Meta-reposting with 100% more repostiness

This is the wordy waxing about which I spoke before. File this under: slice of life. Or the circular file. It’s cool. I won’t know. “And really,” the narrator gazed at the imaginary audience askance, “would it matter if I did?”

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Last I left off, I was screaming, wasn’t I? I’ll get back to the memoir-related stuff in due course. Then again, since this is about the present, maybe this is, too? What do I know? For now, I just felt really compelled to check in. With whom, I’m not sure. It just seems sporting if I’m going to neglect the blog for a while, as I do. Huh. Three months to the day since I posted that last one (before the last one, that is). Fancy that.

It was as fine a day of work as I could have hoped. Thank you for asking, dear. All the finer for letting out nearly an hour before the end of the day to get a wee jump start on what, for me, will be a relatively rare guilt-free and maybe even enjoyable three-day weekend, the first since the end of the year. There have been plenty of others, some mix of scattered guilt with acute and intermittent joylessness. If I didn’t know better, someone out there has a doll with my name on it and a collection of needles they’re dying to try out. I’ll venture this much…if you believe in poetic justice and what goes around, comes around, and you feel the need to vent, do NOT call anyone a boil on the ass of society. Just sayin. If there is someone with a heap of needles (a problem heap if ever there were one), I’m not giving ’em any more ideas of where they can stick ’em.

Then I got home to the kittehs. I do love the little (little?) bastards, fur goblins though they be. There have been times where they’ve been my anchor, moreso that I maybe even realized at the time. I ain’t going anywhere because these little shitheads rely on me, and it turns out they perform a bigger service than acting like a couple of needy, squishable doofuses. Thanks, Sam and Dean. You assholes.

Memory, or remembering memory? Or: Let the screaming commence

Rubber, cracked. Red. Ball of spongy rubber, skin cracked and peeling, crumbly interior exposed. Thin rubbery mold line to pick at with tiny nails. Trailer door. Hand slammed in door. Snow. Sea foam green room, cradle. Creepy with the smell of age. No faces. Nothing else.

That’s it. Time’s a muddle. Time? New place, Gentilly apartments, likely a no-tell motel with day rates. Sitting on walkway, dried brown leaves on gravel drive, hand’s reach. Pick up, crinkle. Snap. Crisp. Tear. Peel the flesh from the veins. Crumble in my hands and grind to fine flakes. Mother’s alarm. What am I doing? Palms chapped and bleeding.

Or was it beach on the right, and water? A lighthouse. A road, trains alongside. White water tower. Missisuburbia in washed out 1960’s postcard tones, even in real life. Grampa’s house. Ornamental structural brick carport. Was this first? I think. Maybe. Yes, it comes back to me now, a conversation with Mom many years hence. We’d stopped there with hopes that Grampa would take me in. Apparently the answer was hell no. More here later, but when? Or did I ever remember this moment at all, only to hear about it later, and then to build a false memory built on the bricks of later memory.

How much of my memory today is memory of times recalled, and how much is just remembering what I think I remembered the last time I remembered something? Even then, don’t I likely remember even less, else I’d maybe also remember the setting in which I remembered? Each new memory of a memory seen as a later generation, each losing resolution like photocopied photographs.

Manifest divinity

16:9 aspect ratio 4k image for wallpaper or printing free for download here.

Where to begin? How about the beginning?

I wrote the following back in 2007, or, rather shockingly to me as I think about it now, about 20 years ago.

I was born on April Fool’s Day at 4:50 in the morning at a VA hospital to one helluva character, rest her blessed soul, which makes me, to those who care about such things, an Aries with Pisces rising, a screwed up combination if ever there was one. My planets align in such a way that just coincidentally the things the astrologers say about such matters appear to be true of me.

4:50 in the morning was not a pleasant time at any hospital, much less the VA hospital where I was born, populated as it probably was, I’m sure, largely with wounded and recovering veterans who sustained injury in service to country for whatever their reasons. 4:50 in the morning is generally not a good time anywhere, unless one is either fast asleep, or lost in passionate embrace, or drunk to the rafters, perhaps the first subsequent to the rest.

PSA: Suicide Prevention Awareness & Trigger Warning, or This Slice o’ Life Ain’t for Everyone

Truly, the “substance” of this post takes second place to the trigger warning and awareness raising. When I first posted this, I inaptly named it and left out any indicators that the warning was the first part of a two-part thing. I originally posted this nearly four months ago. I’ve become much cheerier since. I think. Life is a fixer-upper, and I’m back on the upswing, which is probably my favorite place to be. I suck at plateaus and kinda hate that I’m good at troughs from sheer practice. That slide down, though? Whew, what a ride.

Life with Cats: Verbing Nouns Edition

I’ll be darned. I just verbed the word ‘asshole.’

I love muh kittehs. I give ’em treats. But I make them work for the treats. They have to chase, stalk, find, and get the treats. And for fairness, I have to separate them as I do it. So I stand in the kitchen where I can toss one treat across the linoleum floor toward the utility room and the other across the hardwood floor heading into the living room. It’s best when it’s dimly lit. They’re quite good at chasing them sight unseen from the little tikkytikkytick sound of the crunchy treat skipping across the floor. And when that’s not enough, their sniffy little snoots do the rest.

Why should there be something rather than nothing at all?

In this case, because I know what happens when I post nothing. Posting nothing becomes a habit. Next thing I know, months will have passed and I’ll just be the least bloggiest blogger to have ever blogged a blog again. This isn’t my first run around to the back of the barn where I get distracted and wander off into the woods. Two nights ago (Tuesday) I made a wee bit of progress, but then last night and tonight I just kind of hit a wall. Well, a wall and a distracting Midjourney rabbit hole. This is probably a pretty good indication that I need to spend some time centering to get back on an even keel.

The above scribble is hardly a beauty. I’m not terribly satisfied with my slop in this one. But this early in, and for another crack at speed drawing, I’ll cut myself some slack. It might have yielded an artistically deficient dodecahedron, but by golly it’s a recognizable one. The guitar practice went well enough. The notes on law were taken. The navel was gazed it. Then the next topic my rounds came up, Gaming (by which I mean just about any kind, boardgaming, ttrpgs, video). I wasn’t quite sure what direction I was going to spin off to. It ended up being a search through a few different game systems for a rule system I like for playing gods against gods. Still haven’t made up my mind yet on that one. Then I considered and reconsidered whether I wanted to tackle solo BECMI D&D or solo AD&D. Still leaning to BECMI at the moment, but probably with a lot of material migrated in from all over the place.

As for tonight. I’m off-schedule and I’ve got a few hours left. I’ll probably get another post in and go play in the photon mines some more.

Well, that was all right for a Tuesday

Work didn’t suck, which is nice. At lunch I actually locked in plans to get the car serviced next week. Don’t know how I managed, but I cracked the crap out of my power steering fluid reservoir or something down near road level. I dreaded trying to find a mechanic because in the past I kept trying the wrong ones apparently. Nope, easy peasy this time. That’s a relief.

Then it was 5. An hour flies by and it’s time to start my Dailies and Rounds. Today we’ve got some rumination about the reason for doing nearly anything at all as part of my daily deep dive into what I call Praxis. Dipped my toes into administrative law for the law daily. Learned the opening bars of The Cure’s A Forest. Drew a thing. And for today’s Rounds, we’ve got Worldbuilding and Iaon.

Today in the rearview

Oddly enough, today went pretty much according to plan. There’s not much point in mentioning work as I can’t go into detail ever, law firm and all that. But the morning went according to schedule. Up on time. Morning praxis. Coffee and headlines. Mocha and to work on time. Afterward, saw to the pups, came home, and had a breath of a break before spending half an hour in the kitchen tidying up.

After that, I accidentally spent half an hour reading and taking notes from Raja Yoga before I realized I’d intended to work on praxis development in that time slot. No biggie. I could just tend to that in the later slot and get the sequence right next time. As for Raja Yoga, I made to the end of page 1 this time.

Praxis Development. What?

Don’t I wish it looked half as cool as that picture above. I have a difficult time visualizing a day when it might look remotely like that. I can do it, but it begs a lot of questions.

Begging questions. Story of my life. Literally, even. Considering I’m a Pyrrhonian skeptic, I have to beg all the questions just to get on with the apparent day to day business of living and not falling in front of oncoming traffic because I “don’t believe in cars” or some shit. There’s philosophy, then there’s avoiding death.