The Square Peg and the Triangular Hole

As far as the War on Fleas is going, I believe we are reaching a new plateau which defines a minimal completion criteria. The cats are all visibly more affectionate and several degrees less cranky than they have been for a while. My conclusion from this evidence is that they are not bothered by pests nearly as badly as they were a fortnight ago, and this behavior is a result. So there is that. The Living Room Gaming Table still has its pile of unsorted clutter that needs to be sorted and then dealt with, today is not the day for that to happen.

Yesterday, I felt really lousy, emotionally. I am swinging through a period of comparisons of my life with those of others from my class and being harshest critic of myself means that I measure my life with a low valuation. My big success, if you call it that, is that sometimes I am the Head Rigger for a show here in Jacksonville, Florida. This is likely because there is might be a deficiency in ambition, or a deficiency in drive to achieve ambitions or aspirations. I have this really intensely detailed and dramatically large background data for an entire planet of narratives, hell there are narratives which span across multiple cosmos contained within this dataset — note, just because I call it data does not mean it is composed of just numbers, there are pages and pages of interlocking and connected prose which builds this world. But my drive to plug away and define a single book or movie script or video game just evaporates after a day or two.

Let me give more examples here. I have a document called ROUGHDRAFT which is a 300 page screenplay. It is basically the plot and outline for what could be a trilogy of fantasy epics. It does need to be doctored and rewritten into a much more dramatic screenplay, something that hangs more meat on it than the thin bones of its story. Once that is done, it is probably that the trilogy could be expanded, depending on the filmmaker and the filmmaker's stylistic interpretation. There are a couple of daunting angles that this one document represents to me. The first of which is the amount of editing that just the text requires to become presentable. The next is the perceived pathway to getting this screenplay into the hands of people who would want to actually invest in the degree of production value that this story would require in order to turn it into films. The other direction on this decision tree, is to write it into novels and sell them off. But that is all real work and if there is anything that I am allergic to, it is real work.

This is the nature of my measuring my internals against other people's externals. I look at their high marks of success and then look at my internal struggles and just think that I am a slug, and my emotions fishtail all over the road and leave me in a state that is even less ambitious towards achieving anything of measure. Sure I have invented and created a vast amount of information that supports the premise of several different narrative stories, I can even sit down and tell you one of these stories, albeit without the degree of detail that my written words would give you, and it will be entertaining. That is if you can sit there quietly and listen instead of trying to talk about it with me. Because this thing happens in conversations all the time. Other people talk talk talk, I listen to what they are saying and respond to what they have said instead of just holding onto the idea that I wanted to talk about and suddenly within three or four turns, instead of talking about the ideas and concepts that I wanted to express, we are in a bitch session about other people who are not there. And I hate that. I hate talking about people.

I hate talking about myself too, but I have long determined that there is only one subject which I am an undisputed expert, the subject of what I think and what I feel. So when a conversation drifts away from the ideas and concepts which I use this worldbuilding to explore and finds itself dealing with what my interlocutor perceives other people's thoughts and feelings to be based upon their facial expression, body language and their actions, I get really anxious. And when I get really anxious, I start listening harder and talking less. And then my strategies become, what angle can I penetrate this dialog so that it elevates away from this petty squabble and becomes more enlightened. And too frequently to count, the sort of comments that I make in this place, do not land on the level in which I am trying to work and remain received in the petty light.

I get frustrated. I get frustrated and retreat. I withdraw and become more of a hermit. I do not go out and see people because, well going out is usually accompanied by meeting with people who are drinking alcohol and I really despise talking to drunk people because that is the same fucking story on a loop — plus the inevitable bitch and moan political blaming scenario comes out because they are trying to be high minded in their inebriation. I am fine with the hermit lifestyle, the monastic isolation of sorts, I do think Anathem is Neal Stephenson's strongest book, and the idea of living in a concent where everyone there is interested in doing the work of exploring the universe of ideas, pursuing knowledge and the epistemological proofs of that knowledge is genuinely exciting to me. But do we have such institutes on this planet? I do not know of any. Sure we have the world of Academia with its weird little infighting, demands for publication, and the student debt crisis it has created through the hypercapitalistic efforts of the last several decades.

Here, this is the example of the line of thinking that I carry out in order to come to the conclusion that I am the proverbial Square peg, trying to fit into a triangular hole. And that is that.