Thoughts as I sort through the wreckage of yesterday.
I am absolutely sick of my wife Penny and our dog Shelley and Penny's failing mother and all I want to do is get high and work or play video games, with preference given to work, because it keeps my mind busy in a way that video games seem to fail.
Yesterday: a trip to the airport to drop off an old greek lady so she can get back to her home country
Me, driving in the car, listening to Penny commiserate with this lady in the car, right after she basically extorted an extra week of pay out of us, which I paid out of pocket, cash taken out of a TD bank on the way to the airport.
Enormous bags, darkness outside, tight traffic. I'm looking at the map on my dashboard to figure out where to go through the tunnels in boston. I need to concentrate. The two of them are talking and I hear a lot of I know I know and they say Thomas' name a lot and I know Jennie is just chatting. The serious bit -- the part where this lady demanded money -- is over. They are having fun. They are bored. They are passing time, not information. Penny seems to think they are talking about something real. They aren't. The only thing that is real is that we are getting rid of her and I am helping to make sure this happens.
It could have been worse. I was initially asked to take this lady myself. A daunting task considering I don't speak Greek and I had to get her checked into the international flight to Turkey, then Greece, and make sure she had wheelchair assistance.
Full disclosure, I was stoned as fuck when Penny called. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do the driving.
But the high faded and I was stable enough to do it all.
I was planning to spend the day high and working at home instead. I was about to put shelley down and get even higher, ever higher, soaring, testing the limits of what THC can do for me. I felt reckless, like the seams of my life are coming apart. I thought about getting a bottle and combining drinking with the cannabis.
Then Penny calls panicked. The only way out of this, I realized, is for me to agree to help with the trip to the airport.
It felt like I didn't have a choice. We had to get this woman back and Penny also had to figure out what to do about her mother's probable UTI. She wanted to take her to the hospital. I convinced her to wait, that getting rid of the help was the most important thing. The flight was booked. We had to just go.
So now I am working. I took a gummy already and that will kick in. I want to pretend the world doesn't exist. I want to put my hoodie on and code. I want to get this ansible shit working, next week is going to be awful: in the office on Monday for an office move, crating shelley for the day, tuesday is dentist shit plus it my dating anniversary with Penny and she will expect us to do something interesting.
I am basically barely working out now. I went from religously working out every day to .. nothing. Years and years and years of working out and now I'm doing some pitiful amount of weights in the basement.
Enough. I'm just bitching. It's painful. I'm not happy about any of this.
The cannabis makes me happy. Cannabis and working and shutting everything else out. The work thoughts drown out my thoughts of family and UTIs and elderly people crapping their pants and how Thomas is not doing enough and all of the family shit that we seem to talk about endlessly.
I have the energy to do work right now and so I am going to do it.
I am in my office at home.
I hear the whooshing of computer fans and the muffled voices of contractors outside, contractors who are trying to fix my heat pumps. A board failed on the bigger of the two units. This happened probably two months ago. It took me a little longer to figure out that there was a problem and that I had to call somebody. Then three more weeks before the board arrived and they showed up to fix it.
I wonder when they will be done so I can better focus on work and being high. I'm half stoned throughout my days now. I take a couple of gummies or a puff of the vape and kind of feel good again. I feel okay without it too but it's nice to let the day kind of slip slide around on you a little bit. It lowers my anxiety and helps me to work without feeling too amped up about anything.
My life feels like a mess even though I know it is not.
Today I think I finally resolved my routing rule issues. I can have more than one shibboleth node up at a time, in a distributed cluster, with database session storage. It works. The whole thing. I'm astonished. I still have to test the multiple-IDP node scenario but that has never been a problem in the past and I can't imagine it will be a problem now. I suppose we'll find out when I hit QA and we have two nodes running there.
I've been trying to solve this problem for years where I work, and it's finally done, more or less. Not live in production, no. And there may be some cleanup to do or even a bug that we'll hit as we continue to validate it.
But it works.
Which gives us Live-Live clusters to support the old environment and the new environment. And also gives us multi-node shib live always which will improve operational stability.
I feel like I should want to throw a party -- I probably should at the very least relax a little bit.
But instead I am wondering what the next steps are? I probably want other people on the team to test against this.
And then ... can I integrate it with dev? Maybe that is the next step.
Or I should do the pipeline and docker-ize everything.
Or I can mess around with the admin app. That's what I really want to do. That would be more fun.
I have been really focused on work and trying to get this replacement home grown software working -- I know that if we turn it on live and there are issues, it will be up to me to sort it out. So the work I am doing now is serving to help future me.
Sometimes I don't know how to turn it off. Sometimes I use work as a safe place to take my thoughts that doesn't involve too-carefully-analyzing my own life, my relationship with my wife, how stressed out I feel about the constant dog care-taking -- I can get lost in this problem and that solution and so on. It feels good. Better than most of the other bits of my life do, to be honest. It feels like time to myself, which I can't seem to give to myself in any other way right now.
I miss writing.
I don't write anymore. I wonder if it's still really part of me.
The part of me that wants to write is the part of me that wants to reflect. And I try to reflect less and less as I get older.
I mean that. I actively try to not think too hard about things.
But since I haven't been writing, or thinking about things, this also means I am not reflecting.
When I am not reflecting, I am bottling. The top is on and the pressure builds.
--
Last night I had trouble sleeping.
I think about my upcoming high school reunion. I wonder what I should do to prepare. Get a haircut, certainly. Figure out logistics. The driving, what-do-i-wear, contacting my old friend Ray to see what he is planning, review the actual invite and schedule to see what's on the agenda. I worry I will have to dance. I worry I will get drunk or not have the energy to make it through the day. I wonder why I am going. (I am going because Ray said he was going and he wanted me to go.) I think about the last reunion I went to -- it must have been the ten year, in 2009.
I remember running into Liz and not knowing what to make of her. I remember Rich was there, skinny Rich who blended into the background and smoked cigarettes and looked a little like a starving hyena. I remember David Fischer and him bragging about his consulting company, with his stupid mousey girlfriend and his comment that they're all crazy (women) so you might as well be with someone good looking. I didn't know whether to think he was joking or serious.
I thought of ways to die that would be quick. I'm not suicidal or anything, not in any serious way. But I think sometimes, when I am lying down and trying to not think about anything at all, that a safe dropped on my head would be perfect. An instant flattening of my thoughts.
david foster wallace said my brain. I haven't thought about David in probably a year but he came to me last night and reminded me of something. Most people, when they kill themselves, they point to their head with a gun. It's always the head. They want to silence their thoughts.
He hung himself. I wonder how that worked out. He had to be in there, thinking about it, for the minute or two it took until it was over. Do we think anything at all? or is it more animalistic -- an oh shit, then pain, struggle.
Hardly a role model anyway. I lost my love for him when I learned about him stalking Mary Carr and probably hitting her.
Lost my love, yes. But not the intrigue. He was someone who accepted -- or at least tried to accept -- how abysmally fucked up we all are. And how terribly trapped we all are in our own heads.
--
A short list of things I'm working on and thinking about over the past week.
I am working out right now, listening to Steven Wilson in the basement, doing my chest exercises and my pull-ups. Three sets down on the chest so far, one set of pull ups. I think about things I have to do today: Call the kennel and set up boarding for my dog on Saturday. Get a haircut. Pick up my antidepressants at Walgreens. Take care of the dog all day. Join a 10AM meeting to talk about the SSO revamp project. Put in a ticket to get ansible installed on hosts. Look at the reunion itinerary.
At least Penny will be gone at work. She'd been sick last week and constantly around. I love her but this sort of thing -- too much contact with her -- makes me tired. I have always been this way. A little is good, a lot is fatiguing. We put on movies and I play Ghost of Yotei, the PS5 game, where you play as a samurai and kill people on a mission of vengeance. It is brainless but fun in the sense that it's just hard enough to keep me engaged most of the time, until I get one of these "find the right path forward" missions where I'm looking around the environment for the right foothold to start climbing to reach an intended powerup destination. These can be tedious. And when I'm stoned they become almost impossible.
One more set of chest and then more pullups.
Today my goal for work is to get a simple docker compose script working. Then I can try to pipeline the thing, once ansible is installed on the hosts.
I feel suddenly flat emotionally. There is a yearning in me to do something else, something more, to be better. Or at least not to be the shit that I am. The drug seeking asshole who is constantly trying to escape his own life, escape his emotions and his head.
It is this yearning that I am trying, at all times, to silence.
Computer, it is time to talk about something I don't talk about nearly enough.
It is my wife and her diseased mother and her shit-assed caretakers.
My wife, Penny, is 45. Her father died a year and a half ago at the age of ninety four. Her mother is seventy eight and has Alzheimer's.
I met my wife six years ago. November 2019. Her dad was eighty nine. He was old and already sick but more or less with it. Shortly after we started dating, he started to decline. Penny was distraught. Of course. It's her dad. It doesn't matter that he's old and has lived a good life. She can't stand to see him suffer.
There is a cultural angle too. The family is Greek. Penny is expected to be a caretaker. Her parents told her, time and time again, that it's great to have a daughter so that someone can take care of them when they are older. She was conditioned to take care of them.
As he declines her involvement increases. Caretakers, doctor appointments, constant visits to the house.
We are married in 2022.
Her dad dies in 2023. I'm surprised he made it to the wedding. He's somehow able to dance with Penny.
Moving on.
Penny's mom already had Alzheimers disease, before the wedding. This will henceforth be referred to as Alzies. Penny managed to get her mother enrolled in a clinical trial for some plaque removing drug that seems to have slowed the decline.
But here in 2025, her mom is worse.
I write and my dog barks at me. She is bored. We were outside an hour ago, and then I played with her, vigorously, for twenty minutes.
It doesn't matter. It's not enough. Nothing I give is enough.
Her mother is being taken care of by a caregiver. This is not the first caregiver. It is only the current.
Some context:
It is hard to find a caregiver for Alzies. This is a disease that renders people slow and stupid. On the best days they know who you are. On the worst days, and they far outnumber the best days, they are shitting themselves constantly and have no idea what the fuck is going on. As a caretaker, you are managing a breathing meatpile. You feed them and bathe them and talk to them and for a reward, they ask who you are and where do they live and then they tell you they hate you right before crapping their pants.
Here is the dynamic.
The caregiver cares for Penny's mom.
Penny cares for both her mother and the caregiver.
The caregiver takes vacation days, on which Penny and I must care for her mother. We nearly always do this together.
The caregiver sometimes leaves, which leaves Penny scrambling to find someone else to care for her.
The caregiver says things like I am going to need this day off where this day equals some stupid Greek holiday that no one gets time off for.
The caregiver does not have a car or much money, even though she is being paid plenty, and says things like I need cream for my rash and Penny is left scrambling to get cream and deliver it to the house
The implicit threat is, always, if I do not get what I want, your mother will suffer. Or worse, I will quit.
So Penny texts me updates. During the day. Always.
It is 80% of what we talk about. Caregiving her mom, the shittininess of the caregiver.
The constant demands. The bitchy behavior.
How alone and put upon Penny is.
It is relentless.
I am not unsympathetic but it goes on and on and on and on and on.
This morning I make Penny coffee and start working.
Penny starts talking about the caregiver.
I try to tune her out. I walk away. Penny feels ignored. I must be involved in her internal struggles. Anything less is to be a shitty husband.
At a breaking point I agree with her. Then say something about my job and what just happened.
Penny barely responds and then immediately goes back to talking about her mom, the caregiver, how put upon she is.
I try again. Same result. Nothing. She does not respond to anything I've said. She is a one way entity - words come out, words do not go in.
I don't exist. The only thing that exists to Penny is her mother, the caregiver, her grievances.
During the day I get texts. Penny is beside herself for this or that.
I am trying to work, to manage the dog at home, to clean this and that, dishes.
I cannot escape it. The dying of her mother is a vortex with a central gravity that rivals a black hole. It is sucking everything in.
Me along with it.
Penny gets home. I have cooked for her. Cooked while drunk. I downed three cheap plastic bottles of Sutter Home Pinot Grigiot in forty minutes on an empty stomach. I made salmon with honey and mustard, sliced potatoes, oiled and spiced, baked to a crisp. She is home late because she got the rash medication for the caregiver. Even in my drunken state I can tell the food came out good. But I don't want any.
We play with the dog and Penny tells me more about her struggles with Niki the caregiver and I just can't take it.
I go and walk the dog outside at nine thirty. Shelley takes a big dump and I put it in a green plastic poop bag and deposit it in my pocket. It is dark out. I look at street lights, haloed.
I get home, move the dog's crate from our bedroom back to the office, a nightly ritual.
Open the refrigerator, take out some cheese, put it in the bottom of the crate, get the dog upstairs, into her crate, shut the door. She snuffles around for the cheese. I lock it and put a blanket over the crate.
I think about why I drank.
It is the anger. The anger has been with me all day. Simmering, simmering, simmering.
I don't know what to do with it. I want time to think about work, to solve problems. I want to code and do things that immerse me. Help me forget about my life.
The tension is unbearable.
I think about Penny and her sick mom who is shitting herself. I think about Penny telling me yesterday she thinks about driving her car off the road sometimes so she can escape everything. I don't know how serious she is. I know that she is under a lot of stress, and when she is under a lot of stress, it becomes my stress. I want to fix things. I don't want her to be so miserable.
No win situations. I can argue with Penny. I can not argue with Penny. One path leads conflict with no resolution. Her mom is dying. She is trapped and feels alone. She doesn't feel she has choices. If I don't argue -- If I stay silent -- it leads to resentment. It makes me feel like I am a support pole for Penny. Unappreciated until it gives way and the house falls down.
I am just sick of it. We are all sick of it.
I fantasize about killing her mother. Replace some pharmacy pills with digitalis or something I have read about in some book. Something that will make her mom die without anyone knowing what happened. There will be no autopsy, no investigation. Just an end to this misery.
And we can go back to being what we were, for a brief flicker, before so much of our relationship became about her parents, and dying.
Sometimes I feel as though I made the wrong choice. Why did I marry this person? I suppose part of it was that I wanted to help her -- save her from her life. Save her from the caretaking.
Instead she is dragging me down with it.
--
Yesterday I killed my hamster.
Professor Bananas. Nearly two years old. We got her early 2024. They usually only live two years. In the wild they are born and two months later are having their own babies. Quick cycles. They are nature's food. Owls, snakes, wolves, foxes. Tasty snacks for all sorts of predators.
In captivity they live to the end of their spans. Toward the end they get all of the same afflictions that plague humans. Our last hamster also only lived two years. She got parkinson's and I found her dead one morning, tucked into herself in the little house we bought for her, an Animal Crossing themed shack labeled Nook's Corner. I buried her in the backyard under a tree and tried, unsuccessfully, to not think about Pet Semetary.
The Professor was doing okay until about three days ago. That's when I noticed she was sleeping on top of the bedding instead of burying herself underneath. A definite change in behavior.
But Sunday morning there was blood on the bedding. Blood soaked up by fluffy white bits of cellulose. Under the water bottle, under the wheel, in the corner. Penny and I take a closer look. The hamster is bleeding out of her ass.
On closer inspection, it is more than that. The hamster has a tumor around her behind. This is also common in hamsters -- tumors in old age. The tumor has ruptured.
I tell Penny we should freeze the hamster to slow it down, then I can take it out back and do what needs to be done.
Penny is mortified. How could I do this? It's inhumane!
Fine. my mistake, I think to myself. I should never have suggested this. Not to Penny. I should have just done it and not said anything.
We call vets. It takes seven before we find someone who is A) open on Sundays and B) will treat small animals.
They will euthanize our pet for $150. Plus tax. If we want an urn with creamated remains, they will do that too. For an extra $400.
I tell Penny I will take the hamster to the vet. The vet sends me an uptake form on my phone. I can fill it out. Pet name, services, agree to euthanize.
I fill it out halfway and stop, decide I will not do this.
I'm going to the vet and will take care of it I tell Penny
I put the hamster in the car with me in a box with some bedding. I sneak a very heavy bucket of concrete into the car.
Three miles away on a secluded road I pull to the side, take everything out, and smash the hamster with the bucket, just drop it on her body, the full force hitting her, squishing her body instantly.
I inspect her. Not a twitch. It is instant. She is flattened against the bottom of the cardboard box, immobile. Some blood remains, on the box, on the bottom of the bucket.
I try not to think about it. She was my companion and friend and I hated to do it. I say goodbye to her. I tell her that it's over and she doesn't have to suffer anymore.
I drive home and think about farmers putting down their sick livestock because there is no alternative. Shooting lame horses and that kind of thing.
In this context, what I did makes sense.
In the context of the modern world, where we are never ever ever supposed to harm our pets, and we are always supposed to choose the Most Humane Option, no Matter What The Cost, what I did was barbaric.
What is more humane? Going to the vet and letting a stranger stick a needle in the Professor's stomach and watching her stop breathing?
Or a quick smash?
I'll be honest. When I fantasize about the quickest ways that I myself might die, I often think about having a safe dropped on my head.
Like in Looney Tunes cartoons. I have always felt it'd be pretty much instant.
I still don't know how I feel about the whole thing.
Mostly, I think I feel nothing.