06-19-2026

I have about ten minutes to write before I tackle the day.

The day will go:

Run for two miles, take care of the dog, get ready to drive for a while to The Book Mill, look for interesting books for a while, come back home, probably do some light grocery shopping, probably nap, then laze around for a while with Penny and Shelley (Shelley is my dog's name), then clean and make dinner, then play video games for a while in an attempt to try to do something that is so-called fun to pass time in a supposedly relaxing way because this allows me to spend time with Penny and Shelley on the couch without going bonkers.

It is a day that is not for me. It is Juneteenth, a federal holiday, so new that it still feels unfamiliar, so foreign that it upended the vacation calendar that my employer provides – they felt they had to take away a day in order to add Juneteenth because you can't just give employees an extra free day off. President's Day was summarily removed the year Juneteenth was granted. Holidays are often not for me. They are for family. They are, specifically, today, for Penny and Shelley. My role as the man in this family unit is to enable Penny to have a good day. It is not about me. It is about her.

Luckily, I don't mind going to the Book Mill. It's our third time going, but our first time with the dog. I'll do what I normally do which is: Find a book, park myself somewhere, read for a while, kill time.

My whole life feels like killing time between obligations. I have yet to identify something that doesn't feel like killing time when it comes to leisure. This means, I am aware, that I don't properly value my hobbies. Reading, writing, listening to music, playing video games – or guitar, back when I used to – all feels wasteful to me instead of urgent and important. I remember a time – not very long ago, maybe only fifteen years or so in the past – when playing video games sometimes felt valuable. I felt like I was part of a community somehow. Adults who still game. I thought it was a worthwhile hobby.

I'm not sure I feel that way any longer. I still play games sometimes but it's more like going through the motions much of the time.

When I run my diary entries through AI, it tells me that I am ruminating and expressing neuroticism. It tells me that journal formats of this nature do not hold up because the content quickly becomes tedious and repetitive for the reader.

That is the point, I told it. The point is that I am stuck in my head as we all are in this little bubble of experience recording that we call consciousness and my consciousness provides me with, largely, the same thoughts and ruminations every day. It is only occasionally that I am able to break out of the mold and create something new from the river of brain-soup flowing through my cranium – a new idea, a new take on life, a change in behavior. These things are rarities, not daily occurrences.

A major part of the reason I am posting journal entries online is to illustrate that point – that I cannot change myself. That my journal entries today, as a firmly middle aged man, are still roughly the same as my journal entries from my late twenties. Some things have changed around me – I am married, own a house, have more stability, some amount of money, a dog, a job I've held for thirteen years – but at the core, I am the same. My thoughts are a result of exposure to context. Context changes and so some amount of thoughts change. But exposure to the same information tends to yield exactly the same thought that it did twenty years ago – only, in most cases, calcified.

And exposure to the same hobbies seems to yield – what? Boredom. Recognition that they are not helping me in any measurable way to relieve the stresses in my life.

What does help relieve the stresses in my life, then, if not vacation or video games or hobbies one way or another?

Nothing. Nothing helps relieve them.

That's not true. I think that sometimes but I know that's my ultra negative adolescent voice talking. Sometimes exercise helps. Sometimes writing helps. Sometimes working on the stresses themselves help, particularly if it's just a task that needs performing, like taking out the garbage or driving my mother to a doctor's appointment. Staying on top of things does help relieve the stress sometimes.

But, also, sometimes, at the end of a day I thought I would spend in valueless oblivion, a day driving to and from a bookstore two hours away, a day browsing major works coming from major minds, a day listening to Penny's prattling in the car – a stream of consciousness not that different from my own mental ruminations, with the details changed, because she dwells on different subjects than I do – I look back at the hours and expect to feel the same sense of purposelessness and drifting but instead feel something different, something closer to pleasant fatigue.

Time is up. I have to do The Things and get ready to go.

This is another thing AI wants me to remove, by the way. Abrupt endings and personal mental chatter. I refuse. So far I am refusing to allow AI to edit or change these entries at all – they are one hundred percent human-originated type and I intend to keep it that way. But it remains interesting to get its (AI's) take on things because it (AI) is good at aggregating data and understanding what it is exactly that people want and expect from an online experience. It is not, apparently, valuable to people to hear these sorts of musings. I understand – I'm not sure how much I would read of someone else's repeated tiny insecurities and personal go-to brain-fart-type mental chatter.

And yet it seems to be important to me to close the entry in some banal way.

Let's go.