Late-May randomness

I noticed a few weeks ago that I had gotten my two-hundredth subscriber. Very cool. And now I am up to 201. Considering how sparse my updates are, I’m grateful any of you are here.

When it comes to Doing What I Need To Do or Doing What I Want To Do or sometimes just Doing Something Creative, I have all sorts of random blocks to contend with. Some are small, some are big, some stay in place pretty much all the time, and some jump the fuck out of my way now and again and I can work past them, at least on a temporary basis.

One of my blocks is being interrupted, because then I lose track of what I was doing and THEN, I lose interest. I know this about me, so I get very grompy when someone interrupts me. Another one — and I’ve struggled with this most around weight loss and adopting better eating habits over the years — is always wanting to start on the first day of the week or first day of the month or, Glob help me, New Year’s Day. If I don’t get to start on THAT. EXACT. DAY, I trash the whole effort for another week or month or year. It’s damn near psychotic. I’ve lost fucking decades doing it. And another one is being rigid about how I do things so that if I don’t have every single one of my ducks in a row, I never start at all. Related to the Starting On A Certain Day, but not quite the same thing.

One example of the latter is that for whatever reason, I don’t tend to want to post anything here unless there is an illustration to go with it. I don’t know why this even matters, because you don’t come here for pictures. You come here for words. I am perfectly capable of writing words without adding pictures, and I know this. Nevertheless, there it is. You’ll notice I didn’t add an image this time. That’s deliberate. I’m trying to knock myself loose from that particular stupidity. Will it work long-term? I have no idea. Here goes nothing.

Another annoying thing that happens to me is I will come up with good ideas or whole arguments or conversations in my mind when I’m out walking or doing some other activity where I am nowhere near implements of destructionwriting. Then I get back in front of my computer and whoop, there it went. Poof. Lost forever, probably.

Today is my bonus mom’s (Dad’s second wife’s) birthday. Weirdly, I was always able to remember her birthday (as in “what date it falls on,” not as in “in time to send a card or something”) but always forgot when Mom’s was (as in “what date it falls on”); to this day I still have to check my records most of the time. (I almost never got anything from Mom for my birthday, and I do mean in childhood, so that probably evens out somehow.) One of the reasons I remember it is it was also the date of my high-school graduation, thirty-three years ago now JESUS CHRIST HOW AM I A THIRTY-THREE-YEAR HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATE. HOW. Likewise, back in March I would have hit my thirty-year marriage anniversary, had I not gotten that pesky little divorce two dozen years ago. When your milestone anniversaries start hitting the multiples of decades, it is quite sobering.

(We won’t discuss how my firstborn will be THIRTY next year. Good lord.)

I’m getting a little impatient with my Facebook feed lately. I remarked a while back, to no one in particular, that it seems to me politics is more about status than about anything else: who has it, who can take it, whom they can take it from, what they do with it. It’s not really about solving problems. In a similar vein, when a person claims to want to solve problems, what they really want to do 99% of the time is feel good. They don’t care if the problem is actually solved. They care whether they have to be reminded of the problem anymore. If their immediate surroundings somehow convey the idea that the problem has gone away, that’s good enough for them.

This is why I’m seeing people uncritically sharing memes about how we can save the planet by replacing golf courses with food forests. That the “food forest” might as well be a vertical golf course in ecological terms completely escapes them. I no longer have the spoons to explain why. Two dozen fucking times because of the nearly 150 people on my friends list at present, maybe three of them will even see that conversation, and they may even like the relevant comments, but five minutes later I’ll see them reposting the same fucking thing. I can’t do this. More to the point I can’t do this eight billion fucking times. No wonder Neighbor is a recluse after decades trying to get people to wake up and see the ecological danger. Nobody cares. It gets exhausting.

By “cares,” of course, I mean “recognizes the problem and works to fucking do something useful about it.” I don’t mean you actually have to feel some kind of way. How you feel isn’t really relevant if it doesn’t lead to change.

I’m also tired of pointing out AI content, if you were wondering how that was going. You probably weren’t.

So I’m either rotting with my phone games or working on a book (yes!) in fits and starts or doomscrolling and rolling my eyes or, as I’ve done this evening (although it’s twenty after midnight now), working on repairing my personal internet infrastructure. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that I hadn’t changed my contact info in some of my Instagram accounts. This meant a nonexistent email address and a nonexistent phone number. Oops. I still need to condense and centralize my photo and meme and digital document collections, too. Also throw a lot of stuff out. It is not a thing I can put off forever. If nothing else, I’m not immortal.

And generally I have too many ideas and little damn money. But I’m never going to have this much time to pursue them ever again, probably. Argh.

Okay. My brain is officially mush. I owe you more stuff soon. ‘Night. (Very extremely early morning.)