That’s where I feel like I am right now due to bad sleep. On Venus, with all its pressure and acid and heat.
I’d prefer Bradbury’s genius, which was an Earth type planet covered in dense rain forest where it rained all the time.
Sure, all that raining would get depressing. I should know, I survived El Nino, when it rained hard for almost a whole month without pause and with cloud cover so thick and low that it felt like being trapped under a low black roof. It was so dark under the roof that it was hard to tell day from night.
But at least I could frigging breathe.
Bitching about it does make me feel somewhat better. So thanks for indulging me in this, folks. Reading about this over and over can’t be fun but it’s something I need to do in order to deal with my precarious health position.
The words are not coming easy right now. Hell, it’s hard enough to just stay focused on what I am doing. I feel like I swimming as hard as I can just to keep from being swept away by the waves.
It kinda sucks.
Have played more Final Fantasy XIV Online. Finished the first segment of the main plot. Things got sort of interesting in the process. Now I have been packed off to a new country on a diplomatic mission. Got there by airship, of course.
Final Fantasy always has airships. Often, you get one of your own. Not true for me yet, but I have hope.
I love, love, love having my own ship in video games. The ability to roam the world (or galaxy, or whatever) really appeals to me.
Kind of like having a car in the real world, I suppose. Suddenly you have the ability to go wherever you want. It’s very empowering.
Bought Joe’s birthday gift off of Amazon late last night. It will be here tomorrow. Not bad. Makes paying for Amazon Prime vaguely worth it.
I don’t do anywhere near enough shopping on Amazon to justify paying for Prime, but I just can’t seem to make myself get rid of it.
It’s just so nice to have.
Took another crack at my tough old liberal character in part 2 of yesterday’s blog entry. Turned out way better than the first time. I attribute that to the fact that I have a lot more to say about taxes.
Got to stick to topics I have enough material on, I suppose.
I miss doing standup. It was going pretty good there at the end. But I will find some other way to use my talents to make people happy again.
Then again, my political side might take over and instead of making people laugh, I willl be trying to wake them up to the truth.
Kind of hard to reconcile those two. I mean, the obvious solution is to do political satire, and that might be where I end up.
But my political thoughts are so angry and strident that it’s hard to imagine how I would make them funny.
Oh well. Time to go back to the surface of Venus.
More after the break.
There’s Got To Be A Morning After
They were talking about music for our times and this popped into my head :
It’s one of my favorite inspiration songs of all time, and I think I have figured out why.
Unlike some other inspirational type songs, it acknowledges that things have been very bad for a long time. And not in some abstract and offhand way, like talking about “troubles” or “sorrows” or the like.
Every word of the song resonates with the message that “things are bad now but we will get through this together and finally find our long lost dawn”.
I’ve been looking around for a place that’s safe and warm for a long long time. Since the time when that song was on the air, more or less.
And it gets me thinking about optimism and hope in darker times. It’s no coincidence that so many songs of hope and happiness came out of the Great Depression. That was an era when only great hope could defeat the great sorrows of the era, and optimism was not optional.
It was a survival skill. You found hope or you lay down and died.
It also gets me thinking about something the fantabulous Felicity said to me last night. A lesson I feel like she’s been trying to teach me for years but I was not yet wise enough to learn it until now.
She described something I said as being “logically true but not in a helpful way” and my instinctive response was to wholesale reject this clearly illogical sentiment and insist that something is either true or it isn’t, whether it helps or not.
But, to my credit, I stopped myself from going down that road and thus both avoided a no doubt worse than useless argument and gave myself the space I needed in order to truly try to get what she was telling me.
And that, in turn, gave me a glimpse at the profound and soul-destroying errors to which my Brutal Truth Machine of a mind is prone. How the drive to arrive at the “truth” can eliminate a lot of valuable information and perspective in its drive to solve everything.
No…. that’s still too cold. What I am trying to say is that this merciless engine of a mind of mine kills and freezes what it studies and that if I am to have any hope of growing as a person and becoming a real live actual grownup at long last, I am going to have to learn to see, understand, and integrate into myself far more than such computronic thought processes can ever encompass.
That means I have to learn to slow down that machine gun mind of mine long enough for me to look around, smell the roses, see the sights, and take a long walk in the warm sunshine, and try to remember what it means to be alive.
It doesn’t matter what is “true”. Truth cannot sustain me.
What I need is happiness.
And that’s way more important than having the right answer all the time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.