I think the last 5 days of feeling the life inside me stagnate and form self-gripping fists of self-loathing and disdain have passed for now. I don’t even look at mirrors anymore. I don’t like what I see. But I feel OK today, and I might even tuck in my shirt for decorum’s sake. Problem with yesterday was the extreme boredom. I’m on a new project, officially as of yesterday, but so are a bunch of other people to where it seems we are overstaffed and not enough work to go around. Of course it’s not always like that. Other days, when half the group decides it’s vacation time, things can get pretty hairy. It’s all worked out in the HR planning religion. But yesterday I was fidgeting in my seat most of the day. I refuse to log in to any of my personal sites through these work computers. I’ve never done it in these 17 months. I don’t know who runs the network and I don’t have any reason to trust that they don’t spy and snoop and scoop up passwords and discuss over billiards and a bong the personal non-work usage of their computers. So the farthest afield I go is mainstream news sites, where I flood my head with garbage of the day. So much of what passes for journalism anymore is just scraping conversations off of social media and slapping the “writer’s” name on it. Any time you post to social media you are putting it up for grabs so that others can get paid to copy and paste what you wrote. To say nothing of the AI stuff, which I gorged on for a while but gave up on for lack of any genuinely useful application in my current day-to-day. Everything is up for grabs. Judith Griggs was right. It’s all Public Domain. If you don’t want something you said used for someone else’s profit, don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Don’t document it in any transmittable way. Any word, once uttered, is instantly banal. The only value left is in the unsaid.