Right now I hate the whole world. I hate Facebook and I hate blogs and I hate courts and legal systems public policy and I hate society and politics and social life and the injustice, the terrible, terrible injustice of everything. Everything.

There is just no justice in the world. Not for anyone. Let’s be honest, it is a terrible world we inhabit, and together we make it and make it so. This “human condition” thing, it is not so great. I am not at all sure that it is “a gift.”

Sometimes it seems to me as though it is more “a catastrophe.”

— § —

Helpless. Everyone feels helpless. I feel helpless. Everyone is helpless.

And for what? For what is all of this suffering happening?

Seriously, for what?

Life is a game often decided by mistakes.

And I have made some big ones in my time. So help me.

So suddenly blogging once again loses its appeal to me. But I am going to force myself to do it right now, because I think it’s a better choice than the alternative.

What’s the alternative? I have the sudden impulse once again to retreat to pen and notebook, which I used all the way through the second half of 2015. But I know, better than I like to admit, that this is really a way of withdrawing into myself, of finding safety in tinier and tinier spaces until I have crammed the entirety of myself into a little four-by-six-inch book—that I can then close.

That won’t do. It just won’t do. I can’t allow it to do.

— § —

I have silently disassembled today. Yes, the today that I was so annoyed with earlier. I reached into its core and began to take out bits and pieces, some of them mechanical and some of them organic, like pumpkin innards in October. I did not keep the bits; I tossed them aside silently and continued to reach-and-remove, moment by moment, until nothing was left.

There is a kind of sin in neutering a day in this way. It was a day, after all. An entire day. A day on which to be alive. A day that all of the dead, who lie helpless and without a voice, might well have wished to have. One more day. But I had it. And rather than respect it, I resented it and then I did it under.

Yes, there is sin in laying waste to a day, particularly when deadlines approach and people depend on you. But what’s done is done. Today is no more, and today was not used, and I am the guilty party. May the punishment be far less serious than the crime.

— § —

I am going to have a reading night with the kids. Reading is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in my life, something that feels of value. We’ve plowed our way through some twelve chapter books since October (the kids are three and five, but they seem to love it) and are averaging a book a week at this point.

It’s a nice thing, a lovely thing, a real thing. Something that I can do, and can do well, and that makes the world better.

— § —

One of the dreary things about life is that understanding things doesn’t always enable you to fix them, maintain them, or improve them. Sometimes your understanding is simply an understanding of things beyond your influence and ability.

— § —

An old high school friend has been posting on Facebook about the novel he’s writing (really writing, with an agent’s representation and professional input). These days I generally tend to assume that this is the direction that I’m moving. Not necessarily as a career choice; I may not get there entirely until I’m quite old.

But in the end, the last thing I see that I’d like to do, that I’d value, is to tell stories.

I think at the moment, however, that I’m still too close to the human drama of everyday life to be able to do it. The danger is still too real to imagine and to write in that way; I’d be revealing too much, about myself and about everyone I’ve ever known.

Another five years, perhaps? Ten?

In any case, I can’t imagine myself not eventually taking it up as a kind of intensive hobby, whether or not anything I craft is ever published. The need to type words is just too great in me, and the need to do it in such a way that creates is an intrinsic part of the impulse.

— § —

“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”

— § —

Sometimes I feel bad about not sourcing the quotes that I post here any longer.

But most of the time I don’t.

I think it’s fair to just say, for the record: if there are quote marks around it and it’s in italics, I’m probably not the one that came up with it. That one above is Hobbes (Thomas, not Calvin and—).

Things that are mine go without the punctuation.

— § —

It’s dark already. The day has been officially destroyed and dismantled.

Time to read.

Now I am just plain trying to make rational sense of the surreal.

I need to get a grip and do something else.

This is the old dance, and it will not take me back to Dinah.

When I sit here staring at my two monitors and think “this is my life,” it makes me want to eat nails.

I was made for something else.

So here I sit, alone in my office. Kids gone. Wife of course not here. Just me.

— § —

Dear Today,

You are not a good day. I don’t like you. I’m not sure why I don’t like you, I just don’t.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but in keeping with Today, I go around in circles without making any progress. Some days are like that. You are like that, Today. And I dislike you for it.

Please don’t take it personally. You are a day and you cannot help but be the day that you are. But I am a person and not a day, and I am also free to dislike certain days. Let’s leave it at that.

— § —

The last couple of days we have had snow. Lots of snow. A large, slow storm system.

It is beautiful outside. Some storms are certainly beautiful, and this one was. Some storms are also menacing somehow. This one was that as well. Beautiful but dark. Unapologetic. Heavy-handed. Not ill-willed, just somehow brutal, as nature can be.

Beautiful, but worth being wary of.

— § —

I feel things very deeply. I cope with this in different ways from other people; there are a variety of ways to be a person who feels things very deeply. But I do. The world is never, ever “business as usual” for me. And if I ever say to anyone that it is, I am lying. Or rather: I am coping. It does, in fact, happen, though not as often as I’d like.

Because you can’t be someone that feels things very deeply and at the same time that simply lives “in the moment.” People that talk this way don’t quite understand what they’re talking about. You must cope. You can’t just “go with it.” Whether that coping is meditation, religion, practiced discipline, drugs, alcohol, whatever. The people that say you should just “go with what you feel right away” have no idea what kinds of trouble deeply feeling people would get into if we acted on every impulse or allowed every sensation to unconsciously overtake us.

The world would be chaos.

I do suspect that there are a large number of people who don’t feel things so very deeply. Sometimes it seems to me that it would be easier and more sensible to be one of them. But I’m not.

— § —

http://oddlydevelopedtypes.com/INFP

I like that one. But there are others.

https://www.google.com/search?q=infp&oq=infp

“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

— § —

Invisible walls make for the most ecstatically catastrophic crashes, because no-one slows down before reaching them, and no-one is quite sure what they’ve encountered, assuming they’ve retained consciousness at all.

Invisible walls are built mostly by similarly invisible homunculi who are resentful of those that can be seen.

— § —

A lens is a magic artifact whose aperture is eminently permeable but in a special way; it is also solid as rock. The entire universe may pass through it instantly yet the lens itself is not affected and need not bend.

As the universe passes through it, it is inverted, curved, and ever-so-slightly blurred, all in the interest of truth and its eternal preservation.

This is why lenses have been the secret prayer-objects of all of society since their invention, and why their inventors could not but have been spiritual men. They understood that they were appropriating one of the reality technologies of God, and that its placement in human hands would forever multiply not only human power, but also its consequences and resonances.

— § —

Over the years, there have been many occasions on which I typed furiously to produce an entry, then published it, then immediately pulled it back, cognizant of the damage that I was about to do myself and others.

The feelings thus represented were thus cathected and enlarged even as they were ultimately re-repressed. This often meant an intensification of the distress that had given rise to the now hidden post in the first place.

I am trying desperately not to do this any longer, and have been for some time. Ideally, I’ll give myself the space to establish beforehand whether I ought to publish. And once I publish, ideally I will not unpublish.

I have to admit that this is, in some ways, a frightening enterprise at times. This whole blog is.

— § —

But throughout my entire life, there has generally been no-one able to listen to me as well as myself or my blog.

The question of why I don’t have more friends can also in some ways be answered in that way.

I don’t have more friends because history demonstrates again and again that most friends can’t (this word meant in a variety of ways) hear me anyway.