.

But having my writing read by people who don’t know me personally is a whole other ball of fish, and I find it highly gratifying.

I get the feeling E and D are having trouble making up their mind to hire me. And I totally get that, because it’s a huge risk.

I mean, I know I’m amazing and they would be lucky to have me, but they don’t.

From their point of view, I am some random outsider who might be talented but is still a unknown quantity and so they are understandably hesitant to entrust their project to someone like me.

All I can do is keep doing my best on whatever they ask of me while trying to find ways to dazzle them with my talent and reassure them that whatever they need from me, I not only can do it, but I can do it fast, cheap, and well.

Ideally, I will get to write everything from the pitch package to the bible to the first and/or pilot episode. I would love to do all that.

They might even pay me money to do it!

Wouldn’t that be a trip?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Purging my mods and resetting everything worked. Stuff that was broken in my Skyrim now works as it should.

Plus the game runs smoother and quicker too. All in all, a successful operation.

Not that I can take advantage of my success right now. I’m too goddamned sleepy. Took my sleepy pill this morning at around 8 am and slept a ton.

Now it’s 2:32 pm and I am still very sleepy. And I don’t want to be.

This is the sort of thing that makes me not want to take the pill.

And I know that’s crazy and stupid. By all rational accounts, the pill is a rousing success. I just got six hours of pretty decent sleep, Plenty of time for lots of deep REM cycles. That’s exactly what I wanted from a sleeping pill.

So I know I am being childish when I complain about some leftover sleepiness getting in the way of my busy schedule of playing Skyrim all goddamned day.

Rationally, I should thank my lucky stars that I can get six to eight hours of sleep at all, given how the alternative is sleep broken into naps of 90 to 150 minutes or so.

Part of me prefers it that way, though. It’s way less of a commitment.

Speaking of busy days, today’s a working day for me. E wants a character profile from me and I intend to deliver.

Not sure how long to make it. My natural instinct is to do a deep dive into the character -their motivations, their backstory, their strengths and weaknesses, and so on.

But if the eventual destination for the profile is the pitch document, i am going to want to keep it short. On the other hand, if the destination is the show bible, then going in depth is the right thing to do.

I suppose I could take the radical step of actually asking E what he wants.

I could totally do that. He’s on Facebook most of the time. I could totally message him and ask him what length he had in mind, assuming he had a length in mind.

There. I just messaged him. Yay me! There’s a lot to be said for acting without thinking.

Three cheers for assertiveness.

If….if that’s okay with you. That is.

---

Meanwhile, in the exploding shtscape that is 2020, apparently the Trump people are making plans to hold onto power if/when Trump loses the election.

Apparently, it’s possible for Republican state legislatures to claim the election was rigged and set aside the actual election results and just choose their electors (the people who do the actual voting in the electoral college) however they like.

It’s amazing how, like Trump, America still finds ways to shock and depress me. I had no idea this bullshit was on the books.

But according to this article, it is.

And at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is how civil wars start. Whichever red states try to pull this bullshit are going to basically be resigning from American democracy, and while that won’t lead to war right away, I can’t see it going any other way in the long run.

Luckily, the American military hates Trump. So we don’t have to worry about them being used against the American people. And the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities are not his friends either.

Plus, even his die hard supporters would be hard to defend literally ignoring democracy in favour of dictatorial rule.

I’m not saying they will forsake him but few will be willing to defend him either.

Kind of curious how Fox News would react. It would be the ultimate test of their true nature. To their credit, they have balked at Trump’s most extreme bullshit a few times in the recent past, so it’s possible they would turn on him,

Or at least some of them would.

In terms of armed force, what Trump has is this murky army of thugs who claim to be federal agents but have no ID and won’t give their name.

That, and his most rabid supporters, but they aren’t going to show up anywhere where they might actually get shot.

The question becomes whether the military and federal law enforcement will act against Trump directly. It’s a question that could split the entire government in two.

My feeling is that no matter what, the people who want Trump out of office (if he loses) will vastly outnumber the ones willing to fight to keep him in, and so the outcome is not in question. He will be ousted.

The question is whether blood will have to be shed in order for that to happen, and what long term effects that will have on the US of A,

I really hope that violence can be avoided.

But we’d best start preparing for that possibility right now.

---

O crap, I wasn’t done. I got like, 190 words to go.

Hmmm. Not a lot on my mind. Managed to make it through a super irritating part of a mod called Wheels of Lull that made me have to jump around in treetops in a dark dark forest and that shit is fun in other games, but Skyrim is really not suited for that.

And that was just the first part of this chapter of the mod. Surely it has other ways of being completely frigging annoying waiting for me.

It’s times like this that make me wish I wasn’t as strongly compelled to finish what I start as I am. Because that was not fun. A rational person would nope the fuck out of there.

But I am not a rational person, and I have the psych diagnoses to prove it.

So I will keep bludgeoning my way along, prevailing by sheer persistence, like I always do in these situations.

But when I finish that mod, that is it. I am done with that character. I am starting a new character, a big brutal badass orc.

Because after all this stealth as my lizard and magic as my high elf, I am seriously in the mood to just bash things to death.

Should be rather cathartic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

I had plans for today.

I was going to take a cab to the White Spot at 3 Road and Ackroyd, aka my fave White Spot, have lunch there, then mosey on over to Price Mart to do some shopping and then take a cab home again.

But then I stupidly took my sleeping pill this morning and slept six hours and now it’s 2:30 pm and I am barely awake enough to be eating and blogging.

Still, I could still execute my plan. Only the timetable would change. Do White Spot for supper, not lunch. It’s totally doable.

I will have to see how feasible it seems once I am more awake.

Heck, the weather’s nice enough that I might even take the bus there.

We shall see.

---

I need the shopping because I have run out of nearly all of my usual supplies. I’ve eaten all my trail mixes and my sugar free desserts and I only have half a bottle of Diet Coke left in the fridge.

i was going to get this Wednesday, after I cashed my cheque. But I felt really sick at the time, so it was all I could do to grba the basics from 7-11.

7-11 is a poor substitute for Price Mart or Sav-On because 7-11 has no sugar free desserts any more.

They used to have Chapman’s sugar-free ice cream. Lovely stuff, But alas, not any more. It got displaced by like, a billion flavours of non-dairy ice cream.

Non-dairy, but still plenty sugary. Dammit.

Still, it may come to that. 7-11 at least has some trail mix type stuff. Nothing like the selection at Sav-on, but I am only looking to cover from now to my usual shopping trip on Sunday, so it should be enough.

How I get to 7-11 is another issue. In theory, I could walk there and back. It’s only three blocks away. The weather’s lovely. I could definitely use the exercise.

But then there’s my poor feet. I’ve written before about how walking without pain is a distant memory for me. My ponderous bulk crushes all insoles, so I never have any arch support, and my diabetes often leavs my feet tender and swollen.

If I could walk without pain, I would be way more willing to go for walks and get some exercise and burn off my excess blood sugar both in the immediate by using up what’s in my bloodstream and in the long term by improving muscle tone and thus making my muscles hungrier for that precious glucose.

See, I know all the science. I am not acting out of ignorance.

I am acting out of weakness. Totally different issue.

I do tire of being weak. Of shrinking away from the world rather than tackling it head on and using all my mental strength to deal with my problems and by opposing end them,

It’s not the real me. I am positive of this. The real me is strong, tough, and more than capable of dealing with whatever life dishes out, then asking for seconds.

But I’m so sick, Physically, mentally, psychologically.

Somehow, I will get out from under this bad star and find the real me and be able to get somewhere in life at last.

Until then, at least there’s Skyrim.

Mother fucking Skyrim.

More after the break.

---

The Purge Begins

Finally got so fed up with shit not working in Skyrim that I am doing a full purge.

That means uninstalling all mods then uninstalling the game itself so I can do a fresh re-install that resets everything back to factory settings and then putting my mods back in one by one.

This is not a short process. Re-downloading the game itself will take a couple of hours, and carefully re-installing mods will take at least an hour more.

But what the hell. I am sick and tired of fighting the game to try to make it work properly. Hopefully this stern measure will restore some sanity to my Skyrim.

And if it doesn’t, fuck it, Skyrim isn’t the only game in the universe.

OK, once more, but this time, say it like you mean it.

This is the point in the purge process where doubt. Were the problems really all that bad? Couldn’t I have worked around them somehow? Did I really need to resort to such extreme measures just to fix a few things?

Probably not, honestly. But emotionally, I feel the need to start over, as well as vent my anger on the game that is pissing me off, so the purge it is.

Skit idea : The Purge In Canada. Same setup as the movies, but nothing out of the ordinary happens because Canadians are fundamentally peaceful people without massive issues with authority so we just stay home and watch hockey.

A few young people commit very minor crimes. Like parking in a handicapped spot, or driving around with an improperly stored propane tank, or yelling “fuck you!” at an unoccupied police car.

But they immediately feel bad about it and apologize.

End with an American tourist incredulously asking them why nobody sets fire, rapes, or does any other crazy shit.

Canadians just look at him like he’s from another planet and say “Why would anyone want to do that kinda thing? There’s have to be something seriously wrong with someone to want to do stuff like that. ”

End with all the Canadians looking directly at the American, who now feels acutely uncomfortable. Final shot is him saying “Well…. um…. “

Ya know, I should write more of my skit ideas into this space. It gets them out of my head and into a written form, and if it’s good enough, I might even be inspired to actually write the damned thing.

Like, the idea above would make a great skit, or short comedy film. In my mind, the part of The Canadian is played by Lorne Cardinal, twho played Officer David on Corner Gas.

His Officer Davis voice would work perfectly as the voice of the Innocent Canadian.

Well, Stage 1 of the Purge , uninstalling all mods, is done. Time to uninstall the game and then take a nap while it re-downloads it.

Hopefully this will all be worth it somehow.

But if not, WTF, it ‘s not like it cost me anything in the first place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, check out this steaming pile of crap.

All this guy did was ask to use women’s phones. That’s it. And yet the media are treating it as if a murdering rapist was on the loose.

But the media, I can understand. Their motives for creating a sensationalist crisis out of thin air are depressingly obvious.

Whatever gets the clicks, right? If it bleeds, it leads. If it doesn’t bleed, try stabbing it a bunch more times, we need a STORY people!

But what is truly upsetting to me is seeing women I love and respect falling for this bullshit. There are women more scared than ever to walk from work to their car because of that story and it’s ALL BULLSHIT.

But I think I know why.

Because fear is fun.

It’s fun to imagine the world as being full of bogeymen. It makes life more exciting without actually risking anything.

And it pays out even further when you have fun imagining that even doing thuddingly mundane things like coming home from work means evading the hordes of criminals and murderers just waiting to take your life.

It’s like little kids scaring each other with ghost stories for fun, except people think this shit is real and just plain ain’t.

But people keep the fear so they can keep the thrill, and get quite upset with me when I dare to contradict their danger fantasies.

And the fear itself is bad enough. I happen to think billions of women living in fear for absolutely no good reason is a BAD thing.

Radical, I know.

But this irrational omniphobia affects how people live their lives, how they choose where to live, how they view their neighbors, and how they vote.

And fear always favours conservatism. The more scared we are of one another because we drank the koolaid on crime being rampant, the more likely we are to vote for right wing politicians who promise to save us from each other.

Without the fear, people would realize that they have nothing to fear from one another and that could lead to the people actually banding together to oppose their oppressors instead of hiding in their bunkers scared of their own shadow, like good Americans.

And that’s exactly how our oppressors want it. They want us mistrustful and paranoid and defensive. It makes it so much easier for them to corral and control us.

It’s exactly this kind of paranoid terror that has led directly to the rise of fascistic heads of state all over the world. People – especially old people – get told by fascists that their lives are in constant danger and only the fascists can save them, and what do youknow, they vote these evil fucks into office.

The only solution is to fight the fear. Refuse to be scared of strangers. Stop imagining muggers and rapists and predatory pedophiles around every corner. Accept the evidence that says you are not only safe now but that this is the safest time to be alive on planet Earth there has ever been, and it keeps getting safer,

And that means we all have to stop playing the Fear Game. We have to give up all titillation and thrill we get out of imagining the world is worse than it is. We have to remind ourselves that the news never shows you what is normal, only what is unusual, and that they reap our fear for cold hard cash.

Stop feeding the beast! Foreswear your fear. Believe in the truth about your fellow human beings : that most of them would never intentionally harm you. That the odds are 99.9 percent that they are no more a criminal than you are, no more likely to steal from you are than you are to steal from then, and that deep down, nobody wants to take your stuff away from you.

We all have our own stuff. Why take someone else’s?

This means we have to face the fact that, at least to our endocrine systems, reality is boring. The actual truth is that you are safe. Perfectly safe.

And there’s always going to be a primitive part of our minds that simply cannot accept that. If we let it, it will invent all kinds of imaginary dangers in order to justify its fears.

But reality doesn’t work that way. Emotions are not evidence. You cannot say, “I am scared, therefore there is something scary happening”. That’s insane.

As human beings (emphasis on human), we have the capacity to overcome irrational fear. We can override our unjustified emotions and send them packing. We can choose to embrace higher compassion and love one another without the fear our oppressors poured into our minds to make sure we don’t get together and change things.

Media is not reality. The fact that TV is full of crime shows might make it seem like crime is everywhere, but all it really means is that crime sells.

In the real world, the statistics are clear : Crime is quite rare. Violent crime is even more rare, and when it does occur, it looks a lot more like a bar fight than a slasher movie.

The rarest form of crime of all is stranger on stranger crime. And yet, the media would have you believe that it happens all the time.

I want people to stand up to the fear. To refuse to fall into the right wing’s trap of paranoia and delusion. To be able to look the forces of false chaos and “fear for fun” right in the eye and say, “I am safe. And I am not afraid.

I know people will fight me on this because I am attacking a deep foundational belief that runs very deep into the hearts and minds of everyone, even liberals.

But I don’t care. I fight for truth and sanity because that’s how I am made. I don’t care if the truth is unpopular and sanity just isn’t much fun.

I am safe.

And I am not afraid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sicker than usual, that is.

I feel really terrible. Worn out and dragged down and ill. There’s some kind of fluid in my lungs, my throat is swollen and sore, my head is pounding, and feel very fragile and confused and scared.

So there’s that.

And all on a day when I have work to do.

The day started off wrong. At around 4:30 am, I laid down to rest my eyes and let my stimulation level “zero out”.

I do this all the time. Usually results in me mellowing out for like 45 mins or so.

But this time, I slept till 10 am and woke up feeling terrible.

But I often wake up feeling horrible, so I didn’t realize I actually was sick until I was up and moving and the outside air hit my lungs on the way to the bank to cash my cheque.

It’s pretty unmistakable now. I feel awful. Malaise galore. Nausea too. I know I should eat, but I can’t. I just can’t.

I can barely make myself take my meds.

I’m going to lay down for a while so I can marshal my energies for work.

Don’t this just figure?

---

I feel a lot better after a couple more hours of sleep. Still got the rest of the symptoms but I at least don’t feel like death warmed over in the microwave any more.

I probably shouldn’t make grand pronouncements about my health before 4 pm, because that’s basically when my day begins.

That’s how much of a night owl I have become. I stay up till 6, 7, or even 8 am, then I sleep a bunch, and between 3 and 4 pm I start to truly wake up.

Glad I wrote that down. Been sort of avoiding acknowledging it for a while.

Eh, so I am a night person. History is full of them. It’s not like it’s hurting me. I have very little contact with the workaday 9 to 5 world so it’s not like it’s costing me much.

I guess I was resisting the idea and telling myself that I will go back to “normal” any minute now because being such a night owl makes me feel like I have drifted even further away from the rest of humanity.

But maybe that’s my path. To drift away. To follow my star as far as I can go and find that place where everything comes together. To walk the philosopher’s path that winds ever higher up the mountain, the air getting colder and the path lonelier as I go, but the view becoming oh so clear and I can see so much.;

And the humanity I leave behind will be reclaimed when I reach my promised land and achieve through wisdom and understanding what others achieve by simple faith.

Seems like a lot of trouble to go to get what others take for granted, but nobody said the philosopher’s road was an easy one,.

Nobody said it was voluntary, either. I didn’t choose this path, I fled to it when nothing else ,ade any sense to me.

But I am beyond committed to it now. So much so that I have only two options : go forward, or stop.

And I am through with stopping and being stopped.

Forward, always forward.

More after the break.

---

Wrote the thing, sent it to E. awaiting reaction.

As usual, I set out to do what I was told to do but ended up doing something that may or may not qualify as what I was told to do.

Let’s be clear though : what I was told to do was to go through the show bible and expand on whatever caught my attention.

What caught my attention was that the plot synopses were terrible. Wayy too detailed, lots of extraneous info, not well put.

So instead of trying to fix them, I wrote five of my own.

I was originally going to do ten, but they turned out to be longer than i anticipated and required more of my creative energies than i anticipated too, so I had to cut back to a more reasonable amount.

And even then, that fifth one was hard. I was so tired!

I guess for me, imagining the entire main plot of an episode takes a hell of a lot of brain calories. Makes sense given the depth and reach of my imagination.

Still, a note of caution is warranted. And the note reads : “Remember that your powers, while awesome, are not unlimited in supply. It just seems that way when nothing has taxed them much lately. ”

And I did expand on something in the show bible. I “expanded” the number of plot synopses by five.

What can I say, I have always found it way easier to create than destroy.

Still, looking back, I probably should have done some character work instead. It’s what E told me he thought needed the most work.

I’ll save that for the next document, if there is one, I guess.

The existing roster of characters is decent. There’s The Dumb One, The Crazy One, The Old Guy, The Relatable Coward, The Precocious Child (also the main character).

All well known types it’s easy to write for. In comedy writing, you are not looking for complex and unique characters full of depth and nuance.

You are looking for unique iterations of a known type. And there’s dozens of known types to choose from,

You could have the Snarky Intellectual, the Overprotective Jewish Mother, the Bickering Couple, the Tired Single Mom, the Wife Who Drinks Because Her Husband Cheats On Her, the Wacky Neighbor, the Sex Crazed Best Friend, the relatable Cranky Guy, the Senile Old Coot, the Working Class Dad…. I could go on and on.

Granted, most people are not as aware of these things as I am, But these comedy types work because it gets people into the scene and the comedy as seamlessly as possible.

They don’t need character exposition to get the jokes. They don’t need an in depth understanding of the situation. They don’t need to know the plot.

If you have written things properlu, some part of their mind goes, “I see, that’s the Dumb Guy” and you’re all set for comedy.

The details that make this Dumb Guy unique can come later.

This was fun. I should write down my thoughts on TV more often.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Can’t think of anything to write about. which is rare.

Usually there’s either something on my mind or something I want to explore in my own psyche and I start from there.

But not today. I got nuthin’.

Probable cause : being pretty sleepy. My sleep is all over the place lately. I neve know when I will get sleepy, how long I will be asleep, or how much sleep I will need before I can actually be awake for reals.

No wonder my mind is blank, then.

Half of my brain is still asleep.

Like it or not, I am probably going to have to go right back to bed once I finish this part of my blogging. This, despite having already gotten roughly six hours of sleep.

Standard comment : I hate this shit. Wish I could be relaxed and philosophical about it and just enjoy the cozy restfulness of it all.

But I’m too feisty for that. I want to live, dammit. I don’t want to sleep my life away. I want to be awake and having fun.

I want more life, fuckers!

---

Feel like I am slowly burning out on Skyrim specifically and video games in general.

I mean, by this point, it is beyond trite for me to say there must be more to life than playing video games all goddamned day.

It’s also trite for me to point out that I don’t know what else to do with myself. Or, more accurately, I don’t know how to do anything else with myself.

I mean, obviously I can think of dozens of things I “could” be doing;. Writing, for example. The real deal, not just this stream of consciousness stuff.

I could even be writing something someone somewhere might pay me for.

But I don’t need that kind of pressure.

Which is to say, I lack the ability to put myself in that situation. If I somehow landed a gig, I would happily accept the pressure and enjoy the challenge of it all.

In that scenario, someone else would be providing the structure and I would merely be adapting to it, which is no big deal for a shapeshifter like myself.

But on my own, there’s nothing to adapt to. No form to take, no problem to solve, no focus for all my aimless energies.

I guess that’s another reason why I have to become a harder, tougher, less sensitive dude, even though that is anathema to me.

They very thought of it makes me feel queasy and scared and like I want to die. Because it feels like I would have to die to make that happen, or at least, that if it happened part of me would die.

And that’s true. In order to become the free, strong, happy, healthy, successful version of myself that I know I can be, the old weak toxic version of me needs to die.

Die, and be gone, so that a newer, stronger, fresher, better version of me can be born.

Guess I am mourning it in advance.

More after the break.

---

---

I am happy!

Just got off a Zoom with E and I am on Cloud 9 because it went so well.

Standard disclaimer : I must be vague due to the NDA i signed.

But, vaguely, I was told that E and D looked over the writing samples provided by the Big Time Writer with the Amazing Resume and found their work very dull and pedestrian and not at all what they were looking for.

Plus, dude is super expensive and wants three months just to produce a show bible,let alone actually write an episode.

I told E I could write the show bible in a weekend. Which is true, but I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t believe me.

It sounds pretty implausible, especially when a seasoned pro just told him it would take three months and a fuckload of money.

But I could totally do that. This is what I have been training for with all this blogging. I went the whole of my time at VFS barely even feeling the strain of the workload except near the end, and even then it was nothing major.

I handled it just fine. Hell, I could have done twice as much.

So what E wants from me is to take one aspect of the show bible as it exists now and expand upon it so that he and D have one more example of my work to help them make up their mind about me.

And I am deliriously happy to do so.

I don’t mind telling you, when E was telling me about how disappointed they were in Mister Big Time’s work,, I was trying to play it cool on the outside but on the inside I was dancing a little jig.

It was music to my ears because it played exactly into my strengths as a writer. I don’t do things the normal way, both because I am a breathtakingly original writer and because most of the time I have no idea what the normal way of doing things is.

So I’m a weirdo. But the good kind. With like…. talent and stuff.

Right now, I am struggling to restrain my natural exuberance because if I gave it full rein, I would end up giving E waaaaay more than he asked for and quite possibly overwhelming him in the process.

I can see it now. “Here’s the character profile you asked for. And profiles on all the other characters, plus a dozen new ones. Oh, and the rest of the show bible. And all the scripts for the first season. And a total pitch package. And some extremely moving poetry written from the point of view of us, the viewer. Oh, and…. “

That would be a bit much. I will confine myself to that which was asked of me and keep my usual bounding enthusiasm on a short leash.

Oh, and get this : if they like what I write, they will even pay me for it.

And that would mean I get the gig.

And that would make me an actual, professional writer.

And that would make me very, very happy. \

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t feel much better than I did last night. Starting to worry that I am coming down with or already have some kind of flu.

Which would be ironic, seeing as I am taking a strong antibiotic twice a day. Maybe all it did was take out the weaker germs, leaving only the most cunning and ruthless bugs to take over my body/.

Kidding. If I have something like the flu, it’s probably viral, not bacterial.

Mostly I feet hot. Very, very hot. Like I am baking on the inside. I think my pore are clogged despite having showered last night, so I am going to try to talk myself into showering again today despite not being “scheduled” to shower till tomorrow night.

It’s depressingly hard to convince myself to do things off schedule. I think because it’s so hard for any sort of order or discipline to survive in the hot wet chaos of my mind that when I do manage to establish some, I cling to it with an almost religious fervor.

Plus, rigid habits protect me from option paralysis because they keep me from having to decide what to do.

Deciding to do things is hard for me.

I wish I had some sort of purge mode for my pores. A button I could press that made my pores tighten in just the right way to clear the gunk out of them and leave me feeling fresh and clean because now my skin can breathe.

Skin is happiest when it can breathe.

Essentially, I wish my pores had a gag reflex.

Outta juice, gotta rest,.

---

It’s now 7:44 pm and I feel much better than I did before. I think my pores managed to unclog themselves when I was sufficiently hydrated to sweat them open again.

I still feel too hot on the inside. I still feel like someone left the furnace on somewhere near the core of my solar plexus. It still feels like I have a forest fire inside me.

But at least the outside feels nice and cool and breezy now. Phew.

Speaking (sorta) of my horrific health issues, the Demon Nipple is definitely on the way out. A patch of white is spreading over it and I am pretty sure that this means the growth itself is dying and that eventually all the white stuff will slough off.

I just counted my antibiotic pills and there’s 16 left. At four a day (two with breakfast, two with suppper), that means I got 4 days of pills left.

We’ll have to see how it looks by then,

The big thing for me is to resist the urge to pick at it. It hasn’t been too bad so far but if at any point it starts to itch, I am going to be sorely tested.

But the last thing I want is for it to turn into a dermatological horror show like what it happening to my poor scalp.

It bugs me that everyone in the ER, including the exotic Doctor Andrew Smith, thought I had a open wound on my head.

In fact, the first person to comment on it was an EMT who was hanging with his fellow EMTs outside the ER.

He said “Whoa there, you need some help buddy?”

Perfectly reasonable. You see a guy walking into the ER with what looks like a head wound, you assume he might need help walking in a straight line.

I told him I was good, which I was.

But part of me wished I had lied and asked for help because the dude was hot and I have a strong attraction to men in caring professions and his offer came from such a pure and caring place that it left me all a-flutter.

It’s not an open head wound though. Sure, it bleeds sometimes when I remove the encrusted dandruff from my scalp, but that’s extremely superficial bleeding.

Sure does look bad, though.

Like I lost a flamethrower fight.

More after the break,.

---

We got these huge kiwi fruit at Costco yesterday. Easily twice the size of any kiwi fruit I have ever seen before.

Sadly, the Bertrand Rule of Produce remains in effect : regardless of the size, the amount of flavour remains the same,.

So they are not exactly packed with flavour.

And that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. The usual size of kiwi fruit can be a little overwhelming when you haven’t had one in a while.

Still, there has to be a happy medium between “overwhelming” and “underwhelming”.

If that’s a word. I know it’s not, ’cause I looked it up.

It’s one of those skills that I learned in my school.

Damn I love that song. The comedic tension between the big 90’s high production value music and the extremely picayune lyrics makes me so happy.

Oh, and of course, the fact that it’s full of language pickiness makes me happy too.

There’s no way I could remain attracted to someone who mangled the English language when they spoke. Or texted.

That might seem harsh to some, but I am super sensitive to language and when it is used wrong, it’s actually painful to me.

Like, nails on the chalkboard of my soul painful.

And no amount of attraction could overcome the negative association I would form from having my nerves shredded over and over by their bad grammar.

I am not saying they have to be poets, or even that they need to be as eloquent as I am. That would be setting the bar a wee bit too high.

But there’s definitely a minimum level of language competency required in anyone I am going to associate with for any meaningful length of time.

And the thing is, I don’t think of myself as a fussy and demanding person. I can’t stand Sheldon on Big Bang Theory or Felix Unger from The Odd Couple and I pity Jerry on Seinfeld’s lack of success with women because of his fastidious nature.

But when it comes to language and logic, I am extraordinarily particular.

Guess everyone has something they are fussy about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up from some pretty brutal oxygen deprived sleep around half an hour ago and I have still not recovered enough to be counted amongst the living.

It is 9:21 am, and I am blogging now because I dunno what else to do in order to stay awake long enough to eat and take my pills.

I sure as fuck ain’t taking my sleeping pill, though. Seeing as sleep just tried to fucking murder me in cold blood.

Probably will go back to sleep when I am done here though.

i don’t want to give sleep another chance so soon, but I have little choice. Eventually the Diet Coke I am drinking will wear off and then it’s back to the somnolent ward.

Like a child, I will dawdle and avoid sleep, but like a child,despite my claim of not being sleepy, I will nod off anyhow.

Suppose I should be in bed when that happens.

I really feel like black smoke is coming out of my ears like in a cartoon.

Hopefully, the caffeine in the Diet Coke will ;level me out enough to get some decent healthy sleep now. Because I sure as fuck need it.

I mean, sleep like I just had is exhausting. I need a nap just to recover.

Alright. Breakfast is eaten. Have blogged a bit.

Time to go back to fucking sleep.

---

It’s now 2:20 pm and I have slept a bunch more,. and I must say I feel a whole heck of a lot batter than I did five hours ago.

But I still haven’t fully recovered. There is still a layer of numb sleepiness in the back of my mind, lurking there, telling me sleep is not done with me yet.

Whatever. So I play less Skyrim because I am asleep. No great loss.

Tell that to my addiction that is currently whimpering in the corner from the loss.

---

Things are slowly developing on Unnamed Animation Project. I was asked for and delivered a document about where I saw the show going. So that’s cool.

Still have no idea what my actual chance is of landing a gig. Don’t know how the meeting with the Pro With The Impressive Resume went.

Is it wrong that I kind of hope it went really, really badly? Like this person turned out to be a raging prima donna who rubbed both producers the wrong way from the start and was such an unmitigated prick/bitch they ragequit the Zoom?

Seems harmless enough. After all,. my hoping it has no effect on whether it’s true or not and it sure makes me feel a heck of a lot less intimidated.

I am pondering offering to work under this person or collab with them or whatever, but I am afraid to seem pathetically eager.

I think I already crossed that line when I offered to do all the dev work for the show for free. E seemed embarrassed by the offer and said he’ll be sure to pay me something.

So I guess I will get some $ out of all this even if I don’t get the gig.

I wish I had known what to say when asked about compensation. Instead, I sort of threw myself on the mercy of the court, which was also a bad move.

i have to remember that if I want people to hire me, I need to restrain my usual eagerness to be liked and work more on being respected.

It’s a fine line between being a fun, funny, lovable fellow and coming across more like an overexcitable Corgi who might hump your leg or wet itself at any moment.

Words to live by.

---

Well that sucked

I was fine – or at least good – until I got out of the car.

Today is Sunday and now that the air is no longer broken, i was able to go do my shopping at Sav-On Ironwood before meeting up with Felicity for McD’s.

I had been feeling pretty iffy all day, ever since that bout of bad sleep this morning (see above), and as late as 6:30 pm I was not sure I would make it because I was feeling nauseous and dizzy and slow.

But that cleared up, more or less, so by the time 7:15 pm rolled around and it was time to go, I felt good enough to go for it.

After all, missing my Sunday shopping can really fuck with my week and because of the bullshit with my card, I can’t do what I would normally do and buy my groceries online.

In fact, I won’t be buying jack shit online until I get a new card. Grr.

And I thought I was doing okay as we drove there. I wasn’t feeling fabulous by any stretch of the imagination but the agony was manageable.

But then when we arrived at Sav-on and I got out of the car, the whole fucking world went sideways and I was incredibly dizzy.

The world was a whirling carousel around me and I had this horrifying rushing water feeling through my body and I felt like I was going to faint and/or puke.

Presumably, blood had pooled in my legs and when I stood up too fast, it had to go back to where it belonged in a hurry.

That’s never fun.

Eventually, the world settled down enough that I could make my way into the store. But I was still fairly dizzy, as evidenced by the fact that after putting something back on a shelf ,I got so dizzy that I ended up staggering backwards and using some poor random woman’s back as a balance point to keep myself from careening head first into the shelves on the opposite side.

In case it’s unclear, I never put any weight on her.

And she was fine with it and worried more about me. Which is nice.

But now I am worried about me too.

Especially considering that I stayed pretty dizzy all through the rest of my shopping and felt so bad before getting back in the car that I considered not getting anything at McD’s at all, and only the knowledge that skipping a meal when I felt like that would be a VERY BAD IDEA kept me from making that mistake.

Now I am home and in front of my computer and I still don’t feel right. I am still nauseous and dizzy and scared.

My current theory is that I am dehydrated and need to drink a lot of water plus maybe eat something salty in order to recover.

But it could be something far worse. Something cardiovascular. Or intracranial.

so i better get my act together and get some medical attention. This kind of thing can’t keep happening. This is not normal.

I keep worrying that I will end up like my Grandma, my father’s mother, and develop terrible vertigo as I get older.

Like I need another excuse not to move.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.