June and July came along and were ugly. There’s not really another way to say it than that, though it makes me sad to say it. It’s funny that it makes me sad, but it does.

I think I’m getting old enough now that every season seems special, along the lines of “how many of these do I have left…” so when something takes a bit of a turn, it feels like something precious is being lost, flowing through your fingers. Every season is the chance of a lifetime. I only get one last summer before I turn 50, for example, and this is how it’s gone.

How has it gone?

I’m sad, I guess. I learned a long time ago that ultimately in life you can’t say what you think or what you mean. Some people do it and that’s amazing, but I think there’s a mistake that a lot of people make earlier in life that precludes this—basically, if you (for example) get greedy and take that job where you know you have to kiss ass even a little bit, you’re now on a career trajectory that works that way.

It’s like when you’re in one school and everyone knows you a certain way and even if you try oh-so-very-hard to reinvent yourself or change the way that you approach life, or people, it won’t take—because everyone knows who you “really” are.

But if you move to a new place or move schools, you can adopt an entirely different persona and affect and it seems as natural as anything, and becomes you—because there’s no social inertia preserving the “other” you.

I know, I’m just talking nonsense. But I have the life, like most people do, in which most of what I’d like to say in public I can’t, because I’d like to still know people and I’d like to eat, and as little people, neither of those sticks for me unless I mind myself.

Call it “punishment for little failures of integrity early in life.”

— § —

So what will I say?

• There’s one friend that I wanted to visit this summer, but that’s not going to happen for a lot of reasons related to the other bullets below.

• There’s another friend that I needed to connect with before she left for the summer, but I didn’t do that and now it’s too late.

• There’s another friend I’d like to connect with and I’ve tried once or twice but I seem not to have the stamina to continue to try.

• I’m owed rather a lot of money, but it will forever remain a debt; there’s no way to collect and the people I’d need to collect from have leverage over me and know it.

• I’ve been reminded that one of the reasons people have sometimes said I have Aspergers is because I trust people and think that loyalty matters, and this is only something that little kids think.

• I think it’s more likely that I’m still a little kid at heart than it is that I have Aspergers.

• In fact, I know I’m still a little kid at heart, racing through this whole “adult” thing toward the magical end that is death that I can’t quite figure out and am both ecstatic about but also suspicious of. Because it seems as though it’s transcendental, in the realm of things not understood. It has the whiff of the occult about it, but also the whiff of the holy.

• I’m lonely, but there’s no path out of the loneliness, because it’s intrinsic to our culture, i.e. our desire not to be lonely is in tension with virtually every other impulse we have.

• I realize this every time I try to talk to someone; very often, the very best company is the company of anonymous strangers like the pharmacist or the gas station attendant. I fall in love with these people every day.

• I’m either better adjusted than anyone or less well adjusted than everyone.

• I look at all the people I went to high school with and they seem six million years old and full of this kind of adult dry rot that I find to be both intimidating and also tragic.

• Everyone who loves me will eventually hate me. And everyone who once loved me but now hates me will eventually love me again.

• I told someone that more than half of the women I ever dated have tried to kill themselves after I broke up with them and that this likely said something about my choices in people and they became concerned that I was suggesting I’d do the same, though I wasn’t. I was just expressing a sort of sad truth about people I’d loved and then had to leave because we couldn’t meet in the middle on lifestyle.

• It was almost always about lifestyle, though that’s a pretty broad term.

• I have been consuming all of this self help / self discipline / self discovery crap again and it’s just nonsense. At the core of the problem is that everyone seems to presume you have hopes and dreams, some desire about the future that you’re trying to realize, when at the core of things in some deep way, I will forever be trying to resurrect the past.

• I don’t have a longing for things I can’t afford or want to achieve. I have a longing for something that I know I’ve lost, but more importantly, a longing, an aching, intolerable longing to remember just what this lost thing is.

• It feels forever just on the edge of my memory, dancing there in the shadows, always a bit out of reach, and I have this overwhelming sense that if I could just remember what it was, and remember what it was like, then somehow I could rescue it from the past, redeem it in some way. But there’s no grabbing hold of it.

• It’s a lot like life.

— § —

Time. Time is holy.

— § —

I listen to Milton’s theme over and over again and I sit here and type, alone, in the dark, in the recesses of a tough summer.

I might be waiting for the other shoe to drop, or I might be the one that will drop it.

There are all these lonely people out here but we can’t really do anything about it because we’re meeting each other too late and we’re no longer able to really build close relationships, as those mostly have to be born in your teens and twenties.

We look at each other and sort of wistfully imagine what it would be like if we could really connect, but we all know we can’t.

— § —

Milton’s Theme is the soundtrack of a certain kind of aching loss. Not like when you’ve lost a relative, but like when you’ve lost something that you can’t remember any longer, but you nonetheless know—by virtue of the deep feelings you still have for it, and the hole left in you by its absence, whatever it was—that it was beautiful and eternal.

— § —

Dogs are better than cats.

— § —

The fact that everyone considers em-dashes to be an indicator of AI generation is a sign that mostly the people are now the automatons and the AIs are now the people.

A live recording of Nina Hagen performing So Bad while shooting the crowd with a super soaker. It’s maybe my 10th Nina Hagen video of the night, for no particular reason. But it makes me think of an ex-girlfriend who also loved Nina Hagen and Einstuerzende Neubauten and had a powerful mind and a sideways interest in theology.

If you go out into the world and you meet someone that lines up with you on all of those counts, you think immediately that this couple should be together and it was destined by fate and if they get together, especially for several years, it can’t possibly end because where would these people ever find another weird alignment like that, but really in the end everyone hated everyone and she tried to kill herself.

— § —

Several points later is the sheer number of ex-girlfriends who tried to kill themselves when I broke up with them. I don’t know if this is normal or not. It’s been a long time since this happened, but at some level I am bothered by the fact that I sent people to hospitals.

You would think this is about guilt, but it’s more the kind of feeling that you have when you’re expecting an earthquake or you’re aware of an an aneurysm. It’s like a surreal, somehow haunting fact that exists in your universe and also a kind of threat that hangs over everything thickly.

— § —

Everyone has potential. Some people even have a lot of it.

But potential is no damned good unless you are free. There are a lot of people that are free. I have known a few of them myself, very impressive, very beautiful. They bring tears to your eyes.

Some of us have put ourselves in prison and are busy destroying ourselves. I used to have a shirt that said “Destroy Yourself” and I thought it was about drugs or something like that but in fact it was far more fundamental.

I am going to try to have freedom, maybe. But not today.

Also, QED.

— § —

I started this in 1999 and was way out in front of a curve. Now this is old fashioned.

I keep thinking I should start a YouTube channel but I don’t know if I have the bravery and balls that I once did. But maybe I should, I don’t know.

I have a friend in another state I’d like to visit, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to execute on this desire. That sounds a lot like where I am in life right now—trying to figure out how to execute on things.

It’s tempting to say “oh, but now isn’t quite the right time,” but the thing is that life is short. I’ve been working on the right time for things my entire life. There is no right time, you just have to figure out how to make things work. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.

— § —

There is a genre of thing that happens to me wherein someone says “why are you living your life this way, you’re brilliant and unusual and capable and you could be earning many multiples of what you earn; what’s the secret desire or need that’s keeping you where you are, here, earning a fraction of the money and respect you ought to have?”

This sounds like I’m making things up to blow my own horn, but it’s actually worse than that, this genre of sentiment now weighs on me like so many bricks.

Like, what am I doing wrong? What in me is fundamentally broken? Obviously, people believe I should be so much better off or more successful than I am. What is it that I’m missing? The problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know, or rather, I don’t know what I don’t know. I only know that life has been a slog. I work hard and I work a lot and people also find that worthy of respect.

But I’d love to figure out how to actually cash in on this thing people think of me. The worst is when it’s people in my own industry or workplaces.

I have a full lifetime’s worth of student loans just waiting to get paid off. If there is some way for me to earn half a million or a million a year, please, tell me what it is, or hire me, or whatever.

On the other hand, if you’re going to say “just be an entrepreneur,” well… That’s not something that’s so easy to come by. There’s a lot of socialization there, a lot of subtle cues and ticks that I don’t have. I grew up in a lower middle class “would be a gold watch now you’re retiring after 40 years but this is the lower middle class so it’s a Casio” sort of a family. You know. Go to college and read great books and someone will hire you for $80,000 and then you’ll have it made with stable, respectable employment. You might even be able to afford two cars!

— § —

I didn’t realize how much stuff I buy from China / India / Canada / the EU until all this Trump tariff stuff. Like, I’m that sort of DIYer that just has gone online my entire life and ordered what I need and found it not to be too expensive. Now that I’m filtering out other nations so that I don’t pay $103.00 for a $3.00 item, I’m realizing that there’s a lot of stuff I’ve had shipped in from overseas over the years without much thought.

No, I don’t want to change this practice. I am learning that I’m not much of an American “patriot,” at least not in these colors.

It’s all fast. Very, very fast. So fast it would hurt, only you don’t even get a chance to before it’s over.

— § —

The world is absolutely full of magic. When you’re young, you can see it. You get a little older, you can see it when you drink. You get older than that, and you know it’s there if you’re lucky, but you can’t see it any longer.

— § —

I know that AI is happening and I know that I have the skills and ought to be in on the game. The problem is that I don’t care and I am having trouble making myself believe in reality.

— § —

You reach a stage where you anticipate things being over and mourn their passing before they begin.

— § —

There comes a time in the life of an automatic movement when the mainspring and escapement and pinions are worn enough that if you let it stop, it won’t come back. At that point, you have to just keep it running. Humans are this way, too.

— § —

So are cars. Maybe so is everything.

— § —

You even lose the ability to properly tell your kids how much you love them. You know the words and you say them, but you’re overgrown with time and the waver in your soul is smothered.

— § —

I haven’t been me for a long time. I think every person who can pay their bills eventually arrives at that state. That’s what it means to be able to pay your bills. They tell you that’s a good thing.

— § —

Every moment, every blade of grass and every plant in my yard grows. They grow from “not even there” to “fuck that’s tall” but you never see them grow.

— § —

That is also the waxing of your life. Which gives way to a mirrored waning of your life.

— § —

It rained some today. Some drops hit me. Some drops hit my dog. Someday my dog will be touched by her last raindrop. Someday I will be touched by my last raindrop.

I can’t decide if the parties are naively over-reading their mandates or cynically blackmailing the public, but whichever is true, what’s obvious is that the public wants normalcy, but we’re trapped in a cursed cycle: we’re so far from normalcy that an extreme correction is required to get there—but we seem to be unable to get a carefully measured extreme connection. The only thing on offer in each cycle is so extreme that we immediately require the counter-extreme, and so on. Hence we get Trump to correct Obama—and we’re even farther off the rails. Then we get Biden to correct Trump, and we’re farther off the rails still. So we get Trump again to correct Biden, and now we’re plunging headlong into the abyss.

What’s not on offer is any corrective that will get us somewhere back near “normal.” It just isn’t what anyone is offering, and while the public gets to “vote,” what the public chooses between is not up to the public.

— § —

A couple generations ago, all the jobs that people had trained for were suddenly squeezed out of the U.S. economy, and after that, for a couple of generations we have ruthlessly told people to learn to code, and to learn “next-generation, service and information economy skills.”

Now that we have a generation that has finally internalized this message and done so, we are squeezing all of the “next generation, service and information economy skills” out of the economy once again in a quest to return to the manufacturing job base that we tore away from people that had trained for it a couple generations ago.

Basically, it seems as though the elites, whichever side they are on, are first and foremost in the business of betraying the public—destroying the village to save the village as a flavor of the morally righteous do-good.

This is a corollary in ways to the last thing.

— § —

None of this seems to get any better, because at the end of the day, nobody wants it to get any better—because what people value, more than anything else, is revenge—or, as one t-shirt in my old collection used to say, “Hate drives us.”

For the last decade or more, whenever it came up in conversation, I would tell people that I thought the U.S. system wasn’t long for this world. Everyone acted like I was crazy and would ask why I thought that.

I would tell them that the one—the only—thing that the two sides of the American political system agree on is how much the American political system deserves to die. For one side in recent years, it was never any good from the start and should have been killed years ago. From the other side in recent years, it had been corrupted by the other side and was now evil.

But both sides agreed that it needed to go, and have done for years. What did we think was going to happen?

And even if it somehow still doesn’t happen now, it’s only a matter of time, as both sides deepen in their agreement, day by day.

We’re all just sitting here. What is there to do?

I’ve called and written each of my congresspeople every day for some time now. I’ve started including the governor for good measure.

But what else can we do? It’s not clear to me.

It’s the strangest feeling in the world to sit here and wait while Rome burns.

Things are getting so bad that every time I come back to this site to post, it’s down for one reason or another. And I wonder how long it’s been down, because I don’t actually sit around and read my website day after day.

There’s no one particular reason that it goes down, but rather a bunch of reasons that can all be filed under bad actors have made things dumb and businesses don’t care about you.

In this case, SSL went offline because my host decommissioned some nameservers that they inherited when they acquired my former host. But it’s dumber thank you think because I’d already updated to the new, post-acquisition nameservers. But in their scripting for the change, everyone who came in under the acquisition apparently got their nameservers switched back to the decmomissioned servers, rather than changed to the new servers, because the world doesn’t make any sense. And of course all this SSL stuff is only needed because people suck and that’s human nature.

Yes, it was all solved with 10 minutes on live chat and then a few hours waiting for record changes to propagate, but the thing is, this is basically an “every time I touch my site” occurance. Hosts changing configurations, getting acquired, policies changing, plugins that self-updated but have breaking changes that impose new restrictions due to security best practices that effectively take the site offline… It’s starting to feel as though it’s implausible even to run a fully hosted site these days without a full-time IT staff.

— § —

I don’t like what’s going on in the country at all right now, and I’m frankly alarmed. Everyone thought “I will be your retribution” was basically rhetoric and they also thought “we’ve already done this once before and we survived it” so it’s been more than a bit of a surprise to learn that “oh, he actually meant, like, retribution in the sense of making people suffer” and also to learn that “oh, this is going to be absolutely nothing like the first time and many may not survive it.”

There are a lot of people that are even more in the cross-hairs than I and my ex-wife, but as targeting goes, we’re both far closer to targets than not-targets, each in our own way and in each case for a decent number of reasons.

This American Cultural Revolution is just getting off the ground. It gives me no pleasure and a good amount of fear to wonder what it will bring. I know I’ll suffer, as will many others. But I don’t know how much, or in just what way. That not-knowing is fairly intolerable.

— § —

I’m also lonely. Like, increasingly lonely.

Thing is, I don’t know exactly what the remedy is, since spending time with people, which I actually do an awful lot of, doesn’t fix it.

I am missing that person-that-has-been-my-significant-other-for-decades-now, but I’ve never have that person and will never had or known that person, and it sucks. Someone that I share inside jokes with. Someone that I trust implicitly and can talk to about anything, and more to the point, that already knows all the things I say in preface and can say “I already know everything that you’re about to say for the next hour because you’ve said it before, so let’s cut to the chase—what’s really on your mind?”

I actually don’t know whether to feel lucky that I’ve had many multi-year relationships, or to feel unlucky because I’ve never had a happy relationship that I wanted to stay in rather than harsh relationships full, in the end, of mutual contempt.

It’s sort of like I don’t know whether to feel lucky for being allowed to live the kind of life that the retribution class currently wants to get retribution for having missed out on, or to feel unlucky because I’m about to get retributed.

— § —

In a week, I’ll be in the ring fighting in a tournament. Part of me thinks I’ll get killed. Part of me thinks I’ll just get knocked out. Part of me thinks it’ll just be tiring. Part of me wants to kill. (This part won’t matter, as I’m not actually all that capable of killing, even as someone who’s been practicing martial arts for years now.)

— § —

Like I said, humans suck.

And—2025 already sucks and is going to start to really, really suck before all is said and done. Maybe to a very, very uncomfortable degree.

It was around the time of my post about ghosts, below, that I took the time—entirely on a whim—to play a game that had been hanging around in my gaming systems for a long time: What Remains of Edith Finch.

I had downloaded it, on sale at one time or another, on PS5, and then on Switch, and then on Steam, as though the game was chasing me—but it took me years to finally get to it.

— § —

It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it, or who doesn’t have a rich emotional life, how a video game can move you deeply, in the same way that only the rarest works of literature, or poetry, or art can.

But I played Edith Finch and was transfixed by Milton’s story. And then I learned about The Unfinished Swan. And together, the two of them have gone to that place in me where only the most important things go, with the experiences and moments that you can’t bear to remember and that you also can’t bear to forget. Things that changed you.

— § —

I don’t know how many people there are in the world like this, but for a certain kind of kid, Milton’s story resonates so deeply that you’re moved beyond tears, to that place where time stops and it’s just you, the core of you, and the past that you bring with you—all of the people and the places and the triumphs and the sadnesses that you have lost, that are no longer with you, but that will nonetheless always be yours.

A certain kind of person, who was a certain kind of child, knows exactly why Milton decided to paint himself a door and then walk through it, never to be seen again. It was the dream we had without realizing we were having it.

I was that kid. There are others, I’m sure.

— § —

I don’t know what to say other than that sometimes there is order in the universe—you have a thought, you begin a post, and the universe answers with a work of art that feeds you, takes you back out of the daily grind and back to the world of magic and melody and longing that you left behind—or thought you left behind—with your childhood.