Thursday 2/27/25
I need to work so much harder and with greater efficiency and consistency. What I'm doing now will produce matchless works but it's not going to do the overall job with everything else and where I am trying to get with the impact I seek to have.
Got the printer set up yesterday with the new computer. You have to go to the printer company's website and download the appropriate driver for that given model and then install the software so that the printer will work with that machine. You also have to select what operating system you're running. None of the operating systems listed were the operating system I'm using; they were all older, and I figured that the printer--which is itself old--wouldn't be compatible with this machine. Just in case, I downloaded the software for the most recent operating system on offer, and that fortunately worked.
A post I saw from a woman this morning:
"Michelle Trachtenberg was such a talented actress and all she was known for toward the end of her life was how she no longer looked the way she did as a teen. Be kind to women even when they are not attractive anymore."
Isn't that horrible? Why would you say that? "...even when they're not attractive anymore." Damn. Maybe try, "even if their appearance doesn't align with what you remember from years ago."
(Edit: I did not know who this person was earlier today, but now know that they were a thirty-nine-year-old woman, which somehow makes the comment even worse. That is awful. Found in her apartment by her mother. And someone posts that she wasn't attractive anymore? This world is something else.)
I can scarcely conceive of saying the things that most people say.
Look at how people think:
"So if he’s a cancer he’s automatically a bad man ?"
"i had a bad dating experience with a cancer man so for me yeah"
Awoke today to read that the FDA canceled an upcoming meeting that selects the strains to target for next season's flu shots. People are thinking there won't be flu shots at all or else a kind of guesswork version, the latter of which I'd expect--or for 2024's flu shot to be carried over as 2025's.
Each day there is something troubling now--something that any sensible person knows is wrong. You know when someone is doing something wrong. And they usually know it, too. You know when you're doing something wrong. Or saying something wrong. You don't feel good about yourself then, do you? I tried to cut everything like that out of my life. Out of every interaction. No matter what someone was doing to me or had hurt me. That doesn't mean not doing what I have to do, but rather doing it the right way and the moral way with knowing that I wasn't being deceitful, or making anything up in order to hurt. I want to be able to live with myself a certain way.
I don't really have anyone right now, and I certainly don't have an immediate family or a wife or a girlfriend. I just have me. But even if I had others--and I hope to have these relationships in the future--my second most important relationship will still be with myself. (My most important relationship will always be with my art.) I don't want the burden of disliking things in my myself as they stand in my actions and words especially when I can control those things. I have found, in the past, that when I was less this way, I was more likely to do what wasn't right, like the machinery inside of me was out of order and so what came out didn't work as well.
Being that less-than-opportune way begets being that less-than-opportune way. The bad results pile up. Then there are so many bad results that a person tries to look past them, not see them, as if they're a blur rather than two or three specific items that get seen because they're standing out there more or less alone. That's how it happens. Then you're off and running with bad behavior that feeds bad behavior. You feel worse about yourself, you take that out on others. You feel worse still, etc. I have, contextually, with what I do, the level at which I do it, the value in what I do, the person I am, and what I instead have and don't have, the situation I am in, the worst life. But I do very little that is wrong. And I become better as a person and an artist every day. I don't have to feel this other way about myself that, frankly, I could not handle feeling right now.
This business with the flu shot is someone doing wrong and they would know it. Or at least feel it. I get a flu shot every year, though somehow I neglected to in 2023, which is highly unusual for me. I got the COVID boosters. My stance on these matters is thus: I put my trust in my health in stairs. I run up and down stairs. I consume very little to nothing at all that is bad for me. I do not take any alcohol. I eat no red meat. I eat no bread, no chips, no pasta, no cheese besides Swiss because the others are high in sodium. I drink various kinds of tea constantly. The coffee is always black. Anything I drink helps my heart health. I eat a lot of kale and vegetables and apples.
I can control these things so I control them. I am scared of doctors and have not been to a doctor in a shockingly long time, save trips to the ER and the cardiologist who I've now not seen in a very long time and I have to figure that out. I definitely need to get this doctor thing squared away and be able to handle that and get checked out and provided that goes well have regular check ups. Ironically, these fears of mine make me work harder with the stairs and the like. I'll think, "When was the last time you went to the doctor? That's right, decades ago. I think you're doing 3000 stairs today, chief, much as you don't want to."
All of this being said as what I put my trust in, I'll have a vaccine. I don't fear that science or doubt it. I don't think I need it. But I walk past a CVS often. I am in the CVS often because I get things like trail mix when it is on sale and cards for the kids (and I think I'll get one for my mom today because she has had a hard go of it the last few days I have learned). Doubtless there are people for whom a flu shot--that targets the right strain--is very important and can be life-saving. Life and death has entered the picture with this regime. This is becoming as much, if not more, about mortality as it is ideology.
Many people probably can remember a time when they were back in high school at some party, and they got in a car driven by someone who'd been drinking. Maybe they were seen as cool or whatever and the rider didn't want to speak up, being crunched in the backseat with three of their friends. They took their chances. You never want to take your chances and if you have a kid that age you certainly never want them to do that. You want them not to get in the car and find another ride. Call you for that ride back home. It's not worth any chancing of your life.
I feel like the early days of this regime are like being in the car with the driver who's been drinking. It's definitely different than the first time around with Trump. This is already a lot worse because of the Musk element. Trump is a cartoon character. Pay five million dollars for a "Gold Car" that gives you American citizenship. That's something that a kid in sixth grade thinks up as a joke for his paper with that cool teacher who encourages humor and the class snickers when that bit is read out loud.
Musk is a manic destructionist fed in equal parts by ego, insecurity, hate, self-loathing, and paranoia. He's chemically off himself. The levels aren't right. That's a bad brew of a man. The difference between Trump and Musk is that Trump would send someone off to jail if he existed in a movie without a second thought, the whim of the king. Whereas Musk would go into the cell and watch and delight as the person was tortured by the henchman he'd brought with him, pleasure himself in the observing of this, and come out feeling sated--which wouldn't last long. Then he'd have to do it again, try and do it better, because people still didn't respect him. He'd get angry. He'd show them. Then he'd try to up the stakes. The same thing would happen. Before the cum was dry on his pants, he'd be doing it once more. That's a dangerous person, on account of this being the nature of their derangement.
A friend of mine is dealing with the imminent loss of two parents--a biological father and the father with whom he grew up. My friend has already lost his mother and his brother. I woke up this morning to a note from him and I'd say that has put mortality more on my mind but the truth is that it always is on account of what I'm trying to do, what I began this entry with--the impact I am seeking to have with work that is like nothing else there has ever been. But I wish I could do more than whatever can be done for my friend with my support and counsel and what I hope is his knowledge that I am always here for him.
I am afraid this is not a very cheery entry. I will get to some others that are solely about art, and mix those in with everything else, including ones I must do but don't want to do about publishing and the people in it.
Now, he did a very bad thing, but sometimes I think about Archdeacon Hayes in M.R. James's short story, "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral," writing time and again in his journal--with enough pressure that he eventually began to rip through the pages--"I must be strong." One must be so many things, really, but without strength, it's very difficult to be any of them.
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