A festival. A wedding. A moment. A sudden death. Collective grieving. 3,632km driving on the left. Hiking and empty beaches, a fairy forest, a missing lake monster. Spontaneous car rental. A funeral. 40 degrees. 40 degrees again. Laying on the floor. Too hot to sleep. I need to buy toothpaste.
Hello again. Hello Again is a 1987 film starring Shelley Long, not Shelley Duvall. Shelley Duvall was the host (and producer apparently) of Faerie Tale Theatre, which I loved as a child. She was also Wendy in The Shining. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But Laura doesn’t know which is work and which is play or what in the actual fuck ist going on. The universe has still not revealed itself to me.
All my people keep saying just stop, wait, listen, get bored, don’t worry, you deserve a break. But my stupid, stupid galaxy brain, if it is functioning at all, just keeps making calculations. I have enough time to be someone else. It’s too late to be someone else entirely. I’ve already done the heavy lifting of discovering who I am and what I’m good at. I have no idea why I can’t beast myself into feeling proper.
I read an article called “There’s a version of midlife nobody talks about, where you stop wanting bigger things and start wanting quieter ones, and you spend a year wondering if something is wrong with you before you realize this is what enough actually feels like.” on SpaceDaily.com. It mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Seriously, web archive doesn’t find it, searching direct lines doesn’t bring up anything. But it’s still in my Inoreader. Maybe it was written by AI, so they took it down. In any case, the ridiculously long title says enough, I am still in the phase of wondering if there is something wrong with me. That’s been going on for over three decades.
Yesterday I watched two different small bird attacks on a Red Kite that was cruising around my piece of sky. That mofo mostly ignored them, swooping and twisting in avoidance. It didn’t bother to engage. Thinking about these small birds attacking this majestic sailing “diurnal raptor” made me think about how small people lash out. It’s the small person inside of each of us feeling all the things with a child’s brain. It’s that little guy who is afraid. That tiny child who causes the tingling sensation of anxiety. It’s the child who doesn’t know what enough looks like. Awareness continues to be hard work.
- Red Kite > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_kite
- What You Should Know About Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria > https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/up-and-running/202603/what-you-should-know-about-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria
- How Sober Should a Writer Be? > https://yalereview.org/article/crosley-how-sober-should-a-writer-be
Maybe I’m a dork
My marketable skills are somewhere in the mishmash of the Internet. All of the world is somewhere in the mishmash of the Internet. I still get a little throw up in my mouth at the idea that you have to be on a particular platform (used to be Facebook, then Twitter, for a certain type it became Etsy, now it’s Instagram or Tiktok or OnlyFans, which isn’t just porn, apparently) to succeed. It makes me sad that so many artists and writers and musicians and makers and woodworkers are in the walled gardens of big tech. I think I’ll stay out here awhile longer, the air is clean and so is my conscience.
Perhaps my open source bones and philosophies aren’t as brittle as I thought. At the moment I cannot imagine going back to spending all my time on the computer. I don’t miss it.
Then again, I started an infra project this week. I have been putting it off for literal decades because server admin work absolutely is the suckiest of suck. I got a new server, installed a couple docker containers and set up automatic backups to S3 storage. Routed all my DNS through Cloudflare finally (I mean, wow, my current infra is a half baked pile of shite). Migrated my first site. Talked to AI a LOT. I would never have succeeded if I hadn’t had some inkling about what I was doing because AI is a recursive nightmare of senseless sometimes.
What does it mean to be useful?
- On meeting your own standards > https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/accidental-instagram-influencer-ida-b-on-meeting-your-own-standards/
- Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist > https://www.404media.co/scammers-sell-seeds-for-exotic-ai-generated-flowers-that-dont-exist/
- Carbon Captured > https://projects.propublica.org/carbon-captured/
Maybe I need help?
I spent enough time here this week. It’s time to close the laptop and do anything else.
Featured image is not AI, but an actual photograph I took a couple weeks ago. CC-BY-SA Laura Hilliger