Alert readers will recall that I have said that I never had an imaginary friend as a child. I never went through that phase. I was always a strangely literal and self-possessed child who never thought of his stuffed animals as real animals because… they weren’t.

We had a lot of cats. Those were real animals. And they purred and rubbed up against my leg and played with me. What stuffed animal could compare?

Which leads me to what I am pleased to call my point : I did have imaginary friends of a subtler sort than the usual kind depicted in media.

And the cats were part of that. They were my friends because they were companions whom I loved and cherished and who kept me from feeling too lonely. Even when nobody else was paying attention to me, I could always go find a cat and pet it and it would purr and it would love me.

No wonder I am such a cat person.

Mental note : any place I move to has to allow pets, because I am getting me a cat, god dammit. I want my own cat to cherish and look after and pet and cuddle and LOVE.

And I am quite sure I can be a good cat owner. Cats’ needs are simple, after all. They take care of themselves, more or less. Keep the litter box empty and the food and water dishes full and you are good to go,.

Plus, I speak cat, so to speak. I get cats. Growing up surrounded by them and spending so much time with them gave me a lot of time to wonder what was going on in their fuzzy little heads and observe them and their ways.

Plus I know the family secret of how to raise loving, affectionate, wonderful cats : never hold them against their will. Never grab them, especially not suddenly. When they want down, let them down. Let them do their own thing.

Follow those rules religiously and I guarantee you will raise a happy, secure, cuddly cat who is very people friendly.

Where was I? Oh right, imaginary friends.

Now obviously, the cats were not imaginary. They were real cats. I’m crazy but I am not psychotic. I have witnesses.

So they were only imaginary friends in the sense that they were a non-human substitute for having real friends.

Another type of imaginary friend I had was the characters on the shows I liked. As you know, I was largely raised by television (and cats), and the shows I gravitated towards were the ones that gave me a warm feeling of inclusion.

Hence my love of sitcoms. Any decent sitcom has warm, lovable characters who spend a lot of time together and form a family of sorts – either literally or by association.

So whether it was the Huxtables, the cops on Barney Miller, the gang at Cheers, the courtroom of Judge Harold T. Stone from Night Court, or the Keatons from Family Ties, these fictional people and their fictional “families” became extensions of my own family and when I spent time with them, I didn’t feel so alone.

No wonder I want to write for TV. It’s the closest I can get to moving into the TV screen and living with the “family” that doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong.

Where everybody is witty and funny and everything always works out okay and everyone gets along with one another, even when they fight, and there is a real warmth to their relationship, the kind of emotional warmth I so desperately crave.

It’s so cold in here, I need all the warmth I can get. IT might seem strange to people who know me but don’t know me that well that I might talk about arctic freezeburn of the soul when to them, I seem like such a warm and cuddly guy.

But I can’t feel my own warmth unless it is reflected back to me in someone else. And it’s that craving for reflected warmth that makes me such a warm guy, I think. I have every incentive to output as much warmth as I can in order to maximize the amount that I get back.

So it’s true that making other people happy makes me happy. It really does.

But that has a lot to do with my inability to feel my own happiness, leading me to having to bypass my broken circuits and get my happiness the long way around.

The last and saddest form of imaginary friends from my childhood were the imaginary friendships I had with the small number of fellow students who were sort of nice to me.

Or at least, less actively hostile towards me. They intermittently tolerated me. They were not quite enemies. Whatever.

Now I didn’t go all stalker-crazy on these people and imagine this whole elaborate relationship between us that existed in secret or any of that craziness.

But I did think of them as friends when odds are, they didn’t think of me at all. Or if they did, they were not kind or tolerant thoughts.

I mean, I was such a weird kid. Nothing about me made sense. I was both effortlessly brilliant and hopelessly clueless. I radiated intelligence (still do, apparently) while also being a total slob and kind of gross. I talked like an adult but I acted like a timid toddler. I was both ferociously independent of mine and pathetically dependent of emotions. I got amazing marks without doing anything to “earn” them and worse, seemed to take that for granted instead of seeing it as the valuable thing it should be.

Most people have never met anyone remotely like that and I have never a kid quite like I was depicted in the media. People have no slot to fit me into.

And even though I am a shapeshifter. I can’t/won’t change to fit their slots, either.

Leaving me as a rugged individualist who lives by his own rules.

But not like… on purpose. I have no choice.

Becaause I just got to be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.