It's ten twenty in the morning. I am in my office with the shades darkened even though it is sunny outside. The glow from the monitors in front of me is brighter than the light cast from the single lamp.

I am considering working instead of writing. I am in a mood to do something productive. I ran two and a half miles for the first time in what seems like aeons, since before my shoulder surgery in August – so I probably haven't done it since sometime in July. I ran those miles even though I didn't really want to and it felt tolerable. I kept moving. I didn't push too hard. Easy, slow, old man twelve minute miles. I noticed the fall leaves around me, browns and yellows blowing around my feet, and the brightness of the blue sky.

It probably helped my run that the Dems had a good night at the polls. I stop myself from thinking much further about that because I don't emotionally invest in politics the way that I used to. It doesn't mean much until we see how the governance goes. And that will take a while. And I don't need to constantly monitor it and pay attention to it until it's happening and there's some real data to accept.

I came up with a better title for the horrible book I'm working on. It used to be Patterns but I have been reading about how to actually get people to be interested in your writing, and one of the things this guy says is – consider advertising what the book is about with the title itself. Be bold. Part of your job is to generate interest, and interest is hugely generated by telling people exactly what it is your product is. Example, the movie called The Terminator. You know there will be something that is a terminator and it will be killing people. It will be an action book. There will be blood.

This led me to think of all sorts of terrible ideas until I thought of the right answer, which is: Patterns of the Witch

And that instantly changes the book from something that might be interpreted as pseudo-intellectual to instead something unmistakable: This is a horror novella. The reader now knows that there will be a witch in this book. What they do not know for sure is why we are interested in patterns. Which I can illustrate through the course of the book, because it is also a book about AI.

I won't go on about this stupid book idea because I write using the application Scrivener and I don't want to mix the two.

And now I'm wondering if this qualifies as a journal entry. Probably not. I probably need another two or three hundred words. I have to write about something painful.

Which is perhaps also work. The thing I want to avoid blogging to do is painful. I was thinking about it in the bathroom this morning after I'd finished showering. Running the big green towel over my legs, my arms.

It takes so much energy to focus on the work stuff, I thought. It is a strain. I keep having to direct my thoughts away from other things – my monkey brain wants to leap from this to that – and instead I am training it on just one thing for an extended perioid, maybe an hour, maybe several.

And there's only so much of that energy I have every day. When it's depleted, it's just about impossible to then, say, fire up the blog and do an entry, or, even harder, to open up Patterns on Scrivener and try to remember what the fuck I was even doing the last time I looked at this, because I don't do it every day, I have to sort of re-inhabit the world I am trying to create, and then I realize how broken it is but that doesn't immediately help either because I then have to prioritize all the things that are broken and choose one to work on and it's like if I've already done 5-6 hours of actual real work for my job, I am just not going to be capable of doing that.

Later, outside, smoking a cigarette that I knew I shouldn't be smoking, the thoughts continued: I am just done with work, you know. I just don't get much out of it anymore. I am not young like Sriram trying to prove myself and caring about surviving another 30 years in this field. I am old, fifty, and the end is a lot closer than the beginning. I am not going to give it as much. I'm just not.

I have all of those thoughts and then when I am back at my computer, the first thing I want to choose to do is work. It is impossible to beat the habit out of me. The habit to do something every day that I can point to and use to justify my existence.

What I want to do today to justify my existence is move all of these "always on" clients from one environment to another — to clone them and hook them up. It would take me a couple of hours and I probably won't do anything else today.

But I don't have to do this. I could in fact write all day.

I won't though. I will close this blog out, pick something to work on for the company, and do it.

It's incredible to me what I choose, over and over again.

The wrong things.