This is going to be an update on what it feels like, these days, to be me. Trust me, it's still weird.
I'm running at about 75% mojo, partially cloudy with a chance of showers. My natural disposition to say that I'm good is still in place, but I am inclined to just mumble instead. I think I'm dealing with things at a suboptimal pace, but with the right prescriptions in mind. I'm trying not to push the water that is already headed downstream and wondering why I'm in the middle of this particular river.
I'm a survivor, that is never in doubt. What I wonder is if I should be packing heavy or packing light. Zombies are just around the corner and some of them are related to me. Part of my honor and glory are owed to my responsibility and responsiveness to them. After all I've done, they went and got bit. Now I'm feeling like Abraham. God, must I make this sacrifice? I know that I must swing a hammer at the zombies that were once my charges. Maybe I chose to be too much. Maybe I should pack light and only bring enough provisions for me to survive the catastrophes ahead. Put on my own oxygen mask. I have been putting on the mask and sucking up the gas. It makes you silly and reduces your problem solving ability to one. Self.
Chris has been diagnosed as both bipolar and schitzotypal depending upon whom you ask. I have spent the past six months figuring out exactly what all that means, and the answer is that it's just an ordinary dysfunction. He's is abnormal in a way the reduces what ought to be easy to something that's a chore both for him and for those around him. He is cut loose in a loose fitting society with no place for compassion for the marginally, ordinarily dysfunctional. Well, not only dispassion but incompetence. It's awfully expensive to understand that which requires more than common sense, and I sense those plugging up the dikes against the flood of zombies have better things to do. Alas, he has no street gang, but soft shouldered rebels with nebulous causes. He has joined a rock band, which is a step up from the videogame couch, to a more respectable kind of dissolution. To me, he is Simba in the brambles, trying to live Hakuna Matata, but he has a sty in his eye and refuses to see a doctor. Because he refuses to see? Because he cannot see? Because he sees but does not care? In the end he'll blame all of us, maybe. All I have to decide is exactly how and when to kick him out of my house. What could possibly go wrong?
I am adjusting to the possibility that everything can collapse. So it's fun to have credit cards with low balances, and just enough job security to continue subscriptions to foolishness like Netflix. What I spend more money on is the disciplined self-torture that is circuit training, on those days I feel bouncy enough to get the hell out of bed. It's less often than it should be. I have learned recently to ask myself nicely. When I hover around 202 pounds, I respond with more apathy than I should. Today at 210 dressed, I'm angry at my bad knee but I still want a cheeseburger. Well, I'm going to ruck 10 miles this weekend. Maybe I'll destroy my knee entirely and give over more of my future to the orthopedist. At least it will be me. I have experienced the momentary bit of nirvana when my dental technician actually said 'not bad', and people think my new haircut befits me. I love my new $527 prescription glasses, and have found a new cheap kind of shoe to wear, Chucks.
Within the next four months I expect to empty my house of two guests, attend a Porsche clinic, drive up to Monterey and enjoy some vintage auto racing, and attend my 40th high school reunion. I have come to the realization that although I am always down to buy drinks and conversate, I'm living in my own private Idaho. Me and Dostoevsky. And Taleb. And Pinker and Peterson and Ferguson. And RC Bray. And Destiny 2. And the Hoonigans and an old bloke at South Bay Porsche. And my shrink Chuck E. and my fitness coach M. And my wife every other Tuesday if our schedules overlap and we're not too bloody tired. She loves me. My mother loves me. I love me. Well, lots of people love me. But what if I'm not me? What if I just want to be me, but elsewhere? Am I getting too old for this shit?
See? My mind is spinning at high revs. I'm still rapidly aware and consciously evaluating. My mind is running circles around my self. My self is wanting to be left alone. I'm not resentful. My superego is indefatigable, or something like that. I'm sure Churchill had the right word. I think I am trying to get into the head of a drunk Russian intellectual. Crass rules everything around me, but I refuse to be haggard. This is not work, it is not play, it's distraction from the role I've signed up to play. It's sideboob. What is the point of looking, then again what is the cost of looking? The opportunity to be all that you can be costs attention. I haven't decided how much attention I want. I'm not quite ready to jump into the bucket of single-minded commitment to the greatest idea I ever had. I had no idea the world would make me want to be a rich as I want to be, just to get away from all the douchebaggery. I used to be the enemy of 'whatever'. These days 'whatever' is a friend, certainly a better friend than 'fuck off'. I don't need certainty. I think.
Everybody disappoints me.
My best conversations are with myself because I know exactly how seriously to take myself. I confuse other people. I would like to trade places with the man who has half a billion in his pocket and teaches people how to make on half of one percent of what he has, knowing they'll line up to pay. Of course he's disgusted, but what are you gonna do? Philanthropy is self-aggrandizing, I don't care who you are or how many diseases you cure. But yeah I accept the premise. I don't know why I became a writer. It doesn't reward me as I think I need to be rewarded, and still I keep doing it. I've opened up this wound in my neck that keeps bleeding truth. It's going to kill me one day. Today I'm woozy on the edge of a blackout, and who would be bothered to drink my blood anyway? Is this as good for you as it is for me? Alas. Alas.
OK that's enough pity. I have to load the QRL0069 table so that we can figure out what's going wrong with the APUs on A380s. The lives of flight operation ground crews depend on it, not to mention my salary. I have a lot of rocks to kick. Welcome to May. Summer is coming.
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