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.

• My storage drives failed, both of them.  They hold terabytes of movies.  Also wedding photos and other pictures -- pictures of my life, old cell phone snaps of my house in Needham, my old closets and kitchen and the car I used to drive and the old Flash t-shirt that my ex bought for me and me with a gym shirt on trying to look buff.  I tried to fix the boards but failed and wound up ordering new boards to see if I can use one of them, transfer the BIOS chip, get it going again.  The whole thing is depressing.  
• The dog is constant.
• I am not working out as much and I am coming to terms with that.
• I'm smoking weed as a coping mechanism and sometimes that's great and numbing and gives me a mild high but it also makes me foggy and error prone.

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.

Four o'clock on a Friday

I just crated the dog and have a bit of time to myself where I'm not too tired to do something for myself.  A short window.

Part of me wants to work on docker imaging for work and part of me does not.  Part of me wants to give it a rest.  

Last night I implemented a security fix, an emergency, which covered SAML spoofing against my company's identity provider.  In English, this prevents user A from logging into our systems and then pretending, successfully, to be user B.  This went on from six to seven and then again from eight to eight thirty.

After that I finished working on a feature called Enforcement Redirects for our single signon services.  We're moving to a new system, probably next year, because we want to get away from a terrible, exploitative vendor.  This system will be home grown, custom shit.  I am modifying our IDP to handle certain use cases.  Enforcement Redirects are a way to make sure users are sent back to their originally requested page after we ask them to complete enforcement.  An enforcement is like a security agreement, or licensing choice, or privacy disclosure.  So user says I want to use the Peoplesoft service and tries to log in.  But during the login process there is an intercept that checks to see if the user has satisfied enforcement, and if not, complete these forms.  Then you are returned to Peoplesoft. 

Our current system doesn't do this.  It can't remember where you originally wanted to go.  So it dumps you back on some generic homepage and you have to remember what you were doing and retype a URL or hit your bookmark again.  In our new system we redirect you.  Fine.

So I get that working finally -- it's been a multi day struggle of webflows and request contexts and scoping issues, view-states and velocity templates, and ChatGPT sometimes helping and sometimes being a pain in the ass to deal with.  I document it and promote the changes from my workstation to our central environment.  I go downstairs and sit on the couch with Penny and Shelley for a while, my wife and my dog respectively.

And all I can do is think about work.  Penny is finishing up Twin Peaks, Season 3.  She is telling me about Dale.  Dale is the main protagonist, trying to figure out the mysteries of Twin Peaks.  At the end Dale finally finds Laura Palmer and she whispers something in his ear.  It's a mystery what it is.  Penny thinks it is "you can't save me."  Dale is back at the beginning of the story.  The decades have been erased.  Laura is alive again but will be killed.  Dale can't do anything but he will try again.

It is the story of Sisyphus again.  Push the rock up the mountain, push the rock, push the rock -- until at the very top your energy runs out every time -- and you tumble toward the bottom.  Then you rise and do it again.

Dale's life is Sisyphus' life is my life.

Take the dog out, rest, take the dog out again.

Make dinner for Penny, rest, make dinner for Penny again.

Complete a task for work, rest, complete another task.

Did Sisyphus want to do something else with his time and energy?  Probably.  Life, laugh, love, like those stupid fucking signs.

Do I?

Sometimes.  And other times I get the sense that this is what I am good at.  I might as well be doing it.  I never became all that good at writing or playing guitar or anything.  Definitely not good enough for anyone to care to pay any attention to me. 

So I build my new computer and fantasize about buying a new monitor for it so I can have a new toy to play with, perhaps become more efficient.  I buy noise cancelling headphones and listen to brown noise through the speakers when I really need to focus hard on what I am doing.  I tell myself this is fine, it is fun to do things we are good at.  It is good to be useful.  It is good to be appreciated.

But at the same time I have been working in this field now for twenty six years.  I'm forty eight and started at twenty two, in the fall of 1999, out in San Francisco working for BEA Systems, not to be confused with BAE Systems which is a consulting group.  So it'll be twenty six years in just a couple of weeks -- I was hired at some point in September.

The good news is I have something to show for all of these years.  I did not become rich -- never did work for a startup that gave me a billion stock options and hit a home run.  But I saved and invested my whole career, your standard stock/bond mutual fund asset allocation mixes, your 401(k)s and 403(b)s, your IRAs and Roth IRAs and S&P500 index funds and Total World shit.  

I'm at 2.040 mil.  I'm certain to drop below that at some point as the markets fluctuate.  But it's a good number for my age.  Especially considering I did this on my own.  No help from parents.  My spouse works but doesn't make much.  And has only been my spouse for a few years anyway.  

2.040 mil without counting the house.  800K equity in the house.  400K mortgage, would be easy to sell for 1.2 in the area in which we live in current market conditions.  No problem.  

So 2.84 mil net worth?

I looked at dividends on the year for 2025 so far.  30K.  I made 30K on fucking dividends on the stock market.  Will be 50k by the end of the year.  

There will come a point where I'm wondering why I'm working.

I am still working right now because of all the uncertainty in my marriage -- particularly with regard to IVF.  Will we be able to have a kid or won't we?

Kid creates economic stresses, more uncertainty, higher monetary requirements.

No kid equals the following thought on loop until I can answer it: 

what am I working for?  what am i working for?  what am i working for?

---

I have wanted to, for a while, indulge myself in making a small graph of my net worth over the years.  

I still remember when I took a six month sabbatical after breaking up with my ex, the woman I lived with for seven years.  I can't remember what fake name I gave her for this blog.  Let's say Mona.   

I broke up with Mona and moved to a shitty apartment complex in New Hampshire.  At the time my net worth was about 850K.  This must have been 2018.

It dropped to 750 in the span of six months, a 15% or so cut in the market.  Yes, it rose again, but I remember feeling constantly panicked about it.   1300/mo rent plus 2K living expenses, I was eating into that 750K meal fast, even as it was spoiling in front of my eyes.  I kept thinking well if the market goes up 8% or so a year and gets back on track, I might be OK for the rest of my life, but that's a big if.  And I'll constantly be worried about money -- the spending was too tight.  I felt shitty spending $40 to run a road race with friends.  

This is no way to live, I decided.  So I had a checkpoint with my ex employer and they took me back.  Didn't beg exactly but wanted me.  

They underpay me for my industry and I didn't care.  I also have some amount of control and autonomy there.  They don't expect me to manage.  They don't expect me to go into the office.

Getting a paycheck again was an astonishing relief.  I didn't expect it to hit me as hard as it did but when the money started flowing into my accounts, I felt safe again.  That feeling of panic receded -- the panic of feeling unmoored and adrift and possibly headed toward a future disaster world, a world in which i was unemployable because I'd been out of the workforce for too long, maybe sick, definitely much older -- that feeling went away.  I was back working, doing technical shit, this and that.  I had things to do every day, sometimes interesting, often drudgery, and it didn't matter much.

Anyway. Back to the subject.  I am going through some old journal entries where I mention my net worth.  I don't mention money nearly as much as I thought I might have.  But if I search for net worth through the Scrivener app where my journals are stored away I see a few hints.

2018:  850

2019:  950.

2020:  1.075M

2021:  There is a note in April that says 1.6.  I don't know how I went from 1.075 to 1.6 in a year and a half but that's what I see listed.  This must have been the post covid spikes.  The S&P went from a trough of 2600 or so to a peak of 4500 or so and I probably made this note somewhere close to peak.  So 40% gain or so in the market would account for this.  

2022:  In November I said:  1.3 in investments.  This is after I bought this house so I had 400K in the house as well so we can call this 1.75mil

2023:  In december of this year I stated a calculation of 2.2 mil

2024: I added another 100K to the estimated sale price of my home.  Which bumped my estimated worth up again.  I don't say much else about money this year.  This is probably a good sign.  It means I worry about it less.  It is a lot easier to not worry about money when you have a bunch.  But the S&P went up another 15% that year and my rough math says that probably brought that 2.2 mil to 2.5 mil plus the 100K for the home value increase and I was at 2.7 or so at the end.

2025:  3 something million with the recent market runup and hitting new highs on the S&P. 

I can't make or save money as fast as it is coming in.  

Despite all of this I still stress about money and try to live cheap most of the time.  I am probably going to get a free desk in Wellesley tonight or tomorrow, a beat up 5' x 3' maple top desk that I can put in the basement and work from.  I'm currently using a home depot special workbench for a computer station and it isn't the right thing to be using.  It's not comfortable.  There isn't enough space on the desk.  

I still try to mow my own lawn and hate it.

Perhaps it's time to pay someone to fucking do it.

I think the most unbelievable thing about having this money is how little I really care  about it.  It doesn't make me want to live my life in any radically different way.  

There is a finance guy on youtube that explains the point that I'm at in a clever way.  My salary is about 150K.  But my net worth is now climbing more than 150K a year, on average.  In fact, if you average the gains out over the past seven and a half years, from 850 to 3 mil, I've been earning 300K a year on investments.  Some of that amount was from home sales and appreciation too -- my condo that I bought for 225 in 2018 turned into 380K.  The house we have here went from 900 to 1.1ish.  

But the way he puts it is, if you start investing young enough, you will hit a point at which you are earning more from your investments than you make at your job.  

And you can then almost think of your investments as another you, with another job, one that pays as much or more than your current job.

In this case, my alternate self is making somewhere between 250 and 300k a year.

Maybe that's the way I should think about spending some of that money.  It's not my money.  It's my clone's money.  He's giving it to me.  He would want me to live a little better.

I think I am going to look for a lawn care person to come and fix things over the fall.  
Penny has a phrase from Ghostbusters she likes to say when indulging oneself in something -- ice cream, two hours of video games straight, a nap in the middle of the day.  Venkman gives Ray a chocolate bar because Ray did something good, and he says "you've ... you've earned it."

Yeah.  I think I have.  It's hard for me to admit it, and hard for me to spend money without trying to be "careful" about it.  But there's no question I have earned the right to do certain things if I want to.  To pay Daniel to take care of Shelley, to walk her and play with her and reduce some of the daily stress.  To buy my new computer, a top of the line rig that screams.  

And to pay someone to do my fucking lawn, to mow it when it's hot and weed the front so it looks nice again.

Maybe this will be my project tonight while Penny and I sit on the couch with the dog and hang out together.

Six forty five AM monday morning

I woke up at six twenty, my phone in bed with me, face down on the flowered bedsheet, and grabbed it, looked at the time blearily.  Six twenty two.  Late enough for me to wake up and take pills, start the day without Penny.  I picked clothes off the floor - jeans with my belt still in the straps, shoes, socks, and slipped into the bathroom.  Modafinil, lexapro, pseudoephedrine.  I could feel the top of my mouth, dry, irregular.  It's been like this for a month, my hyper awareness of the roof of my mouth.  Caused by vaping, I think.  But made worse by the drugs I am taking.  They give me dry mouth and make my tongue hyper aware of its surroundings so it probes.  

Five minutes later and I am outside smoking a cigarette under the canopy of trees that divides property lines between me and my neighbor.  One puff in and I hear rustling.  The neighbor's dog, and the neighbor, Danielle.  She is hunched over the dog.  I realize she has probably seen me and is giving me privacy.  It is not a time to say hello, good morning, how are you doing, when your neighbor is awake at six thirty smoking a cigarette.  I am not the only one who sometimes does not want to be seen.  

So I move to the rock in front of the shed, the slab that leads to the door, and puff.  I wait for drugs to kick in.  It is damp outside, damp and cool, a relief from the heat of the last couple of days.  I realize I want to write this morning.  There is nothing pressing at work.  Plenty of stuff I could work on but nothing that needs my immediate attention.

I wonder if I am happy.  I try not to think about this.  Life isn't about happiness.  Life is about getting through it.  Life is about doing useful things.  Life is about struggle and how we respond to it.

I wonder where I got that attitude.  Penny exposes herself to so many things that show her people who are not struggling.  People who appear happy.  

Happiness is often, for me, simply being busy and engaged.  It helps me to be busy and have things to look forward to do -- things to learn, achievements to show off at work.  I like when I complete something and someone says thank you.  Or, occasionally, that was fast -- the expression of incredulity thrills me and motivates me to do more.  I have such a need to do the right thing and feel special that when I am sitting idle on the couch doing nothing, I feel wasted and bored.  Wasted in the sense that my life is wasted.  

I need to exercise.  

I built my computer yesterday.  The new one, the one I allowed myself to buy.  It was two thousand bucks, give or take, when it was all done.

I let myself get the latest and greatest this time.  I rarely do this -- I usually buy shit that is older, a year or two after components have been released, so I am buying yesterday's perfectly good tech.  Not this time.

AMD Ryzen 9950x3d processor, 64 GB of the fastest consumer RAM -- DDR 5, 6000 mhz.  A new motherboard and a good one.  A NVMe drive, generation 5, the latest.  I bought an open box case, a coolermaster, to save forty bucks.  A new power supply.  A SATA controller so I can hook up all of my drives.  

I spent my free time over the weekend assembling it.  A lot of the time was transferring stuff.  Using USB sticks that let me boot into Macrium to do data transfers or Windows Recovery.  My goal was to not have to reinstall Windows.  I have so much shit configured that I wanted to avoid doing over again.  Shortkeys and WSL and VScode and desktop streaming and google drive and network sharing and on and on.

It worked.  My computer is functional today but ironically after all of that work I am writing this journal entry on my crappy Optiplex downstairs that runs technology from ten years ago.  You don't need a good computer to write.  You just need something that runs, that has a monitor, that is hooked up to a keyboard.

I think about the things left to do.  One of the RAM sticks isn't recognized so I have to fuss with that.  I'll probably re-seat the other one and try again, an operation which will require me to remove one of the CPU fans to I have access to the DIMM slots.  I should flash the motherboard BIOS to the latest.  I'll have to find another USB stick to do this because the two I have are already used for boot drives and I don't want to re-do them.  

The cables are a mess and I will need to figure out where to put the extra two platter disks because there are only bays for two on the main housing.  Research is required, either instruction manuals or google or chatgpt.

It's fast.  I didn't use it much yesterday because I finished verifying the drive at nine thirty.  My body felt tired even though I didn't formally exercise.  Probably from all of the cleaning -- I wet-vac'ed the entire downstairs, then the master bedroom and the two bathrooms upstairs.  Cleaned the wet-vac after, clumps of dog hair and grime.  Washed the filthy gray husband that I use when I lay on the living room floor and simultaneously try to work or play switch while playing with our dog.  This was a manual wash because if I put it in the machine it will never dry properly or be all right to use again.  Three loads of laundry, two for me and one for the dog.  I took the dog on walks.  I went to the grocery store to do a quick run and bought a hundred and thirty dollars worth of stuff and it didn't even seem like that much.  I took less Modafinil than normal yesterday and I wondered if that made me more tired than I should be.  I thought often about how I should be exercising more.  That I am letting myself go.  Even when I work out I do fewer reps.  I tell myself it doesn't matter -- my max weight is the same.  It doesn't feel like I'm losing muscle mass.  But I am, physically, not pushing as hard as I used to.

I had a dream last night that I was scheduled to run a marathon that morning.  I didn't want to.  I wanted to run but I didn't want to run competitively.  It as a marathon, oddly, with only four entrants.  But I was one of them.  Dreams being dreams there was no explanation for this.  Only the expectation that I perform. 

I realized the following things: 

1. I could not run more than a few miles.

2.  The fastest mile I have ever run was a single seven minute mile, on a treadmill, in my early forties.  I did it to see if I could do it.  It left me gasping, the last couple of minutes pure agony, staring at seconds ticking away slowly, red LED numbers on the LifeCycle seeming to jiggle up and down as my head bobbed from my strides.  Even at my peak I was doing eight minute miles outside and that was a strain.  My average gait is a 10 minute mile -- plodding.  The half marathon I did with my high school friends ten years ago was at a nine and a half minute pace.  At this point in my life I would do about three ten minute miles and have to stop.

3.  Which meant that I could not run this race.  I would be expected to run five minute miles.  It was competitive.  There were people watching, lining the streets.  It was a real event!  My dad was out there somewhere too, and Barbara. 

I didn't care.  I called someone.  I don't remember who.  But I called someone and said I was sick and couldn't run.  I didn't show up at the start line -- I ducked the whole thing.

My Dad and Barbara picked me up and ushered me out through crowds.  People were shouting at me.  Why wasn't I going to run?  Barbara was concerned.   How do you feel?  What are your symptoms?

My Dad, on the other hand, was disappointed.  He wanted me to run it anyway.  I explained I would not run faster than nine minute miles and I was really tired.  He didn't care.  I signed up for this thing and I would run it.

It is, approximately, at this point that I woke up.

So it was a dream about exercise and the fact that I often feel out of shape or that I'm not doing enough.

But it was also a dream about why I often feel that way -- and it probably stems from my father but is reinforced by society -- by images of people who look way too good, people who utterly devote themselves to physical fitness and post about it, people who would not have a clue where to start if you asked them to write a python server to host your home journal.  To these people, such work would seem pointless, stupid, and isolating.  They want to exercise and then take pictures of themselves exercising then get validation for this.

I want to do something with my brain and receive validation for doing something that required thought and creativity.

You do not need to be particularly inventive or creative to get six pack abs.  You do, on the other hand, probably need halfway decent genetics, a good workout program, a good diet, and the doggedness to stick through it.

Penny and I watched a movie with Donald Sutherland from the 70s and his wife tells him he is gaining weight.  He's skinny as hell, ribs visible.  The comment is not made in jest.  There are a lot of sex scenes.  Penny says it is like watching two praying mantises rub together, that's how skinny they are.  It makes me feel fat even though I'm normal, five ten, 170.  I was borderline fat a year ago at 182, back when I was drinking heavily.  Penny says standards were different in the 70s.  Less processed food, less TV time.  People moved more.  

I think I have decided to part out the old PC components.  I will make more money that way and people will expect things to work perfectly if they buy a used computer from someone.  I also no longer have a copy of windows.  That's something people want when they buy a used computer, even if it's older stuff.  The processor is still worth something.  And I will feel more comfortable selling parts that I know work one at a time.

I am going to finish exercising and then I'll get the dog up, go for a walk, boot my computer, talk to Penny

I am relieved the weekend is over and I don't have to worry about her for at least a few hours during the day.  It was another rough weekend for her.  She's a mess with the mom stuff and I swear 70% of what she wants to talk about is directly related to her mom.  I am so unbelievably sick of listening to her complain about this shit, you have absolutely no idea.

Today:  dental work.  A filling that needed to be fixed, lower left, third from the back.  Novacaine, drilling, my hands clenching armrails on the dentist chair, my brain reminding myself to breathe.

Ninety degrees out, humid, suffocating.

Headache.  Intense all day.  Intense fatigue.  Still tired.  No drive.  

Tried to increase memory clock speeds on PC at home, killed boot drive, had to troubleshoot for an hour.  Brutal.  Chatgpt helped me to restore the uefi partition.  Thankfully didn't lose data.  A reminder how fragile things are.  I had visions of having to reinstall and configure everything again.  Horrible.  A days work.  And for what?  Because I wanted to see if I could actually improve performance on my desktop marginally.

Stupid.  It reminded me how I will create problems in my life just to pass time.  

Jennie at hospital with her mom.  Exhausting to think about.  She will come home and need dinner.  That is exhausting too.  Have to get dog up, she can't sleep all night.  More energy required, more demands.  I don't know how I am going to manage everything tonight when I feel so absolutely tired, like I could sleep for a day straight and still be tired 

I should not be this wiped, I don't understand the reason for it.  Maybe it is just the dental stuff which was painful.  It took four hours for the numbness to wear off.  

Doggo time I guess.  I am going to do the minimum with her.  

Adult life is depressing sometimes.  I would like to throw myself either into an engrossing project or off a bridge 

Instead I am compelled to do these mundane acts of care taking.  Dinner, dog, cleanup, listening to my wife complain about her family or worry about the state of her aging and frail mother.  Ffs.

I don't very much feel like a captain today.

Computer:  It has been too long.  Three weeks with no Captain's log.

I have let work and life get the better of me and I am sick of it all.  

The last three weeks I have been throwing myself at work projects like a madman.  The F5 hardware upgrade -- planning, meetings, testing, discussions with vendors, reviewing documentation.  This week I created some scripts to hammer the units to sanity check throughput and hit the CPU hard, written in a frenzy, six linux clients running K6 scripts that move load through the F5 interfaces.  Got the CPU to 100% -- failures, slow response times, looks like the unit is hung.  I finished the proof of concept for the administrative logout functionality on shibboleth, which has taken weeks.  I've got a build process down so I can generate new code and move it to the systems for testing relatively quickly.  It's challenging and technical and I find that I'm kind of lost and happy when I'm coding and testing and everything else in my life kind of fades into the background as I figure out what to test and do next.  This week people on my team tested and it went fine, feature approved.  On the side I implemented centralized session handling in an oracle database.  I could talk about this for a long time but I won't.

Last week Penny and I almost went to Albania for IVF but we called it off at the last minute because she only has one follicle and we decided doing international travel for one follicle is not worth it.

Penny has been a mess, gaining weight, unhappy always it seems.  I cook and take care of the dog, this is my life now, work, dog, exercise, penny, cook, clean, avoid my mother.

She takes me for granted and I know it and I don't think there is much to be done about it.

I have to respond to emails from my friends.  I had a visit down in Connecticut with my old friends and since then I haven't done a single thing with friends really -- it's like I've dropped myself off the face of the map. 

Voluntarily.

Sometimes I come up for air and wonder who it is that I have become and what has happened to me.  I don't even know what I do for fun anymore.  Play donkey kong bananza on switch 2?  It's not fun so much as a designated way to kill time.

I'm going to shower and crate the dog and maybe I'll write that email to Sheldon that I've been thinking about writing.  He wrote on Wednesday and I know he wants an answer but of late I've been pushing everything to the bottom of the pile except work, basic self-care, dog, and Penny.

I am up in my office.  My dog is crated downstairs.

On my left is a big monitor with a window open to Microsoft Teams.  People from work are on:  John Hastings, Tim Townsend, Tom Borel, Robert "Hamburger."  A vendor guy leads us:  Casey Wallace.  I worked with him last year on fixing web application firewall stuff on our application delivery controllers.

This year he helps John to configure our new hardware.  We configure F5 OS, various networking items, then install guest tenants.  

I am bored because John is driving and there isn't anything for me to do.

I mess around with my glasses.  The lenses are progressive meaning:  the lower end is for things that are near to me, the middle range is for things at arms length or further out, and the top is to help see in the distance.

They are most helpful for the things that are close to me:  Monitors, phone, books.  Mid range stuff looks clearer but it's not as pronounced.  And although the top -- the section that helps me see far away -- is still helpful and clearer, I'm unsure about how much.  

I think I've also identified that the left frame is off.  things are still blurry when viewed through them.  I probably have to call to see if they can address it.  

I find I am fascinated by the change in my view of the world.  Different ways I shift my head result in objects becoming more blurry, or less blurry.  Sometimes the clarity stuns me and I think i haven't seen anything look this nice in years and years.  There is a three dimensional element to the world that didn't exist before -- objects pop out at me and the background feels like it has a soft-focus filter applied to it.  

I went downstairs to get an espresso and I hear the dog shift in her crate, scratch the plastic floor.  I feel guilty for not having her up.  She was up for an hour and forty this morning and then I crated her so that I could join this meeting.  She'll have to sleep for another couple of hours.  I feel like I have to exercise today -- some cardio -- I haven't been able to do more than fifteen minutes at a time lately.  I could try to do twenty today and then take a shower, eat lunch, then get the doggo up.  

I spoke to my mom for a while last night.  She guilted me:  I don't see her enough.  She wants to see me more.  Why can't she come over?

I think about what happens when she arrives.  Always bringing shit I don't want or need.  Flowers, some food that she bought somewhere and doesn't really like so she wonders if I might take, say, chocolate covered rice bars.  

She settles on the couch and immediately I feel a violation.  She is making herself comfortable here.  I don't like it.  I don't want my mom getting comfortable in my house, it feels wrong.  Then I wonder what is wrong with me, that I am so uninterested in my mom's happiness. 

childhood, of course, it always comes back to childhood.

My mom didn't meet my needs when I was young and I suppose I am resentful of this.  After the divorce, in particular, she was mostly absent from my life.  I was left on my own most of the time to figure out how to do basic things:  make dinner, do laundry, clean the house, get clothing.  She worked, and in her extra time, she worried about my brother, who was constantly a mess, in and out of mental institutions, suspended from school, destroying things in the house.  If she wasn't managing a crisis created by my brother, she either sleeping or trying to go to tag sales to buy useless junk.  Things she did not do:  worry about keeping a well stocked refrigerator.  Cook for us.  Clean or organize the house.  She was depressed and anxious and lost.  She got home from work and face planted on her bed.  Sometimes I would ask her for something and she would grunt an answer at me.   i can't i feel terrible i can't leave me alone 

Now she needs things from me and I know deep down in myself I don't want to give them to her.  Or I simply don't want to give her my time.  I want my own time.  I don't want my life to be overrun by her presence.

And yet, I give her so little right now, and I know this.  Probably too little.  

I think about the upcoming weekend:  my old friends Shinji and Josh.  Shinji will stay at my house on Friday night, and probably Saturday too.  I will drive him to the airport on Sunday.  Penny will be left with the dog.

Penny wants me to get bread at Panera.  I want to either code or play zelda.  

enough for today.

A slow day yesterday.

I wake up at 7:30, later than usual.  Take the dog out, play with her for a while, crate her.  I make a coffee for Penny and bring it upstairs.  One of her great joys in life is to be served coffee in bed, allowed to drink it for half an hour, laying back, scrolling her phone.

Once she is up I go downstairs into the basement and work out.  Mostly shoulder.  Some bicep.  Eleven sets.  Nothing special but it has been a while since I really tried to work shoulders hard so I felt it.

During the day we watch movies.  Day of the Locust with Donald Sutherland - great.  The Substance, recommended by Ray and also many of Penny's co-workers.  Stylistic but just OK, not that memorable.  A lot of Demi Moore nude and cronenberg style body horror.  

I work on a thing for my employer but tell myself that I am working on it for me.  Administrative user logout on our IdP (identity provider) server.  It is a programming task and I find it keeps my brain busy, gives me something more interesting to focus on than the schlock on television.  I got to a point on my project where I understand the next steps and need to touch base with others on the team to make a determination as to what to do next.  I will need access to an Oracle database, I decided.  I spent a bit of time trying to stand up mysql on a docker instance and was ultimately successful but then realized that if we ever go live with a solution, mysql is a terrible system to use in production.  It would be better if I used Oracle for maintenance and supportability.

Penny and I take care of the dog together.  A couple of times Penny decides to take care of the dog herself, take her out for a walk.  This is always a relief to me, to have a break from it. 

I make hamburgers and fries for dinner and it comes out great.  Penny is happy.  She uses her phrase.  this is really hitting the spot.  That's how I know she likes it.

I am trying to plan visits with friends.  Old friends, high school friends, people who understand the old me, the version of me from my teenage years, when I was sad and lonely but also fueled by the energy of youth to socialize at all costs, to find ways to be interesting and valued by other people so that I wouldn't be alone, so that I'd have connections outside of my family, which I considered to be a fuckshow circus that needed to be left in the dust as often as possible.

This is an attitude that I more or less maintain to this day.  

It looks like I will see Shinji on Thursday night.  We may have him over the house, which would be fun, I think.  I could show him where I live, give him a picture.  I am proud of the house.  Proud of making it all electric, proud of the functional basement area that I use as a gym.  I didn't just pay someone to do the work, I did a lot of it myself.  

I am sad this morning.  The usual cocktail of stimulant drugs that I take has succeeded in waking me up but not in making me feel good.  Instead I feel hollow inside, like if i reach down into myself there is muck and grime.  I feel bad for ignoring my mother over the weekend and bad for my continued attempts to avoid her as much as possible.  If I see her I tend to feel shitty but if I don't see her I also feel shitty about it.

I cannot win.  The family I wanted to run away from as a child continues to haunt me.  There is no escape from it.  I can program, I can cook, I can play Zelda: echoes of wisdom on my switch, make love to Penny, watch movies, exercise -- and that feeling in my gut stays with me through it all.  

That feeling says I am a bad person.  That I am not doing the right things, that I do not measure up, that I am the source of other peoples' problems or that I am not doing enough to fix them.  That feeling says that I do not deserve to just sit around and idle with my wife and dog.  That feeling tells me that this life is insufficient and meaningless.  It whispers to me that something must be done about this situation.

But there is nothing to be done but endure it.

I am dreaming again

For months and months and months, no dreams.  No bleeding or hoping or running or loving while I slept.  I woke up tired, my mind a void, thoughts already racing.  Things to do.  The ConstantObligations in my head.

Lately, more dreams, trickling in, slowly, spotty, here and there.

Last night anxiety dreams about travel, about being single, about not having friends.

I took a flight to San Francisco.  I was in my mid-30s but I was not in my mid-20s -- I had features of both current me and mid-30s me.  

I went to escape but found myself trapped.

The dream started with me trying to get to the airport.  I took buses. I was in a great city, one with tall buildings.  I had to transfer between buses and I was conscious of the time.  It was going to be tight.  I kept looking at the clocks around me and they all told me I was going to be late.  I had to walk from here to there, one bus stop to another, in a strange downtown area, and if I screwed up the direction and went the wrong way, I wouldn't be at the bus stop in time to make it.  If I missed that bus, I'd lose an hour.  I'd miss my flight.

Uber either didn't exist in my dream or I was too stupid to use it.

I made it to the airport.  Went through the usual panic of do i have all the stuff I need.  tsa checking things and I can't find my fucking passport.  finally I see it somewhere, back of napsack, and pull it out, relief flooding through me.  

Before I know it I am in San Francisco and I assess what I have done.  And what I did was quit my job and fly here.  I didn't have a place to stay or a job.  I walked around the hills of San Francisco wondering what to do.  Who could I call?  I went through a list and kept coming back to my old high school friend Shinji.  But he was married and lived outside of the city.  Would he come and pick me up?  

I started thinking about hotels but they were $500 a night.  I could pay that for a night but what about tomorrow night?  And the night after?  The money I had worked so hard to save would be gone before I knew it.  The weather was balmy, maybe I could just find a place, sleep outside.  

I was berating myself for not having more friends, and wondering why I did this thing, why I came out here without a job or a plan.  I heard peoples' voices in my head, people commenting on what I had done.  peter's gone of the deep end, they were saying.  nobody does this.  just quits their job and moves.  it's erratic behavior.  i wonder what is wrong with him.

In my dream, I wondered what was wrong with me too.

I woke up in bed next to Penny, relieved.  I am here.  Old, yes, forty eight.  But I am in my house and I am warm and comfortable and there is nothing urgent to do today.  In my dream I remember thinking about all of the things I had to do that very day.  Find a place to charge my phone, call friends, find a place to stay, start looking for jobs, get a decent outfit for interviews -- I might have to sign a lease somewhere within twenty four hours -- and how the fuck am I even going to pass a credit check since I just quit my fucking job?

Old insecurities.  Old fears.  Bits of my old life all mushed together -- me leaving my ex Maria nine years ago, 2016, me leaving my job around the same time to take a self imposed break and get drunk for half a year.  I drank to punish myself for leaving her, because I could not make that relationship work.  I drank because it is what I thought I was supposed to do after a breakup like that.  I drank to celebrate my newfound freedom and I drank to trap myself in a new prison because it made more sense than being completely free.

I am on the floor of the living room again, writing with the macbook on my lap, the one I got for free from my employer.  

One of the things I sometimes think about is -- why do I write about what I write about in the morning?  Why did I just include "for free from my employer" after macbook above?  Why that descriptor?  It could have just as easily had no modification.  Or a different telling detail:  glare hitting my face, reflected off the lights above.  : my mind still foggy from sleep : Penny upstairs, still asleep.

I am trying to avoid talking about penny and ivf.  I was supposed to be on a plane at this very moment, traveling to Albania to get an egg retrieval done at a clinic.  

Instead I am home.  Instead Penny and I went out to the movies and then dinner at the town sushi place that we like.  We caught Superman, the new one.  It's goofy and modern.  It is the only superman movie with a dog.  

I could write about Superman.  I could post a mini review here.  But that's not real.

What is real is my sense of relief that I am not traveling right now.

What is real is the momentary sense of peace I have here in my living room doing absolutely nothing, the quiet of the house surrounding me, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator compressor and the ticking of a wall clock.  I don't have to listen to Penny and I don't have to think about anyone else.  Even the dog is gone, kenneled at Thrive

this is her first night without us  Penny said

Yeah.  Well since she was a baby-baby, I said

how do you think she's doing?

i think she doesn't care.  she doesn't sleep with us in our bed, she's used to sleeping in a crate.  She'll be okay.  

we agreed it would be good practice to have Shelley stay overnight in the kennel for one night, even though we were going to be home because our trip was cancelled.

Our trip was cancelled because the newer reaadings from Penny's blood work showed that she had probably ovulated already, which means the eggs dropped out of her follicles and are sitting somewhere in her, waiting to be impregnated.  In ten minutes I'll go upstairs with a coffee and we'll make love.  I often don't come with Penny but I realize I will have to today.  

My father's brother is being buried in two weeks, on a weekday, in Pennsylvania.  There is a military funeral.  I will have to decide whether or not to go.  I should probably ask my Dad if he is going.  I could drive down on a crazy trip.  I could do it in a day.  It would be an interesting experience.  I will think about it.

I am going to look at porn for a few minutes to get aroused and hopefully help me finish when I'm with Penny.  I am attracted enough to her but it is sitll hard to come when we have sex.  The friction isn't quite right.  So I have to be really worked up to pop while in her and she is not going to let me stop until I come because of the ovulation.  She sees this as another chance to get pregnant, and those chances are dwindling.   For her, this will not be romance, not today.  This will be about ticking a box and getting something done.

What I want to do is work but I can't work today because I told the office I will be out of state at my uncle's funeral.  Nobody can see me online.  Penny won't want me to work.  She will want me to spend time with her.  

I don't really want this.  I want time to myself.  I always have.

One of the central conflicts in our marriage is a silent one:  She wants to be with me all the time, and I need pockets to myself, but I cannot directly come out and say this because it sounds hurtful to her.

It's hard to write after working.  

This has always been true for me.  My brain gets scrambled.  

I finished implementing auto-restart changes for our access manager gateway nodes.  This consists of a cron job that executes a script which calls out to our load balancer to shut off alerts and disable the node.  Then the cron restarts services.  Then another call out to the load balancer to re-enable the node and alerting.  Then connection tables are reset.

It sounds like a simple thing but there are SSH keys to worry about and error checking to make sure services are shut down and, on the other end, correctly started, and the alert suppressing routine was a pain to write.  

Yesterday I came up with a way to decrypt passwords on SSL certificates stored in our load balancer.  I did this mostly to prove a point to my co-worker John and his manager Tim.  And the point is:  I am smart.  

I had plenty of other things to do yesterday and didn't have to do it but I suddenly felt compelled.  Chatgpt was no help.  I wound up doing a tcpdump on traffic to sniff passwords directly off the wire.  And stuffed the password into an object that would generate that traffic.  The result was a base64 encoded version of the password, easily reverse hashed with a command line utility.  Then I validated this against the original key with openssl.  Worked, I could open the key.

Penny is out getting some readings at the lab.  Blood work for hormone levels, ultrasound for follicle size and number.  With any luck we will know today when our travel days will be and we can book flights.  We are going to Albania for an IVF cycle, maybe our last one.  If that doesn't work it is still possible we will do another cycle if the results of the diagnostics show a clear path toward success.  But if there is no clear path toward success, we may do donor egg, which will run us probably 20K.

It's only money.  We have some.  I know she is going to want to try everything before giving up.  Donor egg will be the next thing to try.  

I don't feel a compelling need to write today.  That's another thing that working early in the morning does:  takes away my will to live.  Never mind that I physically feel fine and I have some energy.  

What I don't have is drive.  There is no particular route for the energy to follow. I am three cubic meters of water in the middle of a lake, pressure on all sides, and pressure from within, pushing out, equally, in all directions.  The pressures match and I remain inert.

--

I decided to schedule a real appointment with the therapist, Matt Cerne.  I should probably come up with a nickname for him -- Scarecrow was the last therapist, named from the Batman movies, because he resembles that actor, in that role -- there is something preppy and well bred about his face, even though I know his father was a drunk because he told me so.  But maybe it is too soon for nicknames.

I managed to tell Matt that I had or have a drinking problem.  And that I smoke and now vape.  And I'm concerned about my compulsions.

I did not tell him about the modafinil.

When I told him I've concluded I have to abstain from alcohol, he indicated approval.  

I asked about his background in treating people with substance abuse problems and he rattled off a long list of things he did.  Supported alcoholics in a hospital, clinics.  

I asked about his background in finances and he said he did projections for a utility company as an accountant.  He didn't find it particularly meaningful.  I bet it was both boring and stressful.

Penny is home.  I may resume this later.  I am also trying to work out but I have to get the dog.  She wouldn't pee late last night so I am positive she has to go pretty badly.  It was pouring rain at ten thirty when I took her out -- I ran her up and down the yard trying to get her to go but she wouldn't.  She looked at me -- and yes I know dogs don't have real expressions but sometimes they look so human it is hard to interpret things any other way than as a human would -- she looked at me with a why the fuck are you making me do this kind of look.  She looked upset and confused.  you know I'm not going to fucking pee out here, it is raining buckets.  This is torture.

Inside, after giving up, I assessed the situation.  A total waste.  Me: dripping wet, my black zelda t-shirt stuck to my back. Shelley, shaking the water off everywhere.  

This is life with a dog.  A lot of extra work and worry.

Monday

It is six AM and I am in the basement typing.  I am awake.  Part of me thinks I should keep sleeping, force myself to keep sleeping, but another part of me needed to wake up and do something for myself.

This is the new me.  The me that is not a drunk.  The me that takes modafinil instead of drinking alcohol and feels shitty about it because it is not prescribed by a physician.  it's not as bad as drinking, I tell myself, and I believe it.  when you were drinking you couldn't get enough sleep.  you woke up bleary and the world seemed hostile, a force to protect yourself against.  Now the world appears indifferent.  

I could talk about the weekend, the slow drip passage of time while Penny chats about this and that, while we watch old movies, Psycho first, then B movie schlock.  Planning to go to Albania for IVF which stresses and terrifies me.  Dog care and time spent playing Switch 2 working through a game, Astral Chain, that I've wanted to finish forever but is kind of boring.

What I really need to do right now though, the thing that I wanted to do yesterday, the thing that was keeping me awake in bed when I woke up at five forty and couldn't go back to sleep, is the consult with Matt Cerne, my potential new therapist.  I'm supposed to write out answers to questions and go over it with him, according to Alama.

Share the main reasons that brought you to therapy.

So here it is, Matt.  Here are the things I don't want to tell you that I want to work on.  I will try to write these out without too much explanation.  The explanation can come later.

• I feel shitty and empty most of the time.  
• I have addictive personality traits.  (What is your background in addiction?  Did you ever use any substance yourself? )
• I stopped drinking in January.  Since then I have gotten drunk three times.  It is always hard for me to stop.
• I take modafinil, not at the direction of a doctor, but because it seems to help me function.
• I stopped smoking a month ago.  I hadn't smoked in years but took it up when I stopped drinking -- just a few cigarettes a day.  Your classic crutch.
• I replaced smoking with vaping, which I probably do too much.
• I'm also on lexapro and this is prescribed by a doctor.  Low dose, 5mg.
• I hide most or all of this from my wife, who is kind of clueless about this kind of stuff.

This combination of things keeps me fairly functional.  I would say that I function better on this combination of things than I did on the alcohol.  I'm looking for guidance on this.  

I can share other life details if we have time or he asks.  But I'd like to know what he thinks about this, to start.  I don't know if there will be time to talk about anything else.  I will be listening to him, trying to get a sense of his own personality.  Other details would be things like:

• I work at Boston College in their Information Technology department.  I mostly work from home.  
• I've been married three years, been with my wife exclusively for five.
• I have a young dog.
• I own a house in Natick.
• I am more or less financially independent.  I think about money a fair amount but don't exactly worry about it.
• My wife and I have been working through IVF for four years straight and are probably close to the end of the road (she desperately wants a child)
• I have a childhood that continues to haunt me and shape my behavior
• I worry about meaning and purpose a lot and often feel like I am not doing enough --- that I'm wasting my time in the world.
• I have perfectionist qualities that I am often fighting against.  
• I don't often feel joy.  I more or less have my needs met but there is an ache in me to do something different with the years remaining to me.  I would probably work harder on finding another path if I weren't trapped by IVF and my wife's needs, her mother with Alzheimer's and so on.
• I am increasingly thinking about aging - I'm 48 - and consider my time left on the planet and what to do with it.  

I don't think that I am a supremely complicated person or case.  It's hard for me to share these things.  It took me a long time to work up the courage to tell these things to my old therapist, who I called Scarecrow because he reminded me physically of the guy who played him in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies.  And I never did tell him about the modafinil.

There it is.  It's pretty simple when I just bullet it out like that.  The complications come, as they often do, when we begin to unpack the details.

And what I would like to know is: What will we do with those details?  Will you ask me to do things?  To try things?  Will you ask me to change behaviors?  Or will you just listen?  What is the approach?

That's it for this entry.  I'm going to try to exercise right now, before I get the dog up, before the day starts.  Penny is already up, getting ready to go out and get bloodwork and an ultrasound to measure follicles.  By the end of today we may have dates for the trip.  Then we will scramble to book flights and make sure we are ready to go.  I will have to take days off work and come up with an excuse for time off on short notice.  We will call Thrive and make sure we can board and crate Shelley for a few days.  

I'm going to at least try to do pullups.  I did absolutely nothing for exercise yesterday.  Mostly I sat around and played Astral Chain, avoided the heat outside, avoided thinking about anything too difficult.  The one house thing I did was install another three fire alarms.  The old ones had all been going haywire, breaking, beeping in the middle of the night.  In the past week I've replaced five of them and also put a new one in the basement, the room with the air handler and the heat pump hot water heater.  The one in the bedroom was a pain, I had to bring the ladder upstairs from the garage, heavy.  Kick out legs, extend it, get it in position, hold my arms high above my head with a powerdrill in one hand and screws in the other, fiddling with tiny holes that I can't see.

So maybe that was ... something?  Some exercise?

I don't know.

Another item for the list:  I don't know if I exercise because I want to or because I just feel like I'm a bad person if I don't.

When life is messy and I feel strung out by family and the dog and my mother's needs, hopeless by the consistency of the days of a middle aged white collar guy, tired from house care, bored with self-care, the exercise, doctor appointments and whatever else (I could go on but don't know where to stop)  -- I sometimes think about money.

Thinking about money is, at this point in my life, mostly a safe space in my head.  It wasn't always like this.  When I was a kid, I never had enough.  My parents were lower middle class during my formative years.  We ate at home, always:  spaghetti and meals centered around potatoes were the most common dinners, never went out, wore hand me down clothes from my older brother, drove used shitty cars that broke, got the knock-off toys for christmas, action figures from the bargain bin, used legos my mom found at a tag sale, furniture from consignment shops at best, shit someone left on the side of the road at worst, blah blah blah and so on.  If we were out and about and it was a hot day and we wanted ice cream, the answer was always no, we couldn't afford it.  Other kids would be taken to amusement parks and movies to kill a Saturday, we would just be left around the house to roam, or invited to go fishing with my Dad, which sounded more like punishment than a fun way to spend the day.  (It's no wonder I turned to reading and video games to pass time -- to escape.)

So I'm contemplating the fact that I'm sitting on two million in investments, accrued slowly, over time, over twenty six years of working more or less nonstop.  I've been working so long at this point that I sometimes think:  Twenty five years is often the length of someone's entire career.  Thirty is considered a good one.  Forty is considered a lifetime of work.  

There is a voice in my head that says:  I could be done with this.  With working.  

I spent a few years in my mid twenties really getting my financial act together.  I read books on investing and decided to go with the index-fund approach recommended by John Bogle.  This is the get-rich-slowly approach.  Dump your money in the S&P 500.  Diversify a little.  I dumped as much as I could into my employer sponsored retirement plans.  The surplus I moved into taxable accounts.  

The compound growth has been astonishing.  I do rough math in my head:   On two million, if the market goes up even four or five percent a year, on two million that's eighty or a hundred thousand dollars.  Plus another percent and a half from stock dividends -- which in my mind roughly tracks with inflation, keeping the purchasing power up.  If it's 100K a year of growth -- well.  This is almost my salary.  It's more than I spend a year anyway.  Even with the house, even with Penny.

Thoughts like this make me wonder why I'm working but then I remember how terrified I become when the market is dropping.  When the numbers are plummeting, the main thing that keeps me sane is that I'm working, that there's a steady stream of money coming in, that I have a great health care plan and. so on. 

I always reach the same conclusion:  I can't stop working right now.  Not unless I have something I really, desperately want to do with the time that I free up.  

And I can never seem to answer that question -- the what else would I do with my time question.  So instead I think of easier things.  What should I do with the surplus money I have?  We need a new porch in the back.  That's twenty thousand probably.  We could go on a real vacation somewhere -- not this trip to Albania for IVF that we're taking later this week that I dread.

I will try to open this and write more later.  Even this little bit of writing took twenty minutes and now I can hear Penny rustling upstairs and I know I should make her a coffee and we should make love, we haven't had sex in three weeks because of <reasons> -- her period, an illness the week before, my back blowout the week before that.  Then it'll be breakfast and dog care and I need to exercise and mow the lawn and by then it'll be time to go do something, just the two of us, because Penny likes to do that, go to the market with me, or hit a store we haven't gone to before.  She'll take over my thoughts with her talk of her brother and her mother and so on forever.  It will be a fight to get back to the page.

It is always a fight to do the things you really want to do.  

It's later in the day on Saturday.

Shelley lays in the grass chewing on wood chips and whatever else she can find to put into her mouth.  These things may or may not make her sick, may or may not clog her up inside, may or may not turn her solid poops into liquid messes.

I find that the older she gets, the less I care.

Here is something true:  I am often resentful of how much care the dog requires.  It grows less as she becomes older.  I can leave her alone for short periods of time, take a shower while she is out and about downstairs without too much worry, sit and type on my computer on a nice day like today while she investigates the world outside.  But I am still constantly worried about her.  Has she had enough time out of her crate to run around, exercise, and feel mentally stimulated?  Any failure is not hers -- it's mine.

I decided to have a consultation with the new therapist that I identified last week.  Matt Cerne.  He won't see me in person -- telehealth only -- but I figured, what the hell.  His profile says that one of his specialties is alcohol use disorder and we can talk about that.  I can gauge whether or not he will be of any use to me in that area.  Maybe or maybe not.

After two and a half hours of dog care this morning (I took her to the dog park for a while and that ate up forty five minutes) I closed my eyes for twenty minutes to reset a little.  Then I decided to go and do the trip preparation that, prior to the refresh, seemed impossible.  I went to Burlington Coat Factory and bought, for a hundred and twenty dollars, three pairs of shorts, three short sleeved shirts, and a pair of shoes to replace the black shoes that did not survive all of the messy attic work that I'd been doing.  Those black shoes now have mastic and silicon gunked on the fronts, the soles, everywhere.  They are also covered in insulation residue.  I could run them through the washer but I always feel like that's the beginning of the end for shoes anyway.  I may keep them around as a junk pair to put on if I do another messy job, like painting the basement or a room in the house.

I also stopped in one of those low cost haircut places -- not Supercuts but that kind of place.  A black lady cut my hair, straightening things up, making me look clean again.  

I got home and thought about exercising but changed my mind.  Instead I tried on the clothes, put things away, and found myself on the computer in my basement, the one that I've been trying to fix for two months -- I couldn't get the nvidia drivers working, couldn't get streaming services to work, couldn't get remote desktop sharing via the sunshine application working.  It's all linux and things are just a complete pain in the ass there.  So many libraries and dependencies to sort through -- something is always wrong.  But I had breakthroughs today.  Reverted to an older version of moonlight, installed via appimage, and boom, it works.  Sunshine works too.  So I could in theory finally pair my laptops against it and work on it remotely, which would allow me to set up local AI and fuck around with it, which was my original intention all along.  

So the consult with the new therapist is monday at twelve forty five and I think I'm supposed to write down what I want out of the sessions along with questions I have.

And what I think I need to do is come clean about the drug use and the drinking up front.  I will tell him I stopped drinking, more or less, since the end of January, and prior to that I was going a little nuts.  I will tell him I'm using modafinil and I'm on lexapro and I'm also now vaping, supposedly so I can stop smoking -- I've only had one cigarette since starting to vape.  But the vaping might be becoming a problem in and of itself.  I'm definitely sucking down more nicotine this way.  Vaping all day whenever I feel like it versus having a few cigarettes a day, hiding it from Penny.  Now I can vape when she's around and she doesn't notice, there's no tell tale smell, it's virtually odorless.  I can tell him that I'm looking for someone to help keep me accountable.  And I'm not exactly sure why I take the modafinil other than it gives me some alertness that I seem to lack without it -- it seems to clearly help with the depression, keep it at bay.

But I know it's really prescribed for narcoleptics and I do not have narcolepsy.   If I'm going to stay on it I should almost certainly get a real prescription instead of buying from semi-shady companies that produce pills in India and ship them over here.

I felt like drinking today -- when I was out and about doing the clothes-and-haircut errand, I was literally right next to the Wine Stop and almost went inside to get a bottle of something.  I could already hear that familiar addictive voice in my head telling me that it would be OK to do some day drinking today while Penny is at work.  She won't know.  I did the important shit around the house already, cleaned everything, I'm taking care of the dog, I deserve it.

I looked at the electronic doors opening for me and decided to stop the pattern, walked to Burlington Coat Factory next door instead, and busied myself buying new sneakers.

I'm going to go inside soon and play games for a while, I think.  Hopefully the dog will chill out.  I don't want to work anymore or do technical shit -- I can do some of that when Penny's around later tonight and we're settled on the couch watching either shitty movies or Andor.  I wanted to catch Season 2 at some point -- it came out a few months ago but we haven't seen it.  Penny prefers watching absolute schlock on Tubi.  B and C horror movies mostly.  

I thought it'd also be worth spending a minute talking about money.  

The new therapist, the one I am screening on Monday, says he has a background as an accountant and financial analyst.  this is one of the things that drew me to him, to be honest.  The accumulation of wealth has been a pursuit my entire life.  And on Friday I hit the 2M mark on investments.

Two million!  I used to have a recurring dream when I was a teenager:  I found a big bag of money, like the kind you see in gangster movies after they rob a bank -- a big duffel bag absolutely stuffed with green, twenties and fifties and hundred dollar bills.  I always woke from these dreams elated, tingling with the feeling of having limitless funds to do whatever the hell I pleased with.   I thought a million dollars was such a large amount, you know -- enough for a life of forever not working, forever doing what I want.

Now, at 48, I have two million in investments, which is roughly, adjusted for inflation, the same as the one million that as a child I thought would be plenty.  I also have 800K or so wrapped up in home equity.  Of course this is in theory all split with Penny -- we co-own, we're married and so on. 

And I think:  It's not enough.  Healthcare and mortgage and food and Penny and doggo and endless home shit that needs to be done and endless demands for entertainment -- for eating out, for going on trips -- it will never stop, it isn't enough.  

What is enough?  Three million?  Will I be there in ten years? 

I don't know.  But it's something I think about from time to time.  And I wonder what Matt will think about all of this, should I choose to tell him.

Saturday 

Yesterday, for the 4th, Penny and I went to her friends house in Millis, driving down route 27 to 115, Shelley in the car with her head stuck out the window, ears flapping, squirming on Penny's lap in the passenger side.  The oppressive humidity had broken, the temp in the mid 70's, Penny happy, Shelley happy, me ambivalent, thinking about other things.

I'd decided I would drink only if offered.  I went outside to throw the frisbee with their dog Jones, a big black lab mix.  After six or seven throws he lost interest in the tossing and the running and decided to chew on the frisbee instead, not giving me a chance to take it from him and resume the game.  I snuck vapes outside, pressed against the siding next to the door, certain no one would see me this way.  When I came inside there was a mimosa waiting for me on the table that I tried not to chug.  That was followed by another mimosa.  And another.  After three over the course of an hour and a half, we ran out of champagne.  I asked for another drink but they didn't have wine on hand and I didn't want a beer so I stopped drinking for probably two hours.  Then I grew restless and bored, Penny and her friend Macie talking and talking and talking, monopolizing conversation, enjoying themselves.  They know each others' families really well and have lots in common -- they were childhood friends in high school and hung out all the time, continued to get together after college, which separated them for a few years, had ended.  Penny talked about her family mostly, but also work.  Her absolute favorite thing to do is dump on her sister in law and brother.  We all express incredulity at how crazy they are.  Loaded.  They clear 500K a year.  And yet they don't spend a dime on Penny's mom who is late seventies with Alzheimer's.  

Penny works through stories I have heard dozens of times.  I am tuning out.  I pick up our dog and play with her ears, kiss her neck.  Her fur gets all over my shirt, a navy blue tee with comic book guy from the simpsons.  He holds a magazine in one hand and a soft drink with a straw coming out of it in the other.  Yellow text in the Simpsons font reads can't you see i am a very busy man.  Penny says this reminds me of her brother, every time.  

By three I am faded and ask for that beer.  I drink a blueberry ale out of a can in ten minutes and feel momentarily better.  Then worse.  I take another pseudoephedrine tablet and sneak vapes in the bathroom.  And outside again, taking Shelley out to pee and poo.  I hide what I am doing by facing away from the house and holding the pen close to my face, making sure I keep the smoke inside for a good twenty seconds so when I breathe out there is no vapor cloud.  

I think about secrets.  It seems important for me to have secrets, something to hide.  And something to do for myself.  this is for me, I think.  Freud thought secrets were an important part of integrating with the external world.  We keep things from others in order to have better connections, healthier connections.  Maybe that's an oversimplification.  

When everyone is outside eating burgers I find myself going through the cabinets in the kitchen looking for a bottle of vodka that I can sneak a good gulp out of but there's nothing.  After five cabinet doors are opened, I give up and realize that what I am doing is invasive and weird.  I would not want anyone doing this in my kitchen.  But the voice that tells me to drink more is strong.

We stay until close to eight.  Penny would stay there forever with Stacey.  Stacey gives her something I cannot:  constant conversation.  I grow weary after twenty or thirty minutes, and less if the stories are old and tired.  

Home, we watch an old B movie with Wings Hauser.  Penny says she wants to watch them all.  I ask if we can watch something good someday.

I think about Stacey's comment to me:  we're all so fucking weird anyway.  She had noticed something I was doing and decided that it was really, really weird.  I wondered what it was. 

This morning I take the garbage out, break boxes up, get rid of the recycling.  I wash the kitchen floor with water and vinegar because it had become gross from spills over the last couple of weeks.  Penny comes down at eight and is happy that things are clean.  I did the dishes - put them away from the dishwasher, put more away from the dish rack, load the washer, clean the sink.  I spray the countertops with Fantasic.  I wonder why we don't have a maid.  Everybody has a maid.  We can afford it.  But part of me likes cleaning.  I think of a recurring thought I have had this week.  I have enough money to do basically whatever I want.  Get the maid, hire someone to mow my lawn.  nobody will say no to me except myself.  i am the one who says no to myself.  i must like the cleaning.  I tell myself that it is part of my values -- to not outsource such simple tasks.  i get to put on headphones and listen to Porcupine Tree.  It's not so bad.  I get to purge things, to satisfy that urge to throw things out, to remind myself that I am not my mother, I am not a hoarder, I do not find it difficult to have a clean house.  Self reliance is an integral part of me.  

It was hard for me to even have help with the dog -- we have a guy who comes over and walks her on weekdays, to help me clear time to work.  Privately I admit that what he really does is clear time for me to have for myself.  I can nap or play a video game or work out.  Sometimes I have a work meeting and sometimes I don't but if the dog had to be around during a meeting it wouldn't be the end of the world.

But now I'm used to the help.  I wonder if I'd get used to having a maid come once a week too.  Probably.  This is what most people do when they have some money, hire a house keeper to come once a week and do the things I am doing today.  

Writing time is over, I have to get the dog.  I feel certain my mom will bother me today about something.  I'm not sure what my personal goals are now that the house is clean.  What will I do once the dog is all set and ready to be crated again, around ten or ten thirty?  

Maybe think about whether or not i will see this therapist Matt.  Maybe I'll talk about that more later.  And maybe I won't.

Today, seven thirty AM on the 4th of July.

I am in my basement, typing on a computer on my old kitchen table that is no longer a kitchen table but a makeshift office desktop.  This is different from where I was typing yesterday, another computer on a different desk, a work-bench style desk.  I have two separate stations because one of the rooms has been safety proofed for my dog to accompany me down here, and the other is not.  My server, the one that hosts thelastcaptainslog and might host my old blog again, is on the machine that isn't safety proofed.

I am trying to work out before the day begins, a day of Shelly (our dog), a day of Penny (my wife), a day of hot weather and Penny's friends I am wondering if I should cancel my final therapy appointment, the one scheduled for two weeks from now.  I found a closer guy, this guy Matt, in Wayland.  It turns out that he can probably take my insurance.  For $25 a visit, it might be worth seeing him.

My big concern today is a simple one.  Will I drink a lot at Suzanne and Macey's? 

Part of me wants to and part of me knows that this is death.

Another early wake up, six thirty, cannot sleep.  I make it to 6:50 lying in bed, thinking about, in turns, the dreams that came to me in the night, and, that it's time to work on my house's energy efficiency.

I am in the basement now, writing in front of my makeshift desk, a plastic bench from Home Depot that is meant to be used for house projects.  Kamelot playing out of shitty Polk audio speakers, bonded to the sides of the monitor with JB Weld epoxy.  

The combination of work and play both in my dreams and at my workstation is not lost on me.  I seek to separate the two but they cannot be separated.  They must be combined.

So I dream about trying to entertain a group of people assembled on metal chairs, the cheap kind you see in rows at a Church outdoor event.  I think I am flailing the whole time.  I have a stereo and try to play music, a variety, this and that.  We are all waiting for something else -- I am not the main attraction -- I am helping the audience pass time.  Toward the end the stereo malfunctions and it is too loud, the music coming out high gain, distorted.  It's unbearable to my ears and I imagine myself from the third person, a skinny middle aged white nerd fumbling with controls.

Before I know it, the stereo is broken.  People are getting up, moving toward the next event.  I think they are leaving me because I sucked but one of them stops and says to me nice job, you made the time go fast.

When I wake up and think about the dream, half asleep, Penny on her side breathing next to me, I think maybe I am getting better, less depressed.  Even in my dreams there is some positivity.  It's not all bad all the time.

Penny is sleeping upstairs.  I write in this journal because I can't talk like this in my real life, completely openly.  I have to listen to her chatter.  It invades my mind.  She repeats the same things over and over, seemingly without knowing she's told me this and that, Connie said this, Irene was a bitch, my brother is an asshole.  I know I know I tell her.

I get out of bed and fix the NuHeat system that controls the electric floor, radiant heating, in Penny's bathroom.  It's been on for months and months even though it is hot out.  Wasting energy, using a few kilowatt hours per day.  I've had idle thoughts about turning it off for a long time but they get swept aside in favor of dog care, Penny care, care for myself, working out, cleaning, cooking.  But it's time to do a basic energy sweep.  In the mail yesterday came my energy report for June.  700 kilowatt hours.  Staggering.  I need to spend a little time adjusting things.  I never did set the schedules on the thermostats so that the AC is not running when it shouldn't be.  I need to.  It will take me half an hour to do them all and will save a lot of energy.  Fuck the cost, who cares about the cost.  The energy usage is what makes me guilty.  The waste of it.  I will try to do this today.  

But nothing is easy.  I log into the application on my phone that allows me to change the schedule and I have to log in.  Before I can log in, the unit reports it is offline.  Right.  Because I changed the SSID on the router a while back.  I pad up the stairs and go into Penny's bathroom.  She is still sleeping.  I enter the wifi details on a keypad that has only numbers so you have to press them multiple times to find the right character, like texting in the early aughts.  It informs me that it's connected but I have to reset my password on the portal.  I go downstairs, navigate the NuHeat website, reset the password.  Finally I can log in on my phone.  I shut the schedule off.  I'll look at the energy usage again next week and I should notice the spikes between 6 and 8 AM are gone.

This is all very boring to do and just as boring to write about.  And yet, this is modern life.  Constantly resetting passwords, working through two factor authentication and so on.  Yesterday I spent half an hour updating credit card information because my old card expired.  Chargepoint for my electric car, Ting for my phone service, Amazon for a million other things.  I ordered Donkey Kong Bonanza on Switch 2 because Best Buy sent me a five dollar promotional gift since I am a member.  I am a member of this and a member of that.  Youtube sends me a bill for $18 because I use their non-ad service.  I wonder if I should keep paying for this.

I have to get going.  I had an eye appointment on Tuesday, my first tests in a year.  I think I had a test back when I lived in New Hampshire because I noticed an increase in floaters and worried about it.  At the time I was constantly drinking myself into stupors, trying to deal with the grief of breaking up with my long term girlfriend Maria.  Mad at myself for so many things.  Things I will not write about today.  I thought the floaters might be caused by the drinking.  But the report came back and my vision was fine.  20/40 or something like that.  Fine.  But this year in particular I've noticed the world looking blurrier.  It is probably because I stopped drinking that I've noticed.  When you are hung over and the world looks bleary you just sort of either block it out because you have bigger things to worry about like will you make it to noon without puking and what are you going to drink tonight, or you blame it on the hangover itself.

This eyedoctor, after a series of reading tests through various lenses, me trying to figure out if a very tiny shape is a G or an E, says I need a triple prescription.  So I'm going to pick out frames with Penny at ten.  I handed a work task off to my coworker John yesterday so I could do this.  I am going to become a member of the Glasses Wearing Crowd.  I find a picture of my Dad wearing glasses and decide that no matter what we choose today, what I do not want are glasses that remind me of him.

This will be difficult.

Up at 5:50 AM, could not sleep, I stumble to the bathroom, drink a glass of water, go back to bed.

I think about what a therapist would say to me.  Someone reassuring, someone who wants the best for me.  Someone with kindness and sense.

They would tell me to go back to sleep.

6:15 my phone chirps.  A walmart text telling me items will be delivered.  10 bags of Starbucks caramel coffee, household odds and ends.  I turn my phone's alerts off and make a mental note to do something about this today.  I have an application on my phone called tasker and I should be able to set a job to stop any sounds from texts between 11 and 7AM while allowing the phone to go through.  

At 6:30 I give up, go to the bathroom, take pills.  I decide to take less modafinil today but double the lexapro.  Tomorrow maybe even less modafinil and normal lexapro.  I go downstairs, drink an espresso, wonder if Penny will be irritated by how many espresso particles are in the sink.  She said she'd do the dishes this morning.  Monday nights she works late and I made tilapia with fried zucchini on the side, a strawberry-and-dragonfruit smoothie for the dessert.  She is wrecked.  She tells me about her day:  busy.  I am awake in the evening, my brain more alert than usual, and I wonder if I should seize the opportunity to work, to do something for myself, but instead I vape, play with the dog, watch Fairy Time Theater with Penny on the couch, an ancient show from the 80s.  We watch a rendition of the three little pigs starring Billy Crystal, Fred Willard, Jeff Goldblum.  They are dressed in ridiculous outfits, as pigs, as wolves, as shopkeepers.  It goes on and on.  

I scheduled an optometrist appointment for today at 2.  It's close by but still will mess up dog schedules.  My plan is to wake up Shelley around 8 and keep her up until ten, text Daniel that he will have to get her up on his own and take care of her.  I should be back by 3 at the latest and I can keep her up a bit longer to stretch it out.  

This morning I sit downstairs in the basement and type.  I don't know why I am doing this exactly except that in my head, part of a good day -- a perfect day -- is writing something.  Before I started the journal entry I blew twenty minutes getting replacement smoke alarms.  $120 for three, wireless, but not interconnected, so if one goes off, it won't instruct the others to go off too.  

I also reached out to a new therapist.  He lives in [town close to me] but still only does telehealth, which kind of sucks, I wanted to do someone in person.  

This is because I'm quitting my current therapist.  It's run its course.  Our sessions consist now mostly of storytelling.  I tell him about my week instead of my internals.  To be fair, sometimes I tell him about things that are actually bothering me.  It took me two years to really address the drinking shit.  I did reveal at some point my fantasies about self-harm.  (I do not take action on them and will not document them here today, they are just ideations, harmless in my opinion.)  

And he did provide, occasionally, some useful feedback and guidance.  He wasn't a terrible fit.  He was intelligent and kind.

But younger than me and seemingly not beat up by life.

Worst of all, they are having a child soon, and I don't think I can bear to talk to him while he is deep in little kid care while Penny and I are grieving about not being able to have a child together.

So I will check my insurance.  Matt doesn't take Harvard Pilgrim directly but it may be that he can provide what he calls a superbill and I can submit it to Harvard Pilgrim and have them pay it.  I'll look into it today.  

The thing that I like about Matt from the online profile is that he is older than me and his face looks worn.  

The other thing I like about Matt is that he says he specializes in alcohol use disorders.  I would like to talk about my drinking (I am abstaining successfully right now) and potentially the rest of my drug habits, and I feel he will have the expertise to help guide me -- or at the very least, understand me.  If there is a list of goals to talk about -- things I could actually use a professional to talk about -- they are:

- My alcohol use

- My smoking/vaping use, as a crutch to not drink, and how to stop that

- Possibly getting off modafinil, which is .. not great for me and is not prescribed by a doctor, but definitely seems to have helped with my depression, which is the main reason I keep taking it.

On the side, there's the other stuff of course, the constantly lurking mild to moderate depression, the cynical thoughts, the IVF shit with Penny, daily stresses.  

But those are less concrete and harder to address.  For the most part I don't expect that shit to ever go away.  There will always be marital friction, I will always have mild depression because of my childhood, my family, my genetics.  I will always have to do the ongoing work to manage the conditions.

I doubt he's the right person to talk about how professionally unsatisfied I am, but in the age of DJT and AI, I am mostly just happy to have my job -- my personal satisfaction or lack thereof with it can go to fucking hell.

I woke up at five to a sound every adult dreads:  the beeping of a fire detector cutting through the air, slicing through my dreams, urgent.

I waited until the second beep to get out of bed and do something about it.  Just to be sure it was happening and not part of my dream.  I thought the dream might be telling me something just as urgent as the alarm.

Penny told me she was pregnant.  Twins.  A boy and a girl.  She had her legs spread as she told me this, khaki pants on for some reason, the crease of her womanhood visible  Even in my dream I wondered how she knew the sexes of the babies already being that it was so early.  But she seemed certain.  The first thing I was asking was:  Does this mean we don't have to go to Albania?

I got out of bed and tried to figure out which fire detector was beeping, wondering if the noise would wake the dog up, my head cloudy from the dream.  I couldn't figure it out.  I thought initially it was the one upstairs but after waiting for another beep realized that no, it wasn't that one.  I staggered upstairs into the attic because i knew I had a step stool up there and I'd almost certainly need it to do whatever I would need to do -- push a button, reset the thing, take it off the mount, crush it with a hammer.  Anything to stop the beeping so we could go back to sleep.  The stool was, of course, in the middle of a sea of blown cellulose insulation.  I walked joists to get to it, my feet getting dirty and covered in the stuff, picked it up, walked back, one foot missing a joist and hitting drywall, me, panicked that I would go through the floor, astonished it held my weight, continuing downstairs with the stool in hand.  I found the offending unit, climbed the stool, pressed a button to turn it off.  An electronic voice, inaudible from the bedroom but clear enough when next to it, said that the wifi connection had been lost.  Pressing the button reset the thing and made it re-connect.

I went back to bed and tried to sleep.  I could feel the roof of my mouth, hot, a little burnt from all the vaping I did over the weekend.  I wondered why it was burnt and suddenly realized it must have something to do with the new coil I bought on Thursday morning.  Was there something different about it?  There must be.  When I woke up at seven forty five this morning the first thing I did was fish the old coil out of the garbage and look at it.  Gray base.  New one:  red base.  Look online:  Yes, the gray has a higher ohm value, 1.2, more resistance, less nicotine, less heat.  So I'll go back to the 1.2 coil and my mouth will heal.  It is helping me to stop smoking so I will probably keep doing it.  I will have to go to some store or other to pick it up -- there's a place down route 9 near the Scrub a Dub car wash that sells them.  It's the same place I went to get replacement nicotine fluid -- they call it e-cig juice.  I don't know if I'll go today.  Part of me just wants to go back to smoking.

Yesterday I felt like ass all day and now I think that part of it is the increased nicotine I have been getting from hitting the vape.  More than I'm used to, more than I need.  

I don't know what else to write about.  I was irritable all day yesterday, felt half asleep, kept trying to figure out what combination of drugs might help me feel better or what I might have take to feel so anxious but simultaneously listless.   In the morning Penny and doggo and me all jumped in the car to drive to the donut shop, bought six big gourmet treats, promptly ate one each, drove home, had avocado toast, and then I tried to play Robocop on my steam deck.  Ten minutes later my mother is texting me and she needs stuff.  I tell Penny it is OK, I knew I'd have to see her this weekend.  I haven't seen her in three weeks.  She wants a hug.  She wants connection.  

Penny is irritated with my mother.  She says she is not, that she loves her, but my mother's need makes it hard to love her. I would like to write and expand on this but I feel it is important to get the dog.  I would also like to write more about the upcoming trip to Europe for IVF treatment -- obviously this is the source of my dream -- but thinking about it is painful and writing about it will take probably twenty minutes and I've written so much about IVF in the past that I'm not sure how necessary it is.

And yet, I know it's necessary.  If I am a writer, I should be unpacking these things.  I want to unpack them.

But another part of me wants to just leave it all in the box and instead live my life, play Robocop, shoot criminals, ignore everything as long as possible.

I suppose this is completely normal.  within normal ranges of human behavior is a phrase I like to deploy when identifying some tendencies of mine.  I use a psychoanalytic voice when I say this to myself, because I cannot argue with a doctor's professional reassurance.

I need to work out today, to exercise -- weights, curls and shoulder and yes, finally, back, I will work my back out for the first time in two weeks, when I injured it doing shit up in the attic.  It's time to invest myself in my old routines -- without them I feel lazy and lost.  I hate the routines but I also need them.  

Speaking of routines, the dog awaits.

It is eight in the morning and I have assumed the usual position on the rug in front of the couch, trying to clear my mind and think about life before the day begins.

I might as well talk about dreams.  I rarely remember them any longer.  When I was in my twenties I would often have vivid dreams with details that I could remember for an hour after I woke up.  Dreams where I visited my grandparents' house and grandma and grandpa were still alive, walking around, but never talking, dreams where I flew across cities but, despite having this incredible power, when I showed it off to my friends, they were not impressed, dreams where I would fall down mudslides helplessly into an infinitely deep fissure in the Earth.  

Last night I dreamed I met George R. R. Martin as a younger man, for no apparent reason.  It's been years since I've seriously thought about Game of Thrones.  Maybe it is because Penny and I are watching some of Beauty and the Beast, the television show from the late eighties with Linda Hamilton in it.  Apparently he wrote it.  This is before anyone knew who he was but he had already been writing for decades.  

In my dream I wondered about his involvement with the show and asked him.  He produced part of it as well.  I asked him how, as a writer, he transitioned into television, and he told me he was nervous about it, uncertain at first as we all are when we try something new, but he held a strong conviction that video  -- as opposed to a book that only contains words -- was merely another viewport into the story, and he was a storyteller, so he would be successful if he worked at it steadily.

I also asked if he was Ser Piggy in Game of Thrones.  And he laughed and said of course, that is how I wrote myself into the story.  Fat and unloved by his family, insecure, forced to make it on his own in a cold and hostile environment.  But a hard worker.  Someone who could spend hours doing research because it was interesting.  Someone who honed his own mind over time.

Then I woke up, Penny next to me, seven o'clock.  I took drugs to wake up.  I ordered things on amazon that will help me to stay organized  -- I am now taking various powders in the morning and want to make this process more manageable.  The plan is to pre-mix the powders into containers so I can set up for the week in advance and make my bleary mornings a little easier.  I'm tired of having a shelf in the laundry room just absolutely strewn with packages of magnesium and creatine and phenylalanine and whatever else.  

Penny a disaster last night, a mess.  Five twenty and she is texting me she needs to go out tonight.  I agree to it but have to of course manage the dog so I wake up the dog earlier than I wanted to and do an hour of close attention with her, playing.  We create her and go to a restaurant in town, a five minute drive.  Penny doesn't even eat much.  She is stressing about her mother, about Alzheimers, about the home care Nikki that takes care of her mom, Nikki's demands, Nikki's upcoming vacation.  She complains about her cheap asshole brother who is a lot less helpful than he could be.  I have heard everything before and I am bored because I want to work on my coding project for work or play Robocop on my computer or anything other than listen to the same stories again but I know she has had a terrible day so I listen, listen, listen, try to ask her questions to get her to open up and keep talking.  It's OK, I tell myself.  It's all right.  She is my wife and I love her and she needs this more than I need to do what I need to do.

I think my time is up.  I will say one last thing - I have been conversing with chatgpt a lot.  I asked it to simulate Dr. Freud  -- an older man, a therapist, a hard working weirdo -- and I ask it all sorts of questions.  I ask HIM about HIS mother.  I ask him how hard his life was, where his inner struggles lay.  Today I will ask him if he was a big fan of vacationing and posting about it on Facebook.  He will probably say no but he loves Insta Reels for when he needs to floss a little.  That crazy Freud.

Time to get the dog.

I want to work out today:  pullups and chest.  It is often a struggle when I have a weekend day with Penny.  She is going to want to have "fun" and I don't always think we have the same idea of fun but if I don't engage her I can feel her unhappiness radiating off of her.  I would also like to do more in the attic -- I made a lot of progress yesterday, the end in sight -- but I probably will wait until next week, when it becomes somewhat easier to manage with Penny at work. 

Wish me luck today. I often find the weekend days with Penny are harder than the week days when I have more time to myself.

Computer: 

My brain has decided that the normal wake up time is some time between five thirty and five forty five in the morning.

I go to bed around eleven.  This means I am now getting six and a half hours of sleep.

I should not wonder why I am frequently exhausted mid-day.

Initially I try to go back to bed but under the covers with Penny next to me my brain swirls with the day's obligations and the defeats of yesterday.

I could not figure out how to get a certain nested loop structure working in my screen scraping code for my job.  I suddenly have an urgent need to finish it, after a week of completely ignoring the thing.  I have a need to prove to somebody -- anybody -- probably mostly myself -- that I can do this thing.  I realized late last night, while ignoring Penny and my dog, leaving them alone to watch, first, a french movie called The Vourdalak (artistic and weird) and then, a bit later, Poop Cruise, one of the most soulcrushingly stupid documentaries that Penny has seen, a chronicle so dumb that even she could not watch it, she who recently started to suck down episodes of Virgin Island, that I have to restructure the loops or it will never work.  And adjust the way a certain function operates.  And this refactor will take time and it will be difficult to re-assemble some of the pieces that currently work after the refactor but there is no other realistic way forward.  it must be done or I will not succeed.

At least I see the path.  In my own life, my personal life, I do not see a path.  Penny and the dog are exhausting.  I struggle each day to find time for myself and when I finally have it I throw it into work or youtube or casual and mostly harmless drug use:  drinking more coffee, taking a pseudoephedrine tablet, seeing how I feel after downing 200mg of phenylalanine (one of the chemicals in diet soda -- it's a precursor to dopamine and can increase the body's ability to create it.)

Yesterday I left a long comment on someone's youtube channel thanking them for their content.  It was probably a weird comment.  Later in the day I look at the channel and notice that the creator of the video replied to three comments made before mine and three comments after it but not mine.  

The creator is a stranger and we don't know one another and yet the fact that he certainly read my comment and didn't respond to it stings me somehow, the familiar sting of rejection from when I was a child, always misunderstood.

In my professional life, I know what the right things to say are.   But sometimes in my personal life I loose the thread, veer into strangeness.  

It makes me feel like my mother, who often overshares with strangers and makes everyone keenly aware of her needs and problems and frailties -- her depression, her knee trouble, her loneliness and her fear of going to hell when she dies.  My mother whom the world often rejects, my mother who would do better finding a more graceful way to interact with people to get what she wants.

When I fuck up socially, I am suddenly my mother, I realize in bed, while trying to go back to sleep.

It is at this point that I realize I will not be able to go back to sleep, that I'm up for the day.  These are not thoughts that will lull me back.  My brain is upset and will continue to think about things that upset me until I tire myself out.

How will I tire myself out today?

By trying to do useful things.  By trying to please others -- by completing something for work.  By walking my dog, by caring for Penny.

But also by exercising and by trying to finish another part of the HVAC in the attic and by reading my friend David's story, Avalon's Heart, and providing feedback.

I will do these things today, not out of a sense of guilt or obligation, but because I recognize that I want to do them for myself, so that I can be the person that I know I am.

I wake up at five twenty, pee, and stumble back to bed.

My brain is half asleep and half buzzing with ideas.  I am thinking about Patterns, the idea I have for a book, the book I might make my old high school friend David read.

I am wondering if electromagnetic fields around wires are detectable and if a ghost might be able to produce or interpret them.  I am deciding whether or not there can be transference by touch.  And so on.

Later today I will open the text box on the editor I use to make updates and I will try to recall some of the ideas I had swirling around in my sleep addled brain.

I think the best time to sort these things out, these strange plot details, might in fact be when I'm half asleep.  I'm not critical of myself when I'm like this.  The voice in my head that is always watching, judging, analyzing -- it's gone.  It hasn't just shut up, it is not in the room sitting quietly so to speak, it is not in the room at all.  So I don't think thoughts like is it okay to drop a baby in a pot of boiling water or is that going to stop everyone from reading.   Instead I just think:  The ghost of this demon witch is going to drop the baby in a pot of boiling water.  It simplifies everything in my head.

Not now., though.  Now I am awake again and that voice, my Overseer, is again speaking loudly and even now it is saying don't write in your journal, this is a waste of time, you should go and get the dog and walk outside before it gets too hot, you should start working on items for your job, you should fix your hair before you go outside.  It says all of this even though the coffee hasn't even hit yet. 

Later today it will try to convince me to work on something other than writing.  Update the blog interface instead.   Make the post history searchable.  Create a calendar widget so you can post at a specific time.  Make sure you start backing up the database file because you won't want to lose everything if there's some kind of issue.

A lot of what it says makes sense, this voice.  This voice helps me to be a healthy, responsible adult.  It often has good thoughts, suggestions that keep me in line, things for me to do that are responsible and helpful for my well being or the well being of my family.

But it is death to creativity.  The last thing that The Overseer wants is for me to do anything creative and fun, anything that might make me more personally fulfilled.  It does not care about my personal fulfillment.  

Here is something I did yesterday for the first time in a year:  I opened my editing software and looked at what I had written for Patterns.  And while it's not great, it's not terrible either, there are decent parts, there is something here that is maybe worth writing.  I want to take this brief moment in the morning to feel good about something I did yesterday.  I so rarely give myself credit for anything -- my damned overseer doesn't care about what I did, it only cares about the things I have left undone.  you didn't finish the lawn mowing, it tells me, and so on.  It doesn't care that it was a hundred degrees outside yesterday or my back hurt, it doesn't care that I did manage to do my weight workout, make dinner for my wife, do some small tasks for my job, manage to not drink any alcohol, took care of my dog.  It doesn't care about me.

It only cares about The Obligations and whether or not I have fulfilled them

Writing for pleasure is not an obligation

The toxins are leaving me.  The world, shimmering and unclear this morning, like one of those wavy mirage effects that you see in a movie where someone dying of thirst sees an oasis in the distance that doesn't exist, has coalesced and become steady again.  I don't quite feel normal, but I am okay.

I am okay, I tell myself.  I am okay.  I will stop thinking about what I did yesterday.  There's no point in feeling guilty.  Just get back on the wagon.  No more drinking.  You don't have any more booze in the house, the oxy is gone, just find something to do and do it.

What I am thinking about is writing.  I don't mean writing in this journal.  What I mean is writing for real - working on a book or some other project that might go somewhere.  Every time I get close to it -- to writing for real again -- I stop.  I don't allow myself to do it.  I find a chore to do, go buy something, take a nap, play a video game.  

I have the time today.  I have a bit of work to do tomorrow in the morning but it needs to wait -- I am waiting to see if a job that runs overnight in our development environment completes successfully.  If it works, I will promote it to our quality assurance (qa) environment.  It will probably take me an hour.  I could do it now but there's no point in rushing it.

Late Sunday night, I received a group text chat from my old high school friend Michael.  He is going to Europe to check out an international Strong Man competition, along with his wife and kid.  They love that kind of thing, taking trips to see athletic events.   There is some slight irony in the situation because Michael is one of the skinniest, smallest adult males I know -- he's about five four and bean pole thin, runs like a whip through air, barely any resistance to hold him back.  When I used to run, before all of my back issues caught up with me and put a stop to it, I rumbled along more like a bouncing sack of onions.  I was in okay enough shape and could run for long periods at a stretch but the pace was always slow, somewhere between a plod and a shamble.  Power walkers would pass me. 

I politely declined the invite.  To attend would mean getting a flight and planning the adventure basically immediately -- and there's just no way.  I am not a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person.  I would need a month to figure out the logistics and feel comfortable doing something like this, getting a plane to London, getting a hotel, taking the time off from work, figuring out what to do with the dog.  I am going to Europe later this summer anyway, my first trip there, so my wife can undergo an IVF procedure in a special clinic.  The details for that are not yet set and I am already nervous enough about it.  

Yesterday David replied to the group text and said maybe he'd be able to meet up with Michael.  Then he asked if we would read the latest entries to a book he is working on.  Avalon's Heart.  I read some of it a year ago and wondered how Michael was getting along with it.  The writing is decent and I found myself to be intrigued.  Michael has a difficult time completing projects -- he writes a lot but jumps around from one story to another.  

We used to write together in high school, the two of us.  We'd take turns writing paragraphs of the most ridiculous shit possible, and teenage boys can come up with some ridiculous shit indeed.  I remember Michael would try to make his paragraphs grounded, with rich characters, and I would blow them up by inventing bizarre sexual fetishes for them, uncontrollable urges to face-fuck muppets for example, delighting in coming up with the most offensive lines possible.  

Back then I allowed myself to be completely free, I think to myself with some amount of wonder.  I would write the absolute worst thought that I could think of and then expand on it.

I don't do that anymore.  I program for a university.  I follow processes and procedures and worry about how people perceive me.  Perception is often more important than reality.  I worry about the efficiency of my HVAC system and whether or not we need to re-order the coffee creamer that Penny likes.  

We all agreed in the group text that we would love to read the updates to Avalon's Heart.  I worried I wasn't supportive enough or didn't say the right thing but tried not to overthink the response to Michael.  

And then I felt the old jealousy.  David is a writer and you are not, I think to myself.  This has always been such a stupid dream of yours, that anyone is going to notice your writing and care.

They are depressive thoughts, as familiar to me as my face in the mirror.  They keep me from doing anything.  

David has in the past offered to read anything I wrote, and I took him up on in a few years back.  Just before I moved to [town outside of Moston] I sent him the first three chapters of Patterns, the book I had been writing.  He liked it.  When we met up two years ago in Portland, he asked if I'd written any more.  I said no, I was too busy catching up on my youtube feeds.  He took it as a joke.  I wished I was joking.  At the time I was watching three hours of youtube a day, mostly video game content.  (I still watch youtube a lot but not three hours a day any more.  It helped that I deleted the custom app from my phone and instead force myself to use the browser interface instead.  It's not quite as easy to sit and binge this way.)

He would say things like  you really should write more, it's not bad.  Imagine a book published with your name on it!  Excitement would light up his face.  You might even make a buck.

He's not wrong but it's terribly difficult to allow myself to write when I know someone else is going to be reading it.

This blog, or journal, for example -- it's not going to be read by anyone.  I mean, in theory it could be, but in practice, it won't be.  I am publishing the entries online simply because it makes me work a little harder on the entries and holds me accountable -- I'm more likely to fix spelling and grammar issues on the off chance that someone does read this shit.  The "it's sort of public" status encourages me to write with a higher degree of coherency.

Still, I often wonder:  if not now, when?

I'm 48, closing in on 50.  I'm married.  I have a house and a dog and I'm not poor anymore.  I have the type of job which in theory gives me time to write, if I make it a priority.  I could make it a priority.  

Then I shut down.  The old thoughts return.  My writing is no good.  I don't have any good ideas.  When I sit down to write something literary, something real, it feels like I'm out on a tightrope, unbalanced, bracing myself to fall at any moment.  Scratch that, it's more like I'm on a diving board, because at least on a tightrope, the way forward is clear -- one foot in front of the other, until the end of the line.  On the board, if I keep walking, I will fall off, plunging downward to god knows what is underneath.  Probably a vat of acid.  

It is easier to play a video game, watch a B movie with Penny, take the dog on another walk, work out, scan my phone for news and videos, let the time pass without working, without fear of judgment, without taking any chances.

But my idea of a perfect day includes writing, and I can't seem to get rid of that internal ideal.

I've had new ideas for the book, though.  Things that give me direction and motivation -- ideas that extend the length of that diving board.

Maybe I can give it a chance again.

Today I will be perfect.

I will walk the dog.  I will be nice to my wife Penny.  I will exercise in the basement, pullups and chest work and light squats for my back.  

I will not think the bad thoughts that I had last night, stumbling around, buzzing from the wine and oxycodone.  I will not think that my marriage is flimsy, or that my friends hate me, or that I am useless at my job.  

I will stop this constant drug seeking behavior.  The oxy is gone, twenty 5mg pills prescribed for my back blowout, gone in a week.  The prednisone, gone too.  I still have the muscle relaxants but they do nothing for me, there is no draw.  Something about the oxy makes me want to get very, very fucked up and I become reckless.  I want to drink the world.  It is a small wonder I was able to stop myself from going to the liquor store in the evening, before Penny got home, buying a bottle of vodka, and becoming a hot mess.

It is eight thirty in the morning and it is already eighty degrees outside.  It will hit a hundred today and the humidity will make it feel like the tropics.  Instead of working on climate change, we, as a country, went to war with Iran.

I know that there is nothing appreciably different about the state of the world with regard to climate change just because we are having an intense heat wave, but the heat increases my sense of urgency around the issue, makes me feel something close to despair, and I have to work to push it away.  

I took a ten minute break and took the dog outside into her pen, a fenced off area between the porch and the open path to the front yard.  She can't quite jump up to the deck so I use that as one of the walls of the fence.  I worry that one day she'll be able to make the jump and she'll escape when I am not watching.  While she is in the pen I do ten minutes of lawn mowing, something I haven't done in weeks.  The grass is bushy and high and I have to empty the catcher constantly.  I did five runs, emptied five times, completing maybe a quarter of the backyard.  Shelley was becoming aggravated, barking at me, the lawn mower, her own sense of loneliness because I had left her to spend time with this noisy machine instead of her.  So I stopped.  It was time to stop anyway -- just ten minutes out there made me sweat into my t-shirt and jeans.  I felt lightheaded and wondered if I was already out of shape from just a week of inactivity.  Probably.  The back issues really shut me down.  I need to do some exercise today but I don't really feel like it either.

you will do it, you will have a perfect day, exercise is part of a perfect day

I am probably also lightheaded from all of the shit I put into my body over the last few days.  I have a hangover of sorts, not a terrible one, but that feeling is present, that gritty achey feeling that signals that something is wrong, that I'm dehydrated and probably low on sleep and whatever else.  

It is like I am not real, that the world is not real, nothing is real.  Everything seems flimsy and fake, some kind of facade overlay over the world.  I see Penny and she doesn't really exist, does she?  My stomach roils and I can't tell if it is because I am sick from last night or I need to eat something.  I drink coffee in an attempt to adjust the knobs on my viewport to the world.  Drugs adjust the viewport. 

I think of my mother and her own use of drugs.  Cannabis?  Nope.  Alcohol?  No no no.  These things are bad, according to her.  She assigns negative moral value to their consumption.  But prescription drugs -- those must be all right, yes?  They are prescribed by a doctor.  A certified specialist has confirmed that it is ok, that she needs to take adderal, tramadol, xanax.  So she cycles through them, careful to keep track, always worried she is becoming addicted.

When I'm hitting it like I am yesterday, I stop worrying about the health consequences.  I stop worrying about whether or not I am becoming addicted.  I just hit it, hit it, hit it.  Does it feel good to puff nicotine from my vape machine?  Great, I'll do that and keep doing it until my lungs feel burnt and I can't taste anything on my tongue.  Is the wine giving me a floaty feeling?  Great, then keep chugging until I feel sick.

I know I shouldn't do these things but when I'm in the midst of it, I don't care.  My liver might be getting scars from cirrhosis and my lungs can't be in wonderful shape but who cares fuck it fuck it fuck it

I am going to try to exercise now and get it out of the way.  The dog is crated and I have a few hours to myself.  I will get the staple gun out of the attic and try to put up some of the mesh downstairs between sets.  Maybe I will implement the auto-restart job in the QA environment for our Access Manager servers.  

Let's go.
 

Same day.

It's six eleven now.  I was tempted to go to the local package store and buy something, anything:  a nip of vodka, a bottle of white, one of those four packs of wine that each hold a drink and comes in a cardboard carry case with a handle at the top.

this is something that i permission myself for, I realized.  I want to drink.  I somehow say it's fine to spend twenty minutes out and about getting wine to fuck myself up but it's not ok to sit down for twenty minutes and write instead.

I don't know why this is.  It has to do with patterns, I am sure.  What we are used to, what we do on auto-pilot, so to speak.

Since I wrote last, just a couple of hours ago, I went around the house and cleaned stuff.  why do you need to write about what you just did why why why this is a waste of time my inside voice says

[this is the same inside voice that just told me it was totally fine to go to the liquor store and get booze so I could be really really drunk tonight and hey it's just twenty minutes or so, why are you so bothered about it?  This inside voice justifies certain activities easily and then forbids others.  It is a son of a bastard and I wish I could rid myself of it, the nonsensical shit of it all]

I organized my bathroom countertop and cleaned the tub, a tub that has had, for the past two weeks, a semicircular spiral of hair stuck to the back of it, from where I collected a clump of it from the drain while showering, probably because it was preventing water from disappearing downard, forcing a backup, my feet covered in dirty soapy water while I attempted to rinse myself.

I threw away all sorts of shit, used dental floss, packages from pills I've taken, bits of band-aids, protective barriers from sticky sides that I discarded as I hurriedly tried to wrap a fingernail that I'd bitten to the quick.  I sprayed Fantastic over everything and used an old sponge to wipe and clean.  I uplifted bits of insulation from the mats, blown in cellulite insulation that I tracked in from the attic on my shoes and I know drives Penny crazy when she sees it, a reminder that I'm nuts and I've been fucking around in the attic trying to air seal and get the zones working efficiently.  These are things that Penny just doesn't fucking care about but I am compelled to do.

[just now i feel a bit of relief that I am not drinking more, instead of regret that I am not buying more booze, a good feeling, something that I would like to capture and hold but is almost certainly fleeting]

I went into the laundry room and discovered old milk jugs, gallon sized, each with a tiny bit of vinegar in the bottom, because when we get a new milk, I take the old one out of the refrigerator, pour the remaining milk into the toilet, and then rinse it with water before adding vinegar so that the remaining bacteria gets killed and it doesn't smell like a fucking bomb went off when we try to discard it -- our trash service only comes once a week.  So I grab the jugs, do a final rinse, and put them in the recycle bin, thinking all the while about how pointless recycling is, that it's 95 degrees here in [town of Massachussets] on fucking June 23 and all of our efforts to recycle and combat climate change have done jack shit.  I do it anyway, despite the hopeless feeling in my heart.  

I see Penny has two big jugs of laundry detergent and I pour one into the other to consolidate them and then I toss the one that is empty into the recycling bin too.  The recycling bin is in our garage and it's not attached to the house and every time I go outside to toss something the heat hits me like a wall, and I push through it and become transported into a new universe, one where it is hard to breathe and everything is white hot and bright and terrible.  this is climate change, I think to myself, the follow up thought frequently being I don't know how we ever came to call it climate change instead of global warming, what a victory for the republican fuckheads who brand everything and so on.  

The thoughts are so tired to me, so well tread and habitual, that they barely register.  They register a little better when I write, like I'm doing now.  I'm forced to articulate all of the little flashes.

I want a drink, the voice now comes.

fuck you,  I tell it.  it's almost time to get the dog.

I cleaned the toilet, scrubbing the ring of piss-and-shit from the water line, ignoring the feelings of disgust.  I brought out a big yellow sponge and did a quick once over on the floor, mopping up bits of hair and clipped nails and half a muscle relaxant pill from a couple of days ago when I split it with my teeth and the end that didn't wind up in my mouth caromed somewhere I didn't notice at the time.  I got rid of a stain on the hardwood in the adjacent room that looked like blood but might have just been tea.  Then I brought a trash bag from downstairs in the storage shelf back upstairs and emptied the trash upstairs into it, threw hair and paper towels and whatever else into it. 

Mundane stuff.

I kept thinking I don't have anything else to write about.  There's nothing left. 

Then ideas flood into my head.

what about the group chat with your high school friends today?

What about how you want to write your book but never ever work on it?

What about your so-called addictive personality and your attempts to suppress it?

There are a million fucking things.  You could write indefinitely.  Talk about your mother, for fuck's sake.  That's what Freud always says.  Tell me about your mother.

All true of course.  Which is why I mostly don't write at all.  There is too much.  

It overwhelms.

Let's get the dog.  Things are simpler for her.

Computer:

It is hard to write.  

It is not hard to string words together.  This is easy.   Word A follows word B and so on.  I feel this way.  She said something.  A <subject> <verb> <additional description>.

The difficulty lies in permissioning.

Spell check tells me that is not a word.  But it is.  Permissioning is the act of granting yourself permission to do something that you feel is not all that important.

This is something I am absolutely terrible at when it comes to allowing myself to engage in hobbies that, on the inside, I truly value.

I am good at giving myself permission to work on household tasks, work related items or projects, and caretaking my wife Penny.

I am not so good at giving myself permission to write, play guitar, or engage in any activity that my brain might flag as 'artistic.'

When I feel the mood come on -- when I feel that I simply must write something or I will burst -- I instead do mental checks.  What things do I need to do before I will allow myself the indulgence of writing?

Are the dishes done?  Is my laundry set?  When is Penny coming home from work?  What am I going to cook for her for dinner?  Is that all set?  I am literally now wondering if I have something available for her to eat.  She will be home at eight twenty or so and probably starving.  I do not have anything planned.  I need something planned.  The gears turn.  We had a hamburger last night.  Maybe I can make chicken and something.  I will have to thaw it out.  [I went and took it out of the freezer just now.  We will have chicken and mac and cheese.]   Did Shelley, our dog, get enough attention and exercise?  Is it safe to ignore her?  Do I have emails to respond to?  [Yes, several:  my friends B and R need a response, my father is waiting for a sympathetic response to the email he sent about his brother Mike being at the end of his life and in hospice care.]  Am I behind on work?  Have I done enough to feel productive?  Have I exercised and taken care of my body?  Should I treat my face for eczema or wash my hair or shave my pubes or clean my bathroom?  Should I do a financial checkup?  

When can I say I have done enough so-called productive things to allow me to just sit and write?  To examine my thoughts?  

never.  you have never done enough.  you cannot cannot cannot.

And yet, I allow myself to do such things as:  Play inane video games.  Watch youtube videos.  Nap.  Figure out what drugs I will take next to keep my mood buoyant enough to get through the day.

Writing is always the fantasy that won't leave me alone.  The thought of sitting down and just letting the words spill out of me is simultaneously exciting and completely depressing because I so often table it, brush it to the side, unimportant.

Even today.  I woke up early, took stimulants, and did a quick and dirty journal entry.  Then I took off to get my dental work done.  I am finally getting my TMJ addressed -- I have issues with my jaw joint, crackling when I chew or open my mouth, occasional locking.  

Afterward I took care of some chores, my cheeks slightly swollen, my back still aching from the injury from last week.  But I also needed to hit the Vape N Smoke, because I started vaping a week and a half ago in an attempt to quit smoking, which I took up again in an attempt to stop drinking.  My world reels, I have all of these things to do, some of them good for me and some of them bad, some of them secret things, coping mechanisms, addictions and past times that I use in an attempt to distract myself from my regular life.  They make my head spin.  Should I do something for Penny or something for my job or something for myself?  Should I reward myself or punish myself?  What might feel good?

I walk out of the Vape N Smoke with replacement cartridges for the pod I bought a week and a half ago.  I wanted to make sure I have spares on hand for when, inevitably the one I am using shits the bed.  I try not to think about the Indian guy who sold them to me, the guy wearing a white T-Shirt that said Calvin Klein on the breast pocket, the guy who must hate his job.  Does he own the place or just work there?  Who works at a Vape N Smoke anyway?  Was he educated?  Did he have other plans in life that got derailed?  

Next I head to the BJ's wholesale discount store to get a new blender because the Ninja I had broke just yesterday while I was making a smoothie for Penny.  Right in the middle of obliterating strawberries and frozen passionfruit, I smell the telltale odor of motor failure, burnt oil and sour plastic.  It is done-ski.  Penny smells it too.  Planned obsolescence strikes again.  Five years isn't too bad, Penny says.  We use it a lot.  The previous night, in bed, I had been scanning amazon and costco and target and bjs for ideas about what to get to replace it.  While I do this, I have this underlying thought in my head that I often have lately when I am on the lookout for something new to buy.  It is:  I am a great consumer.  I am not good at much but I am a great consumer.  Other people make time for their hobbies.  I make time to buy shit, do my research, get up early and stand in line for the Switch 2 on release day, get the Bissel Carpet Cleaner (for Dogs!) on sale at Costco, find video games cheap for Steam.  What I am shitty at is everything else.  I buy the Ninja for a hundred bucks.  It has a thirty two ounce cup and a twenty four ounce cup and a full sized sixty four ounce blender for when you want to make a full on fuck ton of something, daquiris for guests, meat slurry for frozen dog treats, whatever else you can think of.  I buy a pound of strawberries because they are too good to pass up, and, for good measure, grab three cases of seltzer water for chugging around the house, because since I quit drinking I slug a lot of seltzer water instead.

Then I remember I need to replace the wine that I drank yesterday.  It is only a matter of time before Penny notices that I drank the rest of the Rose that she keeps in the pantry for emergencies.  So I do a big loop around several traffic messes to get to the Discount Wine and Liquor place and I spend ten minutes there looking at stuff before getting a cheap bottle that I plan to pour directly into the empty in the closet, on the off chance that Penny remembers that it is Castle Rock Rose on the label that she'd been drinking before.  I get a nip of vodka too.  I drank that an hour ago.  So much for being sober. 

It's fine it's fine don't worry about it, you will go back to being sober tomorrow, my inside voice says.  And it's right, I know it is.  I am not going to go back to the drinking shit that I did last year, when I was slugging a bottle of wine practically every night and trying to hide it from Penny.  

Finally I allow myself to go home.  My face hurts but it's already de-thawing from the anesthetic they pushed in there during the dental procedures, the numbness fading.  I leave everything in the car, go in, say hi to Penny.  She's just crated the dog.  I have time.  I tell her about the procedure.  I tell her I'm fine.  But I'm not fine.

I'm never fine

I'm tired and sort of depressed because, despite the fact that we have a good life -- and we do -- I'm unhappy most of the time.  I tell her I have to work but I don't, not really.  I've cleared the day.  I told my manager I would be out in the afternoon for doctor appointments and I have already done the work I needed to do for today in order to feel somewhat online and productive for my job.  I don't have anything that absolutely has to be done.  I tell Penny I need to log in and work anyway -- I tell her this because if I don't, I fear she will talk my ear off.  

So I do nothing.  I do nothing and feel nothing.  I lay on the couch in the front room that we call The Library because it has a big full bookshelf and not much else.   I put a pillow on my stomach because that helps me feel secure and I close my eyes and think about what I might do today.  

I could write, I tell myself.  If I nap and Penny leaves for work and I wake up and take care of the dog for a while, then I can write.  

When I do wake up twenty minutes later, Penny is still around.  She asks how I feel.  Fine, I tell her.  Cheeks hurt, back a little stiff, but fine.  Inside I feel lazy, useless.  What have I done today?  Nothing.  Still I wait for her to leave.  There is something freeing about seeing her driving away from the house, leaving me here to myself and the dog.

I get to work.  I take wake up drugs.  Espresso.  Pseudoephedrine.  I start on the nicotine, vaping.  I think about how I probably have addictions but then I remind myself that nothing I do is really all that bad.  

What was really bad, I tell myself, is what I was doing last year.  What was really bad was drinking every day. 

I just went four straight months without a drink.  All I did was smoke and drink coffee, really.  If I can avoid going back to drinking, I'll live longer.  The drinking was, by far, the worst thing I did to myself.  Nothing else really rates.  I eat OK, don't overeat, don't binge.  I exercise.  I'm busy, I'm active, I'm more or less engaged in the world, I have connections. 

Tomorrow the little bit of alcohol I bought for myself will be gone and I will not buy any more.  I will leave the half bottle of Rose in the pantry for Penny when she needs it, which is almost never.  The oxycodone that I got for my back injury is gone now -- I took the last tab today.  

It's all over.  The drug holiday, the let's-take-a-break-from-this-shit mood that took over when I injured my back last week, it's done.  I have nothing left to fuel it.  And I keep telling myself that this is OK, that people do worse.  Think about all the massholes that went down to the cape over the weekend and drank bud light all day every day, the people that have four cocktails a night, the clowns that go to Dunkies in the morning and Vin Bin for steak bombs for lunch and then roll around to some Chinese joint for dinner before finishing the day off with a huge ice cream treat. 

are they happy?  are they any healthier than me?

I compare, constantly, searching for the lower bar of people that might make me feel better about myself if I could only envision myself next to them.  

It probably sounds like I am a hot mess if you are someone other than me reading this entry.  But I am not a hot mess.  I have to work, sometimes, to assure myself and then re-assure myself that I am doing fine, that I am a good adult, a fine person, a gentleman and a scholar.  People rest sometimes.  People go on drug holidays sometimes.  People take breaks from office life and travel to Paris, people get fucked up on weekdays and don't say anything about it to their co-workers the next day, people do all sorts of shit in this crazy world.  

I usually work hard at my job.  I usually work around the house to keep things stable -- cook meals, clean, take out the trash, listen to my wife complain, make sure the dog is ok, mow the lawn, order shit online so we don't run out of anything.  I exercise, my weight is fine.

But what I focus on are my failures.  My mood is often determined by my failures, and I am hard on myself.  I shouldn't be fucking around with recreational drugs, I tell myself as I'm downing an oxycodone pill.   I don't know why I'm vaping, I say next. 

I should be happy just as I am.

I am not often happy, though.  

Monday June 23 6:44 AM

I woke up at 6, unable to sleep, Penny's arms around me.  The first thought that occurs to me is I wonder if I was snoring last night, followed by a close second, Jennie's face looks bland and round but somehow still cute and I felt love somehow for this middle aged creature that I suppose not too many people would say is hot or a prize or anything like that.  All I could feel for that split second was gladness that she was with me in our bed, that there was even such a thing as our bed, and I didn't have to wake up completely alone to face the day.

this is what I should write more of, these tiny thoughts, these fragmentary scenes in my life

I get up, take modafinil and lexapro, have a sip of water, go back to bed.  My alarm is set for six twenty so I can get ready for my dental appointment.  I wanted to have twenty minutes to write before I had to leave for the appointment, so here I am, trying to write, unsure of what to say.

I went on another semi drug holiday yesterday.  Three oxy pills in four hours, and I drained the wine bottle that we had in the pantry, too.  Once the pills are in me I start thinking what can I do to feel slightly better?  And then I feel powerless but to obey.  I took pills after Penny got back from her get together with her friend Melissa.  I'd done enough work with our dog Shelley to be able to put her in her crate and take a break from the constancy of being a doggo dad.  why did i write doggo dad?  it's such a happy-trendy-millenial style phrase.  something i'd read on a mommy blog.  

She wanted to go grocery shopping and I felt like a nap but I knew that things would not be right unless I did this thing, unless I went on this shopping trip with her.  It's part of the fabric of our weekends to do a run to the local Market Basket, fill the cart with things we will eat together during the week, make some smalltalk in the car, feel productive, envision the upcoming days unfolding between us.  She tells me about Melissa's struggles with glee.  She says things like I'm not trying to be mean but Melissa really should dump her dance group and focus on finding a man instead.  Penny sometimes says stuff that sounds like something would say on a daytime television show would say.  Lower class, my mind says.  The idle poor, my mind comes up with on the second try.  I think of me as a kid, home from school sick, changing channels on our nineteen inch television, unsupervised, putting on Donahue or Sally Jesse Raphael, fascinated by what I saw.  80% of that show was this kind of talk -- you need a man, stand by your man, stop cheating on your woman.  Basic human needs and relationships reduced to the simplest of language, raw emotion expressed constantly but in the basest terms, no bullshit, no hiding behind fancy words.  

I hated it as a child but I now think as an adult, with a great deal of wonder, that I married someone like that.  I married a woman that says things like her picker is off to describe a girl who continually goes after men who treat her like shit and are a terrible match.   

What I like about being high -- when I find a good drug or combination of drugs -- is that I can momentarily recapture a feeling of wonder about the world -- a feeling of wonder that has mostly abandoned me after forty eight years on the planet.  

I can also retreat to some extent, into myself, and float around inside, thinking about my life, trying to gain new angles on old thoughts and experiences so that they're interesting again.  

I told myself that if I'm going to spend the rest of the day with Penny and do chores, I might as well be high.  I might as well finish the pills -- that's what they're for anyway, I told myself. 

At home, Penny put the groceries away and I made a smoothie for her with the farm fresh strawberries that we got the day before, drop in some of the passion fruit from Target, add a bit of water and heavy cream and blend the thing together.  The machine hums and crackles as it obliterates the frozen bits of passion fruit.  I think about how Penny didn't want to have sex this morning.  We got up and did the dog walk and care together and most weekend days we fall back into bed after the dog is tired enough to be crated and after a bit of laying around one of us or the other will make a move and we'll end up all sweaty and happy.  

But yesterday she was too tired.  She said she just wanted to nap.  She lay back on the couch and closed her eyes. She hasn't been sleeping well.  I wondered if it was my snoring.

That's part of why I am going to the dentist today, the snoring.  I am getting the second phase of treatment for my jaw TMJ.  I will have blood and stem cells injected into my cheeks.  It is sure to be unpleasant.  Three weeks ago I did the oxygen treatment and my eyelids twitched for two hours afterward.  After the treatment today I will make sure I understand what the next steps are for the orthodontic work.  I will need a device fitted.  It will be best if we schedule a date for the next session, so I have something to work toward.

It's time to go.

Sunday June 22 8:02 AM

Yesterday:  A drug fueled day around the house, almost a hundred degrees though it's only June 22, me with my back still healing, Penny doing her best to care for me.

I took 5 pills of 5mg oxy at intervals, partially because my back still hurt, but mostly because I felt like being high and tuning the world out.  I threw them down at two hour intervals beginning at noon and ending at eight.  This is in direct violation of the recommended usage on the label.  "Always read the label," says Tobias on 30 Rock when he is dressed up as Mrs. Doubtfire, taking care of the family. "Always read it well."  He is addressing his wife, who is on some crazy prescription drug.  "In the most delicious way!" he finishes in a sing song that sounds like Mary Poppins singing Supercalifragilisticexpialidoucious.  The label on oxy says every 4 hours not to exceed 4 pills in 24 hours. 

fuck it I say.  Down the hatch.  It's not going to kill me.  I'll be all better tomorrow anyway.  I won't do as many drugs.  Cleaner than today. 

And i probably will be.  At any rate I will run out of pills and I am not the kind of person who goes crazy trying to get prescription drugs that I don't really need.  This isn't going to make me an addict.

Despite the back crankiness Penny and I managed to get out of the house, twice.  We went for ice cream in the afternoon mostly because I felt like if we didn't do something, however brief, that she would go stir crazy and resent me for my back issue.  We threw Shelley in the car and drove to Sunshine farm down the street. 

The heat radiated around the car as we drove, windows up, AC cranked.  At the Sunshine farm, the picnic tables where you could sit and eat ice cream were all in direct sun except one under a tree which was, of course, packed.  People sat on the ground under the shade, squatted under the porch of the building on concrete in the shade, parked their butts in a bench in the shade.  The exposed tables were empty, the gray and weathered wood of the table looking almost white under the bright light.  We sat down at one of these tables briefly until Penny announced that the sun would melt all the ice cream before they could even eat it and she was right.  

So we went back to the car.  I lurched around with my canes, wondering if I really needed them, wondering if this was all an act for Penny, to show her I was in pain, needed help, compromised.

Shelley licked ice cream off my shirt where droplets had fallen.  She was on my lap, squirming, trying to have some of what we were having.  I sometimes wonder what she thinks when she smells the food we are eating and is not getting any herself.  Penny says she is in disbelief that we are eating without her.  I think she is scheming to figure out how to get some of the food herself.  Will a whine help?  How about cocking my head?  What is the secret to unlocking our food, being offered whatever it is that we are throwing into our mouths?

At home I went into the bathroom, took another oxy, opened the window, and used my new vape device, puffing out the window.  The combination of drugs made me sweat:  oxy, muscle relaxants, prednisone, caffeine, nicotine.  Then I settled on the couch downstairs with Penny.  I worked on the blog and watched movies.  Penny put on The Great Gatsby, which I haven't seen since high school.  Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and whatever the guy's name is from Law and Order, the older prosecutor who shakes his head back and forth a little bit when he's talking.  Jay and Nick and Daisy and Tom on our big TV, me with my laptop in front of me, figuring out how to fix the file upload issue.  (I ended up switching to a different text library, this one pure JS, instead of using ckeditor, which I just could not properly get working, hours wasted on that mess.)  I moved between screens, ChatGPT open in one, another a shell to my linux server, a third browser to take a look at the blog itself.

I would get up from the couch periodically and take another pill, sneak another vape session.  

The vape approach to quitting smoking seems to be working.  I haven't had a real cigarette since switching.  It doesn't make me as high as a regular cigarette, I don't get quite the same rush, but on the other hand, it doesn't tire me out as much either.  I think thoughts like well this can't be good for me but there is also no way it is as bad for me as smoking was.  

Penny takes care of most of the things that need doing and for that I am grateful.  She owes me anyway, I do the lion's share of cooking and cleaning around the house, the constant trips out for the dog, everything.  She's very passive.  I know she wants and needs to do things too but she is mostly happy to sit and look at her phone with a movie on and the dog providing occasional distraction.

Part of me wants to exercise today, to figure out how I can sneak that in somehow.  And part of me doesn't.  

I haven't been this physically lazy since I had covid a couple of years ago and had to 'shut it down' entirely.  My body is used to being in motion, getting up constantly, fixing this and that, decluttering, cleaning.  I was in a position I am rarely in:  Stuck on the couch, resting my back.

In world news I woke up to our country entering war with Iran.  Oh, I don't know if it's official yet, but it's happening.  We bombed nuclear target sites.  This administration can suck my nuts.  Penny delights in reading internet comments supposedly entered by Trump voters. he said he wouldn't start a new war!  they whine, according to Penny.  I just want this to end, but the way the senate map is constructed, with gerrymandering and everything, makes it unlikely anything will change for a while, if ever.  We are living under a semi autocratic regime.  

In the evening I work on adding comments to the blog and we watch several episodes of the simpsons.  It doesn't work right.  I spend two hours trying to get debug output printed to a log file or standard out and fail.  A great deal of programming is failure.  While I work, I wonder if I could be doing something more productive.  Then I wonder if I could get higher.  Take more pills.  Sneak some wine out of the bottle in the pantry.  Wreck my liver entirely.  I think about the note Dr. Katz left on my last physical.  signs of mildly fatty liver.  I wonder what I could do to fix this.  overhaul my diet, stop doing drugs that make my liver work so hard.  

But the overriding voice inside of me urges nihilism.  fuck it, you are going to be dead someday, take another oxy, enjoy your weekend of doing nothing.  isn't it nice to just sit and work on your stupid project? 

Yes, in some ways it is.

I am going to see if I can fix the comment problem while Penny walks the dog.

A couple of days without an entry…

I have been laid up with the back issue.  Two days ago, Wednesday, I could barely move, but today I'm functional.  My lower back is stiff wonky but I can walk around without the canes that I had to use on Wednesday for support.  I will still use the canes, especially when I am in front of Penny, so she can see that I am taking it easy.  But at this point, internally, I am all-systems-go.  I want to go work out downstairs in my basement, lift weights, prove to myself I am fine, do pullups, feel my muscles move, check an item off my list for today, the item that says dont-be-a-fatass.

It looks like I am going to The Book Mill in Montague today.  Penny dropped Shelley off at doggie day care.  I am tempted to write out how much that costs me but I know I shouldn't think about it.  What I should do is pay it and live my life.  These are my old instincts talking, the instincts that are telling me to always optimize my money.  Those instincts do not make me happy.

What makes me happy is pursuing goals.  Or, once I am tired pursuing goals, relaxing with some creature comforts, a bag of gummi bears, a video game, a bad movie on TV.  But not until I am tired.  If I am not tired, I don't deserve to relax.  Relaxing feels like torture.

Because I was stuck in bed on Wednesday I focused on reading.  I finished The Final Girl Club by Grady Hendrix.  Got it out of the library last weekend with Penny.  She tried to read it a year or so back but couldn't finish it for some reason – probably distractions with her family, her dad dying.  It's hard to believe that her dad died a year ago.  

After finishing the book on Wednesday, Penny left to go do something for her mom and the home help – her mom is in a neighboring town and has mid-stage Alzheimers and the home help is flaky, demanding, strange.  Penny went to three different banks to do balance transfers and conversions to international currencies.  All for the home help.  The home help needs a lot of help herself.  

I took the opportunity to drink a hidden bottle of wine from the pantry.  Took it on top of an oxycodone pill, 5mgs.  Time for a drug holiday.  I always say I won't have another drink and then I have another drink, or, in this case, an entire bottle.  I knew what would happen and I didn't care – I had the first few swallows, felt it hit five minutes later, and then felt powerless to resist.  Down the hatch.  My face flushed and I felt, despite my back problems, good about the world.  

I had finished a book.  I was making progress on the house.  I had time off.  Nothing horribly pressing at work.  Penny out of the house, precious precious alone time, all for myself. 

And what did I do with it?  Got stoned and drunk.  

---

So here I am on Friday.  We are going to drive to the Book Mill.  I am assuring Penny that I will be fine.  She is worried about my back and I am reluctant to tell her that I'm completely fine.  (I am not really completely fine, it's just that I can feel it's good enough to walk through this sort of discomfort and it's clearly on the mend and I don't fear making it worse at this point.).

I want us to get out.  Yesterday, on Juneteenth, we both had off and I was hung over and tired and I took drugs all day to help my back hopefully improve:  Prednisone, oxy, muscle relaxants. I let Penny do everything which is remarkably rare for our relationship :  I am almost always the care taker, the one who gets shit done, organizes the meals, cooks, even cleans after cooking about sixty percent of the time.  I work until I am tired.  I take out trash, I declutter, I vacuum, I figure out what needs to be done and then do that thing, whatever it is, my mind constantly buzzing with a task list.  

But not yesterday.  Penny took the dog out, Penny made meals, Penny cleaned.

I tell myself this is good for her.  To have a reminder of how much fucking work I normally do for her.  

I'm reading a book called Wellness.  It's by the same guy who wrote The Nix and it's good but depressing.  There's a couple in the book that meets in Chicago.  A boy and a girl.  They fall in love.  Get married.  It seems perfect.  

Then the book fast forwards to fifteen years later.  They have a son, eight years old.  The mother wants to micromanage him, the father less so.  They are having intimacy issues.  It reminds me of my ex.  We stopped after a while.  When I think of all the reasons I left her, that is always the number one.  I don't know if the lack of sex was a symptom of the problems in our relationship, or a cause.  I try not to think about it, these are decisions that were made a long time ago, things that happened in what seems almost like a former life.  I do a good job most of the time pushing my past down and focusing on the present.  Right after the breakup I remember trying to sort it out and find closure – me in my shitty apartment in New Hampshire, falling flat onto the carpet and bawling, over and over.  Wondering if she was OK, wondering if I did the right thing.

When I wondered, the thing that helped me stay sane, the thing that kept me from not absolutely hating myself, was the simple fact that we stopped having sex.  That we had sex once in the last two years we were together, and even that time, I could tell she didn't really want to.  She was appeasing me.  And after that I decided never again, I would not approach her again, she would have to approach me, start the seduction, the initial moves.  

Never happened.  I don't want a partner or wife that doesn't want me.  Nobody in their right mind, nobody who still has a sex drive wants this kind of relationship.  

I will buy a book at The Book Mill and find a place to sit and I'll read that for a while, whatever it ends up being.  

I'm glad I'm not hung over or stoned today.  I'm glad I'm functional, even glad to get out of the house and spend some time with Penny.  

Yes I wish I was 100% healthy and yes I wish I could go in the attic and finish shit or work on a project.  But one thing about blowing your back out, going on a drug holiday, and being stuck in bed does is it kind of resets you.

How quickly things change.

I woke up today expecting to have a normal day.  I had goals and objectives.  I told myself, after putting our dog Shelley down for at least a few hours in her crate, that I would spend at least two hours, perhaps three, in the attic.  I visualized how much work I could get done:  I would finish most of the radiant heat barrier.  I would take apart the flex duct that goes to the register in my office, straighten it out, hang it from the beams, remove six feet of it.  This will increase the amount of airflow I get to the register.  Maybe I'll have time to re-seal it, I thought.

Instead, after forty five minutes of work, I hurt myself.

I had been on my side on the floor, covered in gray clumps of blown in cellulose insulation.  This is basically shredded and puffed newspaper.  It looks like oatmeal if you squish it on the floor.  I was tugging at the flex duct's seal to the register and realized I wanted to get up, get a different tool to remove the flex duct around the register.  Either that or see how feasible it might be to keep that seal and instead splice the duct in the middle, re-seal it together.  If I did that, I'd have to create a hanging sling right where the splice went, so there would be virtually no pressure on the joint where the two sections come together.  Do-able, I thought.  And maybe easier and better than fucking around with the register itself.  This approach would allow me to just foam all around the register to create a good air seal and finish up work in that dreadful corner of the attic.  

So I tried to get up from the position on my side, lurched upward and that's when I felt it – a hot burst of pain in my lower back.  I sat down again immediately and felt spasms.  I started to sweat.  I crawled on my hands and knees across joists to the sturdy plywood walking section at the base of the stairs.  Then I had trouble standing up – every move I made that put any pressure on my lower back at all felt like agony.

I've done this before so this is not a condition I'm unfamiliar with.  I worked to take the weight off my back as I stood up, used my arms to push against objects as I lifted the rest of my body weight with my legs, my upper body in a strange position, forward, forward, forward as I was afraid to extend my upper body upright.  Every time I tried to bring my body upright again, I would get another flash of pain and then subsequent ripples extending up and around.  But I managed to sit on the chair I have up there.  Even sitting hurt.  I realized I had to get out of these clothes, these dirty clothes covered in insulation.  I'd have to shower, too – there was no way I could get into bed as dirty as I was. 

I used a stiff tube from a roll of the aluminum barrier as a cane and went down the stairs slowly, one step at a time, putting most of my weight on the stiff cardboard column.  At the bottom, the landing, I slowly stripped out of my clothes and left them in a pile on the floor.  I walked into my bedroom and found the metal cane in my closet, switched to using that for support instead.  i have another cane downstairs,  I thought.  I'll get that later.  

I hobbled into the bathroom, turned the water on, and got into the tub, cane and all.  I couldn't risk falling in the fucking tub.  I did my best to rinse off, get the gunk off me, and when I was done I had to painstakingly dry myself and put on clothes.  I barely managed it, rolling around in my bed in ways that didn't trigger the agony point.  

Then I started contacting people.  I told work I needed the rest of the day off.  I texted Penny and told her.  I texted the dog walker and asked for him to give me a little more time today if he could manage it (He could).  I called my doctor and asked for a teleheath appointment and they said he'd call back later.  

At this point it was one.  I was exhausted.  I fell asleep.  I woke up at 1:45 when the dog walker showed up.  Immediately afterward, the doctor called.  I explained what happened and he wrote prescriptions.  Muscle relaxants, oxy, prednisone.  I will be hopped up for a week as I work this out.

I was berating myself in bed.  I have three days off forthcoming – juneteenth plus the two surrounding days that I took as vacation – and they will be wasted on recovering from this shitty back of mine.  I made it almost to the end of this shit assed project and hurt myself before I could finish it.  I won't be able to work on it for at least a week now.  It'll just hang over me.  

But then I also had parallel thoughts that were the opposite.  It'll be nice to do nothing.  I can't do anything now, after all.  Penny will be forced to take care of me.  She'll do dog shit and make something for dinner and I can just sit and read and work on my website or something.  I can read.  I can relax.  Other people will have to step up and support me.

After the phone call with my doctor I fell asleep again for another hour and a half.  Then I woke up and assessed.  I am able to stand up even without the canes.  Maybe this won't be as bad as the last time I fucked my back up.  Maybe I'll recover faster.

Then the little kid voices come in too. maybe i don't want to recover quickly.  Maybe it'd be nice to spend a couple of days in bed, reading and playing games and fucking around on my computer.  Maybe this could be a great excuse to shut everything down for a few days.

I won't know for sure how bad things will be until tomorrow, I think.  I always know more the day after I hurt myself, whether it will be a long painful forever style recovery or something relatively quickly.  

The last time this happened was October of last year I think.  And that was a quick recovery, the prednisone worked pretty well, I think.  But I have had blowouts in the past that took weeks.

I am going to read a bit and wait for Penny to get home.  She is picking up my meds.

I did manage to update the image on this blog – it's now a gray pencil sketch looking image and it has a better aspect ratio – doesn't take over the entirety of the top of the page anymore.

Time to calm my mind and try to relax.  I can eat something downstairs before Penny gets home.  I could down an espresso and chomp on chocolate chips.   I don't want Penny to see me do these things or she will conclude I am not all that hurt, won't tend to me.  I don't mind having this be a reason for her to actually care for me.  I usually do 90% of the care for her, ater all --cooking, cleaning, the lion's share of the dog work.  It is an unbalanced relationship when it comes to the amount of work we do for one another.  Allowing her to do something for me for a few days isn't such a bad way to re-balance things a bit, at least in my head.

The big drama yesterday was the doggo.

I took Shelley to the dog park in the afternoon, in an attempt to tire her out quickly.  The weather was nice, seventy, sunny, and I figured, half an hour of this and she'll be hot and gotten all her energy out, plus the added stimulation of the socialization with other doggos equals kaput.  Like an equation in my head where I like the result.

There were no little dogs in the under 25lbs section so I brought her in the big dog section.  I've done this before – Shelley is fine with the bigger dogs.

Until yesterday.

A woman, on her way out, said that one of the big dogs likes to nip.  I barely thought anything of it, figured she was being paranoid.  I said thanks, I'll keep an eye on Shelley.

Ten minutes into playtime and Shelley is romping around and I'm not really looking at her or paying attention and suddenly I hear that yelp, the Shelley yelp, the I am in real Pain yelp, and I snap to alertness.  I go over to her.  There is a collection of people and dogs around a rock and I pick Shelley up – she is cowering.   One of the people says she got nipped.  Another guy, older – the one who owns the offending dog - explained that when little dogs go underneath his dog she doesn't like it.  Something happens and she instinctually nips, she doesn't know how hard she is nipping, she's not being aggressive, doesn't mean anything, just wants to shoo her away.  

I examine Shelley.  She's a little daistraught and accepts my comfort but I don't see any bite marks, no bleeding.  I say socially acceptable things to the others.  I don't mind just dogs being dogs.  She seems fine.  Everything's a learning experience for her, it's OK.  I'm not going to overreact to this.  

Someone else says not a trip to the dog park without some drama

I try to sear the memory of the dog into my mind.  White and gray.  Kind of beareded like a terrier but definitely not a terrier.  Probably a mix, probably a mutt.  I need to remember that when I see this dog at the park, we will not go into the big doggy section.  Shelley was fine with all of the other dogs.

I let her play for another fifteen minutes.  After five or so her tail is wagging again and she seems fine.  Tired, maybe stressed a little, but fine, interested in the world.  She hangs out underneath the legs of a middle aged woman who is somewhat older than me, maybe mid fifties.  She lets the woman pet her.  Then goes to the bench near the entrance and sits underneath it.  I sit with her.  She looks tired, her eyes are getting red.  Finally she leads me toward the entrance.  She's never done that before.  She wants to leave.

I toss her in my car and on the way home I realize something is wrong.  She will not fully open her right eye.  And when I try to touch her on that side of the head she reacts like … it's sensitive.  

I figure it's just heat stroke.  At home I let her drink a lot of water.  But she still won't open the eye.  I try to wipe it with a wet cloth.  Doesn't help much.  Finally I make her sit between my legs and I really douse her eye with a cup of water.  I hold it open.  I'm surprised she tolerates this but I have a bowl of chicken salad in front of us and it's pretty clear to her she is going to get it.  After the rinse she eats the chicken salad and her eye pops all the way open.  I am relieved.  It seems this did the trick.  She is happy now, running around a little.  

But later I see a spot of red above the same eye.  Red with a small bump. 

That fucking dog drew blood, nipped her so good it broke the skin.

I rub antibiotic lotion on it and hope Penny doesn't notice.  I don't want her to think I am a negligent asshole.  It's best to just hide the truth on this subject.

She notices anyway.  

I tell her it must be from a thorn, Shelley must have pricked herself sniffing something.

I think Penny buys it.  

I still feel bad. 

Lesson learned.  If someone at the dog park warns me about another dog, stay away from that fucking dog.  Don't put my dog in harm's way.

I was really really mad at myself yesterday for letting this happen, and still am.

I'm going to go get Shelley, make sure she is OK, go for a walk with her, start the day.

Yesterday I faced Father's Day.

I am, kind of sort of, a dad for the first time.  Not a real father, not the Human kind of father with a Human kind of son.  What I have is a puppy, a ten month old puppy, a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, white-and-tan, named Shelley.

I am a doggy daddy, according to my wife Penny.  When Penny speaks in the doggy voice (we each speak in the doggy's voice sometimes in an attempt to articulate Shelley's thoughts) she will often start with “papa!”  

As in:  “Papa!  I am going to need another strawbunkle!”  (Strawbunkle is what the BFG calls strawberries in Dahl's book The BFG.  Penny is a children's librarian and we often make jokes that revolve around children's books.)

“Papa!  I need to go pee!  IMMEDIATELY!”

“Papa!  Don't you understand I absolutely need to investigate and lick everything in the dish washer when you have it open?”

One thing I barely write about are the details of the hours I spend with the dog, which seems strange now that I think about it, to have something I spend so much time doing be so thoroughly unexamined.  It is probably because the routine of it numbs me to the details.  

I put her harness on, a loop that goes over her head, before we go outside, and notice her little nose that she points upward, toward the enter of the ring, to help me get it on without too much trouble.  When she does this her ears flop back a little.  

I am often still surprised by her softness.  She will come up to me when I am on the floor typing on my laptop, trying to do work or order something, and nuzzle my hands or my ankle.  It's gentle and feels nice.  Then she'll do a huff-and-snort to indicate she got whatever she was looking for.  Investigation complete.  Job done.  

Penny and I laugh when we eat on the couch and her head will suddenly pop up, her paws resting on the vertical side of the couch because she isn't tall enough to make it to the top, her body upright in this position.  She will look from me to Penny and back again, a hungry, accusatory look in her face.  Normally I don't think dogs have expressions but in this case the look is clear:  You are eating without me.  I am going to need some food.  Penny thinks she looks outright panicked.  

I don't disagree.  One of the most alarming life events for our dog is to see we are eating or snacking and she is not.  It is unfair.  I am reminded of studies that have been done that prove beyond a doubt that animals feel jealousy.  Like the grape study with chimps where a bunch of chimps are given either a piece of celery (a low grade treat) or a grape (a great treat).  Once the chimps realize that grapes are given out, they won't take the celery any more, and they get mad at the chimps who are being given grapes.  

I'll move on

--

After we made love I went downstairs and mixed pancake batter, heated a griddle, put four of them on for Penny.  She likes it when I make them small.  I heat up maple syrup with some butter in the microwave and douse the pancakes with the mix right before she eats them.  I use the rest of the batter to make a big fat pancake for myself.

I want to do work on the attic and I want to exercise but I do these things first because Penny needs a Sunday morning of spoiling or she doesn't feel right.  Part of Penny's idea of marriage is that her man spoils her, especially on Sunday mornings.  

After she ate she looks depressed, sitting on a chair at the kitchen bar.  I move to her and ask what's on her mind.  She tells me her dad was in a dream.  He was trying to tell her something but she couldn't understand.  She starts crying.  She wanted to understand.  It was important.

I thought about her Dad's last year of life.  Demented.  LIterally, dementia.  Talking nonsense.  I wondered if this was what she was remembering in her dream, the difficulty of trying to understand.

Penny is up.  This is over.

Yesterday:

Penny in bed, avacodo toast for breakfast, a trip out to get some small computer speakers for my downstairs workstation with Penny, a trip to BJs to get odds and ends also with Penny, then home again. 

Doggo up again, walk and play and eventually put down again.  This cycle Penny did most of the work with Shelley and for that I was grateful.  It allowed me to play Prince of Persia:  The Crown

I turned the difficulty all the way down and finished the game.  For most of the game, at least 70% of it, I was playing with stock difficulty but at the tail end the boss fights became huge to-dos, the kind of thing you wpend a full hour on, each, memorizing patterns and getting the responses hard wired into your head, see this jump and slash by the boss with the red-eye tell, this means you double jump, then at the tip of your seond jump press the shadow button, then dash, then return to your shadow which gives you some extra hang time and allows you one extra jump and dash, so now you jump and dash for the final .5 seconds of hang time, and you've avoided this attack.  All that for one attack.  The boss will have six or seven of these to memorize and get into your muscle memory. 

I did this for one of the snake bosses and then realized:  I am not doing this for the others. 

Pirate king boss?  Cheat.

Valam?  Chear

Valam version 2?  Cheat.

After the boss fights, difficulty set back to normal, and I would go through the game.  Consult map, figure out where to go, use powers to jump around, solve puzzles.

So I finished it and gave it back to Penny.  We put the dog down and went to the library.  I checked out the Kirby game I've wanted to play for a while on the Switch only to find that it is locked at 30fps.  It doesn't look great.  There is a patch for it coming out in November along with some DLC but it's $20 and doesn't help me today anyway.  So I'm blowing through it as fast as I can, just to get a taste of the experience.  My understanding is that it's not a long game.  One of the guys on this Youtube channel that I watch called My Life In Gaming said that he unexpectedly loved it, and not because of the challenge (there is very little to be had for a seasoned adult gamer) but because it is unique and does things that no other game does – as a result, he actually felt something close to wonder, at times.

I don't feel wonder but it's interesting to bolt through.  As Kirby I have, so far, inhaled cars, vending machines, electronic fan blowers, staircases, and murphy beds.  This along with the standard fare Kirby stuff, swords and fire and spikes and so on.  

After the library we also hit stop and shop to make sure Penny had everything for the week.

got home.  I made a snack.  Cheese, crackers, some kind of meat from Stop and Shop that I will spell wrong:  Prosscuitto.  Then I succummbed, finally, to the desire to nap.  

Woke up at 5.  Will we or won't we go to the theater to watch the Agatha Christie movie, that's what I wanted to know.  I wasn't bugging Penny about it though, I was waiting for her to tell me.  I woke up Shelley and took her for a long walk.  She peed and pooed twice, the second pool unexpected, and it was tough to re-open the bag to get the extra in there, I fussed with it, got poo on my hands, finally managed to grip it with the top of the bag and get it in there, slipped it in the pocket of my hoodie, tried to ignore the noxious smell.  

I vaped, probably too much, until I felt nearly nauseous.  I have a bench i use already – after two sessions, it it, in my mind, already an established routine.  A bench near the army base entrance.  Next to a memorial.  There is a small retaining wall around the memorial plaque and statue and there are holes in the mortar and bees come in and out.  Shelley is very interested in the bees, sticking her nose into these access holes.  She will get stung if we continue to do this, it is only a matter of time.

I get home and Penny gives me the news – she has decided the play is too expensive.  She will not admit to me that she simply does not want to go.  It's $30 a person.  I ask what she wants to do instead.  Go out.  I point out that going out will be at least as expensive as the play is.  She ignores me.  She wants to go to the hungry pot.  I say no, it is too crowded.  We settle on Burtons, neither of us have been there.  We haven't gone out to eat, not properly, not at a sit down restaurant, in probably a month and a half.  Since our anniversarry May 7.  She gets semi drunk.  She tells me stories she's told me a thousand times before.  Instead of telling her she is repeating herself like I usually do, I just listen and laugh at the right spots.  She has had a long week.  She can have a night out with me and have me not behave like a jerk.  I see her skin flush.  On the way out I look at her in the parking lot and tell her she looks pretty and mean it.

--

Today:  I am about to get the dog and do that for a while.  Probably hang out in bed and make love to Penny after that.  It looks like she is not going to see her friend Effy today, Effy who initially said she wanted to get together but then put her off yesterday.  Effy the immature bitch.  Effy the idiot.  Effy who is forty years old and sitll lives with her parents.  

So I will have Penny all day.  Penny and Shelley.  

I need to work out today – biceps and shoulders and back.  I will do that instead of attic work.  I managed to seal the zone 3 duct yesterday, it only took half an hour.  The mastic is curing.  If I still have energy after my weight workout and Penny is reasonably happy without me - she may not be, she often isn't – I may do another session up there.  Turn that zone on, make sure no leaks.  Do more of the attic reflectix staping.

Or I may settle in and work on this blog.  I want to get the menu set.

That's all I have for now, 8:05 and time to get doggo, start the day 

Early but not too early on Saturday, seven thirty.

I had my trio of drugs: caffeine, lexapro, monafinil.

I probably have ten minutes to write and then the day starts.  Penny needs her morning time with me – maybe we'll make love, maybe we won't – we'll walk the dog, have something to eat, figure out what we are going to do today.

Penny wants to go to see an agatha christie play at the town theater tonight. I agreed to go and the first thing I think isn't “This will be fun” but rather “what will we do with the dog and how is this going to fuck up my day and how boring will this be?”

Boring.  This from a guy who was in the attic yesterday walking floor joists and stapling heat reflective aluminum to the roof beams.  

That's what I did yesterday:  Two hours of HVAC shit in the attic – I worked through getting some big strips of the reflective material affixed to the beams.  I realized I will need more material to finish the job so I ordered another 250 sq foot roll, too.  I'm probably half done with the reflectix but I have painful work to go yet – the entire side of the house, the rear side, the side with the air handler on it, is full of awkward spaces and it will be difficult to roll large sections of the material out like I just did on the front facing side.  Instead it will be a lot of painstaking cutting and smaller peices.  I was a mess after this work was done, just covered in dust and particles – so bad that I decided to actually wash the set of clothes before I go and do another round of this shit.

Then I took a break for ten minutes and went back upstairs and worked on the hose that goes to zone 3, the spare bedroom.  I figured out how long the flex duct really should be if i am doing a straight shot from the main channel and cut it.  Cleared out the space next to the vent (register) box so I could attach it.  I attached it and tried to seal it.  Let's call it round 1 of sealing – I used the loc tite spay foam liberally.  It'll stick, it's not going to fucking go anywhere.  Round 2 will be using mastic goo everywhere to make sure that things are sealed.  I will do this today if I get a chance.  The mastic will have to dry and set a little before round 3, which will be to get the sleeve back on – the insulating sleeve – and use the zip cable to get it snug.  Then I can push the blow in insulation back into spaces where things have been completely disrupted.  That will be it for zone 3 – then I can go back to getting the reflectix up.  Or alternate between the two things.

It's over already.  My time.  Penny came downstairs, I made her a coffee, and she is happily babbling away on the couch about her job and things that happened this week.  

This is one of the hardest problems I have with marriage in general and/or Penny specifically:  she goes and goes and goes.  

She goes silent, looks at her computer.  It may give me another ten minutes.  

I worked on the attic instead of working for Boston College yesterday.  I had good energy most of the day, a welcome change, as most of the week was a struggle.

In the afternoon I spent an hour cleaning the basement and straightening things.  I threw all of my tools and screws and odds and ends into various boxes and just put them into a big cabinet and shut the door on it so it looks better and things are out of the way.  It's still a complete organizational nightmare but at least it's out of sight out of mind kind of shit.  My desk is set up underneath the light and I forced myself to use it a bit.  I hooked up the monitor and got a halfway decent keybaord attached to it instead of the $5 peice of gargage that I got from the seller of the old PC,.  I logged into it and tried to get sound working out of the display, which I was able to do, but I discovered has just about the worst possible sound quality I've ever heard out of anything, reminding me of thse old $2 headphones I sometimes would use in the 90s that had zero bass and even the treble sounded like a fucking kazoo.  So that isn't going to work for audio, not even casually.  But the rest of it is fine, I was able to work a little bit on my blog – this thing.  I got an image set up, a header image, showing pIcard looking at a viewportt where he is typing.  It's the right idea but the wrong image.  I will think about what to do next with it, but it's better than nothing for now.  I also worked on templating shit so I can have the same header on all pages.  And I have to log in to post now which is good for securty blah blah.

Time to get the dog.  

Friday morning.  

I played Prince of Persia for ten minutes on switch and decided that it would be better to write for the remaining twenty minutes of silence before the day starts.

I went in for the department meeting yesterday but left halfway through.  Listened to Father Leahy speak while I stood with my back against the wall at the very end of the room.  I let people see I was there.  Who cares if they later realize that I left.  It doesn't matter.  I ran into Phil, I saw Phani and Sriram.  We barely said anything to one another.  We live different lives, it's OK.  

Father Leahy is retiring, or maybe has already retired.  He spoke about Messina College, formerly Pine Manor, which my university acquired a few years back to save them from a covid related financial death spiral.  He became president of the university before I was even a student there, some forty years ago.  He spoke easily and without cards or any presentation material.  He touched on reduced or eliminated grants and funding from the Federal government for basic University stuff:  research subsidies, for example.  He said, without directly saying it, that this administration is a mess.  He was able to say it by talking about policies that they've enacted.  It was a smart way to do it.

I found, not for the first time, grudging respect for these Jesuits.  I'm an athiest and I expect I always will be, but not all people of faith are morons, either.  Father Leahy struck me as bright, polished, level headed, curious and caring – all of these things at once.  And this, despite being in his mid seventies.  

I will not achieve what he has achieved and at this point in my life I think it's OK to admit and accept this.  The knowledge gives me humility.

So I went home during the ice breaker, like I often do.  There are no repercussions.  I didn't work for the rest of the day either.  

I bought an e-cigarette machine after that.  I felt faded on the drive home, semi transparent, a dimly lit consciousness peering out of my head into the world.  Drove to Framingham Vape and Smoke.  What a name.  The last smoke shop I went into was years ago, some place near the Purple Shamrock in downtown Boston.  I didn't even buy anything, just went in drunk one day.  Must have been twenty years ago.  This was the same night I saw a couple of guys fighting outside the Shammy and one went down and the other kicked him in the ribs a few times.  It sounded like nothing, like a foot hitting a bit of well packed luggage, nothing like the movies.  It made me feel sick.

At the Vape and Smoke I bought a Vapresso unit.  I asked the guy behind the counter what was popular, what did he recommend.  He didn't seem to care much about anything.  Didn't ask me if I was a new vaper.  It was probably obvious, he was probably able to put it together from the kind of questions that I asked.  After some prompting he said things that helped me make up my mind:

So this one has a better battery.  This one has larger cartridges for the liquid.  This fluid is flavored like tobacco and the other tastes like nothing.  We don't sell flavors anymore because of government regulations.

I bought a $35 unit and spent another $20 on the first round of fluid.  I asked if this was all I needed and he said yes.  

As I left the store I saw another white guy walk in, maybe mid twenties, looked like a healthy suburban kid.  I was surprised, I always expect to see people that appear to be on the brink of homelessness in these fucking stores.  Tiny store too, rectangular, like the size of a cargo box or something.  Sometimes I wonder how people survive working in such places.  Serving products you don't care about to people like me who don't care about you.  Not much interesting to learn.  A lot of deadspace and downtime.

I got home, hid the packing material, tried it.  Despite the guy telling me that it's flavorless, it's not.  It tastes slightly sweet, maybe a hint of cinnamon.  Almost pleasant.  You pull – you put your lips up to the mouthpeice, there is a hole in in, you make a seal with your lips, and you breathe in.  As airflow moves through the unit, the elctrics are activated and burn the liquid into vapor.  By the time it hits your lungs, it is vapor.  

I don't know what the right amount is or anything, I am just pulling some and holding it in.  I am trying not to use it any more than I was smoking.

I made it through yesterday without having a real cigarette and I expect to do the same today.

I have therapy at nine and have to get the dog up because if I don't allow her to be up for an hour and a half before therapy I fear she won't settle.  And i have trash pickup to worry about too.  Maybe I willl write more later, we'll see.   But this will do for now.

It is seven AM.  I am in my usual spot on the living room carpet.  I hear birds sing outside and wait for stimulants to kick in:  caffeine, amodafinil, lexapro.  There is a sour taste in my mouth from attempting to ingest the amodafinil sublingually.  

In twenty minutes I will get up and make sure I am ready to to into work.  I work for a large university in the Boston area and it is our bi-yearly department meeting.  Because I work from home so much, it is necessary for me to always, always, always attend these big department meetings and say hi to at least a few people so they remember I am employed there.  Face time and so on.  

This job requires, by far, the least amount of face time I have ever worked and for that I love it.  It is the main reason I won't seriously look for another job unless I know it's a great fit and I can work from home most of the time, the same way that I do here.

Being that I'm approaching fifty and no one is exactly banging down the door to hire people getting this close to AARP eligibility, I don't expect to have another job before the end of it all.  I expect this to be it.  

In a few more minutes I will get the dog and we will go outside and I will pee/poop her.  I will get in my car around seven forty five or seven fifty and drive into the office.  My plan is to try to park near the reservoir, where there is sometimes an open spot at this time of day, someone in the nearby apartments leaving for work, for example.  If I have to kill time I can go to the cafeteria and sit in the downstairs section and look at my phone, play the nyt puzzle games.

I look skinnier.  I have my green shirt on and I don't fill it out as well.  Here is something that I did not expect to happen when I quit drinking six months ago:  I would not be working out as hard.  Since I won't work out as hard, I fear I am shrinking a little bit muscularly.  Maybe this is all in my head.  I do not know, I do not preen in front of the camera and take pictures from all angles and thoroughly examine them.  I am more the put-on-a-shirt-and-eyeball-myself-for-a-second-in-the-mirror type of guy.  My eyeballs told me today that I am skinnier, and not in a healthy looking way.  It is more in the I-am-getting-old-and-frail kind of way.

Today is the day I stop smoking.  I came up with a strategy to stop.  It is to not buy any more. 

I smoked four or five yesterday and I can still feel them today in my lungs.  It's okay, I know it will clear out fast – a few weeks and the majority of gunk in my lungs will have been cleared, a few months and it's back to virtually normal, virtually pink again, a year and it's no longer virtually, it's complete.  

I took up smoking again as a way to stop drinking and it did work.  It did help.  It gave me something to look forward to, a way to focus my breaks from work, and a seret to hide from Penny.  I would smoke next to the shed after she left.  I'm aware that it's only a matter of time before she catches me – goes into the shed for some reason and finds that it smells like smoke, or raises the lid to the black weber grilll and discovers the ten or so empty packets of cigarettes, Camel Blue and Marlborough Light, along with a pack of matches.  I have become increasingly lazy about hiding it.  For the first month I would have my last cigarette around four and then shower before she got home.  Nowadays I smoke, change my shirt, run listerine through my mouth and brush everywhere – top of mouth, tongue, under tongue, sides – maybe not even floss – then gargle a second.  Wash face with soap.  Done.  

Even with these precautions, here is all it takes to be caught:  Penny comes home unexpectedly.  Starts to head to work, realizes she forgot something, home – I am downstairs smelling like smoke, caught. Or worse I am outside smoking and doggo is inside and I am leaving it alone.  Caught. 

She will be in tears, I need you, I can't live without you, we are trying to have a baby together, I have no one else. 

I know this because when she caught me smoking two years ago that was the drill.  It took a while for her to forget about it and trust that I was no longer smoking.  I don't want to do that again.

I may go to the vape store on the way back from my meeting and get a device so I can still have nicotine, still have a break from work, still have a secret, but stop smelling like tobacco – stop worrying about Penny catching me doing something she will crucify me for, stop filling my lungs with tar.

The nicotine isn't good for me but it can't be worse than what I'm doing.  

I have to get the dog up and start my day.

I only have about ten minutes to write today.  At seven fifty on the dot I will wake up doggo and start the day.  It will be hard to write once she is up – it will be the usual poop pee walk then talk about shit with Penny, get into life's shit.

I had trouble sleeping last night.  It might have been all the stimulants I'm on, or it just might have been a bad night.  They happen sometimes.  I kept thinking about the next steps in my stupid work projects, and my HVAC project, and why I'm not writing, and why I don't feel more free.  I should feel about as free as any man who isn't independently wealthy can – I'm 48, in decent health, white, not terrible looking, not yet aged out of society – I have some money, certainly enough to “do mostly whatever I like” even though I'm generally careful with money.  But I don't feel free – I feel trapped in my days, trapped by my dog, my wife, my house, my job, trapped by myself.

My friend Sheldon in New Hampshire wrote me a long email that I read right before I went to bed.  He is in the same industry as myself – IT/Software – but on the sales side for a big well known company.  He is probably the only person in my life that 100% understands what I do and I sometimes take advantage of this fact to bore him with absurdly nerdy stories about what I am up to at home or at work.  I can tell him I got streaming working from one PC to another using sunshine and moonlight at 1080p at 60fps and he knows.  I can tell him I am using python and a variety of screen scraping methods to extract data from a vendor app's UI so we can store it in JSON format and this instantly makes sense to him.  I can inform him that zone 3 of my upstairs HVAC unit is finally working because I rewired the therm to get Y2 connected and he'll know about that too.  These things make sense to him, they are projects worth doing and things worth knowing.  

The gist of his email is that he went to see his failing mother in AZ instead of going to a work conference.  “Took a page out of The Last Captain's playbook and skipped the conference, knew I'm a senior person and they won't do anything about it.”  (The Last Captain is me.  I often tell Sheldon that I skip things at work that I don't feel like doing – a lot of the face time-y networking-type of activities that I despise.  

He expects a response today.  I might ask AI to help me write one once Penny has gone to work.

Yesterday:  Because it was cool out I decided to work on the attic some.  I started putting up this heat reflective sheeting between the ceiling joists called Reflectix.  It stops radiant heat from coming in and is pretty effective from what I read online.  I wanted to see how easy or hard it is to put up and it's not bad.  big 4' wide silver roll.  I undo some on the floor, cut peices out, staple them to joists.  I am wearing my full PPE gear now – my shitty shoes, long jeans, long sleeve shirts, an n95 mask.  It makes the work hotter but also more manageable because i don't feel quite as gross.

So I got a bunch of that up but then got stuck because I did decide to move the flex duct on the registers. 

In the middle of the night I came up with this plan.

• Take the flex duct off the register for zone 3.  I don't need this zone to be working downstairs.
• point the hose somewhere in the attic safe, and semi-secure it so the air pressure doesn't blow it around.
• viola, now you have AC in the attic for the remainder of this stupid project, turn on zone 3 and you are cool upstairs.

Once that is done I can also get the reflective barrier up on the roof behind that register and do that general area.  I can get a lot done on the reflectix project quickly if I move, move, move, don't think too hard, it's just fucking insulation, I'm not breaking anything, it's not rocket science or even computer science or even scripting shit for my shitty job.

I have to go get the dog.  My mood was overall shit yesterday btw for the first part of the day, the largest chunk, and I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about my mother and her side of the famly and their addictive and depressive tendencies and hating them all for the things that I have inherited.

No entry yesterday.  I couldn't quite make myself do it.  I woke up at the usual time but played Prince of Persia on the Nintendo Switch instead.  Penny got it out of the library for me and I am doing my best to finish it as quickly as possible.  It's a 2D Metroid type game, the kind where you unlock an ability and that is sort of the ‘key’ that allows you to progress to a different area of the map.  A double jump allows you to reach a new door.  The air-dash yet another undiscovered location, because now you can span a small horizontal gap in the wall while airborne.  And so on.  These games are about exploration, traversing mazes, solving small puzzles, and loneliness.

Yes, lonelliness.  These are not games that you play with friends, either in-game or outside.  There is no multiplayer co-op.  No voice chat.  Within the game you do not have a sidekick or familiars or a radio buddy telling you where to go.  There is you in this unfamiliar location, trying to figure things out, and that is that.

I realized last night that I am going to finish this game.  In a world where I probably only complete half of the games I play, I will finish this one.  I will do this because I hit a point where the music – a soft arabian tune – started to get in my head and haunt me.  That feeling of loneliness I used to feel as a kid came back to me – a loneliness that I tried to ignore, in part, by playing video games.  I could get immersed in the puzzles and challenges and forget about my parents and the problems at school and all of the ways in which I didn't measure up and instead just work on this game.  Figure it out.  What did they want me to do here?  How do I kill this enemy?  Is there a better way to position my hand on this controller so I can more consistently tap a certain button with ease and speed?  

So I played that for a while and took doggo out and exercised – I did my first weight workout since Thursday.  I will do another tomorrow.  I saw Penny off to work and smoked a cigarette and then I felt unbelievably lethargic.  

The guy from Enphase came over and installed the new monitoring panel for my solar system.  I had forgotten he was even scheduled to come and then suddenly at ten in the morning I am getting texts saying he will be late and he is apologizing and I am thinking who cares, I didn't even know you were going to be here.  He liked Shelley.  His wife is a veteranarian in New Hampshire.  They have two Yorkis and temporarily seven because the bitch gave birth to five pups but they will re-home them or sell them.  it's a whole thing is what he told me.  sounds like a lot of stories there i told him.

Something successful writers all agree on:  Writing takes discipline.

Something I seem to lack when it comes to writing:  discipline.

I am going to do my best to be more discipllined this morning.  I will take Shelley out at seven forty five and we will do our loop.  I'll feed her and chat with Penny for a while.  Then I willl sit at the table and let Shelley figure out how to entertain herself.  I may put the bark buzzer on her.  I may get the clicker out – it may be time to return to click training to fix some behaviors.  And I will try to work, with my laptop on the kitchen table.  I will file the JIRA issue for the automated restarts for Apache on Novell Access Manager.  I will figure out how to disable and re-enable the monitoring on the F5 when these jobs fire.  I will do this in the PERF environment so as to not fuck anything up and I will document everything on our wiki.

What I would really like to do is put Shelley in my office so I can work there and have her fuck around within sight of me now that I can trust her to not pee and poop all over the place.  But not today.  That is too much for today.  This is already a day in which I am filing issues and scripting and probably also doing laundry.  What else can I add to make the day's goals completely unachievable?

More HVAC work in the attic.  Rewriting Patterns.  Finishing my screen scraping project.  A heavy workout.

I don't have nearly enough energy to do these things.  I need useful energy too.  For the work project I outlined, it is not enough to be awake.  There needs to be the tickle of desire, and desire needs fuel.  If I am underslept there is no desire to do anything.  

I was definitely underslept yesterday.  I napped twice, could not seem to get it going. 

While I smoked my afternoon cigarette, out on the rusting soccer goal frame left by the previous owners of this house, my ass pressed against the two inch metal bar that does the horizontal span to hold the top section of the net as I sat on it, a bunny came up to me.  It's the closest a bunny has ever come to me.  These are the most unafraid rabbits I have ever seen in my life.  The only thing that makes them really run from me is Shelley lunging at them.  Big black eyes on the sides of the head – a herbavore feature, a prey feature, eyes on the sides to maximize view, to scan for predators.  It nibbled on the tops of grasses as I pulled from the cigarette and pulled smoke into the air.  Just an hour before I ordered 128 oz of laboratory grade ethelyne glycol.  I will soak apple slices in it and see if they eat it.  It's pure and it's sweet.  The stuff I got from the store a couple of weeks ago had a bittering agent added.  This is why the bunnies didn't eat it.

I am going to kill this bunny i said to myself, half in disbelief, as it sat a mere two feet away from me.  I thought about it dying due to kidney toxicity.  That's how the ethylene glycol does its work.  It's not a fun way to go.  

Maybe I won't do it.  

But I have to find something to do.  Another warren hole appeared in my yard yesterday. This is the fourth I've discovered.  There may be more I don't know about.   They will breed and destroy everything if I can't find a solution. 

Cat?  Mongoose?  Isn't the end result the same if I get a critter-killer?  Death for the rabbits?

Time to start the day.

Computer:  Today I am up early again.  

It is six forty five and I am downstairs in my spot on the rug writing and waiting for drugs to kick in:  caffeine, modafinil, lexapro.

I am doing this because it might be my only bit of quiet time today.  Time to myself.  If I don't get it now, I won't get any. 

Because today will go:  Penny and lovemaking, then doggo duties, then Penny again because we are driving down to Millis to visit a farm that she has been talking about all week.  They have a dining area and we will sit and eat something, people watch, take-it-all-in.  

The weather is decent today, mid sixties, only partial sun – fully acceptable weather for Jennie, who instantly wilts with anything over eighty.  To pick or not to pick will be the question.  It's strawberry season and I'm sure the farm will have pre-picked berries at their stand but it may be that Penny wants to bend down and have the experience of manually gathering some.  We may take a hybrid approach, too – pick the minimum amount, buy another quart on top of that.  

By the time we get home we will need to wake the dog up again.  And we will be discussing mundane things like:  Should we go to Market Basket?  (Probably.)

Yesterday I didn't get as much of the attic done as I wanted.  I did about an hour and a half up there, fully protected this time, long sleeve shirt and jeans and sneakers.  (The protective gear helped, I wasn't as itchy last night and slept okay.). I was able to finish wrapping the zone 2 ductwork in the reflective bubblewrap and seal it all together as best I could so that there aren't any air leaks.  That's the key from all the information I've gathered online:  No leaks.  You can't let air from the attic touch the metal ducting or you will probably have condensation issues in the summer when it's hot and rather humid in the attic but the ducting is cold from the AC cycle.  Water will gather on the ductwork and weep.  It may be even worse if you put something on the ductwork but don't get it air-sealed because then you trap moisture and can have mold issues.  So you want that first barrier against the duct to be air tight or very very close.  I wrapped four foot wide sections of foil around the duct and used mastic tape to seal edges, working hard to line things up with the tape, and press-press-press the edges, running my fingers up and down several times, reminding myself that once-is-not-enough, forcing myself to work slowly and deliberately.  I did the areas around the flex duct exits too – these are the most awkward parts because of all of the irregular shapes, cones of metal sprouting off of the rectangular section, difficult to seal or mastic or tape or anything.  Parts I covered with the plastic sheeting that I got, cutting the right shape (or close enough) out of the roll, covering whatever bit I wanted to seal with that plastic, then carefully taping every part of the plastic over the duct itself.  Sort of like a seamstress putting a patch on jeans, you lay the patch down over a hole and sew the edges onto the original fabric.  

So I finished the two flex ducts, then wrapped a big piece of insulation around the third flex duct, the one that goes to my office, the one that is going to be on most of the time.  I zip-lined it to hold it together and then wrapped the entire thing in plastic again, then worked once more on, you guessed it, taping, taping, taping.   Positioning myself for work on this register absolutely sucked, feet pushing into cellulose insulation, shoes fully submerged in the stuff – it looks like gray hamster bedding – thoughts of “will i have to wash my shoes after this to get it out” – always more work for myself being created even as I am doing work for some other project – I bend over and crouch and huff and puff.  I tell myself this is all good for me and think of friends my age, forty eight, who would not be up for this task:  surely Brian, who is overweight, could not do this work.  Nor his fattie wife.  Sheldon in New Hampshire might be able to do it but might not – he's tall and it would stress his back more than mine.  My calves ache and I wonder why.  

At some point, when I am on my back on the floor with my head sticking up past the duct, finishing the taping on the final bit, I run out of tape.  I bought tons of it but even so somehow burnt through four 100' rolls over the course of this project.  That's the end of the day's work.  

I go outside, it is pouring rain, and smoke a cigarette in the shed with the door open.  I know this is going to make my clothes smell like cigarettes and this is a concern with Penny not knowing that I'm smoking but it seems to not matter.  Everything needs to be washed anyway, because of the insulation.

I decide to go back upstairs and just clean a bit.  It is eleven thirty at this point.  I am tired but convince myself to do it.  Once I am moving the motion of my own body keeps me going.  I sweep bits of insulation into a dustbin and scrape bits of mastic off the floor and arrange all my tools in one pile and all my materials – big fiberglass bats of insulation, the plastic sheeting roll, the zip ties – in another section.  i throw my insulation-ridden temp clothing down the stairs to be washed later.  Then at the very end I decide to open the tub of mastic and go over a few sections because hey, it will have time to cure, given that I'm not doing any more work up here today.

Then I shower and carefully scrub myself and lay down for twenty mintues to re-set a little bit.  I eat the rest of yesterday's sushi on my bed upstairs, telling myself I have to remember to throw out the plastic tray or Penny will know I've been eating in bed.  I fall asleep but not really asleep, a light sleep, something I think is more in line with meditation than sleep.  I imagine a foreign psychiatrist speaking to me, asking me questions.  That's my go-to self-soothing mechanism nowadays.  (It sure beats my old mechanism, which I will not talk about here, but it was a destructive mechanism, not good for me.). 

He asks why the insulation project is so important

I tell him I need to be efficient and busy.  It's good work and it's good to be busy.

He asks what else I would rather be doing than this project and I tell him nothing

He says that is not true, this project is misery, he can see me scratching my arms and there is insulation in my hair and I have small cuts and bruises from shimmying over the floor

I say fine I know you want me to say something provocative so here it is:  drinking drinking drinking drinking

and why do we drink

because we are not writing, because we are not following our dreams, because I am not doing anything that makes my mother proud:  I am not doing anything artistic.

now we are getting somewhere, he says, and I fall asleep.

Eight fifteen in the morning.  I lay in my customary spot on the living room floor and try to gather myself.  

Tired.  Despite all the drugs I took, I am tired.  Didn't sleep well. Wish I wasn't doing the attic work but that's what I have planned.  Penny will be at work and I will create our dog Shelley in an hour or so and then it will be off to the attic to try to finish insulating the last duct.  I will wrap the zone in the reflective bubble wrap and try to make it air tight around the metal duct.  I will wear long sleeves to protect my arms from the fiberglass.  This was my mistake yesterday:  I was up there shirtless, wearing nothing but my boxers, and it got all over me, the fiberglass insulation.  It makes me itchy and gross – I was scratching myself even in the middle of the night, scratching my arms and chest.

My dog brings me toys while I try to write:  a purple octopus that my sister bought for us, a ball attached to a blue tugging strap.  We've been outside already, walked around the block, pee and poop and sniffy times.  I close my eyes and hold a toy in my left hand and she will tug at it and then try to grab it from me.  If she succeeds in wresting it away, she will then try to place the toy on my lap, between me and my computer.  I cannot type when she does this.  I close my eyes and feel the pull of sleep.  I am low on sleep.  The drugs help me to stay awake but they do not give me fuel - they do not give me the core energy I need to do what I need to do today.  It may be that I need to eat something.  This is what I never read in fiction:  The constant brain chatter about "should I do this, should I do that."  Should I drink some more water, would that help me to feel more up to the tasks ahead of me?  Eat an apple?  Have a yogurt?  Can I have more caffeine or will that just make me more tired the way that having too much sometimes does?  I probably need to move around – I have not done enough formal exercise this week.  My routines have been ruined by the dog and the attic project – I have been throwing my useful energy into sweating upstairs, taping things, crawling around in small spaces and huffing and telling myself to keep going because this is my chance to get it done.  Today is a little cooler than yesterday but it will become crazy hot after noonish and then every ten minutes up there starts to feel like an hour.  That's what happened yesterday – I did a final bit of work between noon and one and it destroyed me.  Got the first zone completely done but then – kaput.  

I asked Penny what she thought the most influential book she'd ever read was.  I got in response:  Dracula, Frankenstein, The Handsmaid's Tale, The Belle Jar, everything by Austen.  

Characters in books do not seem to wonder if they have taken too long to respond to a friend's email, or if they've had the recommended eight glasses of water, or given enough attention to their dog.  

Today I am sure I will spend a lot of time convincing myself that the attic work is a good enough workout for the day, even though I haven't done any weight work since Wednesday morning.  It seems like too long a gap.  I worry I will start to get smaller.  Then I will worry about not having any time to myself tomorrow, since it is a Family day, a Me-And-Jennie-And-Doggo day, and I will do whatever she wants to do.

I must be in a shitty mood because everything seems black right now.  

I feel lost a great deal of the time, even as I feel I shouldn't.

I sit in bed at 4:15 today.  I took a nap and finished the training that I had no interest in – the BASEcamp training about identiy management.  I got very little out of it if you want to know the truth, and even writing that down makes me feel silly and stupid.  I should have gotten more out of it, I think to myself.  Other people got more out of it.

To me it's half buzzwords and half people talking about their backgrounds and how they wound up where they wound up and that kind of thing.  I don't care.  

I have forty five minutes until Penny gets home and I should be allowing myself to just sit and exist.  I tried reading a bit and stopped after six or seven pages.  I'm working my way through the Thursday Murder Club and it's not bad.  Better than Anxious People, the only other book i've read this year.  Man that was a turd, I don't think I'll be reading anything else by Fredrick Backman.  Too cutesey.

This book, TMC, has some cutesey stuff in it but feels more grounded and well thought out.  Some characters are legit hard and cynical, like Ian Ventham, the diabolical condominium developer who is scheming to build his next set of units on top of a graveyard.  Well, not on top.  They are going to move the bones first.  The bones will be moved by diggers – lowest bid won the contract.  It will not be pretty.  Graves will most certainly be upset and spoilt.

My skin itches from the insulation work this morning.  Itches and tiny pin pricks and zaps.  It will be better tomorrow probably.  Some of the fibers have worked their ways into my pores.  

I've decided that I will offer Penny the choice of sushi or Chinese tonight so I can avoid cooking.  I've been cooking something or other all week and wouldn't mind a night off.  My guess is that she wouldn't mind some filthy chinese herself.

Eleven twenty two in the morning.  I'm in my office, having just smoked a cigarette, eaten a peanut butter sandwich, and showered.  Porcupine tree plays on my phone, the Anesthetize album.  The shower was necessary because I'd been in the attic for an hour and twenty minutes doing – you guessed it – more HVAC work.  I silicon sealed the leak to the master bedroom so that, later today, I can stuff some insulation around it and then plastic-wrap seal the whole thing.  

Then I put insulation back for one of the three sections on zone 2, the one to my office.  It's painstaking work.  Wrap insulation, tape, more tape, adjust, stuff more insulation back in, tape, seal.  I bought a big bag of R13 unfaced at home depot yesterday and I plan to wrap that around the ducts to give it even more insulation.  I ordered radiant barrier to install between roof joists, to reduce radiant heating that makes the space a hundred and twenty degrees when it's just 80 outside.  Every time I finish something I see another improvement.  I am hanging the flex duct from joists to remove ninety degree angles.  I am probably going to get the flex duct off the ceiling and hang it instead because if it hangs, I can 1. reduce the path by probably ten feet and 2.  get it to be more or less horizontal instead of up and then down again, in an arc, plus 3 the top of the attic is the hottest part and having the ducts up there guarantees the greatest energy loss.  

But doing this is probably several hours more work.  I am trying to decide now just how much I will want to do this afternoon.  I have the BASEcamp stuff for work - people presenting, discussing shit, and I tried to mix that in with work yesterday with mixed results – I wound up exhausted.  

Who the fuck installed this shit?

I think I will want one of those 95 masks for when I move the duct because I'm up to my ankles in cellulose insulation and the dust gets pretty intense.  I know it's not good to breathe.  

All the while I work, I wonder why I am doing this.  Am I happy doing this work?  Shouldn't I be writing or working on other goals?  If I were Ryan I would be noodling on guitar or playing a video game or doing something on the internet.  This is how I'm choosing to spend my time instead.  Re-doing my fucking ductwork.  It makes me think that I'm crazy or OCD or unbalanced or whatever.  Even now I am thinking i probably should go to home depot and get the mask and the heat foam for sealing the registers after I move the duct work.  

Although, instead of that, I could do a more casual, leisurely thing and finish insulating the zone 2 duct.  That's probably a better thing to do. Get something finished before I start on the next big part.  If I finished sealing the route to the bedroom and then did the zone 2 duct, that would be a lot of work for today and I could call it done.  Move the ducts another day, if I feel like it.  I don't have to.  There's no requirement to do anything after I get the rest of the main duct insulated, you know.

I'm going to do and do the next section and then log into the meetings at work and see how it all goes.  

I didn't have therapy this morning because I took it on Wednesday instead – my guy is out today.  Doctor appointment with his wife.  They are having a baby.  I think he'd been hiding this from me because I have been working through IVF with my wife and it's been such a struggle.  He probably didn't want me to be jealous.  

I think I am still depressed.  I don't think I've ever stopped being depressed – I've just accepted it as a part of my life.  

One way to look at the HVAC shit is that it keeps me busy – motivated and pushing forward and trying as best as I can to stay out of my head too much.  That, I am pretty sure, is not good for me.  My therapist told me a while back that “leaning into projects” was probably a healthy reaction to being depressed and he approved of it – working on projects certainly helps me to not drink anyway.  

I need the energy to push.

Computer:

Today it is two twenty in the afternoon.  I am on another BASEcamp meeting listening to a bald guy in what looks to be his fifties talk about Identity and Access Management.  

This morning I woke up at six twenty, took my antidepressant and stimulants, drank an espresso on top of it, and drove to the Framingham Target to try to get the new Nintendo system – the Switch 2.

I knew I was in good shape pretty much immediately.  There were only ten or fifteen people waiting for the place to open.  I figured they'd get at least twenty five systems and I'd be able to snag something.  So I got my spot in line and waited for twenty minutes in the early morning sun, comfortable and confident.  Struck up a conversation with the woman who got a spot behind me – an overweight nerd who looked to be about my age, closing in on fifty, graying hair, but a happy face somehow.  She was married, had a kid around ten, said she was getting it for her kiddo but she played too.  Zelda, metroid - she knew all of this stuff in a fair amount of detail.  Complained about the motion controls in Skyward Sword and revealed that it was the one Zelda she couldn't finish.  Mentioned that Nintendo never seems to release enough product, and I agreed – they try to keep up artificial demand.  I was glad to talk to her, it made the time pass a little faster.  

And before I knew it, I had it.  We moved inside, two guys in the electronics section manned the register, one dealing out stock, the other ringing people up.  I got the non-mario-kart bundle because I don't care much for that particular game – total 483.   Stopped by Stop and Shop on the way back to grab a few things that Penny wanted:  Salad stuff, fruit, eggs.  Home at seven forty five, woke up my dumb dog, went for a quick walk, then back home.  Played with the doggo while Penny finished getting ready for work. After she left I did the usual:  Smoked a cigarette outside, let our dog mess around on the carpet.  I took a picture of the switch and sent it to my friend Brian, made him jealous.  He may end up getting a Switch after all – he wasn't sure before, but it looks as though I managed to make him jealous enough to go and pick one up.  I set it up, removed drawers from the entertainment console so I could plug things in and do the wiring, put the drawers back, grease stains on my hands from the rails.  The last time I removed these drawers I had a back flare-up that made me pant and sweat, the pain of it.  This time it was difficult but easier than before.  I secured the power cables to the wall behind the drawer and made sure they closed cleanly.  I set up the HDMI interface.  I booted the system and did the initial setup:  Wireless, account login.  I installed Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and then did more account stuff so I could log into the eShop and download the TOTK “Switch 2” expansion / graphics pack.  Presto:  The game now runs at 60fps and looks incredible.  I still have to move over save files because I'm pretty sure I don't want to go through the whole game again.

By the time this was all done it was ten AM and I was able to crate Shelley.  I decided fuck it, let's go into the attic and do ductwork.  I secured the zone 3 output using zip ties and wrapped some fiberglass bat around it for an additional layer of insulation, then wrapped that in plastic from a garbage bag, then did my best to air-seal it all together using HardCast mastic tape.  It had to be a hundred degrees in the attic even though it was morning.  I wore boxers only, my chest bare and glistening from sweat, peeling off sections of tape from the roll, removing the backing, sealing, sealing, sealing.  I drank coke zero because I bought a liter of it – I normally don't drink soda but I wanted to have it included in the picture of me with my switch 2 that I sent to Brian, because Brian's Language of Jealousy is all about indulgence.  He likes Coke Zero, so that's what I bought.  Zone 3 is done.  I moved back to Zone 2 and tried to mastic around it.  I decided to remove the damper entirely  on the route to the register in my office because I couldn't fix it.  I tried to imagine a scenario where I want to heat and cool zone 2 but wanted reduced flow to my office and couldn't really come up with anything.  It might as well get full flow, always.  Who cares.  After sealing the opening with plumber's putty and more mastic, I re-attached the flex duct, zip lined it tight, mastic'ed it to the metal opening.  By this point it was twelve thirty.  I had my work meeting in the background, people talking about identity management, and felt bad that I wasn't paying full attention.  I'm in my office now and I wish I could run the AC here because it's fucking ninety five degrees outside but all the sealant shit I used upstairs needs to cure for a bit before I start everything up in that zone.  Although at these temperatures, I might be able to do it in another hour or so.  Once these work meetings are over I could duck up there and check.  If it's dry and cured, I might just go ahead and turn it on, see what happens.  

Then what I have left is applying the flex-foil to the ductwork where I'd removed the old insulation.  it needs to be airtight around the duct or there could be moisture issues – humid air will produce condensation against the duct if there is any flow at all.  I'll do my best.  I don't know if I have enough flex-foil to do the whole thing.  Then I'll finish wrapping the flex duct that leads to my office.  This will mean more zip lining, some usage of the extra insulation I brought upstairs, maybe another plastic-wrap, like I did with the zone 3 duct.  Probably two more hours of work.  I could do it today but I probably shouldn't – it is going to be an absolute furnace up there.  It would be saner to do it tomorrow morning, let myself relax today.  Maybe go to home depot and buy unfaced insulation bats to bring upstairs to wrap around the rest of the duct.  I'm not totally sure that I'm going to do this yet.  it's a lot of extra work and probably another hundred bucks of material.  But it might also be worth it.  I can feel the coolness of the ducts that only have the foil on them and feel that the extra wrap will help to really keep them tight – a particular concern when I am running this thing constantly, which I will be.  Did I mention it's 95 degrees today?  On June 5th for fucks sake.  Anyone who doesn't think climate change is real can suck my balls.

So the better plan may be to go to home depot and buy a bunch of insulation and prep for tomorrow.  I'm almost done with this fucking project.  I thought I'd be done last week but no.  It just goes on and on.  It's time to finish up.  I'm sick of it.

Computer:  I am doing better today than yesterday.

Waking up without a hangover is important.  Not drinking for four months straight has really cemented this fact for me.  It affects me all day, even with the stimulants I take.  I felt more hopeless than usual, the what's the point of this or that kind of questions that often plague me but are harder to shake off when I'm in this state.  The tension – the internet calls this hangxiety now – will not leave, negative thoughts sticking to me like flies on sticky paper.  Why should I finish sealing the duct in the attic?  Why am I so worried about my stupid dog's happiness and well being?  Why do I have so much difficulty feeling satisfied and happy in my life?

Today things are simpler in my head.  I am listening to presenters on a zoom meeting discuss identity management topics.  They use acronyms like OCLC and AuthZ and SAML.  It is a foreign language unless you work in this space.  It is boring and I find that the discussions are without much of a point.  You sift through hours of bullshit monologuing for a single gem of data – something like “oh it's possible to dynamically reload a service provider in shibboleth.”  Which isn't something I've looked into for years.  And would benefit us on a day to day basis if we could figugure out how to do it and implement it.  I listen to this while cleaning my office.  I am securing plastic retainers to my walls right above the baseboard molding to hide wires in the hope that I will be able to have my dog in this room, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.  

I am thinking about going to Target early in the morning tomorrow to see if they have a Switch 2 to sell me.  It is the release date of the console and I know I want it even though I barely play games now.  I will buy it because I am compelled to buy it, the way I buy all Nintendo systems.  I talk to Penny about it – if I can get one, we will take a picture of me playing it, dressed only in boxer pants but otherwise naked, the game displayed on our big screen TV, candy and nachos scattered around me, a scene of nerd bliss.  She thinks this is a great idea, to take pictures of unadulterated sloth, and send them to my friend Brian, who has a lot of jealousy when it comes to other people living a better life than him.  To him, a better life is an easier life, a lazier life, a life full of entertainment and food and friends and posting and bragging and winning and cheating if the situation requires it.  I don't think he has managed to get a pre-order, which means he won't have a switch 2 and I, theoretically, might.  And in this theoretical world he will become Jelly of me, a fact which justifies almost any cost or inconvenience to myself that I might endure as a result of questing for this product.  Target opens at seven, I can wake up at six thirty, take drugs, and drive down for the seven o'clock open to see what they have. 

I had therapy this morning at nine.  Penny is home today – it's her day off – she has to work on Saturday and when she works on Saturday she gets a weekday off prior.  Her “ADC," whatever that stands for.  Adjusted Day Compensation?  She took care of the dog and I talked to my therapist, whom I think of as Scarecrow because he sort of resembles the actor who plays him in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, for an hour. 

I told him I am doing fine overall.  I revealed that I did jack shit on my vacation – not much vacation-y stuff.  But that it was satisfying to resolve the HVAC issues in our house.  Full disclosure I still have HVAC work to do but probably will not work on it today because it is hot as fuck upstairs and Penny is home and I just kind of feel like it will be a pain to work it all out.  But that being said… maybe.  Maybe I can just silicon the seals and get the flex duct attached to the main outlet and do the initial round of sealing – it will need more than one so it would be helpful for it to do an initial cure today before I lay the second one tomorrow.  That might set me up to complete the project on Friday.  We talked about the IVF status – going to Greece and Albania, better diagnostics, justifying the trip – the time, the energy, the hopelessness.  I talked about the argument I had with Penny last Saturday.  The burden of the dog.  

I did not talk about the drinking on Monday.  He didn't ask if I'd had a drink since the last time we spoke and I didn't bring it up.  I think it's ok – I'm pretty clear on not drinking again, not repeating the mistake.  I have – finally! – come to value the benefits of not being drunk.  Without the hangovers I am able to face things better – my anxiety is a little lower – my energy levels are still shit but better than being hung over.   There are actually days now where I don't nap.  Granted, not many, but they exist.  They used to not exist.  

I also didn't talk about how bored and tired I am of my job.  I have to bear it for Penny, to support our lives together.

I found a reddit thread from a month ago where someone posted about the deletion of my old financial independece blog.  Some people miss it.  More than one person suggested that I put my blog posts into a book.  A few people were a little bit PO'd that it's gone – “a disservice to the internet that it's offline, it is sad."  I wonder if I will tell Penny about it.  It was a big part of my life for a long time.  Part of me wants to respond to the comments, inform people I am alive and well, but I think I will end up refraining.

At any rate, it's still part of the internet archive and people can view the old posts if they really want to.

Computer:  I regret drinking last night of course.

Penny came home and I was half drunk and completely exhausted.  I somehow managed to make dinner – warmed up the baked tilapia that I'd made the day before along with some mac and cheese, the good Panera stuff, and made green beans from scratch with some bacon to give it some kick.  She said she wasn't going to be hungry but when I put it in front of her she scarfed everything down.  So either she was hungry or the food was good.  We put on one of the Hitchcock Hour shows and Shelley fell asleep on Penny's lap.  The Hitchcock stuff is from the 50s and has a slow, campy feel to it that we both like.  Penny tunes out on her phone or her laptop, looking at clothes to buy or new IVF procedures or whatever news and social media her feeds recommend.  I can tune out and work on a coding project or play a video game on my Steam Deck or Switch or whatever.  I can stream pretty much everything to my SteamDeck now via the sunshine and moonlight applications.  

I fell asleep on the couch for half an hour, fried, hearing something on the television in the background.  It could have been anything – I don't remember what Penny put on after the Hitchcock stuff ended.  

I didn't exercise today which is unusual for me but whatever.  I consider it to be a punishment for the drinking.  I was plugging into work for the day.  I'm signed up for this training on identity and access management called BASEcamp.  It's boring as hell but today I was scoping out the structure (basically non-interactive), the people (eighty or so people on each meeting), and the content (most of it not all that applicable to me, but I did learn that many universities are doing SAML proxying to ENTRA because ENTRA supports openID tokens behind the scenes and there are a lot of benefits to that especially for Microsoft heavy shops.)

My dog is barking at nothing, about twenty feet away from me.

I am wondering what I will tell my therapist tomorrow about drinking.  Does it matter that I had a failure?  I don't know.  I'm not drinking tonight and I'm not tempted.  It was a mistake and I want to just let it clear out of my system and go back to feeling steadier during the day.  I was not all that steady today.  

I moved this blog, the lastcaptainslog.com, from my main desktop computer to a small Dell Optiplex Micro, the 3070 model, and made sure the power usage is low.  And it is.  Ridiculously low.  6w idle power running ubuntu with a python server.  The Kill-O-Watt doesn't lie – I plugged the computer into the Kill-O-Watt and picked up real time data.  6 watts is trivial.  It's less than the raspberry pi that I ran this project on when I started it.  Now that it's been moved off my desktop I may go back to this old model I used to have of automatically shutting my windows desktop down at midnight and auto-starting it at 6:30.  It will give it six hours of downtime and over the course of a year that electricity adds up.  Plus I get a freshly booted PC to start the day, never a horrible thing.  

I will make chicken with corn and tomatoes tonight, served with nachoes, for Penny.  We have some ripe avocados that I want to use.

After the meetings were over I smoked a cigarette in the backyard and wondered if my neighbors have figured out that I'm smoking.  Probably.  At least the direct neighbors, Danielle and Adam.  They are around enough and I have been smoking long enough.  I told myself as I smoked that this would be my last pack.  I'll finish it before the week ends and call it quits.  I am barely enjoying it anymore.  I should do something else to relax, to take breaks – go read a chapter of a book, have a cup of tea, get off the screen.  I think that's half of the pleasure of it, getting up, going outside, walking a bit, forcing myself to look at the property, my trees, the grass.  Letting myself think things for a minute, plan the next move.  I don't know.

 I should probably walk Shelley around the block for ten minutes and figure out what I’m going to do next.  Maybe get that Optiplex to auto-start the blog after the system bounces.  Then maybe come up with a list of enhancements.  I was going to add a welcome image and an “about this blog” type page.  That kind of thing.  Because once Penny gets home I really won’t be able to do shit.

Early Tuesday.  I have been up since 6:20A and cannot sleep.  Took drugs:  monafidil, lexapro, caffeine.  Laying on carpet in living room, thinking about life.  

I am hung over but not so bad.  Functional, just hazy and gross.  I feel kind of like death but with a tiny bit of drive somehow.  The drugs do that, give me some drive to power through, no matter how I feel, as my mom might put it, “emotionally.”  Emotionally I feel upset about so many things, and disappointed I didn't get more done in my vacation, and disappointed I can't find better and more sustainable ways to be happy and content besides smoking and drinking and cycling through drugs.

Work today:  Nothing except the BASECamp stuff that runs from noon to five.  I don't really know what I'm in for.  I will probably take most of that shit on my phone if it turns out to be fairly non interactive, which it most likely will be.  I'll set up zoom on my stupid phone and lug it around with me.  Or set it up on my macbook and lug that around with me.   Anything to not be fully plugged into it.

I finally rearranged my office yesterday afternoon.  I didn't even get to talking about it in yesterday's entry because I needed to complain about Penny so badly.  It was one of my goals for the time off – to finally put my home office back together.  It had been in a state of absolute disarray basically since September or October, when we got the dog.  I had moved the desk around to be in a position where I could see Shelley walking around the room – where she couldn't hide from me.  And everything else got moved as a result – the computer, the lamp, the record player stand, my guitars, the printer and end-table that holds it, my speakers and their stands, everything.  Then I worked on a project to Fix My Home Internet and as part of that I moved the small entertainment center piece of furniture out from the wall to access an ethernet jack.  Tools were brought up from the basement, used, and then scattered about the room.  Wires wires wires everywhere, usb this to USB that, male and female ports, thick black cables that carry power, power strips, power extension cables, speaker cables, RCA adaptors, records, dry erase board markers.  I drank a double chai tea and powered through it.  Two hours.   Got things into position mostly.  I'll see how it goes today and if I feel like it's fine, I may attach wires to baseboards, hide them.  Then get fences up, keep shelley from wall.  Then try to put doggo in room, see what happens.  See if it will work, if she can be in the room with me while I work.  We have to do something about our relationship together.  I need to work and don't want to continually care for her all day. 

I don't want to be on high alert, stressed and anxious about her all the time, the way I have been.  One thing about being drunk last night that I truly appreciated was the ability to completely ignore her while I was with her.  We went outside and I let her play while I wrote and I just absolutely did not give a shit about her.

Right before I did the room re-org, I was in the attic, hot, stripped down to my boxers, sweating, looking at the HVAC like I have so many times during my vacation.  Wondering where the problem is, why I don't get good airflow into some of the registers upstairs. 

Finally I made the decision to tear apart the register that I really want working better, the one to my office.  I took a razor and undid the sheath on the ductwork, tough going, cutting through an inch of mastic, some still wet, hands getting dirty.

I cut the flex duct off the main line.  dropped the flex onto the insulation covering the floor.  Looked at the joining metal duct, an O pipe coming off the rectangle of the main rectangular duct.  

And gaped. 

a flat metal damper.  Cutting off airflow to the flex duct traveling to the register in my office.

Explained everything.  I took it out, re-attached flex duct, went into my office.  Strong airflow.  I thought about what I should do.  Do I need to worry about equalizing pressure and shit like that.

I decided no, who gives a fuck.  I will re-attach the flex duct and call it a day.  I have various things to seal and tape together before I can consider this stupid project to be completely over but this explains everything.  I'm upset I didn't catch this earlier.  The hinge to the damper was hidden under plastic from the insulating sheathing over the flex duct and sealed away.  I still should have known better.  Should have looked for it.  I tore apart practically the whole system upstairs looking for the problem and it was in the very last place I could have possibly looked – there was nothing else to tear apart. 

I suppose I should be happy and just let the rest of it go.  I was telling myself that starting the project at the other end resulted in me fixing the electronic dampers which is great for efficiency and comfort.  This way I've redone most of the system and know it's pretty tight.  Not perfect but yes pretty fucking tight.  

It's time to stop wasting time writing and go get the doggo, get ready for work.  I don't want to.  But there's nothing else to do but this. 

I ordered from amazon:  100 more black gloves, a zip tie cutter, and 20 heavy duty zip ties to help fasten shit around the ducts.  Another $50.  I could total what this project has cost me – it will wind up being probably $600.  I think I blew $200 on mastic alone.  Another $100 on aluminum and mastic tape  $30 for a tool I never used but was too embarrassed to bring back to the store because I felt like the employee who checked me out knew that I was buying the wrong thing and I can't face him.  $100 on silicone sealant, $50 on putty, $30 on AC adapters to test motors.  I may spend more on insulating material before it's all over.  

I'm reading the Thursday Murder Club.  There is a character in it, Joyce, who keeps a diary.  She has a line in it.  “I'm writing now, that's what's important.  It is important to focus on the writing.”  She feels that way.  She values it. 

I wonder if I will ever get back to valuing it like that.

Computer:  I've been sober for a hundred and thirty days, give or take a day.

And here, Monday, the last day off of my two weeks of vacation, I have decided to drink.  Penny is still at work and I am outside with our dog Shelley.  Mondays Penny works late at the library.

This would not be a big deal, the sudden drinking, except that I've made it a big deal.  I went through a stretch from about August of 2024 until January 23rd when I was drinking, to use some tired cliches, like a fish.  I drank a bottle of wine by myself almost every night by myself and more or less kept it hidden from Penny, who is clueless about this shit for the most part, because she is self absorbed and not all that aware of what I am doing and how I am most of the time.  She seems to view me as "husband' –  a role rather than a person.  It has something to do with her Greek upbringing.

It took until today, the last day of my precious days off, for me to realize I would have a problem.  I was smoking a cigarette behind the shed and wanted a drink badly.  Penny had left for work and Shelley was crated and I thought to myself that this would be a perfect day to be drunk all day.

So here I am, in my backyard, surrounded by temporary black metal fencing that I bought online somewhere, my dog nosing around in the grass, half drunk already from a glass and a half, realizing I am probably going to go inside and drink more, even though it will make my day tomorrow harder, even though it will put me back on track to be drunk again, a drunk just like my father was for a time, the time when he was with my mother, before they got divorced and before he met Martha, who became his wife.  Martha would not tolerate my Dad's drinking.   A drink or two here and there, no day long binges, none of that shit, no indeed.

Maybe I won't drink tomorrow.  This is my hope.  That I can just sort of enjoy the evening of being kind of drunk and letting my dog do whatever it is that she feels like doing and not feeling obligated to entertain her or tire her out or anything.  

I wanted to talk honestly about how my life is going and how my vacation went.  I have therapy on Wednesday and he is going to want to have a summary.  How did I do?  Did I have any fun?

I don't know.  Being with Penny is a constant strain.  I was with Penny a lot.  She tires me out.  She wants to sit on the couch and watch movies and television shows, which I often like but also makes me feel tired and useless.  She constantly talks about her mother and her job and people, people, people.  I wish she had a hobby, I wish we could talk about other things, but we don't know how.  I love her but when I am actually with her I often just feel bad about everything – her, me, our lives.  She is incredibly angry at the world because her father died last year and her mother has Alzheimers and she has to do a lot of coordinating and care and it's very difficult for her to handle.  I find that much of my time is spent supporting her.  

Take Saturday, for instance.  

Interruption:  My dog is digging in the dirt.  I didn't think she was much of a digger but here we are.  Her paws are covered in black and I am probably going to have to clean her up at some point.  This is the life of a dog owner.  Messes and barking and training and care.  I am amazed I am dealing with it as well as I am but I often resent the stupid thing for needing so much.  

Saturday Penny had to go and take care of her mother and the whole thing spiraled.  She drove thirty minutes to her mom's place and talked to the caregiver and did some chores for her – took her to two banks because the caregiver needed to do a wire transfer to Haiti, her home country, and the first bank wouldn't do it.  Then she interviewed a new caregiver, someone to do the dirty work of feeding and clothing and staying up half the night tending to the evening psychosis of the mid-stage alzzies sufferer – and came home in a terrible, foul mood.

I should add that before she left for her mother's place that I decided that it would be a good idea to tell her that if we do manage to have a child together – we are doing IVF in an attempt to have a late in life baby – I fully expected her to abandon us to go and care for her mother.  you will do it, I said.  you will leave me with the baby and go care for your mom, the same way you are leaving me and Shelley right now to go and do stuff for your mom.  You will do it because you feel like you have no other choice.  And because I am available to help you make these bad decisions.

I hate it all.  Alzheimers, Penny, my stupid dog, my stupid life.  I'm forty eight and you would think and hope that I would be past this kind of shit.  More mature somehow, serene.  Like I should just agree to everything.  Let's go to Greece and Albania for IVF because the doctors here are no good.  Let's do a lot of bullshit with no scientific merit. 

I make so many excuses for her, you know.  

I listen to my next door neighbor Yuri clean the deck.  She was power washing it just a few minutes ago but now she is sweeping.  Shelley had been barking at her but now that has stopped.  Shelley is instead chewing on bits of mulch because she finds it to be rewarding.   A girl I met at the dog park today said that her two dogs went through a phase where they chewed on wood chips too.  It stopped after two or three months.  We'll see if the same holds true for Shelley.

So Penny comes back in a bad mood and feels like I don't support her and I don't understand and nobody understands and I have to reassure her that I love her and that I see what she is going through and it doesn't matter.  She makes a comment that she doesn't want to stay home all day – a comment I read as something some entitled bitch might say.  A comment with a dig:   You don't take me out.  A comment with subtext:  You don't treat me right.  

These sorts of things make me feel as though I have married the wrong person.  And of course I knew that we are not the same person and we have different expectations but I often feel as though her expectation is that I make her happy always and solve her problems always and so on.

The rest of the day was a trial.  By the way I drank the rest of the bottle of wine already.  Three quarters down the fucking hatch just like that, under an hour, and after the initial twenty minutes of euphoria I am already sagging.  I feel like drinking more but I won't because Penny will be home before I know it and whatever I will just try to slog through the night and see how I feel tomorrow.  I don't want to be sloppy drunk when she gets home in an hour.  

I took Penny out.  We went shopping – initially to Wallgreens because I needed dental wax to help ease the discomfort of a temporary appliance I had put in on Friday morning to help hopefully improve the TMJ in my jaw.  Then she said I thought we were going to Target and I said well we could go to Target, there are some things I want and need there so we did that, I bought stuff for smoothies, frozen peaches and passion fruit, and we left.  We went to Fresh Market and got peanut butter and chicken salad and gellato.  I was bored and tired and wanted to go home.  I pretended i was fine and happy.  I am rarely fine and happy.  I don't know how to be that way.  Sober or drunk, nothing changes,.  I am task oriented and miserable most of the time.  Straining to fit into Penny's world.  

If you read the previous entry you will be happy to know the rabbits didn't eat the lettuce, by the way.  The lettuce poisoned with antifreeze.  They avoided it.  They are continuing to tear up my lawn, dig holes, breed more of themselves. 

I am supposed to be okay with this because:  Nature.

After shopping we get home and watch a hitchcock movie and I fall asleep and then I wake up and get the dog and we walk and I make dinner because I guess I am in the doghouse because of the comment I made that morning about Penny probably leaving me to care for her mom even if we had a kid together.

Nothing helps, nothing matters, Penny hates everything.  At one point Penny is in the kitchen doing something, cleaning maybe, which she does rarely, less than me, and she is monologuing, talking about the usual things.  I think this time it is her friend Christine, and she is bitching about how Christine thinks that she (Penny) has all the time in the world because she (Christine) is single and childless and bored and has a lot of free time.  I am barely saying anything.  Not really responding.  A lot of mmhmm.  Yeppers.  I have a dental appliance in my mouth from yesterday's TMJ procedure and it hurts to talk and the pastic retaining bands are irritating my gums.  I am trying to play a game on my nintendo switch, the zelda game, breath of the wild.  She suddenly pivots the conversation, if you can call it that, to my mother.  Says my mother will get sick someday and soon i'll understand.  That everyone will understand. 

I hate when she is like this.  being a man, I think about what caused this behavior.  Was it something I did?  Was it because we made love that morning so she felt too secure in our relationship?  Secure enough to start ripping on my mom and telling me that I will soon be as miserable as she is?  I tell her enough.  Not in those words.  Ok, Ok, Penny.  I got it, I got it.  That is my nonconfrontational way of saying I have heard enough chirping about shit.

She is just… lost in herself and her thought patterns.  How is this person doing, and that person, and this celebrity, and that celebrity.  When Rick Moranis got punched in New York a couple of years ago she treated it as though it were a personal offence.  

It baffles me.

She pretends she is a housewife and I need to do my duties as a husband to make evertyhing OK and whatever she does is fine because she is a woman.

Ok.  OK OK OK enough of this fuckery.  I've had another glass of wine.  But not a glass, just wine chugged out of a bottle I shouldn't be drinking, the bottle Penny bought last weekend that made me apprehensive about her going at it because I remembered when she had three drinks in quick succession a year ago at the Rodgers family farm and went fucking bananas angry about everything.  

I am going to still be unsteady when she gets home, most likely.

All of this talk and still I have not summarized my glorious two weeks off.  Instead I just complain and document domestic bullshit.

My two weeks off was not what I wanted.  A lot of dog care, a lot of HVAC work and troubleshooting – shit nobody cares about but me.  I ripped apart the fiberglass sheathing on the last zone today in the attic.  I found that two of the registers had fucking metal dampers in them.  That's the whole reason the system wasn't working the way I expected it to.  Three years in this house and it took until today for me to figure out why two of the upstairs rooms were not heating and cooling the way I expected.  I'd basically already torn the rest of the system upstairs apart and rebuilt it.  This as the final thing.  And probably the biggest thing.

It makes me crazy.

I can't believe I have to start working again tomorrow.  I dread it.  Even though my time off was not fantastic, it was something different.

Computer:  Today I will talk about the tyranny of the dog.

The dog rules my life.  The dog and Penny of course but I am here today to talk about the dog.

Our dog's name is Shelley, a ten month old King Charles Cavalier spaniel.  She's cute and more or less well behaved.  There are sometimes health or behavioral issues that occupy my complete attention:  barking for no reason (how do I train this out of her?) or unusual amounts of drool that might indicate an oral problem or lumps in the poo or failure to poo and so on.

But that's not the biggest problem either.  

The biggest problem is the constancy of the care.

I know that this is a common complaint amongst mothers, too.  You are never off.  You are constantly monitoring them, teaching them, worrying about them.

Well, I have this complaint about the dog.

I have to wake her up in a few minutes to do what I think of as a ‘cycle.’  She is crate trained which means that when we are not cycling – when she is not up and around me – she is in the crate, napping.  Since she is older now at ten months, her cycles are, minimally, an hour and a half.  Less than that and it's hard for her to settle in the crate.  So I find that I am scrambling to live my real adult life – exercise, work, house-care, even some of the care of Penny – in the off time – meaning, the time that Shelley is in the crate.

Which means that I am always scrambling to get things done.  And worrying about having consistent energy – enough energy to get all the things I need to get done every day.

I thought it would be better by now – and although it is in some ways – it's also still a terrific daily burden and wears me out.

I don't want to wake her up and do another cycle but I will.  It will go like this: 

Wake her the fuck up, give her something to drink, get her harness and lead on her, walk her outside for fifteen minutes.

Then we will be back inside.  I want to work out – I think I might have the energy to do this, even though I've been busy already today.  I think I might be able to do my shoulder and bicep routine in the basement.

But will I have energy after the walk?

I will have to bring Shelley down into the basement with me.  Will she behave?  Will she be distracted enough to sit with me for an hour while I slog through it?  Or will she start whining and god forbid barking?

I wish sometimes that she didn't exist.  The amount of care that she needs is ridiculous.  I wonder what other people do to transition to the next phase – the phase where they don't give a shit about their dog, the phase where the dog just kind of sits around and does nothing.  I would like to do whatever is necessary to hasten it.

--

In other news I bought things I should not have bought today:  Antifreeze, lettuce, a home depot bucket.  Our yard is absolutely overrun with rabbits and they are digging holes everywhere.  I have tried letting Shelley pee and poop everywhere (the scent of the dog is supposed to make them think twice about setting up shop in the area) and I have tried sticking cigarette butts into their main warren hole because they don't like the smell of ashes and fire and I have tried putting bars of soap into little decorative and water permeable bags and leaving them in areas where they nest.  I have tried cinnamon powder and chili powder soaked in water and I have tried putting up an owl on the top of the shed that looks like it's waiting for a moment to strike and have a snack.

I am horrified to say I am about to try killing them with lettuce soaked in antifreeze.  This is probably illegal.  It is certainly unethical.  It fails basic principals of “do no harm.”  But the rabbits are messing up my property, my porch, my house.

I have become a terrible person.

Computer:  Please forgive me.

Computer: 

Today I faced my greatest domestic challenge:

My sister, my mother, my wife, and my dog, all in the same day.  

Today will be difficult as well but at least I will not see my mother.  She came over with my sister after their day out together.  Insisted, even though I told my sister that I didn't want to have dinner with my mom.  My sister spoke to my mom, tried to make the conversation lean away from coming over, and failed.  Mom wanted to see me.

Penny, my wife, has a phrase she likes to use about needy people.  So and so “Needs attention.”  Or “needs attenciones.”  She uses it so often I get sick of it.  And it isn't a particularly nuanced comment.  My mom needs a lot of things other than attention.

But when you get to the bottom of everything, Penny's assessment is probably mostly true.  Although there's other stuff going on – depression, meds, physical issues  and so on, a little of column A and a little of column b is another favorite phrase of Penny – the need for attention and validation is probably the most powerful driving force on days when she actually has some energy.

I don't know how other people deal with all of this domestic shit without losing their mind.  All I want to do is work on my HVAC issue so I can put it behind me.  Today I will see if any of the mastic sealing I did yesterday helped at all.  I will toss a lot of the refuse into a trash bag and remove it from the attic to give me better working space.   I will see if the sealed damper that I made in the basement yesterday works any better than the non-sealed sort.   I will try to close gaps and whatever.  I will spend hours on it.

I had thoughts about the story I had been working on.  Patterns.  Maybe i will pick it up again.  i had new ideas and fantasies about weaving them together.  The main character's wife is a phone scroller.  Their baby is an IVF baby., donor egg.  Unbenownst to the characters, this egg could have been .. from the guy who owned the condo.  His family line.  Who is also the family line of the woman buried under the condo.

I thought about other horror movies and how they are created.  Swirling thoughts, half asleep.  You meet new characters and you say things like :oh they are going to die."  

I will never write this story but it is interesting to think about.

Yesterday after my sister left at 11, I crated Shelley and tried to work upstairs. 

It was slow going.  I did about two and a half hours of work and half an hour of cleanup.  Mastic clung to me everywhere, arms, hands, feet.

Penny texting me from the bathroom where she is getting ready.  There is no peace anymore.  There is never peace, there is texting from penny, my sister, my mom, there is work in the background, there is the dog, always the needs of the dog and how to manage her.  I cannot go away, cannot retreat, there is no about face and run option, there is just engagement engagement engagement