Probably not. Which way is north? WHo knows… Which way to emptiness? I’ll find it eventually. Thinking of ways to make a dead-end job feel less dead, less end. I’ve tried befrinding seemingly amiable people but it didn’t work. Quickly I learned to trust no one. I speak as little as possible. When I do I sometimes think my social skills have eroded worse than I might have thought. I consider myself a witty, funny guy. But nothing seems to translate here. I used the word “schadenfreude” and was stared at, longly, not longingly, but longly. Is that a word? It is now.

Thinking again about the woman I was with last year. 2024: The Year of the Horny Girlfriend. As much of a disaster as it all ended up being it’s interesting to reflect on the impact it had on my daily life. No more grannysmoth apples for breakfast. I eat pears instead, as they are lower in acid, according to her. I seek out White Mountain Bulgarian Yogurt, a hard-to-find product that is the best yogurt I’ve ever consumed. Another brand, Trimona, is a passable alternative if White Mountain is unavailable but the White Mountina is best. I also use Dash (Everything but the salt) solely on account of her introducing it to me. Other changes and flourishes as well, far more than I can remember from other relationships. From other relationships I ended up with things, and pictures. I don’t do pictures anymore. I’ll never forget the Japanese Waif’s face and body but I never took a single picture of her. I do have one picture of the woman from last year, which she sent me. A topless photo from her living room. Her body got me so charged, and she knew it. Part of the lore of this beautiful woman was how she kept her men at bay, kept them wanting more until they cried, or just gave up and left, as did I.

I tried writing out thoughts yesterday while on company time, feeling no guilt at first as there was utterly nothing job-related to do. Eventually I caved and went back to focusing on what they pittance-pay me to do here, while also playing video games to erase my mind of all creative thought. There’s a real danger here, in that I have two keyboards and tow mice for different devices. In one keyboard I might type maudlin, self-effacing drivel. In the other I conduct work-related interactions in a professional manner. The chance of those two environment overlapping is very real, with my poetry or ongoing screed about the sometimes annoying co-workers could get sent to entirely the wrong people.

I noticed something about the pear stems yeterday. I have been stashing pear stems throughout this 2-floor FiDi office space. I stash them in nooks and crannies (or crooks and nannies, as I like to spoonerize) and check on them every day or so just to keep myself grounded and a little less bored. They are hidden in plain sight, but when I first started stashing them they would be removed. This surprised me, especially certain locations that just seemed too invisible for anyone to notice or care about. But over time they remained in place. One of them, blatantly visible upon entering or exiting this floor, is a veritable oak tree in the context of these stems, it’s so large and obvious yet it has remained in place for probably a year now. I sometimes question who it was that originally removed the pear stems as they were discovered, and if they left the company or just gave up and maybe started placing pear stems themselves. But yseterday I saw that one of the steams, one of the earliest ones in fact, had been repositioned. It had been firmly on the surface of a grid-like pattern on a wall. Now it is suspended over the psace between those surfaces that create the grid. There is no way entropy caused this shift to happen. Someone knows. I have a new pear stem in my pocket today that may find a new home, should I be able to locate one. I cannot attribute this to the woman who turned me from apples to pears for breakfast. I was doing this earlier with the apple stems.