Cutting off all that is pretend. Cutting off all that is meaningless. Left staring at a wall....

Close to deleting my facebook account. Close to destroying email account. Soon I'll not exist at all.

Soon free to be nothing.

And... running 5 days a week. Really trying to get up to a minimum of 6mph. Feels like a return to youth. A pretend youth that never actually was. Now I can go back and remember it all insanely different from the hell it was. Back then my achilles tendon, my grievous injury... I remember imagining the euphoria if this grievous wound ever healed. But of course there was not really much euphoria. Did that which didn't kill me make me stronger? If at all, only for absurdly useless activities. But the euphoria didn't happen in part because I've forgotten. Through (faster) running it's like I'm going back... ?? (This is a paragraph safely misunderstood, for all of time.)

The problem with music is that it's not supposed to be such a spectator sport. The massive concert of people just watching is the height of the sickness. If at least they were watching some freak, some Vladimir Horowitz at least, that, although also wrong, would be a magnitude better than Brittany et al.

Playing a musical instrument well shouldn't take years of practice. Practicing by yourself 8 hours a day is sick. Music should be a participatory endeavor. It should not consist primarily of bystanders.

Musical instruments should exist that the average person can pick up and immediately play a half decent tune on, immediately improv with others. There shouldn't be pain involved. There shouldn't be the need to toughen up the finger tips, etc.

Plucking/strumming strings is no good. Brass instruments no good (hard on the mouth, takes too long to learn to play, too much spit.) Keyboards too unweildly. Plus 12TET set-up too difficult for novice. Reed instruments too difficult.

And the embochure of the flute is too difficult for the novice. The one I built from PVC, I have to change the shape of my mouth for each note. Then instead the fipple of the recorder and the irish penny whistle, etc... still the issue of overblowing. Will construct a micro-orifice upstream to limit the max flowrate. But still, such a small max volume. How else to reduce overblowing? How to get a louder sound?

Will learn the physics of the whistle next.

Will tinker around. Watched Scanners and The Deadzone last night. Put 5 60's and 70's Godzilla movies on my netflix. Watched short thing on how Monty Python got together (I never had a chance in this life). Will tinker. Will run. At the same time that I cut off everything meaningless, everything pretend, such that I don't exist. And life is such a quick blink of the eye. There's hardly any hurry for what comes immediately after...

I'm of miner stock. A bit of genetic inertia of something else. It's painful to watch. My epigenetics are miner stock at best. Maybe a lot worse. Me not having children is no loss whatsoever.

The woman sweating her ass off beneath her burqa in Saudi Arabia convinces herself this is the best of all possible worlds just as the slave did, just as the man struggling to survive from paycheck to paycheck in capitalism just as the aging hippy who used to have a nagging sense of loneliness about the lack of community but now but manages to drive hours away in his car 6 to 9 times a year for festivities like going rafting or to the Burning Man festival and just focuses on that.

It's so easy. You fall asleep, you forget. The goal is to be happy. Utilize your stupidity. If someone points out how wrong it is, demonize them.

Everyone's a pangloss. Everyone ensures that this world will never change. That it will always be insane. Everyone has learned how to be happy by being insane.

It's simply evolution. He best adapts who believes this is the best of all possible worlds.

And so you have children and then, simply evolution, the person who exists for their children, for their family, for their welfare and no others, best passes on their genes. A morality that doesn't go beyond one's own children. No sense of community beyond one's own relatives. Even if, by some chance, you don't think this is the best of all possible worlds, you just turn away from everything but your family, you turn away from all else. And your children flourish and reproduce in turn.

And these people are the only people alive at all now.

For better or worse, this is it! (He says as he flashes a big dumbass smile at his 'masser' whom whips him for his own good.)

Two books, one I had previously forgotten to mention:
Andre Agassi's autobiography. This is well written in the sense that he manages to make himself come out looking as if he's being honest, while at the same time he comes out looking really good and making others look not so good. And that's pretty much the idea of any autobiography it seems. Or blog, etc. One can't just say it straightforward (I'm wonderful, everyone else sucks!) but that does seem to be the goal. So we come to the conclusion (seemingly on our own) that Brooke Shields is materialistic, selfish, shallow. That Agassi's dad, to whom Andre owes all his success in life, is basically a lunatic. And that despite making a few mistakes, Andre is just this wonderful person who exists to make the lives the others better.

Humorous to hear him try to explain the 'Image is Everything!' quote he's so famous for. Still, other than being almost as vacant ultimately as Brooke and everyone else in his book, he comes across as relatively harmless...

Dragons of the Dwarven Depths by Weis and Hickman: guilty decadent book. All long stories are decadent in the first place. This is 'escapist fiction'. Understand though it's not so much that it's dwarves and dragons and elves that makes it escapist. What really makes it a nice place to escape to is how 2D everyone is. How simple to understand the people are. How relatively straightforward everything is. Good people, bad people. Stark charater flaws. Things are exaggerated and thus so much clearer... With a plot that's badly glued together.

Sturm is honor. Pefect morals. Tanis is the smart guy. Raistlin is a basically a good guy but he's kind of an ass. Clearly a bit morally challenged. Tas is a total airhead. Flint is the stereotypical grumpy dwarf. Caramon is 2D stupid and exists to be taken advantage of by Raistlin. Etc. Each character is clearly not a real person. Just shards of real people. And so they merely survive as 2D evil bears down on them. Is this not really what life is? Or is it maybe exactly what life really isn't? Could it be that this type of thinking is so appealing to people that makes real life such crap? That in real life it's not the existence of evil that's the problem, it's the constant mistaken perception of it. It's that people are constantly seeing it all around them where there's actually none.

Occasionally I think I should set my sights low, hold my nose and try to write such a thing. Was really thinking that the past day or two as some disgusting back stabbing at work has really stressed me out and thus, this is a nice escape. But then later, when I'm less stressed out I'll change my mind. The constant changing of my mind and only having a few moods that desire to write, stops me from writing. Clearly I don't have the continous steady desire in me. And once I've stopped for a while, I don't start again because the stopping part has deeply engraved Failure upon whatever it was I was doing. And so a feeling of certain failure stops me from ever starting up a given project again.

Also the mood for the given story is just gone by the time I feel like coming back to writing again.

My moods change thus I can't stick with any story long enough to get anywhere with it. Is it a flaw in me or the lack of a necessary flaw in me?

A woman at work was going around saying I had a crush on her. I did not. I definitely don't want her to think that. I also don't want that kind of rumor going around, seeing as I'm married, etc. So I've since been erring on the side of being unfriendly, making sure to not smile at her, etc.

And so now she's smearing my work performance. Lying about varioius things. Seeing as I work with 50 some people, you'd think the fact that only one person is smearing me would mean management would be able to figure out the person is full of shit? But no, my management is incredibly stupid. So now what? Get down in the mud and smear back? Just shut up, continue to do more than my part, kiss ass, and say nothing while this person ruins my reputation?

Considering how middle management is, the thing to do is leave somehow. But I have to have worked for a year as a nurse here to be able to transfer. And I have to pay back my college money if I just leave the hospital before then. So I have to stay right here for at least 4 more months. Should I fight back in the meantime? Or will that just make things worse? Maybe it's really just management stirring up the trouble in the first place?

So then from the tick tock back on over to the chop chop for a bit, a while, a life, whatever.

It makes one want to wander around underground with an axe killing goblins.

The problem is people communicating with me that I don't actually speak to. On facebook for example, despite clearly stating that I strongly prefer the phone I still have people just ignoring that and still communicating with me there. A girlfriend from more than ten years ago that I've almost not actually spoken to in a decade occasionally writes me, not entirely sure why. I'll assume just to be nice. We broke up ugly. (Totally her fault and absolutely no way around that.) It's nice that we're on good terms now. I guess it's nice the positive sentiment of her facebook messages. But... she brings up veganism to me, notifying me of something happening like two hours away, (which is as good as it gets where I live, but useless to me.) I ask if she's interested in veganism. She isn't. End of long spiel she says: "Maybe you can send me some vegan recipes? :)"

I'm not much of a cook and I seriously don't want to do recipes with anyone. How can I communicate this via typing with someone I've virtually not spoken to in a decade without potentially hurting her feelings? I don't know how exactly and so I spend days putting it off, being preoccupied by this pretty useless conversation with someone who's ignoring what I've clearly stated in my status and profound saying or whatever, that I strongly prefer the phone. This is another of the endless people who won't use the phone of course. I'm stuck trying to communicate via this method where miscommunication is so highly likely. Face to face this would be nothing to communicate. It would take a second and would be forgotten. Instead I'm stuck with this bit of crap in my head for days on end, this useless communication (although the positive sentiment from someone who had treated me so shitty is nice) taking up my life ultimately. My life ultimately because one after another follows. This sort of thing over and over again with people who won't actually speak to me, whom yet I'm so worried that through miscommunication I'll manage to offend.

After being stuck at this point and seeing no way forward for quite a while, I read that book, and finally decided to just be direct with some people. In return I was told by one to 'fuck off. I'm a sociopath.' (Although that one seems to think everyone's a sociopath, so it doesn't mean much.)

So, perhaps I should just delete my facebook account. That too will offend people. But it will be a short term thing as opposed to years and years of this, my life passing me by, with this absurd stupidity. Being dragged into unhealthy ways of interacting which are seriously ruining my life. Do I owe it to anyone to be forever dragged into such arrangements with people who refuse to even occasionally use the phone?

I really don't think so. And I would absolutely prefer to just not have anything at all to do with someone than to only communicate via email, etc. Better of course would be to interact in a more healthy way, but if people won't do that, they hardly have any basis for villifying me when I say goodbye and wish them the best. (But that again, is the exception I guess. Most people aren't so tied into seeing themselves as the perpetual victim.)

It is a sort of social anxiety perhaps that I've developed that I don't want to communicate via this medium anymore (with people whom absolutely won't communicate any other way) but it is at the same time highly twisted on their part that they're like this. And that's a huge part of what's causing the anxiety on my part. The understanding of these things. That the whole communication has such a basis in fear.

It doesn't have to be based on fear of course. It's possible for it to be a basically healthy thing. But I know damm well it's not in the case of this past gf for example. And many others.

I know it's fear and I see the bigger picture. I see how it all connects (albeit vaguely). And it ultimately drives me bonkers. Drives and drives me bonkers, on and on. And finally I tell someone please use the phone, or just have a nice life, and I'm a sociopath.

So of course I can't win. This is the one thing I know. No matter what, I lose. The problem being of course, trying to care about people who are utterly selfish. Of course I lose. In the same way, I'm so worried about saying something to offend old gf.

..but it is maybe much ado about not much really. I mostly started up this unhealthy communications with people far away I've never met. I just won't do so in the future.

And it is a sort of neurotic behavior on my part. Two types of people: those making other people's lives hell and those making their own. So I'm definitely the latter. And it's just not a good way for me to communicate.

My wife, feh, she has to do almost all of her communicating at work via email. I think that would drive me bonkers. She handles it way better than most but she is about driven bonkers presently.

The other thing of it is, is that I strongly desire to be a part of an actual community. I strongly desire more interaction with thoughtful people. And in the 'real world' that just isn't happening.

And so, I turned to the internet, where I ran into a whole bunch of people who unfortunately communicate in unhealthy ways. So I've got either ....'solitude' or unhealthy unfulfilling miscommunication. I've spent the last 10 years trying to avoid 'solitude', recognizing that such personal solutions really are simply not the best way forward. And instead I've been having unhealthy unfulfilling miscommunications.

I'm better off with 'solitude', if the choice is one or the other.

I say 'solitude' with reference to Robert Johnson claiming in Heaven and Earth that the cure for loneliness is solitude. I think it sort of sounds like crap. Or at least not well explained. It is possible to not mind the state of my life though. It's not really that lonely. I just had wanted so much more.

It's mostly a matter of forgetting what I wanted. Forgetting what should be.

Flute dimensions spreadsheet:
http://www.cwo.com/~ph_kosel/flutomat.html

My past experiment with running a very long distance once a week may have been causing me to slowly run faster, but it seems to have been awful for my joints. Now I'm trying to run almost everyday. Mixing up my speed/intensity from day to day. Almost always on a sturdy treadmill with at least a 5% incline. When I go out on the concrete my right knee isn't liking it. I'm trying to strengthen my legs and work into this gradually. Hopefully my knee will strengthen up.

I need to aim for 45 minutes of aerobic exercise on average. Also need to get into more of a habit of drinking tea, wine, consistently getting adequate vitamin D, consistently getting enough omega 3's. And making more friends. Except for the omega 3's and perhaps the vitamin D, I can immediately notice feeling slightly better when I do these other things.

Otherwise I'm apparently a really healthy person without hardly trying to be.