So I’m sitting here writing this on an AlphaSmart Neo that, regrettably, seems to be developing screen problems. An old device, breaking down, like me.

I got it out to try to write maybe two hours ago. I decided to use the Neo to try to avoid distractions and nonsense, which seem to be getting the better of me these days.

But when I tried to power it on, the batteries were dead. It’s probably been a few years since I actually used this device. And then, when I put the new batteries in, the filesystem was corrupted and we were hung at error messages.

So I had to pull out the laptop and go online to diagnose. Where I found out how to do a hard reset (the password on the confirmation flow, for some historical reason that I don’t know, but that makes me smile, is ‘tommy’).

Then, after the hard reset, my custom typefaces that allowed for more than four lines of text on the screen were gone. So I thought no problem, I’ll just re-install them.

But try to chase down actual downloadables for the Neo these days, like font packs, or even harder to find, the Neo Manager software… Not easy. So that took me a while.

Finally tracked down at least the Windows version, and was wondering how compatible it would be with anything modern, but then found out that the Windows VM on my Kubuntu laptop no longer works after my recent updated to 25.10.

So then I’m into diagnosis. I don’t have a ton of time to look and it’s not like I’m a Linux virutalization expert or working on those codebases, so I rely on LLMs to help me to diagnose.

Multiple reboots. Grub work. Kernel work. All kinds of nonsense. Finally, we (myself and LLM together, with me directing the conversation) realize that the KVM module is listing vboxdrv, which leads to the realization that VirtualBox now integrates with Linux KVM on the latest releases, so I actually need to remove the workarounds (blacklisting modules, adding Grub command lines, whatever) from previous Kubuntu releases that I’d put in place and then rebuild initramfs and reinstall Grub and so on.

So we finally do that and now in all the futzing, VirtualBox has lost access to USB devices.

I could sit here and try to continue but all I was doing was trying to get usable fonts back into this AlphaSmart which now has a dying screen and probably doesn’t merit much love an attention going forward.

But I’ve managed to burn like two hours on this. That’s how life is these days. You start with good intentions but there is basically an infinite queue of to-do work or an infinite set of regressions (however you want to frame it) and you never really get done with anything you’re doing.

Instead, like a fractal Mandelbrot “flower” there is just this infinite blossoming and telescoping and repeating of things that aren’t really work but that sort of give the metaphorical appearance of work.

We do all of this stuff until we die, burning our whole lives at it, myself included, and this is why modern life sucks and I’ve sort of turned against it.

Because somehow in late modernity there is this game they trick you into playing whereby you just spend your whole life doing pointless bullshit and spending money after hours or when you’re on break.

I don’t know. And I don’t know who “they” is. I just know that today disappeared and even when it got late and I was going to come and blog for the first time in a long time and say that today disappeared, even that moment for blogging soon disappeared beneath a giant pile of unproductive stuff that, if it isn’t done, is somehow moving one backward, making anti-progress.

Treading water is the mission. It is what all of life seems to be now. Treading water in a silly 6×9 pool in an AirBnB rental.

— § —

So I took some more time to work on it because I’m addicted to modern life.

Now it’s about three hours in. We’ve restored the functionality of VirtualBox in Ubuntu 25.10 by removing the kernel modules from blacklisting. We’ve fixed a bunch of permissions stuff. We’ve re-installed guest additions and switched from the ICH9 chipst to PIIX3 so that shutdowns work.

It’s all pointless. It’s a waste of my life. But now I can start and use Windows 11 again properly inside Kubuntu. Which I really don’t have all that much reason to do.

I mean, I was just installing fonts on a Neo, which I almost never use and which is breaking anyway, so that I can post on a blog that I have recently mostly neglected, in a post about—

about—

And this is the problem. Having been routed once again into techno-distraction, I have no idea what I was planning to say. I only have the vague knowledge that there was a bunch of stuff I was going to write about and mention and I was wondering whether it was really too long for one post.

Only now all I have this this stupid post about Ubuntu 25.10 and VirtualBox, which nobody wants me to be using anyway, but I can’t be bothered to figure out KVM because I’m old.

Okay, that makes me think something, but I’m going to put it in a separate post because if I put it here after paragraphs of boring-as-shit technobabble, nobody will read it.

Not that anybody reads it anyway.

But that’s beside the point.

— § —

(And now, to add insult to injury, I have just discovered that what I’d thought were fonts I’d added after the fact—in short, what I was working on all this time—were built into the Neo after all, and I just had to look for them after doing the hard reset.

F***.

Such is life.)

Returned yesterday from the annual trip to stay in the mountains. Nothing special, just tent camping, sometimes in wilderness area, sometimes in Forest Service campgrounds. This year it was the latter. I know, in 2025 this is weirdly lower-middle class, as in anyone with any taste avoids an actual campground like the plague and instead ventures out on their own Kon-Tiki or climbs Everest or something else that’s Insta-ready (it increasingly seems to me that aging is also a way of falling like a rock down through the class strata, as the older tastes are the less likely they are to be in fashion, and the less they are in fashion, the more they mark you as gauche, but I digress)…

But no, I just take my kids and go into the forest and disconnect for a few days.

— § —

Here’s the thing: you have to be careful not to do this too long. Just a few days is already almost too much.

Because the more time you spend up there, at altitude, without mobile service and without co-workers to nurse along, the more you start to think that the whole world is backward and none of the things you spend so much of your time on mean anything at all, and also the more you start to ask yourself questions like “Was Kkaczynski right?” and “What would happen if I just disappeared one day and never came back?”

And these are the sorts of questions you can’t afford to ask yourself because your having a microwave oven and a mobile phone depends on not asking them, and because having custody of your kids and your own freedom of movement depends on your being able to prove you have a microwave oven and a mobile phone and some minimal level of debt that will last for at least years and that you nonetheless pay toward regularly, demonstrating both that you are a slave (citizen requirement one) and that you are a productive slave (citizen requirement two).

Listen to me.

This is why I say you can’t stay up there too long. Or at least I can’t stay up there too long.

Because you lose the ability to lie to yourself, and without that ability, you quickly find yourself in crisis.

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.