First off, of course, the vid.
No big surprises for anyone who knows me in this one.
These facts are obvious to non-idiots, so you can why I figured Dumb Donnie and his coterie of fucktards needed an update.
Next time, I will only use short words and say his name a lot.
Oh, and I thought this was quite clever.
Got that off BlueSky, naturally. It feels very good on my jaded Gen X sense of humour.
Yes, we still find self-referential stuff funny. Deal with it.
Oh, and then there’s this gem. Originally from Instagram, I think?
Thinks like that should be labeled “Mormon family sized”.
Bet they’d go through one of those a week.
Anyhow, what I’m actually going to talk about today is that awful beast that just gets stronger as you get older : the feeling that time is passing faster and faster every day.
Wow, when you’re over the hill, you DO pick up speed!
I have to keep reminded myself that this effect is an illusion. I am still getting the same amount of life per minute (so to speak) and there’s still the same number of minutes in a day, and it’s only a trick of how we measure time in our minds that makes it seem like the days are just flashing past like telephone poles do when you’re at highway speeds.
Still, it’s an unnerving sensation, to say the least. And it really gives you insight into why people become more conservative as they get older.
It seems cruel how things start feeling like they are coming at me way too fast just as my reflexes are getting way too slow.
And the urge to shout, “Stop making new things until I catch up, dammit!” is strong.
But I know better. I have since I was a kid. I have always known that what happened to others as they aged was going to happen to me so I knew I, too, would want the world to “stop spinning so I could get off one” day.
So I am somewhat ready for it. It still has the capacity to rattle me if I think about it too much, but I think I am learning to cope with that too.
I just imagine myself as some member of the Royal Family in a touring car waving to the people as we drive by and smiling.
It’s all passing around me like I’m on a dark ride at an amusement park and so what if it feels like the ride is moving faster all the time?
I know it isn’t, and so I can relax, enjoy the scenery, and try to have fun for as long as this silly old thing is going to last.
And at the end, there’s death. And there’s a comfort to that.
Not that I am eager to die. Not at all. It’s just nice to know that there is, in fact, a silence at the end of the symphony, and if we’re lucky, a little polite applause.
I’d be lying if I said that suicide was entirely gone from my mind. It’s still in there, though its cage get smaller as the mental anguish that powers it lessens over time.
On my better days I can even sort of look forward to the future, or at least look forward to the next day or so.
That’s still an improvement over viewing the future as a dark grey nothingness that stretches off into the distance.
A filthy nullity that feels like death at its most pointless and pathetic.
Not so much shuffling off this mortal coil as throwing out some particularly odious garbage long past its due.
By then I will be truly sick of hauling this defective dirigible of a body around anyhow.
Until then, I will try my best to learn to enjoy myself.
Why is it so hard?
More after the break.
How to have fun
And I mean, real fun, not just the forced fun of compulsively playing video games as a way of hiding from the world by running on a hamster wheel with pretty pictures.
That’s still mostly what I do. When I am done typing to you lovely people, I will lay down for a bit, then whatever time I have left before watching Colbert off the PVR with Julian at midnight I will fill with the universal spackle known as burning my brain with gaming.
I dunno what else to do with myself.
And when I say I dunno, what I really mean is that I can think of millions of things I could be doing and even some I should be doing but that deep freeze inside my head makes it too hard for me to decide on one and just do it.
Oilcan, said the Tin Man. Oilcan.
I’m afraid of my own impulses. Doing something just because I feel like doing it is foreign to me. What if something unexpected happens? Something I can’t predict, control, or prevent? What then?
Wouldn’t that be, like, the worst thing ever?
That’s how it seems to the scared little animal inside me, anyhow. It’s that whole control/trust thing again. On a subconscious level, like I’ve said before, I feel like only the predictable and controllable can be trusted and leaving anything to chance virtually guarantees it will be an unimaginable but horrifying disaster.
And that is, of course, bat poop crazy.
Well it’s not like I ever consciously chose this level of bugfuckery. It’s not like this is a conclusion I came to as a result of rational analysis.
It’s more like important parts of me just sort of decayed into that shape. Presumably from being frozen in place with option paralysis for so long.
So much of me just… did not happen. From never having an imaginary friend or playing with toys to never getting a job or getting into a relationship, it’s like I have been in semi-suspended animation all this time and so much of that stunted growth is trying to come out at the same time that it leaves me paralyzed.
And I still don’t have the strength to figure out what I really want.
All I can do is keep on struggling to be alive.
And kill my fears.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.