So here we sit on a Saturday morning at 8:00 am, a single adult man. Professional job, many skills, nothing in particular pressing. No children and no spouse here to commandeer and consume energy and time.

It should be a moment of freedom and even release, a chance to pursue just about anything that tickles my fancy.

Instead, it’s likely to be spent doing not much of anything but paperwork and housework. I know this going in, which is not comforting. I don’t know how to get out of it.

Because the money’s all tied up, the job market is precarious, the friends are, to a one, not local, and I have a dog of a variety that really can’t be left alone and that, at the moment, can’t even be left at daycare for medical recovery reasons.

Therapists and self-help authors have this two-word trope that they use to launch marketing pitches for their advice: “Feel stuck?”

Well, let’s be honest. Hell yes. I feel stuck.

— § —

The thing that most characterized me when I was younger, the thing I was most about in my teens, my twenties, hell even mostly in my thirties was never putting myself in a position to feel, or be, stuck.

I was one of those people facing the opposite risk. I was avoidant. I wouldn’t be tied down. I wouldn’t commit to things. I didn’t want to make promises. I did’t want to tie things up or tie things down. The primary goal was to ensure that the future was always open and that my will always had a canvas to paint on.

So how is it that I have ended up stuck to this degree just a couple decades later?

Freedom in the modern world, the ability to act in any way at all, comes from just a few sources:

• Economic resources—having money to spend

• Social resources—having people to call

• Personal resources—having time and energy that are not already committed

I don’t have any of these. The money is all spoken for until the day I die. If I had another 50 or 75 years to live instead of another 25, it would still likely be spoken for until the day I die. Now just starting there, it’s easy to jump to “you’re foreclosing on possibility for no reason” but the thing is:

I also don’t have people to call. And finding new people to call and building new relationships and networks requires money and time. And we already talked about the money, so let’s talk about the time and energy.

I can’t even leave the house today. Many ways to lay this out. The house—continues to age at a rate faster than I can repair it. The same with the cars. I have piles of urgent tasks that are key to my future well-being. Taxes. Legal paperwork. Managing my student loan situation through the current policy crisis so that I don’t end up in the catastrophic, Kafka-esque situation that the Trump administration wants borrowers to be in for punitive reasons. But also I can’t leave the dog anywhere, and the dog is in a cone so I can’t take the dog anywhere.

All three of the axes above are just locked down today. Absolutely locked down. And if you don’t have any room to act within the realms of money, people, or the structure of your own life process, you really just don’t have any freedom to do anything but let the clock tick.

— § —

There is only one answer, of course, and it’s the one that nobody likes and that also creates social opprobrium and future problems. Something gets sacrificed. For example, all of the following are simple solutions, from one perspective or another:

• Stop paying debts and just walk away

• Just quit the job and go on as many forms of assistance as I can claim

• Say “screw taxes” and “screw the student loan paperwork”

• Just let the house and the cars rot

• Drive the dog over to the shelter and put her up for adoption

• Throw caution to the wind and just walk out the door and straight into the nearest bar to meet people

I mean, taken this way, there are six dozen ways to shake out some more freedom. But the thing is, all of them are temporary, i.e. they would enable movement today, and maybe even for a few weeks, but they would create significant problems in the future that would make life even worse, and that would leave me absolutely hating the me of today for refusing to just do something simple, easy, and lazy and stay home doing the expected things.

All of this sounds so juvenile, and so low-IQ. Like, an adult professional who is well-liked at work and has graduate degrees and lots of physical resources (computers, telephone, network connectivity, reliable transportation) ought to be able to figure this out.

But I am so f*cking stuck. And I have been stuck essentially since the divorce. Extended stalemate. I think this is why people do the thing where they just quit on everyone and everything. Like that—that I could probably do. Liquidate everything I can over the course of a few days, then empty out all access to capital, buy a plane ticket and grab my passport, and disappear forever into the streets of some low-functioning society where I’ll never be found, under a new name.

It’s like resigning in chess, or flipping the board over. You just throw your hands up and say “I concede. I lost!” and then start again.

But I know I won’t do that. So, it seems, I won’t do anything.

Happy Saturday. Sunday will be the same. And at the end of the weekend when they ask at work what I did on the weekend and other people are talking about ski trips and concerts, I’ll be talking about paperwork and house repair by myself. Again.

What I can’t quite figure out is whether the level of distraction that has overtaken my life is:

• Unique to me or experienced by everyone

• Part of human aging in general or specifically related to the late modernity

• Something to try to overcome/change or something to accept

I mean, the thing is that the days just fly by. It’s all a sort of whirl of adrenaline and racing and trying and failing to hit targets and explaining to rooms (or calls) full of people who you did or you didn’t or how you came close and then there are some numbers here and there and a lot of decks passed around and then the day is done, and then the week is done, and then the year is done, and then (this is where I am now) the decade is done.

And how did it all happen? What was the opportunity cost?

Who knows?

And I have talked to and/or asked a bunch of people that I know about this and it seems to all come down to “you have time for what you make time for” and when I sort of ask if anyone has any tips on that, the general wisdom seems to be “you’re going to have to actually sacrifice something” and/or “you can’t have everything so it’s time to decide what you want” and what I can’t figure out is whether everyone else is wise and has this sussed already and I’m way behind the curve or whether everyone is just repeating the platitudes they’ve heard but nobody knows if they actually work or do any good because nobody puts them into action, they just repeat them for peers when their peers are having a down day about the meaning of life.

I mean, I just don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s just damned hard to “find” time for anything. For your kids, for your work, for your household chores. Nothing seems to get done despite lots and lots of energy and effort being spent and what actually feels more or less like continuous and unacceptable sacrifice and then before you know it the time has passed and you don’t really feel good about it and you swear that things are going to be different but then they never really actually are.

What I can also tell you is that I have 45 (count them, 45) two-factor TOTP entries in my authenticator app, all distinct, all current, and I don’t even have TOTP on everything in my personal life, or on everything in my work life. And that my work Slack is blowing up and it’s 9:21 pm and I’m actually answering the questions and doing work.

So of course nothing happens.

And, again on the “I can tell you” front, my life is full of people telling me to “hug” or to “hang on to” or to “continue to ensure that I impress” in my job right now because the job market is a disaster and the economy (and tech in particular) are only going to get worse and of course the American-led order is collapsing so that means that whatever “bad” looks like right now (and it’s enough to cause people to reach out to me and make sure that I’m not thinking or even tempted to be thinking of finding new work), it’s going to look orders of magnitude worse (many orders of magnitude worse) within months to just a couple of years.

— § —

Am I living my life wrong?

All I’ve ever done is work hard and do what’s asked of me. I graduated high school. Early. I got college degrees. Bachelors. Masters. Doctorate. I started at gainful employment as a teen and have never had a period of unemployment longer than a month in my entire adult life. I’ve turned up. Done a good job. I proposed and got married. I bought used rather than new cars. I don’t own any luxury goods. I’ve not taken a bunch of international vacations. I was never abusive and I never cheated.

And yet I have no wife, just an ex. My cars are owned outright but I see everyone else driving around in $50k-$100k new cars. I have missed an awful lot of vacations with my kids that I sometimes sort of wish I’d taken. And for what? I don’t seem to be any better off than anyone else, and in fact in general I seem to be worse off.

And here I sit, working at 9:30 pm in the evening, while also perpetually running short on meeting bills (thank you, divorce, and thank you, student loans) and never having gotten on to the property ladder or managed to accumulate much in a 401k.

And unlike all the other guys in my boat, I hate Trump rather than taking pleasure in him so I don’t even get that.

This has turned into a pity party.

Let’s back it up.

— § —

I guess the thing is:

• I feel like I did it all wrong

• I feel fairly certain I am still doing it all wrong

• But whether as a matter of class, culture, or something else, I don’t have the knowledge and neither did my parents

• Won’t someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong, and how to do life right instead

I guess that’s all. Maybe that’s what this entire blog has been for or about all along. It’s a message in a bottle? I’m not sure if that’s what it always was but I guess that at least tonight that’s what it is.

No response yet though, after all these years.

I don’t like the way I’m living right now. There are two parallel senses of life, neither of them salutory.

1 — I feel like I’m just going through the motions, like time is sailing past and I’m wasting it, hardly even knowing that I exist at all.

2 — When I do have moments that I wake up and manage to take a few minutes to be alive, I find myself mostly thinking about legacy and end-of-life planning, as though I’ve been given a terminal diagnosis and am trying to tie up loose ends.

I also have this tremendous sense that I ought to be on vacation. I don’t know what that’s about.

But also, right now, when I’m not at work (say over weekends, or on holidays, I don’t seem to manage to do any of the things I plan beforehand to do. I’m often not even sure what happens to the time; the day starts, I shake my head a couple times, and the day is over—and I have no idea where it went or what I did.

Significant others are gone. Friends are mostly gone. Kids will be gone soon. Parents will be gone soon.

Here I sit.

Not sure what to do next.

It feels like for the last couple of years I’m caught in this weird reality in which I can’t properly perceive the emptiness of time, or possibly in which I won’t let time be empty, I’m not sure which.

Point being, there is this thing called time, and you have some of it every day. At least, that’s how we culturally construct this thing. And you are supposed to leverage that time that you have as a resource and use it to do things, perform tasks, etc.

The problem is that these days, I notice, particularly on weekends, that I don’t feel any opening to actually get anything done though I supposedly have two whole days of empty time to spend. Instead, I’m not sure where I spend it, but I get less done than I do on weekdays.

It’s clear to me that I don’t know what to do with it any longer, that I can’t see the opportunity that’s wrapped up in it or the freedom that it affords. Instead, I feel as though I’m repressing consciousness of it, i.e. that I might be just burning time on purpose by busily doing vacuous, forgettable things, purely so that I don’t have any of it.

But why would I do that? I’m not sure, but it results in the strangest sensation on, say, a Saturday, that the day isn’t really there and that I’m not really sitting in the middle of it. And then it’s over, after a brief period of studied deontology.

I used the same web host from November 2004 through December 2023. They were always good to me.

In December 2023, I got caught in what was, essentially, a scam. One of the discount sites that rhymes with “Poop On” offered a “lifetime hosting” package for a couple hundred bucks. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of sites. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I thought if I get a few years out of it before they wound down, it would be worth it. So I switched.

Well… It lasted all of about three months before the “company” that offered the package “went out of business” and just sold all the accounts to their hosting wholesaler. The wholesaler then proceeded to charge us all at more or less what I’d been paying to my original host every month.

So to be clear, some “entrepreneur” 100% just defrauded a whole batch of people out of a bunch of money, then profited again by selling all those accounts in place to the company where they were hosted anyway. I imagine it’s like the old chain letter scams—people set it up when they need a quick $50,000 or $100,000 and assume they won’t get into legal trouble.

Anyway, now my sites were all on an international hosting wholesale host… who has honestly just plain sucked, and who really doesn’t care much about supporting these individual accounts vs. their reseller accounts. To be clear, it has sucked badly. Slow, no control over site domicile (I ended up on a UK physical host), buggy, unreliable. So I’ve been meaning to rehome back to my original host for a long time. (I toyed with the idea for a while of hosting in LightSail in my own AWS account, but I just don’t have the guts or the trust in my own skills to avoid huge unexpected charges.)

Anyway, we finally did it. Here we are with the first (and most important) of the sites back onto our US-based host that served me well for 20 years. The site feels much faster and the CPanel installation actually works properly. Also, I managed to create the hosting account with a serious typo at the start and they answered my ticket and changed the string in their hosting DB within about 10 minutes, from ticket create to ticket resolve.

If you want to know who the hosts are, let me know. But aside from that detail, the takeaway is: for everyone that for a couple of years now has at times had to email me with “I think your site is down again,” that era should be over. Thank God.

And hopefully I’ll post more as well, because the crap shoot of “is the site up, and will it respond within five minutes” when I go to post should now also be done with.

The structure of creativity throughout the information age is pretty simple, and it goes something like

• Increasing exponentially through the rise of the electronic world

• Reaching a crescendo around the time of the critical mass of the internet, with a higher cultural creativity and innovation quotient than ever before

• Then, falling completely off the face of the earth and entering a period of zero or even negative (destroying) creativity after the arrival of social media

Art is dead and I hate it. We need to kill social media and kill the internet and kill technology so that we can have art and the humans and sex, drugs, and rock and roll back.

Death, death, death, death, death.

— § —

Every word or image of creativity deletes a corresponding chunk of time from your life.

This is why creativity hurts, and also why the oldest people are also the dreariest.

— § —

The Posting Plan has been in execution and then aborted and then in execution and then aborted over and over again for days, and amidst it all of course there were more threats and such. But that’s how it all works, life isn’t really life without threats and such, especially in America the Beautiful.

— § —

When I feel my youngest is also when I feel my oldest.

There is a way in which nobody can read this or bad things will happen to me, and this is the sort of thing that everyone deals with in Our America which is why we’re all nihilists. At some point in the repression curve you decide that actually you would love for bad things to happen to you because you are tired of chewing on your voice.

Whatevs whatevs.

Nobody cares because nobody has time to care. Hell, people don’t even have time to care for themselves.

— § —

Frank Lloyd Wright is the scarecrow.

Enough.

Night.

I’ve been frustrated feeling like I never post anymore and not knowing why. But tonight it seems obvious why.

• Work is overwhelming over the last year.

• I have two teenage kids.

• I have a young, athletic dog.

• I have massive student loans and a complicated financial life.

Basically I don’t post for the same reason I don’t do anything else I want to do: the enshittification of American life and bad decisions made when I was younger, both of which leave me now doing nothing that I care about.

It’s 12:23 am and I’m just finally arriving in “you can go to bed if you want to” territory. I’ve been doing the thing all day again where I go “I’ve got stuff to say online, I’ll pound it in tonight,” only to get to tonight and feel like @#$*, I need to go to bed, it’s been a long day, I’ll post tomorrow.

But I don’t want to post tomorrow.

So you won’t get a lot of the stuff I was going to say because I’m *&$#(*! tired. But at least now I can claim I was here.

— § —

Also, I have to get a new web host. I should never have switched. I switched because I got baited into one of those “lifetime hosting” packages by one of those “shopper discount” platforms. Of course the company providing the lifetime hosting was a reseller and “went out of business” after one year (what a scam) and then the wholesale platform started charging monthly for anyone remaining. And of course the tier I’m on is terrible.

Honestly this is why people are willing to vote for authoritarians. Because whoever did this clearly does this repeatedly. Create a LLC, create a “special offer” for lifetime hosting for $hundreds, close up shop before the first annual bills come due, pocket MOUNTAINS OF CASH. It’s yet another one of those things (like making porn using eager but underprivileged girls, or like selling pot and THC vapes) that will make you a ton of money fast but that most people are unwilling to do because it’s not just dishonest but in fact just plain dirty, albeit (and this is why it keeps happening) legal.

When you’re young you’re always completely alive, but as you get older this is no longer necessarily the case.

Beyond a certain age, as you start to feel how things could break down in this way or that, possibly even catastrophically on any given day, you start to spent much of your life feel as though you’re just a bit dead, or at least, a little more dead today than you were yesterday.

At times this can be very pronounced, to the point that just how dead you are right now can wax and wane over the course of a week, or even over the course of a few hours.

— § —

This month, and especially this week, and super especially today, I am feeling quite a bit more dead than has been typical thus far.

I tested for my black belt almost a month ago now. Yes, I’m too old for it. But the thing is that I’ve given a decade of my life to it, and made promises to the people around me (most notably my coaches and my children) that I would do it.

And I saw the window closing, and did the “it’s now or never” thing.

And I left it all there on the studio floor, every last bit that I had in me. And then, afterward, I couldn’t walk. I still can’t quite properly walk and it’s almost a month later. The hips aren’t quite right, the ankles aren’t quite right, the feet aren’t quite right, and the knees are frankly so, so wrong that I feel a lot like I think 80- or 90-year-olds feel.

It’s tough to move without some amount of pain, so you go slow, and you can’t just “power through” the pain because not only will it hurt, but in fact you’ll drop as though you were shot and land on your face because you’re muscles and bones just aren’t working properly and won’t hold you any longer.

Yes, I know, I should see a physician, do physical therapy, etc., etc. At some point we’ll have to try to get to that but I’m also a father and a person with a very intense job that I need to do right by (after all, that’s where my health insurance comes fro), so it’s taking a moment to get there.

But at the moment, it gives my a kind of tense appreciation for just how late in the game it is right now for me.

— § —

You work enough years, and you have enough success, and you paradoxically also have enough failures and it all causes you to lose touch with reality.

I don’t mean that you go insane or start hearing voices or trying to buy souls from bus drivers with spare change.

No, I mean that the real stuff right in front of you starts to dematerialize. Or, to put it another way, you start to dissociate.

I know, I’m not really supposed to say this, but I think that pretty much all white collar office workers actually do this over time. I have that suspicion because I’ve known so many of them over the years (most of us have) that have clearly lost touch with the concrete, sensual, ontological existence of:

• The world outside their window
• Their pencil, paper, and desk
• The person standing in front of their desk (e.g. you)
• The person behind their desk (e.g. themselves)

What’s real? The stuff on the paper they’re looking at. The stuff on the screen they’re looking at. Information. Ideas.

There is this nasty trick that Plato has played on a lot of us whereby we actually believe in the platonic, in the solidity and importance of thought, ideas, information.

We’re so sure about these things that we built an entire information economy and a basically infinite universe of billions and billions of pages, profiles, articles, videos, and megagigapetamargaritabytes of data, and we’re convinced that all of it is really there, unlike the mountains and the trees and the nuclear stockpile, which obviously aren’t.

— § —

No, I’m not here to give anyone a hard time or to look down on anyone, I’m one of these people. I’ve been in the white collar world of work and day-to-day long enough now that I go years at a time without encountering any non-informaticalisms that have the whiff of reality about them.

But every now and then—every now and then reality breaks through.

— § —

Today I was driving the kids to school and I just happened to glance out my window for a moment to the left as the world slid by and I nearly jumped out of my seat.

Thing was, the hills and the grass and the trees and the frost that were streaking past the window as I drove were real today. It was all real.

And it has been so long since anything was real that I almost didn’t know what to do with myself; I found myself being tossed on sudden, emergent sea of feelings and confusion. The shock was nearly overwhelming. There it all was—grass, frost, dirt, cold, air, earth. There it all was as clear as day.

And then the moment passed and things were back to normal. The world was a virtual one again. The work to be done was information and service again. The important things of the morning were times and data again. My destination, the point I needed to reach and at which I needed to settle for work, was once again what we used to call ‘cyberspace’ but we now don’t call by any special name. Or maybe we just call it ‘work’ and ‘shopping’ and ‘dating’ and so on.

— § —

When you have one of those days or indeed one of those nights where you’re more dead than usual, where you can feel how old you are and how much time you may or may not have left, and feel the sand slipping through the proverbial hourglass, the slight whiff of reality (which still hangs in the air for me right now, hours later) is all the more assertive.

I am sitting here tonight surrounded by no reality. I’m a single guy, alone in a house, no spouse, no significant other, no close friends ready to hand, no particular projects other than work ongoing, but I’m just a bit haunted.

I’m haunted by my own mortality, and I’m haunted by the fact that there are still things out there that exist, even if most of the time I can’t see them.

— § —

The dog was asking to go out about half an hour ago so I took her outside to pee.

I took a flashlight and a camera and I was looking around the entire time we were outside, pointing them all over the backyard. I was desperate to find some trace of something that was real.

Sadly, none if it was real; all I have left is the memory of this morning and the yearning for a sensation that I can’t quite grab hold of any longer, an encounter with what was once commonplace but what is now the numinous and not amenable to literal remembrance or recall, only a kind of echo in metaphor.

— § —

Moments ago I abruptly came to. After typing what precedes this, I had somehow come to a state of rest sleeping, sitting up but drooping forward awkwardly, my hands pressing on the keyboard and generating hundreds of pages worth of apostrophes—that have now been erased once again.

None of it is real. None of it. I’m left with a vestigial thirst for something that’s slowly—but surely—slipping out of existence altogether.

Like me.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I finally tested for black belt.

This is not a small test. And I’ve been working up to it for not a small amount of time. Without getting wrapped up in details, it’s two days, involves hours of cardio and hours of combat and technical testing.

But I’m not really posting about the test; I’m posting about my knees.

I went into the test knowing I had old knees that weren’t getting any younger. I left the test barely able to walk.

It’s now more than two weeks later and I still can’t properly walk. My gait is strange and my knees won’t hold weight in all positions and there is some pain and some numbness and some popping and clicking.

The dog that wants to walk 5-9 miles a day is increasingly frustrated with our single-mile days since then. If that.

Yes, yes, I’ll get myself to the doctor at some point. Right after the test I wasn’t sure how bad things were and then by the time it was clear it was Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend and then yes, we’ve had a week after that, but my work life these days is in that space where you say “at least I have a job” as everyone around you is losing theirs, and as a result you really don’t want to take a lot of time for extacurriculuars like calling and/or going to see a bunch of specialists about knees that got messed up by your own personal hobbies that have no bearing on work.

And that last part is important because work is the purpose of life and you really have no excuse to put it in jeopardy and reduce it in any way, and if you do you really have no business hanging on to your job, and if you don’t hang on to your job, you won’t eat and also won’t be able to get medical care anyway so it’s all moot.

I don’t exactly know what in that statement exactly went wrong or where exactly it went wrong. I’m not even sure it’s wrong. I’m not sure about anything any longer.

There was a time when I had a doctorate and considered myself very bright and well-read and I could code in many languages and I had written many books (I just initially typed this as boox, not sure why) and I was bright, bright, bright, but not now.

Oh no, not now. I don’t know if it’s age or if it’s the general tenor of the world in which we currently live, but I’m now an idiot. An idiot of the first order. Day by day, more and more, I really don’t understand anything, anything at all ever and ever again, amen, amen.

I mean to say that I’m really a completely lost fucking lost sheep, I think and I’m just bewildered by work, by life, by parenthood. Is this all how it’s supposed to work? because it doesn’t seem like it really works all that well, but what do I know. Nothing. I’m just some schmoe like all the the other schmoes out there right now trying and failing to pay their bills while simultaneously trying and failing to “live in the moment” or to “put first things first.”

— § —

But I (aggressively) digress.

I am aging. Some people have asked me why I did the black belt test right now this year, this time, if I thought my knees weren’t in great shape just now and the answer of course is becasue they’re not getting any younger.

I can feel myself entering that time in life when things don’t really ever ‘heal’ fully ever again. I haven’t been here before, but when I was young I saw it on older relatives and on other older folks in my circles, who seemed ancient to me then.

But I can feel it now. I know it’s happening. I took the black belt test now because the knees were never going to get better than they already were, because what they most fundamentally are, beneath and beyond anything else, is old.

I saw a window closing. It’s been closing for a while. I’ve missed black belt tests for a couple of years now because I wanted to do this with my son and he keeps breaking bones and then healing up right at the times that made testing impossible (he’s still young, so this thing called ‘healing’ can still play out in his world) but I saw a window closing. I saw a window closing.

And the fact that my knees are fucked up now and I almost can’t walk, and that I don’t know if this gets any better, and that I don’t know what doctors are going to tell me but I think it probably won’t be all that great, isn’t really an argument that I shouldn’t have done this, but that it was good that I did it now, while I still could, because how would things have been next year, or the year after, with my knees not getting any younger?

My knees feel older and older. My lungs feel older and older. My back and my neck feel older and older. It’s a pretty big ordeal now to drive my second car, the one without the backup camera, when I have to back up and in order to do so I have to turn around while holding the wheel and physically look to the rear with my own eyes. That shit hurts. It hurts.

Forgive the four-letter words, but when you’re talking about getting older, at some point, some four-letter words need to come into it or you’re not being honest and/or you’re not really doing yourself justice.

— § —

I’ve always thought to one extent or another about things like legacy and impact and what I want to get done before I die and all those sorts of things.

I was one of those kids that was making a bucket list by the time I was a pre-teen and that was actively working on my bucket list, as a bucket list, throughout my twenties and thirties.

I’m one of those lucky people that actually did everything on my bucket list. (Well, not quite. There’s one more thing—to write and publish a novel—that I need to get to, but everything else has been done.)

So the fact that I’m talking about legacy and impact right now isn’t about bucket listing or the 50,000 foot view of “what was the purpose of my life” or “what will I leave behind.”

At this point that’s mostly baked and I mostly know what it is, and while I’m not 100 percent satisfied with the state of things, it’ll have to do because there’s only so much flex in the (what, something like) 20 years or maye 25 that I have left, much of it destined to be on the less productive side relative to the first two thirds of my life.

No, I’m actually reflecting these days on the literal mechanics of departure. As in, wills, and passwords, and accounts left behind and what needs to be cleaned up and what needs to be put in place.

There are people in my life who think this is morbid and/or that it’s premature, but I can see, as I get older and feel my knees stop working and my lungs increasingly stop working and (on the data sheets from my doctors) my kidneys and my liver stop working and do on, that I’m aging.

I’m not getting any younger, and I’m well into that age group that routinely just drops dead of a heart attack without warning, and also very practically, it’s not clear to me that I’ll be better positioned (or able) to figure out how to “hand everything over” and how to “prepare to hand everything over” when I’m 70 than I am now.

I think if I leave it until I’m 70, or maybe even if I leave it until I’m 60, it just won’t get done, because I won’t have the energy to do it.

— § —

That’s a thing. That’s a real thing worth flagging, though I hate to do it and it won’t earn me any girlfriends.

Energy.

I can feel the energy dissipating. I don’t feel like I did when I was 20 or even when I was 30 or even when I was 40.

Because I’m not 20 or 30 or 40.

I’m just about 50 (if I passed my black belt test, which I won’t know still for a little while, then I’ll basically get it for my 50th birthday) and counting.

In everyone’s life there are a small handful of moments that you remember, and a smaller handful still that are you remembering moments when someone said something to you that stuck, that had an impact, and that you can still hear them saying in your mind’s eye years later.

One of these for me (and this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned it here) is hearing my dissertation chair, who was already of retirement age or even older when I was wrapping up my Ph.D., tell me that he still had a full calendar and a lot of projects in his mind to launch because, in his words, “I still have a lot of energy!”

I hear him say that line in my head louder and louder with every passing year because it stands in such stark contrast to how I feel as I’m aging. With every year, month, week, day I feel the energy draining away from me. I watch it go and I feel a kind of panic along with a kind of resignation.

But no, I do not ‘have a lot of energy’ in the way that he talked about and I routinely wonder ‘how long I can keep doing this’ at the end of a workday, or at the end of a taekwondo session, or at the end of a long drive, or when working on a car, or when doing a home improvement project, or anything at all really.

I wonder it because I can feel it. I can feel it leaving me mentally, and I can feel it leaving me physically.

It’s not ‘I still have a lot of energy.’

It’s ‘How long can I keep doing this?’

— § —

Now, on a different but adjacent note, this all makes me wonder if there is a hidden key here that I should be paying more and more attention to. It is this:

Life fit.

As in, does your life fit you? Is it the right life for you? Are you living the right life or not?

Because I find myself thinking that it may be that he still had a lot of energy because he was doing work that he wanted to do and that he had always planned to do, while I am doing work that I didn’t really plan to do, didn’t really anticipate signing up for, and that doesn’t really do anything spiritual or deep for me.

Much of my life is just work.

Yes! Oh yes, the ‘going through the motions’ cliche. But of course that undersells it. We’re not all going through the motions because we’re idiots, we’re going through the motions because:

• We have significant needs and responsibilities

• We have a set of motions that can meet these

• We do not seem to have other sets of motions that are readily available that will meet those needs

So we ‘go through the motions,’ yes, and we feel regret about it, but on behalf of the ‘going through the motions’ crowd I feel that it’s incumbent upon me to say that this is not a low IQ thing we’re doing despite the perception, which is accurate, that everyone including the cheapest Hallmark movie and the bum outside the Seven Eleven knows that ‘going through the motions’ is not what you’re supposed to be doing with your life because life is too short to waste and you only get one of them and so on.

And yet here we are. A lot of very intelligent, very hard-working, very perceptive, and in some cases even somewhat wise people are going through the motions.

And getting older.

This was a post about getting older.

— § —

So I’m not really able to walk right now. And there is a strange paradox that could play out; it could well be that in the end:

• As I age, physical fitness is more and more important

• I got more serious about physical fitness over the last decade than I’d ever previously been in my life

• The culmination of all this physical fitness was a physical fitness event

• That may end physical fitness for me for the rest of my life and mark the transition from “middle age” to “older” (the ‘euphemism’ form of ‘old’)

I may have sacrificed my ability to do martial arts (or indeed, to walk) in order to get a black belt in martial arts.

There’s a kind of poetry there, but not good enough poetry that you’d write it down or ever bother to read it again once you had.

But it is what it is.

— § —

Last note in this whole aging thing is about friends.

I reach the point in my life where I start to think about what the end of my life will look like, and whether I really know very many people and whether I will really end up alone most of the time staring at a television set that now mostly shows nothing (the television set because like all people who age, and who start to creep into ‘aged’, I am set in my ways and the ways of my generation are, to a significant degree, television; showing nothing because already there is nothing on television and television is mostly dying, and by the time we get another decade behind us I’ll be old and television will probably finally actually just be YouTube, which isn’t television, or whatever comes after YouTube, which also won’t be television).

Anyway… Digressing. Always digressing. This is also a sign of age.

Yes, I have friends. And one of the things I’m most grateful for over the last month, as I have been stumbling around mostly unable to walk, is my friends.

Not becasue they have been here carrying me around the house or bringing me soup or anything (most, though not all, of them don’t even live in Utah).

No, I’ve been grateful for them because this month we’ve talked rather a lot, myself and several of my friends, more than has historically been the case (this in part because I’m often not great as a friend at communication and staying in touch; over the course of my life I was first too busy working on bucket lists and have in recent years then been too busy working on all the things that don’t matter in the aforementioned ‘going through the motions’ genre of regrets).

But my friens will still take a call from me when I reach out. And when I talk to them, I still find that they are just lovely. It is lovely to have friends. I am a fool for not talking to them more.

I don’t exactly know what the next (and likely last) 20-25 years will bring (assuming I even have that long; it’s entirely possible that I don’t).

But I hope that:

• The black belt test comes back as a ‘pass’

• My lungs hold out, because though I’ve always assumed that someday when I eventually die it will be of lung trouble

• I end up able to walk properly again, by one method or another

• I end up able to do taekwondo again someday (though this is mostly a nice-to-have compared to the rest)

• I remember to stay in touch with my friends and tell them things about my life and ask them things about their life

• They will continue to indulge me even though I don’t always remember to reach out as often as I should, and even though in some cases they have significant others that they really ought to be investing most of their time in

— § —

Meanwhile, it’s getting late; we wasted most of tonight on silly technical stuff (see previous post) and I’m getting older, and what’s more, I can’t see how long this post is because of the device I’m writing it on.

So this is the end of the first post I’m making in quite a while (something that’s just this moment dawned on me).

New year’s resolutions (so far):

• Put some of the first ‘mechanics of the end of my life’ in place somehow—passwords for people to find, codes to safes, last wishes, etc.

• Post more frequently on this thing, and contribute more often to all of my realms of writing and recording, since I think, bucket list complete, that’s really what the next 20 years are about… not uploading myself to the cloud for preservation like Elon Musk things, but really just preserving myself in notes and recordings

I’m becoming simpler as I age. I’m becoming simpler and realizing that most of this, maybe even 90-95 percent of this (this being the realm of modern economic productivity and public social life) is utter bullshit and we’ve all been fooled and cheated.

We’ve all been fooled and cheated and we should fucking throw drinks in the plantation owners’ faces and then just go hang out with our friends and family and tell them all how much we love them.

End of story.

(For tonight.)