Quick update : I am feeling better than I did yesterday. I still feel tired and weak but otherwise I am back to being only the usual level of ill.
Which is good because that means I will be able to make it to Denny’s tonight. And seeing as dinner at Denny’s with Le Gang is always the highlight of my week, that means a heck of a lot to me.
Le Gang, of course, consists of Joseph P. Devoy, Julian Castle, and Felicity Walker, and those are really all the friends I need.
But I know that for some people that would not be nearly enough.
And I might be one of those people as well.
Because you see, those are just my real life friends. In the realm of virtual text interaction known as Tapestries MUCK , I have dozens.
And they cover the full range, from nodding acquaintances to people I feel extremely close to like my darling Luke.
Right now, at the place I hang out, a pub called Merriam’s, there’s Ada, Windchaser, Sylver, Niva, Coaldust, Kusaro, Jaekob, and many more.
Plus, of course, my good gamer buddy Maelkoth.
And if asked why I have a lot of fuzzy friends, my pragmatic answer would be, “so that I always have someone to chat with and/or cuddle with and/or fuck.
That last one doesn’t come up much, admittedly, but I haven’t given up on it yet.
And that is really my strange introvert v. extrovert relationship in a nutshell. On the one hand, in the real world, I have three very excellent friends and I can’t imagine feeling the need for any more.
On the other paw, on Taps, I have tons of friends and I am always open to making more. In general, I am far more open and sociable as Fruvous than I am as the inestimable Michael John Bertrand.
We won’t go into why that is.
But Fruvous is an idealized version of myself, so I have to ask myself if a healthy and relaxed me would be a lot more like him than my current sad and sallow self.
I’ve tried to imagine living in the real world the way I live on Tapestries and my mind boggles at the notion.
There would need to be a real world location where I hang out all the time. Given that I want to keep option 3 open, it would have to be a gay bar or club or otherwise just very groovy in general.
I’ll hand-wave any logistical issue about how I get there et al.
And I would have to have made lots of friends there, which means I am way more open to talking to people I don’t know.
And snuggling up with them, if they’re amenable.
That’s the truly unimaginable part. I can more or less imagine a club where I feel comfortable enough to relax provided it was small and quiet enough.
But striking up conversations with total strangers? I shrivel up inside at the very thought.
Clearly I have a long way to go before I am truly Fruvous.
But I will get there some day god damn ir!
More after the break.
I hear a calling
So tonight I learned that BCSFAzine (official publication of the British Columbia Science Fiction Association) has been declared dead as has Vcon (the Vancouver science fiction convention) and WCSFA (West Coast Science Fiction Association, who runs said convention) and deep inside me I felt a tug on my heart in a certain direction and heard a metaphorical voice calling to me and saying, “Do this!”.
This has happened very rarely in my life. And I have never regretted doing what it told me to do.
It bade me to order the original cast recording of the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack from a CD catalogue, and that changed my life.
It made me volunteer to direct a play (The Real Inspector Hound) another person had to abandon because the UPEI Theatre Department decided said person was spreading himself too thin, despite the fact that I had never even thought about directing anything ever until that exact moment and I didn’t even know what the hell a director did.
It called me to write my own play to direct and act in, even though that was an objectively insane reaction to the problem of not getting the right to the play I wanted to direct (The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard) and something nobody but a lunatic like me would ever think of doing, let alone do.
And now it is telling me to take over BCSFAzine, and what the hell, maybe even offer to chair Vcon and get WCSFA going again.
So I am gonna do it. I will take over BCSFAzine and put it out monthly. PDF only because print is a massive expense and hassle. I will have fun both soliciting and collecting content for it. I will use it as a platform for my own writing and ideas. And I will make it something worth reading every damned month.
And for me it’s a godsend because it already has an audience. That massive barrier of me having to try to figure out how to get people to pay attention in the first place has already been breached. Whatever I put in there will definitely be seen.
And by people who don’t even know me. Imagine.
I have finally found my next “thing” to do that will absorb more of my overflowing creative energies that blogging alone can’t contain.
Right now, my only worry is that in my effervescent enthusiasm I will make the thing too darned long for people to read.
I have a track record of this. I have made multiple English teachers openly ponder instituting a maximum wordcount for essays.
What can I say? I have a lot to say and a powerful need to express myself. With me it’s very much a “trying to sip from the firehose” kind of situation.
So wish me luck, Big Bad World.
I’m finally taking the next step.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.