Sure, maybe i’d thought about writing, or being a teacher, back when i gave a damn about life; but no more.

There isn’t any point, i see now. Nobody much cares about teaching or learning or writing. They just go on with their drab little lives and try not to pay any attention to inflation, corrosive politics, or the widening gap between the 1% and the 99.

I was glad to have been removed from the workforce, glad to have escaped the increasingly pointless rat race. Nothing means much anymore. It doesn’t matter as much anymore if you go to university, except as a wealth-marker. AI and robots will be doing most jobs soon enough. Existential despair is on the horizon.

People’s main jobs soon will be simple consumption and also watching over the machines that produce. No wonder the birthrate has fallen — who wants to bring more people into this mess?

I have a little voice inside me that every time i hear an English sentence or read an English sentence, it wants to correct that sentence if there are any “errors”.

It’s a curse.

I was an English major at Cornell University. Yes, a misfit one, but also with a long history of reading a lot of books. And then i took a variety of linguistics & more English classes at other schools — UNC Chapel Hill, Arizona State University, and Framingham State College.

Yes, my approach to language is more computational than others, partly because i was a Physics major before English, and partly because i’ve worked with computers for forty-some years.

Maybe it’s all the proofreading and editing i’ve done; maybe that’s the voice.

But i still have my own English-language idiosyncrasies, as you have probably noticed. I do not care; i like my English.

Rely on yourself, on your own conclusions. Other people generally don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, except in the specifics of their own lives. Trust yourself, always.

Being alone doesn’t have to be that bad.

My wife of 13 years died last year, and i’m alone now.

I was alone for much of my younger years, and i’ve gotten used to being alone again; it’s not so bad, doing what you want, when you want.

Do you have kids?
I don’t have kids. (And like me, my wife never wanted kids; so she didn’t have any either.)
Also, the rest of my family is mostly dead or far away; so i don’t have to worry about that.

It’s a nice quiet existence.

And it is easier, being alone. Not having to keep track of a whole ‘nother life; one is more than enough for me. Sure, nobody to tell stuff to; but when you’re older, there isn’t so much to tell anyway.

Life slows down, but time speeds up. The years go by, one after another.

Enjoy what you can.

Real life is pretty boring, most parts of it at least. Fiction is an artificial construction of things that seem a little bit like real life, but put together in much more interesting ways.

I didn’t get to participate much in real life; i became disabled pretty early on (age 21) and didn’t get to work much of a real job. I did get to finish my undergraduate degree, appropriately enough in English.

So i love the way that you can use language to create a world — an interesting world — fairly unconnected to reality. I don’t actually like real people much anymore; i prefer fiction.

And it turns out that i didn’t miss much, not working. I was never going to be well-off; i probably would have struggled like most people, no matter what i did — regardless of my aptitude. The American Dream seems officially dead, to me. So i’ll just spin out the next twenty-five or thirty years as peacefully as i can (and hopefully find things to enjoy, probably mostly fictional).

I read someone’s post on Sincerely about love, and it got me thinking.

If you’re lucky, you will meet someone who genuinely loves you — a combination of respect and caring and concern for how you’re feeling — and you’ll happen to respect them and want to care for their well-being too.

It’s a difficult and rare combination to find. And it doesn’t always last, either. Life changes people, including me and including you.

Realistically, even true love can falter. Please don’t have an over-idealized view of love, or you may be disappointed. But true love can also recover (sometimes) from major fights, problems, and serious disagreements. And people make mistakes, big and small, all the time; everyone has difficulties.

The test of love is whether or not it can survive real problems — medical, financial, personal, et cetera — because problems eventually come.

And even if you do find some perfect love, one of you will eventually sicken and/or die. And the survivor will have to go on without that love.

Everybody dies. All love ends at some point.

I was pretty happy being alone in the first place, so i was prepared.

Halloween, if you hadn’t noticed, was Sandi‘s favorite holiday.

Last Halloween, there was a large gathering of friends and ministers at our apartment to give Sandi a grand Samhain ritual as a kind of a going-away present. Singing & chanting, with everyone gathered around her bed. It was lovely.

She died almost exactly seven days later.

She held on as long as she could, fighting constant pain and discomfort. She didn’t complain, but just nodded when i asked her if it was time for more pain relief.

We both did our best; that’s what any marriage boils down to. It was enough.

If you ever help someone fight their final battle, right to their last breath, it may change your outlook on life.

Even though i’m ok with being alone, life is never going to be the same again.

Do not enter into a relationship with someone who can’t fully take care of themselves. It’s bad enough that inequalities may develop later on; relationships should not start with such inequalities.

You know how much work relationships take; don’t take on an unnecessary extra job! When you’re dating someone, try to notice how well they’re doing on their own; if they are struggling, it’s a bad sign.

Instead of becoming involved with them, have the patience to encourage them AS A FRIEND to get their shit together on their own. Once they’ve shown that they can get by on their own — say, for a whole year — then you can consider going out with them. 

And if you do decide on another relationship, try to keep it casual — you don’t want to spend your time taking care of someone who can’t take care of themselves.

Don’t get sucked into a relationship-trap. You’ll have enough work ahead of you with your own life without taking on someone else’s issues. Take it slow. Take it easy.

If it seems like someone needs you, back away slowly; they’re not ready.

Try to only be involved with people as equals.

What happens when you find the thing you’re looking for in life?

You enjoy it. And then you move on.

It’s no more complicated than that.

It is a little confusing when you get the thing in life that you’ve been searching for; because maybe you’re better at looking for it than getting it, and you have to keep going and find something else to look for — that’s all there is.

It’s why i always wanted to become a writer. You think shit up, you write it down, and you move on.

When you’re a writer, you write stuff down like you’re a fictional character in your own story; and when something sounds good, then you have the character say it or do it.

It’s like everyone is a writer, and they each choose what their character does & says and where they go, what they do, and who they do things with … and how they do it; whether they cheat, or if they obey the rules.

Don’t listen to what other people tell you — they’re idiots, most of them. Do what you know you have to do; fuck them.

When you have something to say, write it down; who cares if it offends someone — they can go to hell.

If you think of something, write it the fuck down, please. Otherwise you’ll forget it, and the world will be less one more original sarcastic idea.

Go ahead, be sarcastic. 

People will likely not notice, because most of them aren’t listening … not to you, at least. 

If you have to say something, give it some fucking spice; don’t just exchange bland pleasantries like a lobotomized corporate stooge. 

Subvert the dominant paradigm. 

Go ahead, i know you really want to.

Don’t hold back.  

– – –

Birthdays suck. 

People suck. 

Life sucks, and it’s only getting worse. 

Jobs suck.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Pay no attention to any of it and just let it slide by like a crash scene on the highway when someone else is driving — it doesn’t mean shit. 

Have a sarcastic day.