Everything I own is irreplaceable
That, or simple repairs to the quality-of-life shed aren't worth the trouble
2022 passed with lightning speed. I did nothing worth remembering at all, other than taking a midwinter solo-with-dog road trip that barely dented the ennui.
Whatever minimal hope I had for the future of collective society thirteen months ago evaporated throughout the year, with any palatable distillate unlikely to condense from the global cloud of Wokish stank and censorship funk. The public conversation is created by despotic billionaires, controlled by lying millionaires, and channeled through masked-up, multiply injected suburbanite drones whose brains have been liquefied by privilege and continual submersion in corporate “news.”
Sadly, my resistance to living for another year and my attendant resolve to participate in nothing whatsoever did not dispel my need for metabolic energy or keep me from wearing things out. Much of my passive, self-imposed 2022 struggle involved simply not getting things I either needed or was used to having as a convenience or a comfort, even though I had the resources to obtain such items.
I’ve already posted my inverse bucket list.
A corollary to this fuck-existing, fun-is-gone mindset with real-world effects is an arguably boneheaded level of asceticism. For someone with ample demonstrated energy and far too much time, I never seem to leave the house to actually get things other than chewable and swallowable material that fends off an unwanted and recurrent drive. I have an array of credit cards with zero balances (all of which I could carelessly spend to the limit because this will ultimately become the financial system’s problem, not mine) but can’t even be bothered to order things online, even running shoes.
The only thing I care to do with any reliability and consistency is run, and the only thing I truly need to do to support that is regularly eat. So, I cannot be entirely negligent in either of these areas. But I cut it as close as I can.
I do not have an eating disorder, but I have a pronounced meals disorder. Possibly a dining disorder too, since I use a lot of battered Tupperware and forks with bent tines, with all cutleries held in randomly chosen hands and most nourishment consumed in a recumbent position, and grudgingly, like a spindly ogre. The idea is not to ingest as many confirmed nitrates, sulfites, preservatives, disguised forms of sugar, and unidentified oncogenic chemicals as possible, but rather to acknowledge that this is a strong possibility and root for it absolutely.
Before inflation doubled the mostly stable prices I was used to through early 2020, I was already spending as little as possible on food. I always have. As a consequence, I was never a person with a negotiable food budget—someone who could respond to rising prices by switching from Whole Foods to King Soopers and then to Dollar Tree, because I was already wandering the same aisles as the hunched-over poors, looking just as hopeful. So, because I have resided at the basement food-budget level all along, that portion of my expenses has risen as the bottom of the citizen-commercial building gets hauled upward and refurbished, with those too tired to hang on for the climb quietly left in the sub-basement rubble.
Despite eating out of bags and cans, if a professional licensed nourisher-feeder looked only at my macronutrient intake and was ignorant of the source of the components, she would conclude it was fine. It must be, because I maintain my weight and can move around. Although sometimes I wonder how, other than lots of milk and partially cooked chicken basted in unlabeled fart-sauce from a dusty bottle in the back of the cupboard.
I recently discovered that Tootsie Rolls come in a vanilla flavor, and I have taken to dunking these in peanut butter and eating them that way, each end of each white Tootsie getting a dip into the brownguck. If I were serious about competitive running, I would have to stop at least this much because it has contributed to sparse but non-negligible “love handles,” back-fat, what have you. This would not be a major sacrifice, as the habit feels dirtier than porn; I’ve watched porn with others in the room but would never go that far with the candy perversities even with am AI-driven sex doll in the room (something else I’m too lazy to order in, along with live prostitutes).
I will probably have a new pair of running shoes within a week. I have a pair of Asics with thousands of miles on them and a rapidly dissolving upper. These “shoes” are basically midsoles held to my feet with brightly colored shoelaces, stolen from a pair of ugly old racing flats that did in fact become too comprehensively beat up to wear even to the bathroom.
Speaking of the bathroom, that’s another thing I’m tired of. I have a ten-second walk to the nearest bathroom most of the time, and yet I treat the need to urinate as a fascist overture by militant innards, something that should have stopped by this point in life after thousands of repetitions. Not eating would solve some of this, but I like water, too, and I like coffee even more. There is no way around any of this, even though enough of these pointless interruptions are enough.
I interpret my taking offense at minor affronts like these as another symptom of the supply of life in my case having simply outlasted my intrinsic demand for it. I know how shitty that must sound to people who actually want to live, especially sick people or those with sick relatives. But I hear similar laments all the time, especially from other single, child-free, and technically pointless middle-aged individuals. (I don’t mind showering, and I do it every day for at least ten minutes because I’m unlikely to look at any screens during these desultory crevice-scraping rituals.)
My shoes are not the only items of clothing I wear out. I started 2022 with two pairs of non-running shorts, both khaki-colored, one cargo-style, the other downright dressy when produced in 1972. These wore out in the same place late last summer no more than two weeks apart. Not the same spot in Boulder, but in the same region of each garment—the left ass. My theory about why I would wear out any side of the back of any pants before anything else is because nothing is there to fill the ass out; this results in wind- and motion-induced flapping and fraying of the fabric a more robust ass would prevent. There is also the frequent stress of active sitting to consider.
The same thing happened a couple of weeks ago with my favorite pair of jeans. While I threw both pairs of shorts out, I am not ready to part with these jeans yet. I haven’t patched them, but I carry a couple of losable cards in the left rear pocket of these jeans when wearing them in public in case I forget or decline to wear underwear, another thing I could use more of. I think a few people, mostly at the Dollar Tree, may have been treated to small patches of bare ass before I discovered the most recent pants-wound. That’s what people get for staring.
I own no dress shoes. I thought I had an old pair that hurt my feet, but Rosie may have buried them somewhere. The last thing I need is anything that makes me look either suitable for a workplace, a date, or a restaurant with seats, tables, or smiling patrons.
I have a shaky relationship with electronics, including my brain. I buy very cheap because I’m easily able to convince myself nothing I have has to last especially long, but then phones and computers prove prematurely unreliable, and I resent having survived to experience more modern-ass need and another shame-based trip to Best Buy.
My phone took this photo today. It shows the road covering the 40th latitude line north of the equator, meaning that Boulder is forty times sixty nautical miles from the equator. (In Earth geometry, a minute, or a sixtieth of a degree, represents one nautical mile. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. I have never been on a sizable seafaring vessel.)
I’ve decided that, although tempted, I won’t blame Wokism or any other cultural factors anymore for my own irrelevance and non-productivity, because anything I can do after bumbling around in the adult sector for a few decades can easily be duplicated or done better by relatively inelegant learning software. Anything I’ve written, no matter my attempts to personalize it, could be replicated and improved by a bozo-level robot. Ditto any editing or tutoring I’ve ever done.
Whatever skills I have are no longer skills, and while I can take solace in knowing I can keep myself and my dog housed by working at 7-11 if I have to—a pretty big deal, really—there’s always the option of just not buying myself additional, arguably unearned time in the world. Most of my automatic everyday neglect is pointing in that direction anyway. Waking up daily to free-for-all shit-scrum of lies and galactic stupidity just doesn’t resonate with the kind of long-term appeal a clever marketing team could attach to the prospect.
But this is about you, not me. And the future of the nation is balkanization, fear, intellectual flaccidity, people not letting their kids play with the children of queers or MAGAts or covidiots, character subjugation, and an inexorable too-comfortable slide into “choices” that are not choices at all but the outcomes of classic authoritarian impositions on free expression given increasingly less of an “open debate” veneer.
Perhaps these are poor reasons to shelve all personal ambition, but I have. I hope that despite my apparent efforts, you’re still enjoying whatever you still have—especially if it includes any sanity—with a small number of friends and family members, because the idea of even a sham American democracy is dissolving in chunks in the bluish reservoir of a Washington-wide chemical toilet. Which isn’t really an excuse to treat my body and wardrobe like one, until one day it is and has been for an entire year.