Raquel and the boy are home from Arizona. It is only a matter of time before I begin to feel crowded again. I know this in advance. The last few days I was increasingly eager for them to return.
It is the way of certain things. We want what we dream we do not have. We tend towards longing. We lean again and again into dreaming.
I started watching Parasite tonight. I made it about halfway through but stopped. I wanted to finish watching it with Raquel. It is clearly plot-heavy and I do not wish to know what happens without her. It is a film about social classes, but also much more. The friend who recommended it said, Enjoy the ride! when I told him that I was going to finally watch it. So far, I have.
Speaking of finally, I got some sleep last night. The first night of good sleep in more than a week - 8 hours. These periodic bouts of insomnia destroy me as I get older. I used to just ride the wave of them without any joy though with less suffering. I was more willing to narcoticize my body into slumber, I guess. As I get older I have less left to fend with. The body's resources recede into the ever what was.
But that's all over now, I've told myself. The narcotics and the insomnia. Everything must go. Everything but the girl.
I told you that I had run out of pictures. I wasn't lying. Why would I? This is one of my favorites from the past. It's been up here before. Perhaps you will remember the shadow on the wall.
If I could go back I'd do it all over again. Making a baby was fun and exciting and scary. But that's not what you come here to discover. You already know that.
My body feels broken. I have had a terrible case of insomnia for many days now. It makes everything feel broken and brittle. Last night I only slept a couple of hours, maybe three. It's hard to tell since my mind races and I can never tell where it stops. It all just becomes a dark noise. I awaken and look at my phone, hoping that it tells me a miracle. Last night no miracles arrived. I've been up and working since 2am. It's not as if I've been very productive. I've made as many mistakes as I have had successes. Both have worn me out and I take joy in neither. I've responded with edginess towards most.
Everybody has suggestions - read a book, get a sleep mask, leave your phone and computer in another room, sleep with your hands above the covers, wear two pairs of underwear, most of all don't overstimulate yourself. Nothing works.
Now I await. The sun is sinking behind the creek. We'll see about it darkness.
I must be at "the age" in which I still have many friends and am in casual contact with most of them, which greatly increases the likelihood of me finding out they are now dead or dying. It makes me want to have lived life differently, to not know about it. I almost miss hearing about it from friends, a telephone call, a chat about it. Now it is an online event. The news of an old friend with stage 4 cancer in several areas of his body just posted. I had to look away. But to where? Here? Nothing makes any sense, and it never has. We do things because there is only one alternative to not doing things.
Do you remember when this site used to be funny? That was the sound of me doing things.
I should not write tonight. I'm in a shit mood. Whatever happened to my hopeful life of crime? I read all of the wrong books, perhaps, idolized all of the losers but never made the leap into complete temptation. I succumbed to a mid-life of labor.
I am trying to lie here and listen to music while I write, but it's not working. I also tried watching a movie and reading a book. I'm the chairman of the bored (watch that with the audio off, it makes more sense). I know why this is happening: I'm being punished for not drinking. The mind starts to penalize its host when its compulsions aren't satiated. It's the curse of the age. Drinking makes me foolish, abstaining makes me listless. Truly, spiritless.
I don't have any new images. This is what you get. It has no relationship to this post. I say that because it is virtually a guarantee that I will write something that I will regret associating with the image. I pre-forgive myself for any miserable thing that I do. It's how I get by. One must possess enormous flexibility in the department of self-forgiveness.
Well, now I've therapeuticized myself out of wanting to write anything horrendous. Do you see how damaging self-love can be for anyone trying to write? It has ruined me over and over again.
It is time to put a movie on, surrender to the earth's turning.
I probably shouldn't try to adjust the colors of an image when I have Night Shift mode enabled on my computer. The feature removes the blue light and leaves more reds and yellows. It's sleep science - it helps me.
When I took my new phone out of the box I made the mistake of trusting Apple. I let their setup software copy the data from my old phone to my new phone, wirelessly. Then it would not let me sync the new phone to the computer. It told me that I needed ~90GB of more space. This did not seem possible. I realized that in letting them copy my content and settings they had taken the liberty, as they always do, of changing my settings so that I was using their bullshit cloud services for backup. They wanted to double my music library, but I didn't buy enough space to have two copies of every song on my phone. Stupid me. So, I tried again. This time it told me that I needed ~100GB more space. I am trying for a third time now and I think I know how to trick them into letting me use my phone.
They are a despicable company. The reason that I still buy their products is because I lack ambition and mental energy. I'm a coward. The people I know that are enthusiastic about their products are all dullards. My stomach turns when I hear people's voices rise in pitch with excitement for a product release from them. I'm sure that somewhere there are intelligent well-meaning Apple enthusiasts, but not in my circle. I'm surrounded by the piteous sort. I don't mind nerds and I have nothing against gay people, but gay nerds are uniformly terrible. They can't help themselves.
The device is restarting again. This time it wouldn't let me get to the setup screen without doing a software update. No explanation why that had to be part of this restore attempt. Who am I to complain?
I haven't been able to read recreationally while all of this was happening. I have been seething, the effervesce of wrath.
Keep in mind that I was a technician for the borg for five years. I have a very good idea how I want to use their overpriced products. If I have these types of problems then I can only imagine what others suffer. Actually, I know. They have replaced Microsoft - too big to win, too stupid to please. The cash just keeps rolling in. My phone was $1500, with taxes and the extended warranty. They did not provide any headphones and only one Thunderbolt cable. There was a message about how it's part of their environmental initiative. I'm partners with Apple in saving the earth now, but it'll cost me.
The IRS displayed bubonic incompetence today also. I waited on hold for two hours before I was told by an automated voice that I was being connected to an agent, then there was an error message, then I was brought back to the initial phone tree options, except there were no longer any numbers to press that would allow me to speak with an agent. For two hours I listened to a loop of bad Kenny G, interrupted every 30 seconds with a loud reminder not to hang up, that I would lose my place in the queue. All for naught.
People wonder what I am always so angry about. It is this and this and this and this.
Ah well, Ahab - tomorrow is a new day. I was supposed to work but I chickened out at the last minute and traded shifts with somebody to work Sunday instead. I have a lot of administrative tasks to complete. Tomorrow I will run errands all day. I have a list, and I know how I want to get them done. As long as the American Telephone & Telegraph corporation doesn't cause me any problems I should be golden. Otherwise I may not be golden, I may be rusted.
Fuck it, here we go again. I am sitting upright. I've had no wine for about a week or so. I am prepared to tell the truth: she looked 18, sir. She seemed old enough to do all of the things that I like to do. We had a pretty good time together and we didn't hurt anybody.
The truth is that I don't want to talk to humans any more today, not even little miss titties up top. I have been putting in unusual hours at work. It has sickened me to the sound and presence of others.
How would somebody like R. P. McMurphy be regarded today? I assume that the younger crowd, if they would watch a cuckoo film like that at all, might see the horror that he represents and sympathize with Nurse Ratched. Why not? You can probably believe that there are some that might align with her struggles now, too. She had a difficult job to do, and what did he decide to do. There has been an inversion of the protagonists and the antagonists. It happens every 50 years or so, maybe more. The guy admits upfront that he likes to fight and fuck too much. Who would come to his defenses now for such things? Fighting and fucking are acts of violence. What could be worse than violence other than words, literally?
We have raised several generations of morons; they just keep 'em coming. They have access to all of the information that anybody could ever want and still they find a way of misusing it every time. People feel empowered by being informed. So, they start to believe their opinions are informed opinions, and why not?
You know something funny? Well, I'm sure that you probably know many things that are funny, but something that I find funny every time I hear the word "literally": the secondary definition of the word is in effect, virtually. It is used to express exaggeration, for emphasis. It has been this way for more than a hundred years.
So, the next time you hear some snotty little douche-bag (they always are) correct someone's usage of the word tell them to read a book, literally.
You've got at least five arrests for assault. What can you tell me about that?
Five fights, huh? Rocky Marciano's got forty and he's a millionaire.
There is some irony here, too. Raquel and the boy are gone. Arizona, visiting grandma. Somehow the day was not my own. I worked. I am often involved in email. It is a protocol that offers nearly endless problems to unravel, in all directions. Where would we be without problems. In the early days of the internet I could not believe the wonderful luxury of being able to write a letter from a computer and watch it vanish from the screen, knowing that it will arrive at its destination seconds later and make its mistakes.
I have been giving some thought to the meeting we had with the lawyer, preparing to map out the conditions of our love. The terms of the term. I am torn, like most, between what I thought I felt and what I think I feel.
I have loved her too much and for too long, but not well enough.
It is late now, the house is quiet. It is only myself and Akira, the husky. She sleeps in the chair near the bedroom. Sometimes she will come climb onto the bed with me. The quietude does different things to each of us. She seems sad and lonely, wondering where the family pack went. I try to cheer her up with additional niceness and playfulness, behavior of which she is suspicious. We both seem to love our morning walks the most. There is some sense of optimism in walking together. Or rather, it can fend off some of my pessimism, if I do it well enough.
I have not settled into the silence of being alone.
I am alone, or almost so, for the first time in a while. The boy sleeps upstairs. Raquel went into the city to go out drinking and to an event with a friend. They got a hotel for the night. I didn't check, but I believe it was a woman, her friend. She texted me after I had gone to sleep, telling me that she was at a bar that a friend of mine owns, some SF upscale place structured around some loose concept of days past. I did not get the text until early this morning when, as always, I awoke long before my preference to do so.
The boy now sleeps quietly upstairs. That will all change soon. He will come bounding down the stairs and ask if he can play video games. It is his life now. Most of his joys emerge from those screens where I can see many of mine vanish. Before Covid he was still present and available. Now, he mostly wishes to be playing a game, or discussing the goals and trials of playing one.
On Monday they both leave for almost two weeks. It will be myself and the dogs. We have booked plenty of time at the kennel for the most challenging of the dogs to care for - the husky, of course - in the event that I tire of her company, or the responsibility. Many that I know have spent long periods of time alone in the last 16 months. Not me. I've had very little of what could be considered time to myself.
Yesterday, Raquel and I went to see a $350 per hour lawyer, to talk about estate planning, trusts, wills, terms, beneficiaries, trustees, etc. It seems that we are going to reunite, though not under the vulgar banner of marriage. It will be more of a business agreement, where the individual terms can be more easily negotiated to suit our shifting moods. Prenuptial agreements, it seems, are not nearly binding enough. They simply don't work, insisted our counsel, they only cost you much more to enforce after things collapse. This bit of advice actually did sound true to me, knowing what little I do know of the family court system.
It is best to have contracts in place. There is unexpected death to consider, as well as the expected kind. Who wishes to give up their control merely because they are no more? That would be relinquishing your grip on the television remote only because you had slipped in a coma. One must be prepared for the eventualities of aging into decrepitude or sudden enfeeblement, also. Trust no one after your body and mind have perished. Your determination can live on through an estate. Your assets can grow like a flower from your demise. It is not quite eternal life, but it is some reassurance that you will defeat a small portion of the grave and the potential shame of poverty in the afterlife.
After the chat with the lawyer it occurred to me that the conversation, while amicable and friendly and even having some moments of levity, was among the more difficult conversations I've had in a while. Nobody likes to think of what might come. Or worse, what certainly will. I diverted my attention by thinking up absurd terms: funds will be released only if my soul's happiness can be verified through the psychic medium of my choice. If my son is ever heard singing Sweet Caroline the remaining assets will be forfeited to charity. Funds will be contingent on voter registration party affiliation. My body should be sent to a taxidermist and then placed within a medieval suit of armor and displayed prominently in the foyer with the visor kept open, my right hand affixed to a steely broadsword. My funeral should happen in a pyramid and my name should be legally changed to Pharaoh Q6.
For many years Bette Davis would often denigrate Joan Crawford after the latter had passed away. Once, on a film set, someone said to her, "But, she's been dead ten years!" A statement which was met with the famously cold Davis stare.
"Just because she's dead doesn't mean she's changed."
I have been poisoned by a crisis of anxieties. I can't seem to relax, and too often drink myself towards oblivion. It is a bad look and dumb sound. Once you drink past the point of pleasure few good things follow. That's one of the tricks of the stuff, I think: the imbiber believes the pleasures to continue and even multiply.
Those are my thoughts tonight. I am trying not to break my heart.
It was the best of times, these were the rest of times. At least Styx was no longer a band. He had that going for him. Everybody did. Everybody except, of course, Styx. They were a band that shuddered and loathed death, we must assume.
Jesus. Nothing ever quite works out for me. I just looked it up online - Styx is still touring, they regrouped in '95 and whosever responsibility it was to prevent such a thing was sleeping. Do they have no mercy at all in their hearts? Think of the children. They were our future.
I esteemed so much bad music when I was a kid, only ever partially recovering in adulthood. I don't just mean Styx, either, there were a lot of bad bands. Too many to mention. I can still go to a used record store and marvel at all of the bad choices I have made over the years. Yet I'll still walk out the door with a couple hundred dollars worth of new bad choices. I can't seem to help myself, Narcissus forever gazing at the reflection in the passing waters.
Many of my stupid addictions tend to resemble my other stupid addictions. It's not even as if I have changed very much as I've aged. I mostly just have less energy to make the same frequency and magnitude of bad choices. I create slightly less catastrophe now and it makes me sad. People avoid me more now than they once did. It is my curse. One of them. You can make tremendous mistakes when you're young and most people barely even notice. That's what I did. It is the well from which I now draw my distorted and outsized sense of misguided pride. Few find my stories to be nearly as funny as I find them to be.
Earlier tonight somebody told me to act my age. Well, in a sense that is what they told me. I said that drinking to excess is painful, that it makes me uglier and dumber. They told me that most people learn that lesson in their early twenties. I didn't want to tell them that I learned it then, also.
Some truths only flow from the stream of continued exaggeration.
Perhaps writing a love letter is what I should do. I have been writing emails, outlining what I see, what I feel, and understand. They have not had quite the tone of a love letter, though there is love in them.
If you make the realization that life is meaningless, that your existence here is only a matter of genetic chance, that all that you are is an insignificant dust mote in the magnitude of the cosmos, then why go on? Was it Sartre that asked if he should have a cup of coffee or commit suicide? Or, was it Camus? I forget, but it's a good question, particularly once you start to live in pain. Life offers some pleasures, which can then become distractions. There is beauty in the world, though I increasingly have less time to enjoy much of it. Everything seems so impossibly far away. Drinking seems to help in the temporary sense, but the overall effect does not at all seem positive, or even pleasurable. We are told to live in the moment, and to prepare to die at some undefined moment in the future.
Well, few encourage anyone to prepare for it, but everywhere there is a sense of needing to shut up about it, and to endure. If life is short and meaningless then the argument is to enjoy it as much as you can while you're here.
My hands have started to seize up on me. They are always sore and have lost much strength, particularly certain fingers. I'm not sure if it is arthritis, but it is something. My guitar slipped out of my hands and became cracked on the bottom side when it collided with the corner of the wooden bed frame. So, I bought a new one, a very nice one, though now I can barely play it. Many chords require more strength than my hands can deliver. The result is increased pain. Barre chords are out of the question, or playing them for any length of time is. My left hand will simply give up in a spasm of sharp and sudden pain. Barre chords are what I have mostly relied on all these years without ever really stopping to consider that there might come a day in which I would need to learn to play chords differently. Perhaps it will all be for the best. I may learn to play fewer notes and accomplish a more careful sound than fully strummed chords, which always sound the same. The stiffness, soreness, and weakness is there whenever I play now.
It hurts to hold a camera for any period of time, also, and my eyes are going. I'm only 52 years old. I had thought that this type of bodily decay would not arrive until I was 60 or maybe 70.
Those are my complaints for the day. Sometimes pain just goes away.
Fuck. I did a Google search on my work computer to verify the question. It was Camus. Suicide hotline numbers came up and a lot of resources ready to help prevent people from committing the act. I'll probably get a call from HR before the day is out.
No, I called in sick today instead of having to deal with anything else. I am not feeling well and have not for many years now. I feel sickened.
Cells aligned in youth to create more youth - perched to spring, launch, collide into the gametes of strangers, or what may one day become a stranger.
Bursting with glandular joy at the prospect. We travel here and there preparing to prepare. Making ourselves more complete to complete the task. To give life a crucial buoyancy, its sense of rising. Having balanced itself enough to surface well upon or approaching a natural death.
The child, of course, becomes something else. By and by there is growth of its own accord. As if, and so much of it. There is something selfish about living, though worse accusations can be leveled about much less.
The well-rounded people I know regard loneliness as an occasional luxury to explain or describe their occasional sadness. If they feel the unexpected need to bother. The least are full of the most that can possibly be endured.
Broken and empty and increasingly meaningless. My life is not what I might have chosen. It is not what I choose now. It is not what I had seen those years ago. Yet, I recline in a sometimes quiet place to read or play the guitar or listen to an album. In the end little is satisfying. What used to fascinate me now appear as stars
I have been reading too much, trading recipes for too long. I.
Strange life, this. How does anybody stand it without some fond sense for the depravity of stupidity.
I intended to write another post tonight, but wrote the two sentences above and then retired to bed to read. Now, it is later and neither much reading nor much writing will be getting done. People must be crazy to write. It makes no sense to confess thoughts and feelings in this way, yet there is an unuttered loneliness without it.
There was a passage from Submission by Houellebecq that briefly outlined why writing matters and just how absurd it is that there are institutions that teach it. It is more difficult than it should be to write after reading a good author. Perhaps he is great. I am trying now to find what I do not like. Nothing breaks my heart as much as nothing mattering.
There are basics that some seem incapable of communicating, agreeing on; structure must be imposed, usually from without the understanding than from within it. It makes perfect sense, yet it's not the love that was wanted. We are primates howling fits of gloom and joy towards and past one another.
No, wait. I am reading Philip Roth's My Life as a Man. It is in part about marriage, sex, and wounded prides. A trinity of trifles and grievances. There are other themes, but those jump out.
Well, I started writing that two weeks ago or more and that was as far as I got.
I'm reading Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory now. My life is just a series of laughs and giggles.
Perhaps CS chose a better way of conducting this: behind a mask, at night, with all of Gotham and Wayne Industries to hide behind, from which to launch attacks of uncertain motivation. It is safer to maintain tenable deniability.
Denial is the surest evidence of crime. What could be more indicative of guilt? There is witch-catching weather in the winds. Everywhere. My thoughts have nothing to do with themselves.
I felt young then my memory started to fade. I'm not the person I was seven seasons ago, I insist and repeat. Something cracked, split the billion year old carbon.
