Hi, world! It’s me, Gideon U Eklund, back to… um… wow. There’s approximately fifteen different ways I could open this post, and none of them seem adequate enough to get out what I’m trying to say. Maybe I’ll stay up here on the ol’ Golden Pedestal while I figure out how to lay this down for you.
Let’s start with this: I have a very noisy brain. Today, it’s being really loud, and hard to sort out. I was challenged to throw down my scrambled thoughts into a blog post, sort of like a stream-of-consciousness experiment. But where to begin?
When my mind gets like this, it’s very difficult for me. It is on almost all the time, bombarding me with shit like the following:
- Book ideas. Lots and lots of them. Sequels, spin-offs, new stuff, other genres I feel I could tackle, etc. All the time, non-stop.
- Realizing I’m not submitting or querying my existing manuscripts enough.
- Wondering why I’m not, berating myself for it, and then not doing it anyway.
- Looping and revising fictional dialogue in my head. I literally have a single two-sentence interaction which I plan to use in a scene someday that comes back into my head like a stuck song, over and over and over again. I literally cannot go more than two days without thinking about it, and it’s not even that good.
- Repeating old things I’ve written back to myself, as if I were sitting through reruns I cannot switch off.
- Running old clips from cartoons, TV and movies I absorbed throughout my formative years, also like reruns I can’t switch off.
- Reminding myself that there’s a lot of shit I haven’t watched yet, and why not? I mean, I could stand to absorb even more bullshit pop culture than I spent my entire childhood and formative years absorbing, right? I should get on that.
- Thinking about things I’d like to buy. A new, smaller, better laptop, or a bigger, better laptop, or a new bag, or new tires, or, or, or…
- Holding hypothetical arguments with people, so that I’m armed in case an actual argument breaks out.
- Plotting the deaths of my friends and loved ones, in case they go rogue and need to be put down. Better to be prepared and not need to do it than to need to do it, and not be prepared. One of my sisters is particularly scrappy. She’d be a challenge.
- Wondering why people park backwards.
- Reviewing the life choices and decision-making skills of Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, and re-confirming that they are all bad. All of them. Literally all.
- Hating Olaf from Frozen. Seriously—fuck that guy.
- Wishing they’d just give Elsa a girlfriend already. We all know it, Disney. Let her chow down on that clam now. Damn.
- Rearranging my bedroom, deciding the layout is bad, and doing it all over again to further displeasure.
- Butts. They’re great. Some are horrifying, but for the most part, I’m a fan of them.
- Figuring out ways that I can be on my PS4, while my girlfriend enjoys running her music through the Bluetooth on my TV, without the whole thing being a pain in the butt for everyone involved.
- Thinking about my bun-to-hot dog ratio in my kitchen. (When that shit is out of balance, I genuinely cannot handle it. How does that even HAPPEN?)
- Reminding myself that recreational drugs are only going to make this out-of-control train ride a thousand times worse.
- Getting embarrassed at the fact that I used a lot of regular dashes in my old writing where em dashes or semicolons should have been.
- Brainstorming ideas for a podcast I’ll never start, because of all the other shit I fill my time with.
- Panicking about my late blog posts.
- Realizing nobody notices when I miss my self-imposed blog deadlines, because nobody really READS this thing en masse, anyway.
- Wondering how much diet soda I’ve consumed, and what the breaking point is before it causes my entire body to convert into a liquid.
- Gundam. The shows, the model kits, the games, what it would be like to pilot one, the horrors of war even if I were inside one, and the realization that I would be a terrible pilot, but would enlist in a heartbeat if it meant getting to be a fucking Gundam pilot.
- Picturing myself shopping, even without a purchase in mind. I love shopping. It’s so therapeutic.
- Ultraman. There’s a lot of that show, and I want more.
- Super Sentai. Why do they transform the plot so dramatically when moving it to the US to make Power Rangers? Re-cast if you must, but why not make a directly faithful translation? What’s THAT shit about, Saban? Also, Pirate Sentai Gokaiger is awesome, and easily my favorite.
- Thinking about going to the store, the logistics of it, if I actually need to do it, then not doing it.
- Trying to figure out if and when I can fit more anime in my life, or if I’m fine watching less, as long as I’m doing something else that may be of equal or greater importance?
- Worrying that I’m playing too many video games if I’m not getting work done, or worrying that I’m not giving myself enough of a break when I’m working to enjoy video games.
- More hypothetical arguing.
- Getting into pretend super hero fights. (Sometimes I swing my arms while punching bad guys.)
- Thinking about putting up my wall of fictional weapons, but not really finding a layout that makes me happy.
- Choreographing fight scenes for my books. (Sometimes I swing my arms doing this, too.)
- Getting angry about Wi-fi.
- Realizing my parents did not do a great job, but do I bother telling them, now that they’re almost dead?
- Wondering when they’ll be dead, but not wishing for it.
- Wondering if it’s morbid to wonder that.
- Trying to figure out why we invented carpet, and added it to floors, when everyone seems to think hardwood floors are the more luxurious item to have in their home. Why did we invent it if we don’t tend to prefer it?
- Am I just projecting my love of hardwood floors?
- The black-and-white glory days of Hollywood, when celebrities had to have talent instead of likes.
- Vanessa Williams. She was in Eraser, and I didn’t really love that movie, but she was prrow in the 90’s.
- Do bees know their stingers kill them to use? They’re like the suicide bombers of nature.
- How soon is too soon to make fun of the Boston Marathon bombings? Because when we can start doing that, I’m gonna have a blast.
- 9/11 is older than my soon-to-be 18-year-old son. He has no idea what the airport was like before it all went down.
- What the world is going to be like for him. He’s autistic, and will have to be an adult without guidance someday. Will he be ready?
- Am I as bad at my parenting as my parents were, or did I work hard enough not to repeat their mistakes?
- Could I conquer the world if I were charismatic enough?
- Should I conquer the world, if I could?
- Is ruling the world as much work as I think it is, or would I mostly be outsourcing that shit to my underlings?
- Do I do it heroically, or more like a grandiose Doctor Doom? Cape for sure, but do I go with a dramatic suit of armor, or fancy king?
- Why is thinking so exhausting?
- Why won’t my brain SHUT THE FUCK UP?
- Do I have any gin in the freezer?
- …Etc., etc., etc.
Now, after looking at that list, I want you to imagine that shit (and more,) going off all at once, non-stop, sometimes for days on end. There’s a lot more than this bouncing around in my head, too—I just couldn’t think of it as I typed this out.
It’s downright paralyzing. It’s like being in the world’s biggest, noisiest restaurant, where they serve all the things I like, but the menu is so large, and the people so distracting, that I can’t get anything decided. My girlfriend has literally watched me freeze in place, (while I am ignorant that I’m doing it,) as my eyes twitch and dart around; a side-effect of trying to catch my thoughts and hold them down properly for a moment.
This blog post isn’t even planned out right now. It’s all stream-of-consciousness mania. I started drinking a Diet Mountain Dew which I realized had been sitting open in my room for a few days, and I didn’t even CARE. I’m finishing it RIGHT NOW. My desk is cluttered with notepads. Not just notes, but NOTEPADS THEMSELVES. I could tear the pages off, and stick them to my corkboard of ideas and important notes, but that just wastes TIME I could be spending paralyzed in thought.
Today, I was going to take a mental health day from work, until I was reminded that I have no paid leave from my company, and we could not possibly afford it. So, I went to work, miserable and stressed out, and tried to do my hours-long stretch of “point, click, enter, repeat” in my windowless room, alone, (because we’re in a global pandemic right now, and I’m the only one working from the office.)
I spent my whole shift unable to think straight. When I get like this, my patience is considerably thinner. Our systems were so sluggish and out-of-whack that work was glitchy and taking three times longer to accomplish. I almost beat a keyboard against a wall until the whole room looked like a big bowl of Alpha Bits cereal. My supervisor was surprised to see me at all, and was very aware that I was in such a state. She told me that I should take a walk to clear my head, but it didn’t help.
I can’t even feel creative in this state. It’s like my brain is throwing EVERYTHING at me, good or bad, until inspiration sticks, and I’m really not lacking for inspiration right now, so I genuinely wish it would take a day off and let me fucking breathe or function.
The worst part is, I know I can’t be alone in this. There are genuinely manic people out there, who have this problem WAY worse than I do, so I feel silly for bitching about it. Honestly, this whole post is just a way to vent; I’m not even going into my usual style, and throwing in humorous “Author’s Note” segments, like I normally do.
Author’s Note: Okay, one, but just because I wanted to be funny, and it would be funny to slap this right here.
I have a lot on my mind right now, which isn’t helping. Like I said, the world is shut down due to a global pandemic. We’re going into month two of a complete shutdown across the country, and even the world. I’m going to write a post about how I feel regarding that hot mess very soon, but I’m going to do it when I’m way less scrambled.
Some people suggest listening to music to soothe the overload, but that doesn’t really work. Right now, my girlfriend is listening to her music in the living room, and while she apparently has better taste than I do, there is one horrible song that comes on every time she does this, and I’m not going to say what it is, but it’s just god awful. She really likes it, though, so mum’s the word. But, I’m gonna be fucking thinking about that shitty song all night on top of the rest of this mess, so thanks for that.
I’ve tried listening to ASMR, episodes of The Joy of Painting, sitting in the dark doing nothing, tuning out with the help of video games, (if I could decide on a game to try and focus on, that is,) and even meditating. Last night, I soaked in a bubble bath, but all I could think about was that I was probably hogging the bathroom while my girlfriend needed to pee, and we aren’t ever going to be a stage in our relationship where I’m cool with her doing that while I’m in the room.
The lag as I type this is infuriating. My brain is firing off bullshit faster than my fingers can keep up, but they don’t show up on the screen for what feels like eons after I type them. I’m too frustrated to continue. I think I’ll call it an end to this experment in unloading my thoughts, and call it a night overall.
(Okay, first I’m going to post links to this on my social media stuff, but after that, I’ll call it a night.)
Good night, all.
I’ve just realized that I’ve ironically pirated all of the episodes of “Pirate Sentai Gokaiger.” That’s pretty funny.
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