I really feel like I am running out of gas lately.

Every day, I am a little more tired. I find it harder and harder to concentrate and the urge to turn my back on the world gets stronger and my will feels weaker.  I feel very… grey.

And I honestly do not know why. Clearly I am spending more of something than I generate, and I am burning through my reserves at a frightful pace.

One thing I do know is that I am having more and more of the bad sleep. Whether that is a cause of my problems or merely a symptom of a larger issue is up for debate. I am not sure why the bad sleep is back but I sincerely wish it would go away again and leave me with at least a shred of the illusion that I can get rest from sleep.

Maybe I am become depressed, despite my best efforts to keep my fires burning. Maybe I need to learn to live with the fact that there are going to be these cycles of energy and listlessness in my life no matter what I do and the best course of action is to accept the truth and figure out ways to cope.

That’s a galling thought but that doesn’t mean that it does not represent an important truth in my life. And as long as I am living the life of a (mostly) unaffiliated freelancer, there is no reason why I can’t have the occasionally unscheduled off day where I concentrate on getting as much rest and recuperation as possible and lay off the intense job hunt for a day or two.

But I am so afraid of slipping back into numbness and depression that I don’t even want to think about it.  I know far too well how easy it is to let everything slide and give up on life and stop striving and then the next thing you know, years and years have gone by.

I am too fucking old and fat and sick to lose any more time like that.

But perhaps it is naive, childish, and self-destructive to imagine that I can sustain a wave of enthusiasm and energy forever. The mature goal is to learn how to stop for a rest without losing the will to start again. To search for a source of renewal instead of setting myself up for failure by trudging onward till I collapse.

Right now, it’s Friday. That means that as long as I make it through today and Saturday, I will make it to Sunday, which I have declared to be my day off, my Day of Rest.

That means that on Sundays, my only obligation is to blog. I can set aside the whole ferocious multi level job hunt business and concentrate instead on relaxing.

That helps, but it might not be enough. After all, Sunday is my big social day, which I will be socializing from 6 or 7 in the evening until three in the morning. And while I treasure and cherish my social time with my friends, it doesn’t really count as “rest”.

So I dunno. I could throw Saturday in as a day of rest, I suppose. I don’t want to do so, but I have to think in terms of long term sustainability. It would suck because Saturday is one of my most productive days right now. But I need time to rest.

Plus I don’t like the idea of a whole day left to my own devices. So it can’t be that I actually forbid productive labour that day. Then I really would get depressed. And bored. And resentful of myself, which is a thing that exists despite its absurdity.

So perhaps I should see a rest day as less of a full stop and more of a taking my foot off the gas. A lack of acceleration. I have been pushing myself pretty hard and that is the sort of thing that is never going to last.

Honestly, I wish I could rest up today. Despite my having had nine hours of sleep already, what I want most right now is to go right back to bed and maybe actually get some decent sleep for a change.

It’s worked before. It’s like I have to nap to recover from the bad sleep. Eventually, I will feel refreshed and ready to take on the day.

Dunno why the bad sleep is back. I don’t think my blood sugar is high. I doubt it’s my allergies, seeing as I take my antihistamine within a few hours of going to bed. It’s getting warmer and that might be a factor, I suppose, but it’s not really hot yet.

So I am not sure. The heat seems like the most likely thing at the moment Maybe not directly, though. Maybe the problem is that I have been sweating a lot more lately and that’s led to my pore getting clogged.

Seems as likely as anything else, anyhow.

I wish could sleep all day, but I can’t, because I have a Secret Informant (that show I am working on/for) meeting at 5:30 and the trip there is going to be around 45 minutes plus the time it takes to get to the station, so…. I am going to have to leave at 4:30, and before that, I need to shower and get into clean clothes, and… oy.

Where’s a pocket dimension out of time when you need one? Someplace I could go and take a nice long nap and then return the exact moment I left?

Well, okay, a little latter. Otherwise I would run into myself.

I will have to make do with a nap of about an hour and a half and hope that said nap will be enough to get me boosted up long enough to get through the meeting.

Andy says he has some very good news for us. I hope it’s funding and/or support. It would be nice to get paid, or if not that, at least to be able to afford some professionals so that we have some people around who know what they are doing.

I can write, produce, direct, create, advise, and inspire, but execution is best left to others. People with generalized competence instead of my concentrated genius.

And what do you know, I have those people  now.

It’s a dream come true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out LBJ was a total cunt too, at least in terms of foreign policy.

This comes, of course, from that series, The Untold History Of The United States, that I have been watching. It’s been rough going but I persist.

After all, they will eventually get to things which happened in my lifetime.

What I have learned today that I did not know (or at least, understand) is that the whole deal with the escalating war in Vietnam was that the USA thought that, as long as they kept escalating in force of arms and sheer inhumane brutality, the Vietnamese had to eventually reach a “breaking point” where they would lose the will to fight and surrender.

A clearer example of reptile-brain bullshit is hard to imagine. The idea that if you hit the other guy hard enough, he HAS to submit and be your bitch is a pure product of the most primitive brain of our brains polluting our rationality, subverting our sense of self-interest, and suppressing both our compassion and our common sense.

And of course, the very idea that if you brutalize people, they give up is absolutely ludicrous. All brutality does is inspire the enemy to greater resistance. Brutality has never, ever, ever stopped a resistance movement (or “insurgency” as we call them when it’s brown people). Every act of brutality inspires hundreds of civilians to join the resistance and justifies further brutality by those opposing the occupying government.

And what really gets me is that this fact should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a shred of self-awareness. I would love to go back in time to when these testosterone junkies were making these decisions and ask them a simple question :

“What would be America’s breaking point? How much brutal aggression would it take to make America capitulate? ”

They would, of course, huffily reply that there is nothing that can dominate the America spirit and that if the Russians invaded. they would fight to the last man, no matter what the odds, for the old Red White and Blue.

“And why do you think the Vietnamese are any different? What would you do if the Russians invaded and slaughtered a thousand women and children as a show of force? Give in , or fight even harder?”.

And yet, this androgenic folly is repeated over and over and over again, whether it’s the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the USA fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the Nazis punishing whole villages for harboring the Resistance.

It doesn’t work. It never works. And it never will. The only real way to counteract a resistance movement is to treat the occupied people extremely well.

Then you get this :

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At the same time, the occupying force should do its best to disappear from public view. Leave as few reminders that the nation is not determining its own fate around as possible. Pull strings from the shadows. Do nothing to challenge their sense of national identity.

Leave them, essentially, with nothing to resist. Most people will be perfectly happy to go about their lives because most people have only a shadowy concept of what happens at the highest levels of power anyhow, so whether or not that is “their” government or another means very little to them, as long as their daily lives are unaffected.

This approach goes against everything our stupid reptile brains tell us – what, be nice to people we have conquered? That won’t make my dick hard! – but it would work.

And of course, the third part of the strategy is to get the hell out of there as soon as you can. Long term occupation is never a good idea. To me, the best idea is to tell the people exactly when you will withdraw and leave them to determine their own fate. Make it very clear that past this point, you will accept no responsibility for what happens afterwards. On that date, responsibility will officially be transferred to the occupied nation, and it will be up to them to make it work.

That doesn’t mean you don’t help them build a democratic government. It just means that you are being extremely clear about the fact that you will not be there forever and that the people will be on their own when you go.

By being so clear from the outset, you take the wind out of the sails of any sort of resistance movement and you force the people to realize that they will not be able to blame all their problems on you forever.

This will not be an easy transition for people who previously lived under the patriarchal tyranny of an authoritarian government. These people are not accustomed to self-determination. They are used to doing what they are told.

The same thing happens on a much smaller scale with authoritarian families. The autocratic parents deny their children any chance to learn to think and grow and learn on their own, and then act surprised when their kids can’t handle a world where they are expected to do all three.

So while the date of withdrawal is fixed, the time between invasion and that date should include the time it will take to teach the population about what it means to be free.

It might even take an entire generation. At least until we perfect the art of it.

But in order to get the result we all want, at least on paper – a happy democratic country free to choose its own fate – we will have to recognize that there is a demon in the minds of men (and women too, presumably) and that this demon lies to people in the language of power, domination, submission, victory, and “glory”.

And it is this exact demon of the mind which has lead to all the brutality and inhumanity in the world, whether it’s the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Rwandan massacre, or Abu Graib. The idea that if we are brutal and horrible enough, the enemy will HAVE to submit (even though we wouldn;t submit if we were them) and the accompanying pursuit of the cock-hardening feeling of dominance is the number one factor in all examples of man’s inhumanity to man.

To me, that is the clear face of evil.

And it is that demon we are to vanquish if we are evolve as a species.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.