It’s been hot out. Things haven’t been great.

July 13, 2025
11:03 pm

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.