Change is equal parts creation and destruction...

Phase Shift is capriciously random in her timing; both insidiously glacial, and diabolically blink-and-you-missed it immediate. Dux of her Graduate Diploma of "Come on, keep up, I thought you were smart" class, from the University of "Some genius you are, dickhead". 

The failure, as always, is mine. 

I was a [size undefined] Fish in a pond comprised of One (in that sample set, the size of said Fish is immaterial). The competition doesn't even warrant description; consider the competitive superiority of an obligate carnivore in the company of bottom-feeders. The tide came in, and in turn swept me out of the temperate pool into the deep blue where currents run cold, the depths unfathomed, and unknown terrors dwell. I, having vanquished and forsaken fear in my past life, bared my teeth, and surged rampant, battle-scarred lips screaming a war-song of: 

They named me Agent of Chaos. 

They named me The Perfect Storm. 

They named me Agent of Change. 

And so, having been given agency, I laid waste so I could then create. 

And in the same way the observer affects that which he observes, the change I wrought did change me as well. 

Note to self:

I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 
I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

In the meantime it must be remembered that I am a being who is incapable of doing only one thing at a time; there is no problem worth my attention so simple that it can be solved through a single vector, so whenever such a thing presents itself I will automatically find ways to make it suitably complex.
The problem my self presents is no different. 
So of course I've been playing my self against myself, and threw another variable into the mix. 

Only I would imagine I could maintain a zero entropy state whilst introducing a Perfect Detonator into the equation. 

Repeat after me: 

I am not immune to Newton's Third Law.

I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

I am not immune to Newton's Third Law. 

I brought destruction, and so I was destroyed myself. 

I wrought change, and so my self was changed. 

I was the Perfect Storm I could not withstand. 

But that Perfect Detonator who blew my shit to pieces will remain Nameless. 
Because she is staring back from the other side of a darkened mirror. 
And if the reduction of that equation results in zero, then we are Nothing. 

Struggling

The malaise I was suffering from when last I wrote has faded a little, but still lingers. There are a number of things I suspect are contributory, but the main one remains the diabetes meds. It's certainly helping me lose weight (I found I can fit in my kilt again today for the first time since the bike accident, which is nice), but it's doing a number on my appetite, energy, ability to handle stress... 

Actually that last one is probably burnout, I'll admit it. 

To you, anyway. If I think anyone else is listening I'll deny it ("Fuck you, lightweights, I'm an island. Another 4 years straight, here I come!") but... I'm losing it, and I'm increasingly convinced my continued use of present tense is wishful thinking. The worst thing is I don't know what to do about it (which isn't a question; please don't do that). I don't know how to take a holiday. I haven't had a self-determined holiday since I finished my Divermaster Cert, which was a decade ago in January. Every time since then it's been dive trips with Matthias, Melbourne trips and Iceland with Jenna, work trips work trips work trips... 

All the things I enjoy are... locked; dependent on other people, or on better health, or... or I've been there, done that, and there's no excitement any more. I need more little baby-step breaks like in September, but in the meantime in lieu of a Holiday, there's Change. 

So I got the place on Northbourne - cash is lined up, contracts should get exchanged Wednesday, and on or before Friday 13th of January (yeah, I'm going there) I should be the proud owner of a 6th floor room with a view out over Black Mountain. 

I'm estimating "early/mid-autumn" as when I'll shift my marker. Whilst I'm ostensibly in no rush, since the decision was made (July 30th. Yes, I've been planning for, working towards this since then. Remind me some time, the story of why the date is memorable is kinda funny, and relates to this photo

and the balls are finally in motion I just want to get it done, because 2 years in a holding pattern is enough. 

And I legit don't care. 

Worst case, it'll put me where I need to be for what comes next. 

If I'm lucky, on the other hand, it'll be the first step in a fiendishly elaborate and flamboyant suicide. 

I figure I can be a lonely, miserable workaholic anywhere. 

In the middle there somewhere is a view of a different sunset and a new backdrop for the photos of my Friday Night Drinks. 

I hope you'll forgive me that the thought of your enjoying that view with me every once in a while makes the idea just a little more perfect. 

Regards, 

Peter. 

------------------

To: Becky

December 7, 2022 01:31AM

Another in-line response, I think. Sometimes it seems the only way to maintain coherence, and not fall victim to my penchant for self-indulgent rambling where I don't so much lose the plot, as much forget that gravity exists and get confused when it's not hanging in the air where I left it: 

Hi Pete

 

In case you missed it I have come straight from the last email, and I didn’t even re-read it before I sent it, so I’m not only trusting you I’m trusting myself. It feels nice, but a bit like a new pair of shoes, I’ll need to wear them in a bit and risk a few blisters. 

The "did I say what I wanted to just right so that they'll get it? Did I explain myself just right? Will they misunderstand? OMFG, I used the wrong word for pasta and now they're going to hate me!!" thing? I'm so heartily sick of that sort of appeasement, now I just... say it. If they miss the point then it's their loss. But it's easier for me; i'm not required to care. Giving up is a luxury belonging for those who can get by without popular approval. I recall something you mentioned about the horrible Bitch Boss and your having to tread on eggshells. Not everyone gets to walk in with their middle fingers waving in the air and "Do I look like I give a fuck what you think?" attitude. It's something I'll not pretend I haven't earned, but I'll be the first to admit that it's much *easier* to earn when you have male genitalia. It's easy to get conditioned into a mindset where popularity = survival. 

Oddly, I'm reminded of a moment, not long after I'd moved back, when Emma was driving us somewhere and missed a turn: 
"Oh drat, that was the turn I was supposed to take."
<shrug> "Eh. This area's a grid, next one should loop back."

"..." she said, growing visibly tense. 

"Um... you ok?"

"..." <shudder> "I'm sorry, I just realised I was getting ready for the screaming to start. If I'd done that with [whatever her ex's name was] he'd have gone off about being late or wasting petrol or... you know."

"Really?" I said, confused, "What would be the point of that? They'll wait."

 

So in a seemingly perverse sense, the symptoms of your apparent burnout, have connected to mine and it awakens something in me that mimics enthusiasm, the same-same of validation, the creeping out of a hiding place only to that which is deeply familiar and completely non-threatening. Being surrounded by billions of people and still alone then see your reflection and realise it’s someone else. That’s you I can see now.

See, on the surface that sounds almost perverse, but we're supposed to suck it up and keep going. There's a pervasive trend in our culture that we dare not admit anything that might sounds like "Shit's hard, and I'm not coping," and because everyone else seems to have the perfect job, perfect house, perfect relationship, perfect holidays, perfect body, it seems like we're obviously the ones who are deficient. There's liberation in speaking the truth of our burdens, because in doing so we finally get to put them down. There's joy in having someone else unburden themselves in front of you, because then you get to upend your sack of care and say "Yeah, me too."

I don’t know how to do much in my own best interests. It’s too heavy and I haven’t the strength to drag it around. But it only gets heavier. It seems so petulant to sit in front of the answer and believe that there is a forcefield preventing me from simply reaching out and even acknowledging it is there. I’d seemingly rather sit in the shadow and stare at the key that opens the door, and grieve for the loss of motivation to grab it. What madness. I acknowledge this feeling you are having, of knowing just what you should do and feeling powerless to actually do it. To endure the continuing pain, and for what? The fleeting glory of inhuman success? The complexity of unjustified fear. Is it the deepness of feeling that if discarded leaves a void of any meaningful (painful) biofeedback?

 

This is... a lot to unpack. When you're depressed, you don't matter. How can you justify expending precious energy servicing your own needs when they're irrelevant? If I have no inherent value then anything I might do for my own benefit is, by definition, wasted. My work-around was thus: 

If I have no value, then the people around me are therefore more important (not EVERYONE - people are shit-flavoured scumbags, but the people we LIKE are at least nice to us, so we'll call them "friends"). 

But I can CREATE value by serving and enriching them, which in a profit-sharing model infers that my actions ARE valuable. 

Furthermore, by reinvesting that value-capital in self-improvement the outcomes of my actions become scalable. 

BUT, value is subject to entropy so requires continued effort to prevent it from degrading. 

Secondly, for all that my friends are exponentially more valuable than me, they're kinda dumb, and have a penchant for walking blindly into traffic if I'm not here to stop them, ergo to maintain the cycle of value-enrichment I must therefore ensure my own survival or we're ALL going to hell. The valuable would then become valueless, which would result in a negative-ROI failure-state. 

Thus, to have any value whatsoever, no matter what hell I'm going through, I must keep going, no matter the weight of the burden, or the hideous strength of the forces arrayed against me. 

Of course, the metaphor fails when they don't need me. When the only person who benefits from a course of action is me... fuck it, what's the point? 

My friend/client (on the rare occasion I bother billing her) Amy has worked out that if she invites me out for a pint there's even odds I won't make it, but if she books me to come sort out something "broken" on a Friday afternoon... She's good people, is Amy. 

And secretly, there ARE things I want, that I will pursue, so long as I can twist the circumstances to conform with my internal logic. 

I know where my dopamine triggers are, and how to activate them. 

Because I will demolish heaven and reshape earth for interesting problems to solve, for people I like. 

I take pride in fixing things no one else can, but it's an artificial facade masking the knowledge that if anyone else could do it then what's the point of me? 

There does come a point tho, where even with the most cunning of artifice the uneviable goes past unsustainable, through unviable, into unsurvivable. 
But there's a pure, inviolable joy in being able the tear yourself open and lay bare the Faustian hellscape of your Kafkaesque existence and say: 

"This is the price I pay, each day, to survive, and it's hard, and it's broken me, and I don't know how I'm going to do it tomorrow, but I will, and I don't want you to weep for me.
But I beg you, please weep with me."

 

What you do have is hope (the pain balance), you have plans, you are looking forward to something, in this case a change, a new place to nest, even visions of sharing this with others (and thank you for bestowing me with the pride of being a part of one of those).

See, I don't know what to do with hope... at least hope in isolation. I live in a word of certainty; constantly calculating risk and probability. Hope is a prayer, and if God can shift the balance then, I figure, so can I. 

But that's not what you're referring to here, is it? 

Because you're right; I can see laid out before me the path which my actions have connected me to. I can see the light on the hill in the distance, and I can see how I might get there. It's a (heavily, extensively calculated) leap into the unknown; I might not be able to see the bottom of the rabbit hole I'm throwing myself into, but I know with absolute certainty in which direction the fun is, and it's 'Down". 

I had a funny curveball moment in our weekly catchup a few weeks ago, where Bosslady asked me: 
"I just want to check - this uplift and move over to Canberra isn't just for [this job], is it? Because there's no guarantee that [the project pipeline] will go on more than another year or so..."

I chuckled, reminding her that I have roots in Canberra, not to mention the many employment opportunities that I'll only be able to leverage if I'm local. 

"Anyway, I've moved across the country for a pretty girl too many times to go doing it again," I lied, but not in any way that was relevant to her or her concern, "even if she DOES have 40,000 users." 

 

Bec.

Peter.  

This is what you wanted, you dickhead...

 Jumping at every *ding* your mobile makes and jumping into your inbox to find another Very Important piece of spam or bill is no way to live. There are a couple of emails I'm waiting on, and it feels like life is on hold until they arrive. My brain is full of plans that are made and queued up, waiting for that whistle to sound so I can pull the trigger and send them all over the top. 

It's a far cry from where I was a year ago, when things were unexciting, but ran seemingly on rails. One foot went in front of the other, jobs got done, invoices issued, the sun rose and fell in rhythmic cadence, and time passed barely leaving a mark. 
Or a year before that, when the breeze carried the whisper of pages turning towards the final chapter of books I was thoroughly sick of reading, the night air smelled of rubble settling after the implosion of Happily Ever After, and each breath out of my lungs exhaled the smoke of burned offerings to burdens unshouldered blending with the funeral-pyres of stillborn hope. 

I managed to get through nearly two years of Not Wanting Things; someone told me once "the secret of zen is to want what you have", although I've never been able to find a citation. Regardless, I had an empty house, a job to do, things to fix, and that was enough. Then one day I followed a white rabbit into a hole full of wonderful problems to solve, impossibly broken dreams to fix, and gordian knots to untangle. Somewhere along the line I started having fun cutting through the labyrinthine webs that seemed to completely bamboozle everyone around me, as if my mind was a razer in a drawer full of butter-knives; more fun that I could remember ever having had before. 

"If you want to make God laugh," Woody Allen said, "tell him your plans." 
Pete Townsend, on the other hand, said "We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans."
I took inspiration from Plato, and thought "Well I am a fool, but I know I am a fool and that makes makes me smarter than you, so I'll make no plans at all and stay the fuck out of God's way." 

Of course, in my smugness I forgot the that Philip J. Fry was wiser than all of us, because "time makes fools of us all." 

“There is an art," it says in the second of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books, "or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 

So in my hubris, and my "Life, the Universe, and Everything" Year I tripped, mistook falling for flight, and somewhere in that mad tumble I started Wanting Things again. 

The problem with Wanting Things is when you start achieving them. One minute you're a machete carving through chocolate soldiers melting in the sun, the next it's gone dark, you're cold, surrounded by intimidating-looking shadows, and you realise the brown stuff you're covered in doesn't smell much like chocolate. You got everything you never dreamed you'd be allowed to want, let alone have, and instead of satisfaction you just feel like shit. 

That's what you get for Wanting Things. 

The trap I blundered into, and what annoys me most, was allowing myself to hope. I thought I'd inoculated myself against that insidious traitor of an emotion; "If I don't have a life, I don't have to live," I thought, "then I can have nothing, and want what I have. Simples." In one pithy, self-satisfied gesture I'd outsmarted Dostoyevsky, out-humbled Buddah, and walked away throwing an over-the-shoulder double-deuce to God whilst Nietzsche sat stunned in my wake muttering "Verdammt, das ist nihilistisch." 

The ground was already rushing up towards me at what I would have noticed was an alarming rate, if only I'd been paying attention, when I returned to the stage for an encore. The other day I twisted my brain into the necessary shape so I could write something hopeful. A gift, in my own peculiar way; a bit of fun for the Penpal of whom I've become quite fond. If I'd not been so busily patting myself on the back for bending Plato over I'd have been watching it for Aristotle's revenge; nature abhors a vacuum, and for all that I'd constructed an edifice of emptiness, entropy will get you in the end. 

It's impossible to feed an intelligent system new information without indelibly changing it. Like when IBM fed Watson the Urban Dictionary to help it communicate more fluently, there's no way to remove the influence on your thought patterns. Unlike IBM, I can't just revert to a previous snapshot and clear my input cache. The worst thing is realising that even if I could, the origin of my downfall occurred long-before, and all the Cooking Wine in Alkaline Trio won't wipe the slate clean. I wrote it down, I made it true, I burst my own bubble, and collapsed my own wave function. 

I have only myself to blame. 

So here I sit in my inbox staring up guiltily up at the look of despair on my face, somehow surprised that I was the void all along, whilst we both wait for our respective emails to arrive to tell us whether we're alive or dead. 

I am, it seems, Schrödinger's Dickhead... 

Penpal - And now for something completely different...

 Thinking, thinking, always thinking;
ideas, memories, smells and colours;
Sifting, parsing, sometimes recombining.

Friday evening has been bouncing around my head, as you can only presume from receiving your second email in two days (not counting corrections), two (effectively) strangers finding something akin to joy through the sharing of their respective misery. It occurs that my emails cleave closely to that sort of theme - there are jokes and laughter, but in a "teeth gritted through the pain" sort of way. I decided it was time for a reframe and tone-shift, so I set myself a challenge: I'm going to try writing something hopeful (because 'happy' is a bridge too far).

To select your soundtrack for this I delved into my music collection to find something suitable and came up with Angels & Airwaves. It's not happy (I mean, it's Tom de Longe after all, and by the time they recorded their third album he was so badly messed up on opioids he barely knew what day it was), but I've always found them light (as in full of). Three songs, because you said you read these three times, which suits me nicely because this is me and I've always found both balance and completeness in three.

Heaven
Valkyrie Missile
The Flight of Apollo

I'm declaring this at the start because I have no idea how, or what, or where this is going. I'm taking you with me on a ride. We may go round in circles, or nowhere, or crash and burn, but you're finding out in real-time, same way I am, and only when I'm done do you have my permission to cry.

Now strap in and let's do this. 

---

My email yesterday was bashed out sitting in Haig Park, killing a couple of hours before my friend Marcia was free. A stretch of dead time filling the nothingness in my schedule between when I needed to leave one place,  before I had any reason to be at another.

It was far from an unpleasant place to be - cool, quiet, and still. I usually write these sitting in my hacked-by-hand reclaimed kerbside-shopping-network chair under the tattered remnants of my solar-powered gazebo, but if I was going to do something different, a change of scenery was called for. I stuck A&A in my ears (OK, I did a little bit of prep), got my bike's battery on the charge so it'd start, slammed the bare-minimum chores out of the way before grabbing groceries so there'd be food in my fridge (not just condiments), ditched the car, pulled my helmet on and twisted the throttle, propelling myself to the place I had in mind:

I've just had to move to follow the shade, by the way.

I've been coming here for almost as long as I've had autonomy; on days like this in my teens I used to ride my bike to the river (10ish-km), then follow it along the far side from here another 10-15km before turning around and heading back. Later in high school my best friend lived a couple of streets away and we'd come down at night to feel transgressive. Later we'd steal some beers from his dad (or play on how I looked older than I was and go to the bottlo) and do the "rebellious teen drinking" thing. When I moved back in 2010 I'd strap my roller blades on a bit east of here, skate a couple of km's west into the wind and back again. Here I've had picnics, watched the Australia Day fireworks, and brought tourists to look at the city lights. When I was still with Jenna, Kat and I would hang around the picnic tables, chain-smoke and talk about everything and nothing. It's been the setting for both first and last kisses, and many of those in between. It's pretty, and peaceful, and alive. It felt like a perfect place for this purpose. 

Welcome, glad you've come,
To my favorite place in Perth.
I hope you like it.

There's a group of girls (young ladies?) playing kick-to-kick off to my left; joggers chasing after fitness dodging families taking a stroll; dogs being taken for walks and Smelling All The Things(!); whilst I sit here with my laptop and A&A in my ears, apart from them all, but in the wide-angle panoramic shot it looks like I'm a part of it.

I used to use Mt Ainslie in the same way:

Above, but amongst.
A quiet perch to watch from.
Apart, but a part.

Where I am, where I'm going, and where I want to be, are rarely the same location. That feeling of satisfaction, comfort, contentment, seems so incomprehensible. That sense of being the right person, in the right place, at the right time, eternally elusive and just out of reach. Watching this perpetual parade of peaceful people, I wonder if their perceptions are parallel, whether they ponder as they pass their places in this performance? I don't know, and somehow I suspect that if I were to ask them neither of us would understand. If we spent a lifetime trying, we'd never grok each other; the terms of reference in our language are too far out of phase. 

There's a beautiful paragraph in Stranger in a Strange Land where Heinlein explains the word "grok":

"Grok means 'to understand', of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, 'to drink', and 'a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' - proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you - then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate - and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste."

I don't need to describe to you what a curse it is to see everything, all at once, as it really is.
I won't even try expressing the indescribable gift that is to be seen, known, and accepted; not for what you were, what they want you to be, or might one day become; but for who, how, and what you are. To have someone say "I see you" and not try to guess who, or how, or what they perceive. 
Nor will I make an attempt at the sense of explosive stillness, thunderous calm, or cacophonous peace from not having to wonder. 

I do, however, find it rather pleasant.

Now, I think it's time to pack my laptop away again and slip into jinba ittai. 

Regards, 

Peter. 

Another letter to my Penpal...

 As I'm fond of saying, "I know 'what' I am. 'Who', on the other hand, is hugely situationally-dependent."

I'm pleased (on all fronts). I'm not surprised she treated it as an "interview" - I did present you as a "data analyst" as an excuse to make the introduction. Curious who the "friend" was; immediate guess would be C*** B*** (Head of P/G). Glad your perception was positive - I've not asked, or been told, her perspective/perception. I only found out she was talking to you by accident: 

I figured it would likely be a slow-burn relationship, but one I felt would be worth at least an attempt at brokering. The world is full of dots, and one of my purest joys is connecting them; mapping out the patterns no one else seems to be able to see in what seems to be chaos until the picture resolves. 

On my end of things: 

The rest of my trip was about as frantic as one would expect. I'm yet to book the next one, but looking at being ~19/7-6/8. My project continues its merry waltz (progress has been a bit more "forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and twirling, twirling towards freedom" than the usual "two steps forward, one step back"), but there's definite progress being made towards endgame and initial Go Live is slated for 25/7 so figured I'd be there for it. 

I body-swerved a Perm Full Time role with them (by mutual agreement - I wasn't the best fit, and it wouldn't have been the best use of me as an Asset) which would have been Bosslady's level (EL2-equiv), although I may have acquired the unofficial title of Agent of ChaosChange in the process. I'm OK with it, although I found out recently I've been getting referred to as The Perfect Storm in certain circles, so I appear to be accruing epithets at an alarming rate. 

Still looking at the concept of picking up an investment property somewhere in the 2601/2612 postcodes (have my own bachelor pad when I'm in town, AirBnB it out the rest of the time). There's no rush, and I need a couple of months to rejig my financial arrangements (I've had to negotiate a pay rise with my MD, which was an interesting conversation. His opening offer was "go fuck yourself you lazy c#%t"...). I also want to see how the market shifts as interest rates ramp up. SHOULD be achievable tho. 

I was already in the process of decluttering - trashing stalled projects, giving away stuff I just plain don't need, that sort of thing. The possibility of needing to Do Something about my living arrangements has provided some extra motivation. 

Have been a massive recluse since getting back, even more so than usual. Partly because sifting the detritus of 8 years' stability/stagnation requires a singularity of focus and a clarity of mind, partly because I can feel an inexorable withdrawal from the temporal/physical; a necessary disengagement/disconnection/unburdening ("Free your mind, Neo.") so that when the moment comes the resulting leap is immediate, unencumbered, and without hesitation ("He's doing his Superman thing."). 
I've needed... something (impetus, stimulus, motivus) to kick me into motion. I don't know for sure what it will look like, but I can smell its approach. 

Part of the divestiture has been a conscious withdrawal from the human deadweight - I'm carefully being careless with who I reach out to/communicate with/randomly contact; disregarding thoughts of "I should touch base with Such & Such," and instead going with what seems like a good course of action at the time. It's less that I'm letting people slip  between my fingers, more unclenching my grasp and letting whoever doesn't cling on fall away. Those who remain add no weight; they carry themselves, and we move forward hand-in-hand ("Do not lead, I may not follow. Do not follow, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend." There's a context to Camus which always makes me well up, but that's a story for another day). 

The oddest thing is that, whilst this has all been liberating, the loneliness has been cutting in like an unwanted suitor ("Miss Sharma, may I have this dance?") and swinging a wrecking ball at my nice, neat (and self-contained), flaming little shit. Typical really, that just when I start feeling like I've reached Stage 7 (Acceptance) and can properly own the "loner" moniker that life. and my treacherous brain, go all flippy-da-table.  Agent of ChaosChange indeed. 
Speaking of Loner, not sure if you're familiar with Alison Wonderland (I've nicknamed her "Sad Pretty Blonde Girl" because she's all of those things. Vastly talented, classically trained, and a history of depression; I can't help but feel she's totally Our People), but I just grabbed a copy of the new album she's been drip-feeding singles from over the last 6ish months. The live version of Bad Things is both beautiful, and heart-rending. 

Self-inflicted mind Games (watch the clip - it's fun) and self-sabotage aside, the game is nonetheless afoot. I can only hope tho, that someday I'll find Peace. 

R. 

Penpal - A Minimal-Context Letter to Becky...

I discovered K.Flay after Can't Sleep was featured on the The Suicide Squad (the confusingly-named sequel to Suicide Squad) and realised how well it described my personal zeitgeist a couple of weeks ago: 

Had F.M.L. pop up on my playlist this evening and found that it felt like the next paragraph in that narrative. It also reminded me of a comment you made at one point about "living [my] best life". I mean... am I? Is getting what you wanted a prize or a penalty? 

Then up popped We Hate Everyone which hammered home the "not 100% sure why, but I think I know someone who needs to hear this"  nail. 

Are my heuristics on point? 

Meanwhile, I find myself in the conflictnig position of being a story-teller who's thoroughly sick of the sound of his own voice. Care to tell me one I haven't heard before? 

When did it all go wrong?

i've taken to posting cryptic messages on Facebook; sentiments constructed from multi-layered (and often nested) references which, if you unpack them with an understanding of context, expand into essays-length descriptions of my headspace at the time. For the rare person who can decypher the re-de-re-translation of a thought had in a particular moment in time which was inspired by a particular circumstance. 

Usually just me, but we live in hope that somewhere, someone gives enough of a fuck (not to mention carries the weight of shared experience and influence) to understand. 

It's abject wankery which even i only manage to justify with a blithely-offhand gag about how i enjoy playing with language, or about speaking in hybrid-Tamarian (see Star Trek: The Next Generation S05E02 - Darmok). "Oh yes," people think when another goes up, "there's Pete being humorously opaque. NFI WTF he means, but I'll click 'Like' because at least he's still alive." (Source: spot-surveys of viewer feedback)

What can i say? i feel the need to vent/express/release/cathart, but if i don't veil things people start to do that awkward 'random' "Hey man, are you OK?" thing, and unloading the depth of grief, pain, and despair invariably leads to that look of "Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into... just nod and look sympathetic and say 'Man, that's shit' and maybe it'll stop."

Because people want to help, and they do genuinely care, but unleashing that on the unsuspecting is like watching someone taking a sip of that fast-food-chain coffee, replete with the "CAUTION, CONTENTS MAY BE HOT" warning, and thought "Eh, how bad can it be?" 

13 months and 4 days since Kat left, an hour and change after coming out to where I was sitting knocking out some work and saying "We need to talk." For a year i kept the door to what had been her room closed, opened only to throw something i'd found her hers in there (closed again quickly, lest the Rancor escape), or to make up the bed for someone who wanted to crash. A year and counting I've been sitting here, processing that day, and the 1400 days that came before, and the 1459 days before that. 36.9% of my adult life. Joy and loss, wonder and grief, culminating in 400 days of introspectively-stagnant Now. 

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics," said Mark Twain.
"Numbers don't lie," said the ATO. 

Either way, they all lead to here. 

"You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there," said Maya Anglou.
"Nosce te ipsum," said the Romans, stealing from the Delphics. 

Chatting with a friend this evening i made a joke about being resolutely single, and she asked how how long had it been. i had the answer (coincidentally Dear Reader, i assure you) off the top of my head. 

"The time is now," she said, leaning in so close i could smell the 'too drunk to drive' blood-alcohol reading.
"Erm..."
"I've never been single for more than 6 weeks since I was 18," she informed me, "I don't like being alone. You need to get back out there."
"That's (horrifying/impressive/illuminatory/somewhat-overly-suggestive, i didn't say)... brief. Honestly, i'm good where i am. i'm sorting my own shit out, plus i find the best things in my life have come from Utter Tragedy, and when i Stop Looking; actively searching for what i think i want means i'm not ready to catch when the Universe provides what i really need."
"Hmph."

"In the Envoy Corps, we take what is offered," said Quellcrist Falconer in Altered Carbon. 

But if we're convinced we need 10,000 spoons, how will we notice when the universe offers us a knife? 

So i decided to stop looking, STFU, and listen, and in 400 days i have heard a great many things; the linkages atwixt the songs i gravitate to, the stuttering of my breath when an event reminds me of That One Time When, the echoes repeated in unrelated conversations, the screams that wake me in the night and the thunderous silence of once again waking up alone, the susurration of pieces falling into place, patterns which only emerge from the chaos of experience when you abnegnate and expunge the self. 

i guess that saying "i've spent a lot of time in my own head" would be a mild understatement, but when you've spent the best part of a decade years rebuilding, then reimagining, then recreating oneself... is one tenth of that spent reincorporating and redefining really that much of a luxury? 

"Remember who you are," said Sandra. 

And therein lies the rub, i realised from yet another unrelated-but-suddenly-relevant conversation; i know 'what' i am, but 'who' has always seemed elusive. i've found a certain comfort in accepting the 'what', because 'what' is the foundation underpinning the 'who', but when one's benchmark for 'who' is "a cunt, but not a fucking cunt" you're left with a fair bit of slack to play with. 

So where does that leave us? After all; nothing changes on New Year's Day. You, me, anyone, it's still the day after yesterday; another day that ends in a 'y'. Another day i bash another cryptic message into another keyboard. Another batch of nonsense generated in my Quixotic quest of self-comprehension. Another cavalcade of bullshit. 

At least it will signal, in a "quis custodiet ipsos custodes"-sense, that i'm still learning, still working shit out, and still alive...