I was gonna, but this instead

More and more things seem irrelevant even when held up to the light, including this shit

If viewed closely in chronological order, the titles of this blog would resemble an agonizingly incomplete blotch of programming code. Those have unpaired symbols like [. (. and { begging for closure, whereas this place holds a smattering of “Part 1” posts that I haven’t bothered to follow up on. While this kind of asymmetry won’t automatically truncate a blog the way it does the execution of shitty code, it signals some kind of problem with the programmer and not the language, either motivational or just skill-related.

I also have a lot of drafts, many wordy and most quite recent, that feel about two-thirds done. For various reasons, I feel reluctant to complete them, although “reluctance” was never meant to be used interchangeably with “apathy.”

Despite often being florid with my delivery, I’ve managed, I think, to conceal how much of the value the world offers to me is lost if I can no longer count on the people in charge of information dissemination to even feign integrity, impartiality, and so on. Forget politics; I can no longer count on a mainstream-media take about a basic science or sports topic to be remotely accurate or free of often-ludicrous bias.

Biased or plain bad takes by general publications on specialized topics are nothing new, but the phenomenon’s sheer penetration certainly is. Just a brief example you may have heard about: Simone Biles choked in the Olympics and admitted as much, albeit with far more eloquence than your typical center fielder or outside linebacker. But because the Wokish media had built this phenomenal athlete in a holy shit, no one can really do that! sport into a superheroine, when she proved human, they couldn’t even stop thinking about their own sad selves; they had to portray her withdrawal after choking as further evidence of her mental infallibility—not because Biles had laid claim to such a thing, but because they as journalists had. And these fucking monsters are actually enjoying Biles’ unanticipated swerve into the ditch, because it gives them, the real centers of all of their stories, even more garbage-columns to generate and Twitter exposure to feed from.

I may have also not stressed how fucked up it is that even something with the natural guardrails running includes has fallen prey to this phenomenon, with flat-out lying by figures ranging from New York Times columnists to obese, race-card-playing poser-profiteers going utterly unchallenged other than by a handful of dissidents like me. I don’t think I can stress how quickly these bullshitters would have been drummed out of the whole scene without controversy—just laughed at to the point of tears, like the capering clowns they are—only fifteen years ago. A lot of people who would have publicly and wholeheartedly agreed with me at that point are now either actively participating in the destruction, uncomfortably straddling the playing field and a sideline with a soft dick in their hands, or removed from the scene altogether.

It’s not fun to live in a world like this. As someone who has always sought a dogged kind of joy in trying to communicate ideas in a way that both sticks the landing stylistically and gets the right information across, I don’t really see much point in doing this, or anything, anymore. I can try to convince myself that there is an Internet World and a Real World, but that’s horseshit too, with the overlap between my real-world and online experiences becoming depressingly convergent, and larger numbers of other ordinary-looking citizens appearing frankly delusional.

I don’t really feel like producing anything. It’s been 25 years now since the idea of “a career” has really been a concept in my mind, but all throughout that time, I have at least had concrete goals. None of these were especially grandiose; the important thing is that they meant something. But all of these aims and reveries were contingent around me and at least a certain portion of the world being in agreement about what daily life should resemble, and I have given up on the notion that whatever creativity I possess can be shoehorned into any of the circus sideshows that ambient society has become. Some cool, even vital things have happened for me this year on the family front, and I’m mostly quiet about those.

But as far as what happens inside my mind when I first open my eyes in the morning, I’m basically just awakening to waiting patiently—sort of—to die and taking good care of a dog. Among my first thoughts are “Now I have to find shit to do just to get to this point tomorrow.” I feel like there is no point in eating, as this just promotes shitting and an incremental barrier against my entire metabolism just shutting down when I’m not looking.

Yeah, I know that’s not how it plays out. But with everything, it’s just “Why bother?” I can justify any number of my attitudes, but I’m too mean to be of use, even as a failed novelist-in-the-making.

You can scream that this has every hallmark of garden-variety depression. Well, to the extent splitting hairs even matters, I’ve been through the kind of depression that’s mostly rooted in feeling like a failure for being able to fulfill the basic duties of behaving like a normal-enough person. Many times. That kind of depression sucks, and tends to carry emotional and personality add-ons that men in particular find especially banal, like self-pity.

This, now, feels more like just not having any kind of reason to even favorably impress anyone anymore, including myself.

It doesn’t help that I have actively written off a lot of things healthy people my age like to do. I refuse to do much of anything that carries the risk of personal failure or emotional discomfort for not just me but anyone I like, like returning to racing or dating. But both of those, for distinct but related reasons, present as grotesque dead ends. There isn’t much tying me to the whole human circus except some level of savings, an interspecies commitment (which remains a joy) and not enough outright misery at any one time for me to consider driving my car as fast as it will go into a bridge support.

The scariest thing is that I could rattle off a dozen people who are genuine confidants in every way; who between them offer a totality of perspectives that help keep me from thinking this burgeoning cultural insanity, combined with my own lack of direction, is an excuse for me to go insane and give up along with it. I have problems, but no Problems. What would someone with my assortment of ugly feelings who was, say, about to be released from jail with no firm destination be thinking as he prepares to wander back among the people?

Right now, I go through all the right motions, but it’s hard to look ahead two weeks or a month or a year and imagine having a different sense about myself or the shit unfolding around me.

In any case, I dropped all of my social accounts again. Whatever I write about next may have nothing to do with anything presently going on anywhere. And whenever I post it, I probably won’t be working the controls from Boulder, a place I either need to leave for a while or permanently. I can’t be around 100,000 human faces in 25 square miles no matter what’s in their heads or toppling out of their faces.