People come, people go. Back at work for first time since Monday, one of the people who got hired same time as I tells me she’s moving on. I’m indifferent to her progress, but happy that she’s happy. She’ll make more money, which is something I really need to do. But I don’t see a future for myself here. I thought I did but that future evaporated. I remember somebody early on saying that no matter where you end up in this machine the job is basically the same. I believe that.
Back at work and reflecting on how yesterday was wasted. Most of my days are wasted somehow or other. Thisa job is waste because I take nothing from it. Very little remains in my mind about what happens here. I take notes but they do not seem to capture much. I took this job as a fascination, not out of ambition or as a path toward that most awful concept: a career.
The fascination has worn off but the comfort of the structure remains. After 20 years, the last of which had me increasingly unmoored and directionless, it at least feels proper for me to be in a structured environment where things are taken care of for me. Someone else manages the computers. Someone else keeps the internet running. Someone else pays for the electricity. It’s not losst on me that I was drowning in the mire of having to take care of everything. I was tech support, content creator, programmer, writer, photographer, all this with so much content I regularly feel like I’m drowning any time I try to make sense of it or produce something useful from all or any of it.
I continue to pile on the mountains and oceans of raw material. I spent some of last week compiling 24-hour long videos from the windowcam I’ve pointed out the window for guess over a year now. I didn’t always record it but I started and it’s actually calming to watch the world go by just outside my visual reach. Calming more to know that it is in the past, these people and vehicles moving along. THe past cannot hurt me.
I don’t know what I am doing here. What do I want? Who am I? Am I good at anything? Or bad at everything?
I discovered the Philip Glass Etudes for Piano. For some reason the score is free to download off Scribd, so I for a free one-month trial membership and grabbed it along with a few other things I’ll probably never look at. My sights were set mostly on Etude #6, which so far seems to be the most dramatic of the series. I got through the first 7, I forget how many there are. I can’t say there is much “etudeness” about them. An etude is supposed to be a study on some specific technical difficulty or expressive challenge. These just feel like Philip Glass piano pieces.
Weather is not helping my bleak disposition. It feels like fall but it is mid-July. I was out yesterday in a t-shirt and feeling incredibly frustrated and even angry at the cold, windy weather that greeted me. This was my vacation day, after all, and I wanted sun and heat, not clouds and 50-degree windchills. I might get sun on Sunday. Temperature could hit 85. I’ll feel better with some sun. I think. I also must remember to eat. On my days off dietary regimens are just not in my vocabulary.
Like many across the planet I was drawn in to the story of the Titan submersible. The idea of 5 people trapped in a vessel like that, slowly depleting oxygen and all the other discomforts of shitting and pissing in place. It sounded like anybody’s nightmare. Alas, the deaths were instantaneous. Not the way most people want to go but considering the alternative of being trapped for days it is a far better outcome. What I found fascinating was the sounds they referred to. Banging sounds? I didn’t believe any of that, instead settling on the sounds being those of the metal and other materials on the ever-moldering husk of the Titanic. That thing makes its own music, it seems, with its materials bumping into each other. Sounds of the deep sea are an interest of mine, I need to revive that.
The hatred and skepticism of the wealthy was no surprise to me but it seemed to have caught others off guard. To some wealth is a separator. I don’t know how to feel about it.
With rent rising again my cost of living pay raise besically evaporates. I can cut costs, I guess. Food. Who needs food? The booze adds up, I guess, but it doesn’t seem too formidable a category. I’ll drop the Adobe subscription the moment I can. I feel duped and trapped into that, and now I have no time to use any of that shit. A dream had been to unload the dedserv but I just bring myself to write the code to make that happen. If I see another line of computer code I will hyperventilate. I’ll cut the New York Times sub, since it’s free on the dark web and I don’t read it much anyway. I should cut some audio streams but I can never remember which ones are hosted where.
