Or maybe vice versa.

Just got out of bed, so you know I feel like absolute shit. My head hurts, my blood oxygen level is that of David Blaine right after he came out of the glass coffin, every cell in my body aches, and I am trembling slightly.

Just another day in Casa Del Fru. Or maybe Cabesa Del Fru.

Today will be, by my standards, busy. Supper with Le Gang at 6, then straight to the BCSFA meeting, then back to the homestead for our usual Sunday videoage.

Right now, that feels like way to much. But that’s okay. I know I won’t feel like that later.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Remembering that how you feel now is not permanent. You have felt differently before. You will feel differently again. That’s how you overcome the tyranny of mood and get the hell over yourself.

Not only is this mood temporary and transient, but you have the power to improve it. There are actions you can take to feel better. You don’t have to passively endure it. You can fix it. Not with a single silver bullet solution that gets you all the way from utterly crappy to totally happy in one shot, but in stages, over time.

Instant gratification is great, but when it isn’t available, eventual gratification is the next best thing.

I am having trouble with this. It is my current struggle. Most people have a job to keep them going, and thus, they get lots of experiences waking up feeling crappy, boosting themselves into barely functional mode with out without the help of caffeine, then getting to work and having its structure and demands to work towards. Over and over again, they get proof that how they feel when they wake up is not how they will feel when they get going.

But I don’t get going. Not often, anyhow. Most of my days, most of the time, there is no particular reason to get out of bed and get my day going. Nothing bad happens if I just lay there feeling like crap for hours on end.

Well, nothing bad except feeling crappy. Nothing external.

So I have to become a self-starter if I want to get truly ambitious. And that is exactly the opposite of how I have been in the past. I have always lacked initiative. By default, I retreat within myself. Without something external to motivate me, the intense gravity of my inner planet sucks me down.

This rich inner life thing can be downright dangerous when it gets too strong. It takes so much energy to get even a little closer to the sun. And when that energy runs out, I crash to the ground again.

No wonder I end up spending most of my time lying down.

I know I don’t want to be like this. I want to be someone who is happy staying engaged and active most of the time. Someone who doesn’t retreat into his inner sanctum at the slightest impulse. Someone ruled by will and desire, not weakness and fear. Someone who isn’t stuck trying to interact with the world with mile long chopsticks because he’s trying to get things done without leaving his filthy fucking fortress of the mind.

Someone for whom being fully engaged with reality is the default, not the exception.

So what’s stopping me? Hard to say. I could say I am too weak, but that’s not really an answer. More accurate to say I feel too weak, but that doesn’t mean I really am too weak. It’s just an excuse for not trying.

And if you don’t try, you never find out you are not that weak after all and then you’d have to change your mind about a lot of things, wouldn’t you?

Plus, you might have to stop switching to the second person all the time. And you’d hate that.

Right now, I feel like I am some little shore creature that darts out to grab some food from the sea floor in between waves. I make progress now and then, but only between waves of misery and dysfunction.

A lot better than nothing, I suppose. But I wish low tide would come so I could get some things done.

I guess the real question is, are the up times getting longer and stronger? Am I making progress? And the answer is : definitely. I get more done in a month now than I used to get done in a year.

And I will go back to doing videos soon. We’ve almost caught up with all the videos I did in 2014, and I promised myself I would start doing videos again if we reached the end of those and I hadn’t found another “thing” besides my blog by then.

I imagine I will start off small, with simple “talkers” where I just look into the camera (from further away this time) and blab. But I hope to turn it into someplace where I can do more ambitious stuff, like this :

It’s funny, it was fun to do, it’s content-rich, and it’s not like it was back breaking labour. Took like an hour. And it uses my comedy skills, which don’t get a lot of exercise on this blog for some reason.

Too busy using it as an offshore angst dump, I guess.

I suppose I can also use the videos as a place to work on my standup comedy routines. Technically they have am audience. Not the kind you would find in a comedy club, but still. A place to put together a routine and test it out then watch the video and see what I did wrong and get it as good as I can before sharing it with the world.

That actually sounds really hard. But if I want to make a go of life, I can’t keep just making things and then shoving them out the door before the paint is even dry.

It just hurts to slow things down that much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.