Once i’d grown up, i realized i didn’t really want to participate in the whole work/life thing after all. And in the end, i don’t have to anymore.

Growing up, i’d always taken advantage of whatever opportunities came along; and it wore me out. Now i can retire for real and not stress over letting opportunities slide.

Bottom line: regular life was kind of a disappointment, especially given the requirement of working some likely-meaningless job for most of your life — no thank you.

So you have to go on and find meaning elsewhere.

~

Sometimes it feels like i’m a split person. Split-brained, that is. Maybe it’s because of the TBI, but i seem to be able to hold contradictory thoughts at the same time. When i ask myself a question, i often come up with more than one answer; and the separate parts of my brain then have to struggle against each other to figure out which one wins.

~

I never wanted to start my story at the end, and then go back to the beginning.

Instead i prefer to tell a story from the beginning to the end, but with memories recalled along the way — more like the actual lived experience.

~

Sometimes i ask myself, “Has education made me happier over the course of my life?”

I grew up learning, and i still like to read; i like to watch the news. But has any of that actually made me any happier, or was i maybe better off not knowing all that stuff? Given that I can’t do a damned thing about any of it, being better informed hasn’t done me much good.

~

Maybe i spend three hours working on writing something and then realize that no one will want to read it for fun; so i have to make it an appendix, or an author’s note.

This whole book may as well be a series of author’s notes. Maybe a lot of books turn out that way. You never know where it’s going to take you, when you begin writing.

~

When you get to get to a certain age, you just don’t care about stuff that much anymore. You know that all causes cannot be saved, and none of it is really worth a damned anyway.

So you just let things happen, because they’re gonna happen anyway.

The hell with it.

Let it go.

My hearing is fading, and i now watch movies with the subtitles on. Difficult to know where the problem is, my ears or my brain. So i don’t hear well sometimes, and i try to speak even less than before.

Sandi faded in the months before she died, and slowly now i am also beginning to fade (or at least that’s what it feels like). My function gradually approaches the asymptote but will never cross it during my own personal infinity.

The light dims, and the sounds quiet. Words lose their meaning; symbols blur into one another. Old age creeps up.

My memory is getting worse: when i pour myself a cup of coffee, i have to remember to take it with me & drink it and not leave it behind on the counter. Recently i got myself a big rechargeable coffee cup that will keep my coffee warm even if I forget it for a while; that helps.

My neurologist tells me that my corpus callosum has atrophied; my eye doctor says that my optic nerves are thinning. What’s left of my brain? Not much, but enough to go on.

Dealing with disappointment is part of life, especially as we get older, and i’m getting used to it.

~

The primary conclusion? Life is a crapshoot; you get what you get. Abilities and opportunities — some people get lucky, and some get screwed. We do the best we can.

Wake up every day and be thankful, that’s the goal.

What if every day you woke up and you didn’t know — you didn’t remember — what you were supposed to be doing.

That’s me, every day.

I don’t remember what i’m doing, or what the big plan was; so i just make it up as i go along, do the best i can. And now that i’m with someone again, some things have changed — i’m having such a good time living that i’ve pretty much stopped writing.

Usually i wrote when i had something to say, and that something was often related to being alone. I wrote from a place of pain. Maybe i also wrote from having no one to talk to; and being with someone again has taken away most of my desire to write, since i can just talk to them instead of writing it down.

~

Sometimes i get a few minutes, in between tasks, to catch up on writing (or whatever). If i do, it’s fine; if i don’t, it’s also fine — no big deal.

The universe is one.

~

My experience writing? The kind of stuff i write, i just want to be finished or get to a stopping place. It’s work.

I write mostly because i have to; because something — some thought or feeling — is nagging at me and won’t let me alone until i process it, either by writing about it or talking about it (and if i do talk about it, it’s probably just a prelude to writing about it, even if it’s just a couple of sentences).

If i can write about something, it means i can stop thinking about it for a while.

~

Just making it through one day at a time with a partner again has become enormously satisfying and fulfilling. Life is good.

Waking up next to someone every morning is a huge reward.

She takes me out of the world that i’m normally in; she gives me variety. My fragmented personality has a new fragment again — love.

In case you haven’t noticed, i don’t capitalize the first-person pronoun when i write English (unless it’s the first word in a sentence or it’s in a capitalized title).

I’ve written this way for decades, and i’m not about to change now.

When i ask Google (in English), it says <Pronouns: Always capitalize the singular pronoun “I”.> But i don’t care.

I also ask Google what languages capitalize their first-person pronoun:

<

English is the only language that requires capitalization of the first-person singular pronoun (“I”). In almost all other languages with writing systems, the equivalent word for “I” is written in lowercase unless it starts a sentence. [1, 2, 3]

While English highlights the speaker, some other languages use capitalization to show respect to the listener.

>

Maybe it’s time to change that.

Google isn’t the boss of me; i choose to respect the listener. I have a degree in English, so i’m making a reasonably informed decision.

~

[I added that bit on capitalization to the beginning of a loose collection of random sentences. It’s time to begin organizing these posts into a book.]

~

In writing, you cannot exaggerate too much: always maximize figurative speech. (As if.)

~

Words cannot always explain biological impulse.

~

Random social media posts that i write when i’m high. Song names. Extracts of lyrics. [Writing doesn’t always have to make sense.]

~

For me, the subject of Philosophy is basically mathematics … in English.

~

“In the corner of my eye, i saw you in Rudy’s, you were very high, …” [Steely Dan, “Black Cow”]

Ambiguity is part of natural language.

Rudy’s what? Rudy’s stash? Rudy’s vagina? It’s open to interpretation. And who is Rudy?

~

When you’re high, anything can be funny. Simply expressing anything, even just plain simple ordinary things … you say them, and they’re funny.

That’s the magic of being high.

~

The real prophets of this age? Song lyricists; their words are heard by literally billions of people, and that’s what history will remember.

~

A family goes to Greece. They just stay at the beach. They never travel. Instead, they get a book about traveling around Greece and read it together — they travel by proxy and get to stay at the beach all the while. [Refer to Susanna Kaysen‘s Cambridge for context.]

~

Storytellers are natural show offs.

~

How can you know what you’re thinking, unless you say it out loud? (Or write it down.)

~

Words are simplifications; they are linguistic representations of a complex real world.

~

[Ok, that’s enough for now.]