(This is going to be very rough, nice people. You have been warned.)

Worst. Birthday. EVER.

I had a date lined up. A furry I have know like forever. He wanted to see me. He wanted to meet me. He was actually showing interest in me – the real me, not the fox.

And this after that insane freelance assignment that took me working 12 hours a day at semi-mindless rephrasing. It took over my life. It cut me off from my usual pleasures. It drained the fucking life force out of me.

But hey,…. at least I got paid,. US : 72 bucks. Canadian : at the moment, $97 and change. So around a hundred bucks for 50 hours of drudgery.

It almost makes me want to change my mind about fixed payments. I usually like them because I like the clear sense of what I am working toward. It helps keep me motivated. And reduces uncertainty – always a big plus for me.

But I see the other side of the coin now. If I agree to a fixed payment and it turns out that the job is way, way harder than I thought it would be, I get screwed. Badly.

So, lesson learned.

The job took so much out of me that barely felt a sense of triumph when I completed it.

And if the client says one negative thing about my work, I am going to snap like a dry twig and give them a percent of my mind.

And my mind is huuuuuuuuge.

So after a soul destroying week, I was really, really, REALLY looking forward to this date.

But I fucked up. Like I always do. Like I did last Sunday. The Translink website made it sound so easy. Take the Skytrain to Waterfront station. Take the 6 from there to Davie. What could be easier?

What I didn’t count on was there being absolutely no signage telling me where to go to get the 6. Nothing. I can’t fucking believe it. There were plenty of diagrams. But none that actually told me where the stop for the 6 was.

So I was fucked.

No cell phone. Don’t even have his number. Don’t even know what he looks like or what his real name is. Told him I would be the big fat dude in a shirt that says “The Next Big Thing” on it. Thought that was enough.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Asked half a dozen people if they knew where to catch the 6. None of them had any idea. I might as well have been asking them if they knew God’s phone number.

So that was out.

All I had to go on was that Seymour street starts at a point across the street from Waterfront. And I knew Seymour crosses Davie. So I thought that if I walked up Seymour, I would eventually have to hit Davie.

Davie is where the date was. 8:30. Outside the Pumpjack, a bear bar. Me the guy with the T-shirt. So many happy imaginings of what meeting him would be like. Looking forward to this date all week.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

So I start walking up Seymour, and while my feet aren’t happy for me, it’s downtown on a Friday night and the vibe is pretty groovy. I am not anxious or sad. Yet.

I come to the Granville Skytrain station. Awesome! I totally know where to catch a 6 bus from there. Soi I thought.

But no, that information was very out of date. As in, from before they extended the Skytrain to Richmond and did a massive reorg. So nope, hopes dashed, fuck me.

So I just keep walking. Eventually I reach Davie… great! I walk eight blocks or so and…. no Pumpjack. I had to ask someone where it was because there is zero signage on it. I had to ask the bouncer outside it whether I had found it.

But I had found it all right. But I was 40 minutes late. And he wasn’t there.

He’d given up.

I was devastated.

Because all that time I was walking, it never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there. All this effort would surely pay off. And he’d have a funny story to tell when he finally made it there.

Nope. I was 40 minutes late. He waited 20. I’d fucked up so bad that I hurt him and I was not going to be rewarded and there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it.

It was like a shot through the heart. I walked around the Davie Strip, trying to figure out what I could do. And cried. A lot. It hurt so bad and I couldn’t do anything about it and I was an idiot and a loser and a permanent non stop fuckup who shouldn’t be allowed to leave the apartment without a handler.

The pain just got worse and worse.

The kicker? I was approached by like four dudes tonight. At any other moment, I would have been flattered. I might even have taken them up on an invitation. I’ve never done that before. Could be fun.

But no. Fuck off and stay off.

Eventually I settle at a bus stop for the 6. Eventually, a bus comes and I get in. I hear the bus driver say he doesn’t stop at the Granville Skytrain station any more. Uh oh.

Luckily, he does stop at the Yaletown/Roundhouse stop, he says.

So I relax and wait. Until I see a huge building with an actual fucking steam locomotive inside that says ROUNDHOUSE on it. And we drive right past it.

The name of the stop is Yaletown/Roundhouse.

Panicking, I ask the driver where I should get off to get the Skytrain.

He shrugs and says “That was it. ”

He was too busy talking with his friend with the Quebec accent to tell me. Apparently, I was wrong to trust him. I thought that when you asked a bus driver for a stop, they understood that they should tell you when they make that stop.

But apparently not.

And the Quebec accent makes me homesick and confused and the Acadian part of my brain surges into action and I just get worse.

Great, I thought. Now I’m depressed in French.

He stops at the next stop and gives me directions to the Skytrain station and I am not good with directions, especially when I am very depressed. So I end up lost AGAIN.

And that’s when things get really bad. I had to work very hard to suppress the suicidal thoughts in my head. I never got as far as the “contemplating” phase, but I was in a very bad state and thought dark thoughts would not go away.

And a song kept playing in my head. This one :

But I changed the lyrics a little. My chorus goes like this :

And suicide is easy
The car will never see me
And life is so much better when you die

All those cars going past me. All those distracted people looking at their smartphones and getting confused by downtown Vancouver. All that brutal energy wrapped in a river of steel just a few feet away from me.

Time it right and there’s no chance you’ll make it to the hospital alive.

These were the thoughts I was fighting.

I guess I won, because I found the Skytrain station and came home and started to blog.

And i feel somewhat better now that I have done so.

Oh, the cherry on the cake?

Today’s my birthday. I am  now 44.

There should be some kinds of psychological emergency ward. I know I am sick right now. But there’s nothing I can do about it. If I went to the emergency room, they would think I was trying to score some drugs.

Or worse, they would admit me and strap me down so I can’t hurt myself.

Then I really would go crazy.

I keep trying to imagine what would make me feel better but I can’t think of a thing. Someone could give me a million dollars and I would be all, “Thank you very much. I will feel happy about this at a later date. ”

So I wish there was an emotional trauma ER. I have been told that I could go to any psych ward, tell them I have a long history of depression and I am feeling suicidal, and they would admit me and keep me safe.

I find that hard to believe. They would refuse to take me seriously and tell me to go home.

And then the screech, then the sickening thud, then the crash, then the screaming, then the siren, then the city employee hosing the blood off the pavement because people do not need to see that.

Besides, I am terrified that if I enter a psych ward, I will never leave. Admittedly, that is a lot less likely now that I have things going on in my life that would give me a reason to want to get the fuck out of there. But still.

Besides, there’s people in the Richmond Hospital psych department that hate me because I called them on their bullshit and failed to get healthy on their schedule so they kicked me out of the therapy group.

Life is such a funny thing.

Well I guess I am out of words. I am going to go to bed now. I will feel a million times better when I have had time to rest and heal.

I will definitely see you nice people again tomorrow.