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Daily writing practice

2021/8/28 How easy it would be to quit. I could just not do it today. Say that I'd felt I'd rather spend the time reading or watching something. I thought I'd trap myself. Make the task so simple that I couldn't make any excuse against it. It's been working but some days there's just a big issue finding anything to complete even that simple task with. The problem isn't that the task is hard. I know when I spent a moment to check in that the resistance is because I'm not interested in spending the time to do the task and not that I would have any trouble with it were I to spend the time, but when I start to work on it I feel as if I'm forcing myself and it seems to be hard because of that.

2021/8/27 #poetry How can sitting in front of a computer screen all day make you feel like you've run a marathon? I'm sure I didn't run at all, pretty much just sitting mostly. I don't have the first clue as to what could be so exhausting about that. I haven't heard anyone talking about how concentrating too much can kill you. Perhaps I just wasn't listening though. There's hope, I can nap, sleep, rest, rejuvenate and get back to what I was so busy with. Live to run another day. Sit-run. Just sit. Sit and look at a screen. Pretty screen. Lots and lots of colored lights. Millions actually. And each one tells a story. Well, together they tell a story. Story after story after story. After story. More stories to come too. Millions of them actually. It's not hard to see why so many people stare at these screens for so much of their short uncomfortable lives. There are better things for me to do, I know. I do them sometimes too. I do. I do I do. But, you see, the screen is easier to get to. Easier to focus on for long enough that my day goes by and I can enjoy the satisfaction of having it over and done with. Most days are wonderful, full of interesting and enticing things to learn and see. That could be part of the problem, if I'm not presented with something interesting then I'm apt to go looking for one and the fastest way to find one is to turn on a screen. Bam, instant distraction from any manner of life problem. Vision problems excepted. Also headaches. I've heard those can be aggravated by light and noise. But for everything else there's a specific pattern of blinking pixels that can be guaranteed to distract from that specific problem. Even the problem of feeling like you've been staring at a screen for too long.

2021/8/26 Other people think so many wild, imaginative, & interesting things. They fill books with them, heh, fortunately there's something somewhere that anyone will enjoy reading, or hearing if they can't read. I've enjoyed things for a variety of reasons. I'd like to find more.

2021/8/25 I look around these days and see addicts. Not just coca-cola, which fairly screams it, and other caffeinated things. Not anymore. The last few years any eating of sugar has triggered this. Sugar is everywhere and brightly colored packages declare it so. Now though, with my new understanding of dopamine seeking behaviors, it's almost everyone that I label. Users of phones, music listeners, dogs. Not that any body can escape the seek pleasure avoid pain paradigm, but so much of the fun that modern capitalism encourages us to partake in is demonstrably bad for us, hurts us later. Once an addiction sets in that's not obvious though. The immediate negative effects are normalized and become hardly noticeable or a positive trigger as the hallmark of impending hit.

2021/8/24 #poetry A quiet flutter of leaves as the breeze rolled through. The sound would start gently and fade out again slowly after a half a minute or so. There would be lots of silence in between. Perhaps you've heard about the landscape shimmering as the heat rises off on a still day? Well that's because it does. It adds a sense of unreality to everything. Makes it hard to think about doing anything other than just staring out over it. You'd break the stillness, it would be out of place.

2021/8/23 #poetry This time I'll do it. Really, no false starts, no backpedaling, and no rationalizing about why I didn't act after the fact. I'll just do it. Ok, I'm going to digress here and go off on a tangent. There is a brand that I'm sure your familiar with that has capitalized that last phrase that I used. They use it as both as an advertising slogan and in their logos and have even made it a product all on its own. It is a very powerful mantra and really gets to the heart of a big part of the human experience so I see why they would run with it after discovering it but I resent that they are squatting on it and holding this mental real estate with so many people and deeply linking this amazing mantra with capitalism. It's a darn shame it is. Idioms shouldn't get to have trademarks. But despite all that, just do it I will. I may have fear, I may feel unsure, but I will proceed regardless. The only thing that has stopped me before was uncertainty but I will begin this time knowing that completing my part will be a foregone conclusion, irrespective of the final outcome. I will reach with my mind into the future and see quite clearly that if I don't act this time, I will have to confront the same situation again and again until I do. That therefore if I do delay the inevitable it is only to my detriment because I can not avoid it entirely. Eventually I must and that kairos is today.

2021/8/22 What exactly went wrong? I thought things were going so smoothly. Perhaps the fact that I'd not slept for 40 hours. Or perhaps the fact that I'd not brought the required tools. Or perhaps the fact that I'd shown up at the wrong address, early, and waited for a full two hours for the site manager to find me before getting started on my own was the main contributing factor. Whatever it was, things were not going smoothly now. I really had been doing alright for a while and you're probably wondering how that could possibly be, considering... Well, I like to pride myself on how well I can improvise when things aren't exactly perfect to start with. So, when I found out that I didn't have my power-driver I simply used the head of a nail I found in the corner to unscrew the panel, and when I noticed that I also didn't have any pliers I just wrapped a couple metal pens with some rubber bands, both from a nearby desk, and was able to manipulate the assembly that way. Of course, this caused all the fire doors in the building to close, which I thought was odd, but I let it pass because it couldn't have anything to do with what I was working on and there was no fire or alarm so I didn't see how it would be a problem. When the lights switched to emergency only it started to dawn on me that the panel I had open was an electrical control, which was odd since it looked like the automated surveillance control switchboard sub-panel that I'd been looking for and not like an electrical panel at all. This oddity of design might have had to do with it being an alarms and fire suppression system electrical panel and not just any old electrical panel. Well, I realized I'd been messing with the wrong thing but perhaps not too much damage had been done and I shut it and looked around for the surveillance control again only to realize this building didn't have any surveillance, automated or otherwise. That's when I got stumped. I just stood there, feeling tired from lack of sleep and not being able to process why I was there if not for fixing the surveillance system. I was interrupted from my stupor when a large black jungle cat came into the room. I started to chuckle quietly as things started to click, I was dreaming! But I wasn't, I just felt so tired that my body felt numb. The conclusion that I must be dreaming for there to be a jungle cat was based on the fact that I hadn't known that there was a jungle cat upstairs, or anywhere else in this city. But there it was, I could smell it now and that didn't happen in my dreams so my adrenaline started flowing and I'm sure my eyes grew wide. If I were less tired I might have wondered where it came from, and if I had known it had been in a terrarium like room upstairs filled with authentic plants and carefully placed logs from its native habitat I might have wondered how it got out and down the stairs with all the fire doors closed. But I wasn't less tired, well, perhaps a tiny little bit with all the adrenaline, but that chemical doesn't enhance thinking at all, not by a long shot. The cat was beautiful. It was big, probably the same size as me. It wasn't standing up on its back legs of course but that didn't detract from the impressiveness of it's size. After size the next noticeable attribute was color. It was totally black. Eyes to claws black as a burnt match and when it licked its nose its tongue was black too. I couldn't even tell what it was covered with by sight, perhaps because of the low lighting, I assumed the fur was there but it didn't reflect light like normal fur showing hints of lightness everywhere from glinting gloss. This cat looked like a shape cut from black paper. A solid black form. The eyes and tongue were the only parts that reflected anything at all. It had been looking at me since it entered, as I stared back at it, but now it started to walk along the edge of the room. It's pawfalls made no noise and the motion seemed to happen so fluidly that it almost looked like smoke floating by. What was I doing here? There weren't supposed to be cats, this wasn't part of the job. Well, the cat was moving toward the side of the room with the entry, the way I had come in and I noticed that not only was the cat in the way but the door had closed along with all the other fire doors. The other exit, where the cat had come in, was to the stairs. I took a slow step in that direction, the cat didn't seem to notice as it glided around the room. I took a few more steps and made it to the stairwell. The cat was in front of the entrance now and seemed to be staring at the closed door. I had begun to feel at ease with the cat. It really didn't seem to be a danger to me, but it still had an immense presence and I was giving it respectful deference and wide distance. Glancing through the gap between the staircases they seemed to go up quite a way. I noticed that the door was partly closed but had been blocked by a tipped over potted plant. The plant was dead, only a minuscule amount of dirt having escaped its pot after it fell over. Up the stairs I climbed. I'm always astonished by how difficult stairs are when I'm exhausted. I thought about taking a break but that just didn't seem like the best idea. At the 8th floor there was another door that was jammed open, this time with a file box on the floor. It was slightly compressed between the jamb and the door but held it open wide enough to step past. The doors on the intervening floors had all been closed. I wasn't sure what I was looking for really but I ventured over the box and into the hall. This floor was laid out simply, there was a hall between the bathroom and the stairs with one other door to the big room that took up the rest of the floor. It had windows into it and was filled with plants. The air smelled subtropical. It was warm. The door to the jungle room was open, the panel for the door control had some lights but they were all off. I briefly went into the room but it was plain to see that there was no other exit so I went back out. I plodded back down the stairs musing about how to get past the cat. Perhaps I would just need to open the door for it. When I got to the last flight of stairs I saw that the cat was waiting in the doorway on this side of the room. It saw me see it and wandered off into the room again. I made my way the rest of the way down and followed. It was over near the entry door again when I got in, not quite as close to it this time, waiting, gazing at it. I walked around the cat and over to the closed door. I pulled, and with some effort swung it open. The cat waited, I waited. I walked out and stepped away from the entryway then turned to look at the building. This is when it occurred to me that I'd been at the wrong address. It said that it was a land development agency, Felcar's to be exact. The cat watched me from the entryway. I stepped back farther. I really appreciated the cat and was feeling somewhat regretful that I'd be leaving and not see it again, such an incredible creature.

2021/8/21 #poetry Hopefully, by the time you find this, night will already have fallen. It will be simple, then, for you to go out and look at the Moon. You won't be the only one doing it. That's the thing. The Moon has had more visual attention placed on it than any other person, place, or thing in all of Earth's history. Even before humans existed and long after they've passed, that satellite will continue to attract the eyes of many many trillions of creatures. Some people can't see, it's true, but most can and for them the Moon is the one sight that hardly anyone has missed. We share it like nothing else. Not even the Sun has the draw of the Moon, most won't watch the Sun for very long. It's what the Sun does that's so enthralling, the colors that it casts about the sky as it rises or sets. The warmth it generates and drops upon us. The sights it allows us to see, such as the Moon. The Moon though, with the Moon it is what it is that makes it so interesting. A disk, a dome, or a crescent of light. Softly glowing but still bright enough to let you see. Whatever you see though, under that strange light, always draws your gaze back to the Moon itself, as if you don't really trust it, or feel it's trying to trick you. You have to check. Looking at the Moon with no other thing to do seems to be a perfectly fine occupation. There's no reason to feel a need for anything more. It works, always, no maintenance required. Balancing the active it just reflects, and allows you to too.

2021/8/20 #poetry Awfully fine to spend my time dallying about with books and articles. Anything I'd like to understand, to think about, to muse on. Anything I'd like to give me a laugh or to make me sigh in wonder or beauty. Truths and fictions available both, opinions too, piled to the moon. Why don't I make a plan about what I'll study? It would detract from the freedom. The electronic requests I can make are so easily fulfilled that I can't imagine limiting their scope. I take in anything that could expand my world, anything that could sharpen my discernment. I sometimes loose hope that I'll finish some trail of interest I started previous to the one that I'm on, but that doesn't seem to matter as I've no true goal. With this way of meandering and swooping around the spaces of our collective minds I sometimes find a new way to understand my self or my purpose. A jewel, something I never could have sought. Am I really growing? I don't keep track, per se, so it it hard to tell. I'm always changed but perhaps not much. It's at the very least a welcome distraction and a fine way to spend some time.

2021/8/19 #poetry If you could not operate an internet connected touchscreen mobile computer, how would you feel? Frustrated at times. You'd certainly have a tough time when you tried to use one. Free and unconcerned most of the time. You just wouldn't need to think about it. It wouldn't be inconvenient once you were used to it. You would find that it was actually less of a burden since you never had to worry about upgrade costs, data migration, disposal, software updates, losing it, breaking it, forgetting your passcode, if it's cool or not to use it in the bathroom, all that would go away entirely. You could just live your life, connecting with physical things, people, your own thoughts, and confining digital things to a desktop or make them into someone else's business. It would probably be nice to not have any responsibilities that required you to be beholden to such an object. It would filter away any false friends that wouldn't make the effort to connect with you by more conventional means. It would save energy, and your time. Life could be simpler. Your sense of reality could be more pronounced. If only you could not use an internet connected touchscreen mobile computer.