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.

We were down again. Thanks to A— for pointing this out. No thanks to 20i for failing to maintain the registrations of the domains of its acquired hosts. Why should this be my problem?

But I guess it is.

Maybe it’s time to finally move to Lightsail? Thing is, I’m not sure I’m ready for the PITA level involved there.

Whatever, we’ll status quo a little longer.

In our back yard hangs rope swing that my children used to love when they were very small. It’s hung on what used to be a mature cherry tree—that’s now long dead. It’s been—what—maybe five or more years since it died? Actually, it might even be longer than that. It died some time after the divorce, but a long time ago now.

The leafless old tree is still standing there, with the rope swing on it, dangling over the lawn.

In the summer, every time I mow the lawn under the swing, I tell myself that the tree—and the swing—have to come down. With every passing year, the old tree has less structural integrity and is less safe. And even if the tree was still alive, the swing and the branch that holds it are both far too small now for my children anyway—not to mention that teenagers don’t have much use for a rope swing hanging from a tree.

— § —

Over and over again, and often multiple times on weekends, I survey the Steam store and the PlayStation store looking for a “new game to play.”

I comb through page after page of game thumbnails and descriptions. I pass over endless four- and five-star rated titles, titles on sale, games that have reviewed well, games that have been recommended to me. It’s tough to find things that I care enough to play these days.

Sometimes I buy something purely because it’s on sale. I download it, maybe even start it up, and then abandon it after just a few minutes.

I’ve often wondered what it is I’m looking for, but today I’ve just started What Remains of Edith Finch and it makes me realize what’s been common to a lot of the off-the-beaten path games I’ve had enough interest to actually continue to play over the last decade or two.

Like many of the others, it’s a game about remembering, and about the past. Not just any old objective past, not history, but a past. Someone’s past. And the feeling of having had a past and trying to come to terms with it, or even just remember it.

— § —

My main Lightroom catalog has over 300,000 photos in it dating back to 1999, which would seem to indicate that I love photos, and in some sense I do; I love to take them, at least.

I rarely, if ever, look at them though. A strange, unsettled feeling, like a mix of sadness and dread and love all at once, comes over me whenever I try to look at photos from the past, unless it’s the very recent past. I think, at the end of the day, that I struggle to bear it. To look at the past. To confront the fact that it was once the present—a present that is no longer.

I only look when my kids take an interest and want to creep back through images that they’ve never really seen or don’t remember, of what once was—places they once were, parents they once had, clothes they once owned, activities they once engaged in, friends they once played with, and so on.

While they wander through different flavors of fascination as we page through old photos, I repeatedly have the uncanny experience of finding pasts that are still as vivid to me, as I look at the photos, as if they were yesterday—yet that I had completely forgotten had ever been.

That adds a bewildering sense of something like guilt to the sadness and dread and love. Guilt that I’ve completely forgotten about a wonderful moment, or that place, or that person, or that difficult day, until seeing the photo. Guilt that if not for the photo, that important memory would have been lost, and a kind of desperation at the realization that someday, I will no longer be here to look at the photo and have the vivid memory of it once again in response.

Maybe my children were too young when it was taken to have any real memory of it. Maybe there are a thousand other photos, spread out through my hundreds of thousands, that are equally as important as this one—that I will never look at again.

Those pasts, those once-presents, have already been lost. That sense of loss is debilitating to me. It’s like losing family members that you love dearly, but not even knowing who they are. It’s like knowing that you’re failing to save the world, somehow, over and over again, but not even being able to observe it directly.

— § —

I have yet to chop down the old tree, even though I know I should. It’s not just in the summer when I’m mowing that I think about this. Now that I have a dog and I’m outside at all hours for dog breaks, I have the same thought in the winter, too.

“That old tree’s got to come down. Swing, too.”

Today I came inside and once again went to Amazon and eBay looking for prices on cordless chainsaws and pole saws and so on. But once again I didn’t buy anything. I put it off, kicked the can down the road again.

The thing is, I feel guilty. Despite the fact that nobody has been on that swing in years, and that I have two teenage kids who have forgotten that it exists, I also have two little children who swing on it all the time. Who stand on it, holding onto the ropes tightly, and fling themselves back and forth, giggling, all smiles and hair and sunlight through the green branches above them.

They will be devastated if I cut down their tree and their swing. So I can’t bear to—to let them down—or to imagine the looks on their faces if they were to find out that I have vague plans to do such a thing out of some misplaced adult need for adult abstractions like safety or pragmatism.

— § —

The past is everything. It is the repository of all meaning and all happiness.

The growing and increasingly sentimental museum of one’s life in adulthood also—as it turns out—hurts.

Like hell.

There was this calculation that they kept asking us to make in our heads back in the high school days, which was that the farther along we got toward—or in—higher education, the richer we would eventually be.

Of course it’s now clear that that was entirely incorrect. In fact, it goes something more like: every day of higher education is a day’s worth of income you will never have; every year of higher education is a year’s worth of income you will never have. And if you go “as far as you can go” in higher education, you also go “as far as you can go” toward economic disempowerment.

I don’t think this was intentional deception. I think this was a bunch of people who grew up with the G.I. Bill thinking that digital watches were still pretty cool.

— § —

First work week of the year is now done.

Work continues to have this weird quality for me, this sort of ontological bewilderment that I still haven’t overcome as I realize that what you do at work is both:

(a) the substance of your life, and

(b) generally of no substance whatsoever in the modern “white collar” world

— § —

I am watching this Los Angeles fire coverage and it strikes me again just how badly I misjudged everything over the course of my life. So many people with so much to lose. I don’t have much to lose at all, despite having worked long hours my entire life at “highly skilled jobs other people can’t do.”

It also dawns on me that if I am ever to have anything to leave to my children, or to experience for myself (say, my first ever vacation—I have lived an entire life without ever having one), I am going to have to start over and/or start anew and do something entirely different from what I have done thus far.

You can’t get to there from here. You can’t become financially secure doing white-collar work. Not as such.

The question is: am I (literally) exhausted? Do I still have it in me? I keep thinking and acting like I do, but then days pass and then weeks pass and then years pass and I don’t:

(a) leave my job

(b) exit my career

(c) start a new business

(d) change anything at all

I have told myself I’ll do this when the kids are grown, but by the time the kids are grown and gone I will be that much older, and it now strikes me that I might feel differently once the kids are grown, as they will still be in need—it would still be a disaster if my current career were to crash and burn.

Not a moral disaster or a philosophical disaster, just a financial disaster. And as distasteful as it is to say, in the real world of today money is more important than morals or philosophy.

We all know that to be true, or we wouldn’t still be employed at all. But oh well.

Year 48 almost done. Year 2024 almost done. I can’t remember whether I did an end-of-year post last year. Maybe I forgot. I forget.

It’s been a few months since I posted here as well. I guess it’s been a few months since I posted anywhere. For many years, starting sometime in the 1980s, I was always “posting” public stuff somewhere. Because I wanted people to see it. Because I made friends that way. Because the network loved me, whether or not any particular person did.

But it’s been a few years since things felt that way. In the age of social media, the network no longer loves anyone, and I’m not special enough to change that. So I don’t post as much as I used to. And I don’t meet as many people as I used to. Old instincts die hard, but I guess twenty years on they have finally died.

— § —

I’m in a big house that’s not mine, alone. That’s been most of my life, and it’s still the day-to-day. Probably it will be until the day I die? Not sure.

The kids aren’t here, they’re with their mom. Somehow the timing always seems to work out that way for the end of the year—kids with mom for New Year’s Eve, then I pick them up on New Year’s Day.

The tree is still up. The house isn’t too messy. I spent half the day working. I’m not sure I’m in the right frame of mind for the last day of the year, but I’m not sure what the right frame of mind for the last day of a year is, anyway.

— § —

So what happened in 2024?

• Obvious headline item, got a dog again.

• Had a lot of puppy blues for a long time, though those are mostly gone now.

• Felt most of my friends continue to get farther and farther away.

• Continue to not really know what to do about that.

• Continue to not really know how to live once you’re not in the higher education system any longer.

• Did a lot of my own automotive work.

• Played a lot of Elden Ring.

• Worked an awful lot.

• Not sure what else. That’s pretty much it.

At some point in the past, I remember hearing research coming from the psychology community that adults are least happy with their lives in middle age. So I think that’s me and I think that all of this is normal.

There are these people that you really care about and that you spent many years really loving, but now it’s been decades since you really spent any time together and your lives have gone in their separate directions and they’re far away (or you’re far away) and when you get together it’s not quite comfortable any longer or you don’t know what to say, and that’s if you even get together any longer, which in most cases you don’t.

But new friends are also difficult because frankly you just don’t have a lot going on. Your life takes on this strange automatic quality. Some guru somewhere I’m sure says that you shouldn’t let it do that and you should live consciously but honestly that just makes it more painful since in fact materially you must repeat, day after day, the same things, for many decades in a row, even though they frankly don’t have that much to do with you in any practical way, because that’s modern life. It’s also Marx and it was a good insight, but he didn’t really know what to do with it after that and neither do any of us.

— § —

The kids learned this year that I have a couple of half-finished novels sitting around and they really want me to finish them which is ironic because I don’t think I’ve ever cared less about writing than I do right now.

There are actually very few things that I care about right now apart from my kids and my dog and the fact that I worry about my kids and their schooling and teenage life and I worry about my dog and dog health and the fact that she’s waiting on first heat and will soon need a spay.

— § —

It’s harder and harder to access what I really think or what I really do. Autopilot makes things that way; you start to lose track of the things right in front of your face.

— § —

We did go to a football game this year, even though it’s the worst year that the team has had in decades.

We didn’t manage to camp this year, as we had a small puppy that wasn’t fully vaccinated yet throughout the prime camping period.

We did fish but we didn’t catch anything. Utah isn’t like it was when I was a kid; there are very few wild areas left.

Daughter is trying to switch schools. Son decided he didn’t like guitar. Daughter got her black belt. Son’s voice dropped.

— § —

L—, I miss you even if I don’t know what to say to you. The same goes for you, A—. C— I’m sorry for not calling you more. Thing is, I haven’t kept myself up mentally. I don’t have any thoughts any longer. I think those should come back as retirement gets closer? I don’t know. I know that right now I mostly don’t think anything.

— § —

What am I looking forward to in 2025? I’m hoping that I finally start to make a dent in some financial stuff. There are a lot of things in my life that were very costly that happened years ago, and they have been the dominant truths in my life for a long time now. In theory, some of those debts will finally start to be paid off in 2025.

No that doesn’t really mean I’ll be able to save or start a business or anything like that, as all of that cash is earmarked for other debts. I am a typical American in that. They told us to go to college so that we could become slaves, and we did. It is what it is.

— § —

What will I do tonight? Will I stay up? Probably not. I’m tired and I’m a bit worried. Likely dog is just about to have her first heat, but I’m not sure. Watching out for UTIs and so on.

Have been on PTO for weeks, but have been working anyway, because these are the Americas, and we lie. We say we are taking time off but then we work, because we know that both are expected: it’s expected that you take time off for mental health, and it’s expected that you work through it if you want to justify your salary. That’s just how we roll.

We are a peculiar culture and I’m not all that special any longer. I don’t know how I feel about that, either, but I know that it’s true. Once I was pretty special, but I gave that up for Lent because special largely = painful and because I tend to like Catholic stuff.

Enough said.

Goodbye 2024, I won’t know whether I loved you or hated you until I get farther away and can look back from a distance. But in either case it’s sentimental in some way or other to watch you go.