Blue Saturday

and why not

gloomy day getting nothing done -- one paragraph tinkered with, knowing there's something off abt the whole long piece -- but mostly stuck feeling the best is past and the good ones are gone

― mark s, Saturday, 15 September 2018 18:42 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

back here again tbh: i've done better than just one paragraph 2day but the news abt dawn foster has honestly floored me -- i never met her myself but i know several ppl who knew her well and are devastated :(

I think a lot of people who never met Dawn will have shed some tears over her death, it was terrible - even if a lot of us fans knew she had serious health problems - it didn't diminish the shock of it.

cosines

is it better to have no chance of interpersonal relationships or to actively destroy the chances

https://i.imgur.com/6Mli5lJ.jpg

Tried hard to stay healthy all week, for work, for survival, for what? And now it's Saturday morning lying here listening to Flip Your Wig, frightened of how these 2 days of freedom will run away from me and having no clue how to use them except to run headfirst into boozblivion

I know that was probably rhetorical, but use that store of health and go for a long walk. At least earn that first beer man!

earn while you walk is my motto and is partly why I've enjoyed so much success in recent years!

My 2020/2021 motto:

Unbearably gruelling non-stop work in intense solitary confinement conditions that stretch the limits of human endurance - and the weekends are even worse!

Catch a pint with you later dudes

Eyyyy
So what did you tossers end up doing today

Stuck to Doom Bar zero - surprisingly good for alcohol-free.

very wan and glum yesterday -- and also (less typically of me) just full of dread abouth ways things are headed. not headed for me personally, i'll be ok -- but def the uk at large and far beyond that

the dread is ignited i think by watching several ppl i know -- former colleagues, minor online names i once lined up in the "more or less a good thing" column -- getting more and more radicalised basically glinnerwards. the individuals aren't especially important, they're not "thought leaders" just ppl i know or am aware of: it was much more my sense that their movement in this direction represents a very very bad wider tipping point, and that the mounting ever uglier attack on existing trans rights is a specific culture-war flashpoint being weaponised to enable a much broader crack-down and shut-out… and that many ppl i vaguely assumed wd be on the side against this shut-out (if not especially active or useful) will be actively pushing for it, and indeed already are

some of this is just twitter-bubble nonsense on my part -- my little on-line world is not the world, who cares what those twerps think -- and some of it is the consequence i suspect of my tendency to be highly conflict-avoidant. i don't like getting in fights, and have no practice at being in fights, so i watch ppl being clear and firm when they say "no" to all this (and battle against it without loosing their cool and keeping to their good talking points despite being goaded to explosion point) and envy them and feel useless. i am bad in fights and it's way too late to change that (even if it offloads all the needful activity onto others)

on the whole in the past i have been a "slow and steady wins the race", "things will turn our way" kind of a person -- and on the whole in my lifetime things have done just this, so maybe i wasn't wrong to be. but i think i have stopped believing in either of these claims, and i don't know what to do with my brain in this new state. my skills are very particular and i'm not unproud of them and still have joy of them, but some days they seem very ungermane indeed…

having written all that out i strongly suspect i am talking my way round something much more obvious and basic (and possibly selfish) but if so i don't know what it is

the gusts of hate emanating from the Rosie Duffield "supporters" on Twitter this week was very depressing yeah, i had a brief glimpse and thought "fuck this" and stepped away from Twitter for a bit

the broader entanglement of a sense of the world/the nation/civilization/idk declining and doomed and our feelings about our own personal inevitable decline and doom, well, sometimes it's hard to deal with either thread unless you're full-blown millenarian

a lot easier to believe i might achieve a personal transcedence than that humanity can reach a sociopolitical one tho

What I try to keep in mind is that where we are now trans-wise would 10 years ago not be unimaginable but still seem far-distant. There's been a lot of ground gained and while even an inch of it lost is a shame, the generation that grew up with it will take it as a baseline.

(also no-one has ever won a fight on Twitter)

sometimes i picture trying to climb out of the blues as like building a house of cards, with really trembly hands, and maybe i get two or three tiers built up over a few days and then i wake up and think fuck am i doing this for? and knock the fucker flat

knowing i'll be back at it, hands shaking like the Waco Kid, in a few more days

A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst.

Every day it's good to remind yourself that you could get totally fucked up. Then if you choose not to you can score it as a victory.

there should be an end zone tho, a properly signed biological marker where if you say drink more than amount X you will guarantee death. it's really physically difficult to Leaving Las Vegas yourself

i mean it should be really difficult of course. but nature could've illuminated the target better

not crying for anything just musing and enjoying the bounce of the keyboard

I love that every ilm thread is now just horrific puns on

Every day it's good to remind yourself that you could get totally fucked up. Then if you choose not to you can score it as a victory.

epiphanic week

wanting to not self-mythologize by monstering myself, everything to extremes, pure ego bullshit

but i've lived a life without empathy or himan connection, deserved nothing

maybe end up with nothing

https://cdn.onebauer.media/one/media/5dec/5694/ab24/0419/a833/2e18/free-guy.jpg

A himan earlier today - you've missed nothing tbh.

lolz

i kinda want to watch that, against my better instincts

I mostly want to just drink and drink until everything goes away but my body is a lightweight

Why are there people like Frank in the world?

Why are there people who deliberately watch comedy panel shows?

I mean, there was a good reason, but he died yesterday.

Wish I had the guts to kill myself

Don't worry failure fans, I don't

gonna give my mom your phone number

got a broken ego, broken heart
god i don't even know where to

HERE COME JIMMY ZEN AGAIN

Without ever quite reaching the "guts to do it" stage the insistent logic of ceasing to exist is pounding louder in my head every day

Cant argue to logic or anything

Toast is still good, readily available and hard to fuck up. Its a start

If I keep making my own problems I can certainly make some toast

I eat a lot of toast tbf

Crunch time

in no way is this a humblebrag, two clients at work yesterday told me how nice i was and i filled up with such thick despair and self-loathing i'm still trying to squish it now

and just to prove they were wrong and i'm right i drink myself into incapacity lol 1-0

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

"Dancing in the Dark" just came on the pub playlist :D

I worked out my lack of Yen is killing me

not even sure if this is anything but better on the page than in my head

i dremt i was once more sharing a flat with my sister, as we did 30 years ago: a big airy single open-plan room full of dexxion shelving covered in our books and projects. no sign of her family -- i guess we were young again maybe and they hadn't come along yet. she was the unhappy one back then (work, romantic life) and i was i guess embedded in the bit of my career that now looks like a surprise success -- but none of that was part of the dream.

i was doing the washing up -- sink as part of a kitchen island in the middle of the room lol -- and wearing headphones but with nothing playing on them, and just sobbing. she had noticed and was coming to ask why as i was thinking "i *want* ppl to notice, it's time it came out, it's time i dealt with it"

what though? why was i unhappy? am i unhappy, like, for reals, without really knowing it? i mean, i think i might be

i'm not struggling personally: i have interesting work (less than i could do with but not none) and a flat i love and a project-in-plan for proto-retirement that's started well. i am fine with the way i live socially -- pandemic has knocked that about it a bit and probably nudged me towards being more of an unscoail weirdo than is good for me but i still have busy spaces to be part of and chums who visit and a fore-real lovely stretch of close family (reading round the boards i am aware i am just absurdly lucky with family, they are nice funny creative people). so far my life has been ok! a few small disappointments but also some achievements!

pandemic is the excuse but i am in retreat -- intellectually if you like -- from the state of the world: which seems to me dismally cruel and irreparable, without possuble upswng in view, the worst outlook i ever remember. when i was young (the 70s and 80s) we were in the shadow of crashing into ghastly lethal destruction, a world war that could end everything in seconds. and somehow the terrible ppl running everything -- for all their extremely bad decisions and actions elsewhere, their crimes -- managed to blunder away from that edge after all and defuse the dangers and etc.

so i went into the 90s and 00 (my thirties and even forties) i guess appreciating that a space could be and had been won, and that "better" was somehow also built into the systems of the world even when no one quite knew how, and i pootled away at my own projects and increasingly also looked after my mum and dad in their last years, and mostly just went along the weay things were going. the wrong ppl were still in charge making evil decisions, but there was somehow a resilience after all.

i think that resilience is all gone. i think we are rolling back to a catastrophic lip and i feel like all my moves and perspectives were shaped in times that just aren't relevant any more. it's not that others aren't manouevring to do something -- far from it -- more like my entire machinery of cultural intuition is now ill-fashioned to read the good from the bad any more.

tl;dr: this is just what getting old is probably. anyway, my everyday gameface will now go back on and i'll do a day's editing i'm pleased with and organise stuff for my retirement project and chat to my nice buddies. in my dream i was crying maybe for a sense of uselessness and all that time wasted looking in the wrong direction -- i mean, this is just my guess. once in the mid-90s i dreamed the govt rang me up to "solve northern ireland" so it's not like my dreams can't be very dumb and attached to literally nothing of substance.

"pandemic is the excuse but i am in retreat -- intellectually if you like -- from the state of the world: which seems to me dismally cruel and irreparable, without possuble upswng in view"

I like that your spelling went to bits on this section of your post :) like you don't want to believe it.

"and a project-in-plan for proto-retirement that's started well."

This is really good to hear!

anyway, my everyday gameface will now go back on

So much of late mid-life is having the courage and energy to continue to play your role interestingly, even as you become more disillusioned by society and keenly aware of the frailties and limitations of your own "moves and perspectives".

(You and your = me and my, obv.)

the sadness is coming from outside the collective unhouseness

god the sheer tedious effort of marching in a straight line and how quick the rumble strips will squish you

So if the social worker sets up the annual meeting and never turns up, that's a dick move, right? Never responds to any text enquiry "eh, are you remembering this?", fuckit, let's go drink, oh 4 days later apparently there was a Dead Aunt reason for that, no bother I guess you were too greiving to respond to basic fucken queries. BUT, if you reschedule some weeks later and totally ghost AGAIN then that's fucking taking the piss, yeah we waited around for an hour and an a half before calling it before I took my weekly opportunity to go buy vodka, this time my PA didn't bother to chase her up, instead we told my mother about it who is prolly still ranting at her right now, I donno, maybe she's got more dead aunts than Stephen Ireland has grannies, I don't care, I'm done with this shit and am walking away, all I know is if they send that same lady out again I'm definitely gunna be drunk in advance. Cus I genuinely can't cope with this stuff, "dealing with people" and all that. Her job is talking to ASD folk, shouldn't she have a little consideration? Also her name sounds really threatening, K4t13 Kl1nk? Sounds like the warden from some 50s prison shit. I met her once, kinda, and she seemed nice but I never looked her in the face. Then as she was leaving she asked me if she should take off her mask so I could see her face. I told her nah then she asked me if one of my pictures was a woodcarving, cus she does those? Which made me think maybe she was actually cool but now NO, fuck her to hell. I miss the previous one, who retired to go travel in a caravan, which I'm struggling in her absence but I have nothing but respect for her withdrawal from all this shit