The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Dear Diary:

I slept badly last night. Anxiety kept me awake. I asked myself why I was feeling anxious. The answer was that I am unemployed. I have a fear that my savings will run out.

Today the landlord was cleaning her bike in the bathroom. She suspended it from the shower rail, which I found odd.

I filled in a job application form by hand. Then I had to scan it. This was easier said than done. I don't own a scanner. The nearby library, which has 1 million books and apparently cost $100 million to build, also does not have a scanner. I tried taking photos of the pages but the results were unsatisfactorily blurry.

I remembered there is a scanner at the hostel where I lived for nine months, so I walked over there. Hernan, one of the staff, was smoking outside. He prefers to be called simply "H". He told me the hostel scanner is broken, though I suspect he was lying to prevent me from going inside.

When I got back home, the sky was darkening quickly. It started raining. Then it was bucketing it down. But twenty minutes later, the rain stopped. It was a flash storm. They happen often in Montreal.

My only option was to go to the local print shop. There is a scanner there but I hate this print shop. The staff are big, middle-aged men with smug, contemptuous expressions. They look at you slowly, as if to say, What the fuck do you want? I have enough money. They overcharge. They seem to me like rogue traders, those overweight, middle-aged men who promise cheap labour but then invent further problems that require more money, and then go on to do the shittiest job possible, like wiring the electrics to the plumbing so that your 5-year-old kid, called Jayden, gets electrocuted when he flushes the toilet.

I went to the print ship. They charged $6 to scan twenty pages. It seems hard to justify that price when their olympic-sized scanner took literally five seconds to scan all my pages. What's more, when I got home, I discovered that the scans were not even in colour.

Later that day, Girlfriend and I went to the cinema. While we were queuing up to enter, I felt restless. My mind was wired. Girlfriend asked me what's wrong. I told her, exasperatedly, "I am really, really, really, bored".

"You didn't have to come," she said. "You can leave".

"I'm bored with what I do everyday," I said. "The world is so big and almost infinitely varied. And here I am waiting in a queue".

"You're behaving weirdly," she said.

"I know, I know," I said. I told her about the anxiety I had last night, and that three years ago I had similar anxiety for several months. That anxiety ended with me deciding I was autistic and I stopped eating wheat and dairy. It was a big change in my life. "Perhaps another change is coming," I told her. I thought I sounded deep and ominous but I just sounded crazy. I tried to explain. "This all started with Sporcle," I said. Two days ago, we did a Sporcle quiz together. We had to list the US states. I only knew eleven of them. "It opened my eyes to how ignorant I am," I explained. "But not just that. Also how big the world is. How much there is to learn." I eventually give up. She could not see my point.

The film was a road trip movie. The jokes were dark and risqué. There was incest. A baby was run over. An 18-year-old boy with a low mental age was talked into sucking a cock. It was my sense of humour. However, the film got sentimental and fell into clichés.

When the film ended, I was reluctant to admit I liked it as I was still in a dissatisfied mood.

We went home and went to bed.