Hey my wife does read my blog!

Or at least she occasionally does a control f search for 'wife'.

This line here:

I'm sorry I've already been married for a decade and unfortunately my wife would not like the thoughts in my head so much at the moment.

Would have been better phrased:

"I've already been married for a decade and I'm sorry to say my wife would unfortunately not like the thoughts in my head so much at the moment."

BTW, I've reflected on why I almost never mention my wife in this blog. And it's not because she means so little to me. It's because:
1. This is a blog about negative things and for the most part there's just nothing negative there... not much anyway.
2. To what little extent there is, bitchin about her in a blog would be ridiculous in that it would just be griping about relatively insignificant things.
3. I don't go on about the positives because that would seem like flaunting.
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Just bought 5 decadent books. Robin Hobb. I loved her Liveship Trader Trilogy. I think maybe I would be happy to write like her. Maybe that is someone I could write like and feel it worth the bother.

Robin Hobb: Comforting. Hm. Nothing. Exhilarating to be exploring new territory and setting up a fresh stage and getting to know new characters. 'Daunting' is always there in any book with any setting, old or new. I look at how far there is to go, how many pages, how many words, how many keystrokes, and the whole project seems insane. And sometimes I cross the safety line and say, "Wait a minute. Isn't this an inherently silly thing for me to be spending my life doing? Saying, 'hey, let me tell you a story about people who don't exist in a world that never was, and I'll try to make it so important that you'll spend hours of your life with me over the next three years?' I mean, if you really look at what writers do, it does seem a bit odd, doesn't it? So that can be the daunting part. If you let it. But I'm really good at denial.

Over all, I love to write, and read, and tell stories. Really daunting would be if someone said, "Nobody's interested any more. Go out and work for a living!"

Got another trilogy by her.

Then Gene Wolfe. A beautiful sounding book set in ancient times (Rome) about a guy who has no short term memory but can talk to gods, etc. So everyday he writes what happened to him then to read the next morning. Read a book about an executioner long ago by him. It seemed almost as if it were advertised as cheesy pulp fantasy, but I recall thinking... 'Geez this is really good.' Just found out recently he's actually very highly respected and not some Kilgore Trout.

I do seem to be slipping into a previous frame of mind. For the longest time I couldn't enjoy reading like I once did. But then immediately after getting the RN exam out of the way, I read some of Vellum while walking to my car. I had forgotten how strangely enjoyable that can be; walking while reading. (Dangerously unassimilated though it is.) Really being immersed. It was once such a nice escape. One that I effectively lost for quite a while... I was still reading here and there but not truly falling in...

I couldn't fall in while in nursing school. Previously I could while getting my BS and MS in engineering but for me at least those were easier degrees. Nursing was so much more subjective and had this annoying quality where studying didn't actually accomplish anything but one didn't feel like they could ever relax. So then, little time was spent studying, but I didn't feel comfortable instead falling into escapist type fantasy fiction. Could only turn to less satisfying diversions that were less likely to really pull me in so very much. Like surfing the vast internet wasteland. Which is ultimately such a pale world. Not the best use of time unfortunately despite the few interesting and nice people I've "met".

It requires the author to be "dismissed," once and for all, so as finally to come into existence, to be, to "assert itself as thing without author and without reader." What Blanchot dismisses here, with an irrevocable gesture, is not just the author, but the mirage – so stubborn, though – of a “communication” between the writer and the reader. The writer is alone, irremediably alone ("Khalvat dar anjoman, solitude in the crowd," posits one of the eleven rules of the Naqshbandi Sufis: that is the solitude of Kafka, again, never alone enough and yet always infinitely alone). Vain hope of writing with a wish to be understood, or of establishing any kind of human fraternity with the other; cruel disillusion of anyone who writes with the expectation of a response, an echo. The writer writes as Giacometti wanted to sculpt: so as to bury the sculpture (as Genet tells us), and "not so that it could be discovered, or else much later, when he himself and the memory of his name have disappeared. Would burying it be to offer it to the dead?" wonders Genet, thus putting his finger on this obvious fact: the writer, the artist does not communicate with the reader or the spectator, he communicates with death; the death of others (Foucault) or else his own death, always yet to come but beyond which he necessarily situates himself in order to write. The writer: the one who is always already dead. The reader, on the contrary, lives, and thanks to him the book, "unburdened of its author," lives too: the book, the text leaves the world of the dead, whence it comes (or comes forth rather?) to participate in the things of life. And that is how the noli me legere of the book gives way to the Lazare, veni foras of the reader, the reader who nonetheless, unlike Christ, accomplishes no miracle, but simply, by his free and innocent reading, his "light yes" offered with a smile, shows (and sees) that language too lives, with its own life.

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2009/02/reading-by-jonathan-littell.html

Hmmm, what was it I was thinking? Oh, no. I was thinking of personally thinking of every story told from the point of view of it being a hell. Secretively or openly. This doesn't necessarily mean pitchforks and lots of screaming. More like how Sartre's Hell is Other People play wasn't really any more or less a hell than the average story really. And was better than lots of people's actual lives.

Was a way to get beyond my issues with not liking pitting people against one another. Writing as if already dead is something else entirely. But perhaps useful.

Right this moment is an actual moment to spend writing. I've had a back issue where sleeping is causing my back to hurt. I went to bed early tonight (9pm), by morning I've no choice but to get up because my back is hurting and getting up (so far) has made the pain stop. Today though it started hurting too bad at 3AM.

But I don't feel quite sufficiently dead enough to really write.

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http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/
I'm a sort of Strindberg. Although nowhere near like I appear here actually. But still...

I'm very lucky in that my wife is a sort of Helium. Very lucky all around in the wife I have.