Bright sunshine in the far past. So awful but why? Because this time was futile. 1910 or 1972 all that they did was futile. They ran and ran but were caught in the end. They tried and tried but it was all for nothing. Nothing but pain and then forgotten.

This is the place that one slips through to within the bright sunshine. A summer morning filled with such hope. Such painful hope.

Been digging my pond. Two feet deep the earth turns into really hard clay and gravel. I'm having to use a pickaxe and really take hard swings to get anywhere. The shovel is all but useless. And I really feel physically good as a result. I sort of wish I could have lived in a world where such hard manual labor was a part of most days... I so like how it makes me feel. Occasionally I've tried to find exercise, weight lifting in particular, that successfully mimics it. But I haven't managed to do so. Weight lifting is too intense and too short. And spending hours on end just exercising, in order to achieve a physical effect is not so great. So much better if the exercise has some other purpose, if it's a part of real life, a necessity to survival, and/or something beautiful is getting built.

The video game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has a middle earth setting. In some ways the game is truly a fail. I think they might have literally used 5 people total for all the voices. I think they may have a grand total of 4 tracks of repetitive music. And yet they have endless characters. And endless dungeons (which seem to just be repeated.) And the game can just go on and on and on. With annoying loading bars... And having to stand around and wait for your magic to repower so that you can heal yourself sufficiently.

Anyway, despite all the negatives there is just barely some kind of feeling of escape to this otherworld that is somehow enjoyable. Not sure what about it exactly it is. May just be a grass is always greener thing, that one forgets all the worries that would exist over there. The worries which get in the way of enjoying life, the same as they do over here.

There's something about the middle earth setting though where the worries disappear better. Something about life being more simplistic, thus having hopefully having less worries, while at the same time there still being plenty of mystery and plenty to hope for.

I think that's what it is, less worries and more hope. Somehow we think of middle earth and imagine less worries and more hope. Less worries perhaps because life seems more simplistic. More hope because of this great unknown out there with magic, etc.

In truth a relatively simplistic life doesn't necessarily mean one spends less time worrying. And tied into the hope part is that we imagine ourselves as some kind of special person. A hero. We don't imagine ourselves as Joe Schmoe getting killed by an orc while trying to take a crap in the woods.

Less worries, more hope.

Slow muscle up
one arm chinup
iron cross
break upper door frame
#3 gripper
bend something in half

Once again a bit of not sleeping so good. Here and there have periods where my sleep is too short and too light. Seems definitely related to night shift. When I attempted a one arm chinup everyday I certainly slept like a rock. But trying it everyday was too much. Started feeling like just passing out all the time. Was also starting to get weaker. Wonder if it was hurting my heart also. But, must sleep a bit better than I've been managing recently.

So much goes wrong without proper sleep. So many things. Noticed lose ability to appreciate music. Not that that's maybe so high on list.

So not every day then but shall two or three times a week.

...I think just feeling physically not as well makes me fearful/tense. I can see how people get drug addictions in this way. One constantly doesn't feel well and thus is constantly fearful/tense. This is a constant anxiety that ends up wearing them down mentally off into the direction of 'panic attacks', etc. One increasingly, in desperation, turns to various drugs for even a day of relief, something to let loose the relief valve just to survive another week at work. Depending on the extent to which they don't recognize the danger of the drug, they start taking more and more.

...there is additionally something of the fantastic about attempting extreme feats of strength. It is a sort of fantastic dream which means a sort of hope, the attempt to aspire to something remarkable. Silly though it is and really just to exhaust nervous system enough to overcome insomnia.

Liked my new job so much in part because it seemed to me so much better than my previous jobs. Whether or not this was even actually true doesn't matter. Just the perception matters. Lately haven't been thinking in such terms. The newness has passed. No longer comparing it to whatever rebuilt memories of past jobs I had.

Anyway, to think, it could be worse, can work quite well for standing bad situations.

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hope replaced by fear.

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Bob Dylan is freakishly overrated. I do like his music OK. He used to have a nice voice, which he's since lost. Lyrics and composition are nothing special. Emperor's new clothes effect. Which I think occurs so often. So nice to believe in something. Not just to brown nose to the powerful but even just to agree with a group about something and to build something up.

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Need some fantastic dream. Or just some dream. Something to keep me going forward. I've no children. My dream was to write. Lost that. Think it just doesn't matter. I guess need to find a way to bring that back. Need a dream to give me hope. Without hope negative things fill the void. But I've lost all belief in the fantastic.

I remember being very annoyed with myself in either the first or second grade because I couldn't stop daydreaming. Seemed at times I couldn't concentrate continously in class for a single minute. Instead... I'm suddenly flying off, literally, out the window, etc.

I wrote a story when very young about finding a secret door hidden in the corner of my room that led to a hidden place where I ...what was it that happened? Did I obtain power? Something like that...

And so endless such daydreaming. Daydreaming of being a: professional basketball/baseball/football/tennis player/boxer/composer/musician/writer/scientist/inventor. More fantastic when younger, then I dreamed of really doing amazing things: levitating, magic in general. Such daydreaming.

Of course dreamed of women also, etc, etc.

As I got older these dreams have disappeared. First in that it became clear they weren't actually going to happen. Then in the understanding that even if they did it wouldn't actually mean anything to me anyway. And that most of it was really just the desire for power...

So then hope was gone. All my grandeur dreaming, was it seems, primarily my hope. To sit and have such dreams was a fun way to spend my time. To work towards such dreams was something actually worth doing.

Perhaps it's what I got from my biofather. Going back to Rowling's Slitherings whom desire power.

I've negated most such dreams and where/what is my hope now?

...so much to be said for forgetting. Someone (nobody famous) asked recently, "Does total forgiveness only come with total forgetting?" Such a horrible thing to say as forgiveness should be about understanding. But actually forgetting it seems is so essential to life in general...

Horribly insomnified and facing the prospect of a 15 hour day taking care of critically ill people. I can't fall asleep. I finally get up and turn my music on, as it sits up in the far right corner of this blog like so many trees fallling unheard in the forest. I manage to catch the edge between sleep and waking. And enjoy the collapse of logic as I lay there and try to make nonsense sense of the music. The songs speak. Obviously literally speak at times. For hours I can't actually sleep but I lay there drifting to the edge at least into some other consciousness. Something different at least. Through at least the first 60 songs. A very few times I fall into a 10 minute sleep. Once I wake up to Tschai's Spaceport. I hear it. Not able to place it. I know I wrote it but have no idea what it's name is, or what the construction was... Instead I hear it in it's true beauty for the first time ever.

I'm laying there and praying I'll get the call that they have enough people and I don't have to come in. And I do get that call for the first 4 hours off.

I can't sleep remotely anymore though. I come downstairs. I check out the demo for z3ta+. High CPU but has a nice sound and does indeed do the microtuning. Great!

Alternative consciousness, perhaps symbolism or false symbolism or synthesia or sycretism or just blissful illogic... combined with getting 4 hours off and finding that z3ta+ looks nice... The earlier despair about the end of hope which is slowly dragging me to Nothing is forgotten for the moment.

And I had forgotten: just feeling physically horrible. Insomnia is an awful feeling. Combined with my body feeling like it's on fire. This was caused by overzealous Grease The Groove exercise. So I knew to rest and as I missed the next and next workout my body relatively quickly repairs.

So then, happy for a change. Now 4 days off. Where will I be in four days?

The cycle repeats such that one could perhaps remember better and predict... But what would such remembering do? Would it improve the situation or make it worse? Would the remembering help the predictions such that I could avoid the pitfalls? Or is the forgetting the only respite that there ever really is?