Ain’t no sunshine
“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, and this house just ain’t no home, any time she’s gone away.” – Bill Withers, 1971
Been writing heavy stuff lately but that’s not sustainable. Gotta find some joy in the world, y’know? The world is beautiful. People are good. They want connection and happiness.
So where am I finding joy these days? That’s a very good question. I started this post a half hour ago, and then felt like I hit a wall. I couldn’t figure out how to continue. I texted Tracy and mentioned this to her, and she asked me, “Have you made a list of things you find happy and joyful, yet?”
I hadn’t. Something is holding me back. Maybe the blockage is the fear that I’ll look silly? So be it, let’s see what comes out of me if I allow myself to look silly.
Walking
I like walking. I like moving my body around under my own power. At one point in my life I could run, and that felt great. I was never fast enough for the Olympics, but I could move and keep moving for miles and miles. And then I hurt myself, and I couldn’t do that without pain, so I stopped. I stopped running, I stopped walking, I stopped exercising. It got to the point where if I did go for a walk, I’d be out of breath.
Then I got an Apple Watch and it helped me track my movement, and in tracking that movement, and tracking my breathing and my heart rate, it gave me a measurement. And once I had metrics for what shape I was in, I could try to improve those metrics. I could bend the curve toward more movement, with less pain and stress, over greater and greater time and distance. So that now, when I walk, I can walk slow or fast (though still a walk, not a run) and I don’t catch my breath, and my heart rate stays at a moderate level, and I don’t cause myself pain in the movement or after.
I can walk, and take joy in it. A simple feeling. I’m moving, and my body is working as it should.
Friendship
A lot of words to find some joy. Is there anything else lately? My friends and family. Tracy, for one. She has been my closest friend for decades now. She and I are no longer the people we were when we first met; we have both changed and adapted and grown, but our friendship has never faltered. We understand each other. I get her, who she is, right now, even though I remember the many different people she’s been. And I feel like she gets me, too. It’s a simple joy in being known and understood.
When something happens to me, good or bad, Tracy is the first person I think “I’ve got to tell her about that.” There are others in my life I connect with, friends and family alike. But I can single out my friendship with Tracy for being built, carefully, on years of shared experiences, years of honesty and vulnerability, and genuine curiosity and trust. It’s joyful, and it gives me the skills I need to help build stronger friendships with everyone else in my life.
One more thing
You know what? I’ll finish this woefully inadequate list with a third thing, one that I have been demonstrating to myself even as I think I can’t see anything joyful. Writing. Putting together words to express my wordless feelings is joyful. Using bits of language to describe a scene, or a person, or a feeling, this brings me joy. When I can move myself past the anxiety of “not having anything to write about” I can always, always, every fucking time, write about something. It’s not a gift, it’s a skill I’ve taught myself over the span of my nearly six decades on this fucking rock.
There aren’t many of you out there reading this, but I know that you are out there, reading it. And I’d like you to know that writing this out, writing anything out, gives me joy. Thank you for helping me express it.
It’s not just the grill
Community Part 2
I came home from a walk last week and dad asked me “Do you want a grill?”
I paused because that request came out of the blue. A complete non-sequitur. I had walked past him sitting on the couch, and had gone into the kitchen to get something to drink. I poked my head out of the kitchen and looked at him. Because of the angle and because his neck doesn’t turn as far as it used to (he’s got steel rods in there now), he couldn’t see me but I could see him.
“Yes?” I said. Because why not. But… “Why? How?” Was he offering to buy me one? Did he miss grilling food?
“Well, Glasses has one and she’s trying to clear off some space on her patio. I was talking to her and she asked us if we want it.”
Oh, that made more sense. Dad’s been talking to my neighbor, who I call Glasses pseudonymously. “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great!” If I had a grill I would definitely sometimes maybe grill things.
But my happiness at getting a grill for my patio was overshadowed by my sudden worry for my neighbor. “Hey dad,” I asked, “is she still getting evicted? What’s going on with that? Is she OK?” Maybe if dad is talking to her, some of that has come up.
He grunted in embarassment. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, voice low. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it was my place.”
Well that’s bullshit. That was my immediate thought. If she’s having trouble, and she feels isolated, that makes it worse. We should at least let her know… I don’t know. That we know, and it’s OK. But we don’t talk about this stuff. We don’t share it. We don’t ask after each other. It’s considered icky, taboo, impolite.
We don’t have community with one another. Our employers tell us not to talk about our salary, claiming it’s just bad karma, when in point of fact everyone in America, at a Federal level, has the right to discuss our salary with our coworkers, and there are penalties for employers who try to make policy against it. Talking about money feels shameful. They have made being poor, facing eviction, and not being able to pay our bills all off-limits for public conversation. They have trained us away from building any kind of common ground with everyone else in our circumstances. They have denied us community.
I’ve never been rich so I can’t be certain of this, but I bet the rich don’t feel the same social pressure not to talk about money, perhaps because they have so so so very much of it, and sharing stories about it helps them loot even more of it from the working class.
I resolved the next time I saw my neighbor to thank her for it, and ask her if she’s OK. It’s a start, right? Gotta build community somehow. Gotta start somewhere.
That whole Monday thing
Monday morning. Woke up several times before my alarm went off today. Woke up at 4:30ish, 5:00ish, 5:30ish, and 5:45ish AM; alarm is set for 6:00 AM. Rolled out of bed with 6 minutes still on the clock. Not anxious, not sleepy, just ready to start the day.
Couldn’t tell if dad was awake downstairs or not so I creeped around quietly upstairs anyway. Weighed myseslf (about the same as always), got a shower. Had to shave and because I had let the beard grow out a bit over the course of 3-4 days, had to go carefully to avoid cutting myself, which I did, successfully. All good, all good.
Most of my work shirts were hanging up downstairs in the laundry closet, so I just put on pants and a t-shirt and went down to see if they had dried since yesterday. Dad was still asleep so I made coffee. Shirts were still damp in places, dammit all. Went back upstairs and found a slightly-snug collared shirt I could wear. It’s long sleeved, and the weather app on my wrist says it’s going to hit 80°F today, but I’ll be inside in air conditioning almost the enitre day so it should be fine. Should be fine, I say, shaking a mental fist at the weather gods.
Back downstairs wearing my work clothes. Dad was just waking up. Wished him a good morning, made small talk about the weather. He was bleary-eyed and still coming around. I grabbed a cherry turnover. I mixed up my coffee drink (2 ounces of chai concentrate, 2 ounces of half-and-half, 2 tablespoons of chocolate syrup on top of 12-15 ounces of brewed coffee) but I mispoured and got 3 ounces of chai, so I added a little more half-and-half to balance it out. The mug is stting here on my desk while I write this out, little BB-8 keeping it warm for me. I haven’t even tasted it yet. I did eat the turnover, though.
I like having these little moments in the morning. I did not always. This morning thing is new, maybe just in the last 5-10 years. Hard to believe something that happened in the last decade can be new; little 12 year old me is astonished, naieve little kid that he is. It’s OK, buddy, we’ve got a few more decades left in us yet. It’s going to be OK.
Just took a sip of the coffee and the chai is a bit overpowering in terms of flavor. It’s fine. It’s just a caffeine injection for me, to help me wake up and face the day. I have been probing myself for anxiety regarding work and I find that I’m OK with going in. Just the normal amount of anti-capitalism don’t wanna going on, not the stomach churning anxiety of fear.
Does that sound like I am damning the job with faint praise? Maybe it is but I consider it a win. I have to work if I want to keep sleeping under a roof and have access to health care but as far as jobs go, this one that I’ve found is not bad. And that’s good. I can live with it.
Into the Sundered Pass I go
Hinterland released the next Tales From the Far Territory for The Long Dark earlier this week, this one called Last Horizon, and I’ve been looking forward to playing it. This release included the next tale, building off of Signal Void, where we found out about some kind of experiment going on on Great Bear Island; Buried Echoes revealed the machine built by Rudiger as part of those experiments. The story is creepy and haunting, and I can’t wait to learn more.
Along with the Tale we have a new map to explore: the Sundered Pass, which Hinterland described as their most vertical map yet. Apparently, there’s a lot of climbing to be done here, so I managed to bring a bunch of coffee and energy drinks. I’m exploring it first on my Voyageur save, because I want to focus on exploration and figuring things out before I try to survive on the most brutal gameplay settings. Not gonna risk my Interloper save on a map I’ve never seen before.
I took care to not learn much about the map or the story before I dived in; I avoided reading Reddit and the couple of TLD Discord servers I’m in, unlike Forsaken Airfield, the first new DLC map. And hoo-boy did I get lost just trying to find this map. But that’s all on me; I was looking in the wrong place. I paced the whole length of the Far Range Branch line, thinking that I would find the entrance point for the new map there, before I opened up the in-game world map and saw that Sundered Pass was between the airfield and the Zone of Contamination.
By the time I found the cave system that would connect me to the new region, I’d already spent more than a couple of hours wandering around. Which is good. I’ll never get another chance to find this area for the first time. And the caves were gorgeous; huge ice waterfalls, green-white in the darkness, howling winds cutting through the rocky crevices, crawling along ledges with sheer black drop-offs below, and the bright line of sky above. They do an amazing job of designing these spaces; the art style is one of the reasons I play this game.
Some of the game mechanics they’ve added I don’t intend to use. I’m still learning Interloper, the previous most difficult setting, so it’ll be a long time before I try Misery mode, the new hardest. The Cheat Death system is interesting, as it goes against the permadeath default for Survival Mode that the game has had since the beginning. I wonder if Hinterland is aware that some players (I have no idea how many) back up their saves to make their own way to cheat death, and that’s why they’re adding an in-game version that still punishes the player for dying? Could be, could be.
Sadly, Hinterland pulled the new predator, the Cougar, because they saw a strong negative reaction to it. I think their implementation is clever; unlike other predators, it doesn’t exist in-game until it attacks you; prior to that it’s an increasing level of notifications, sounds, and other signs that it’s taking an interest in you and is stalking you. To my mind, it’s similar to the way the Darkwalker challenge is set up, though less supernatural.
The communities I’m in liked it, or at least didn’t actively hate it, so I did not see the pushback Hinterland saw. And it’s super weird that they pulled it when they had already given people the option to just, y’know, turn it off using the in-game settings. Anyway, can’t wait to get it added back in so I can die to a cougar several times before figuring it out or getting lucky.
Community Tales
Part 1
A couple of weeks ago, I got up one morning, went dowstairs to get some coffee and wake up. Dad, since he’s been staying here, normally gets up before me (at least he did before I started working again) and makes a pot of coffee. Dad was sitting at the desk where we put his iMac and he was scrolling through Yahoo! news or Facebook or something.
I made my coffee drink. I take my 20 oz. BB-8 coffee mug and add about 2 ounces of half-and-half, 2 ounces of chai concentrate, and two tablespoons of chocolate syrup then fill the rest of it with brewed coffee. I call it, “coffee”. Then I walked over to where dad was sitting and scrolling. Took a look outside, saw grey but no rain.
“Another gray day,” I said.
“Yeah, where’s our sun at?” dad said. He shifted in his seat a bit. “Had to go out front for a smoke.” My apartment, a townhouse, has a back patio where he normally goes to smoke, but if it’s raining, he goes out front because the overhang usually protects him from the rain better.
“Oh? But it’s not raining.”
“I just wanted to see if Glasses [nicknamed for her privacy] was out there.” Dad is, despite his age, an incorrigible flirt, and he’s been talking to the woman who lives next door. Just small talk, I’m sure, but he’s more extroverted than I am, so he likes talking to people, especially women. He made a sound halfway between a grunt and a chuckle that indicated to me, embarassment. “She’s got an eviction notice on her door.”
My stomach sank. I’ve been there. I’ve had to deal with no money and rising debts. I was kinda going through that now, actually; if it wasn’t for dad’s help, I would be a month or two behind in rent myself. This story is before I landed my job, when I was still hunting. My empathy for my neighbor kicked in, hard. I carefully opened my front door, saw no one was out there, cracked open the screen, looked to my right. Sure enough, a large legal paper was taped to her door.
She’s a single mom, with a teenage-ish daughter who may or may not work. I think Glasses works, not sure. I am also well aware that just having a job does not mean someone can pay the bills, especially the rent. I went back inside.
“That sucks,” I said. Dad grunted again in agreement. I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t think he would be inclined to help her out, though he certainly could if he wanted to. I wouldn’t judge. He’s been helping me and I appreciate it immensely. I’m also quite aware that when I was much younger, he would have probably been against providing me with any kind of financial help. But people change over the years.
When I was a kid, for various reasons related to my probable neurodivergence as well as incuriosity about the world and general distaste for doing irrational things like labor, I did not like or want to work at all. Now, while I still hate doing irrational things for irrational people, I also know that I need to do a certain amount of it so I can continue to live indoors and eat food I didn’t pick out of the trash. Fucking capitalism. And maybe dad feels better about helping me when he knows I’m doing my best to helpl myself?
Glasses, though. Regardless of her circumstances, I wouldn’t wish the anxiety of possible eviction on anyone. If the sheriffs’ deputies come, I pledged to stand in their way.
Car parameters
Now that I created the category, might as well use it, right?
I did a first pass on cars in my price range that might not be terrible. Based on my projected income I am looking at used cars, of course. I want something that is compact or mid-sized. Not a fan of SUVs because they’re huge, don’t want a sub-compact because they’re too small on long trips. Oh, right, I like road trips when I have the mental energy, money, and a car that’s safe to drive. Hatchbacks are fine but I lean toward sedans or coupes.
Price wise, I had no idea what a decent but cheap used car would go for. So I poked around on Kelly Blue Book and Edmunds to see what price range cars that fit the above category and are ~10 years old or newer, and it looks like that price range goes from $10,000 to $15,000. If I have to get a car loan, at my terrible credit rating, that works out to a monthly payment of $200 to $300 for a 48 month loan.
I would love to be able to estimate what my insurance payment would be but that doesn’t seem to be a thing. Lots of sites will walk you through the thousand-and-one questions to come up with a very specific quote for a specific car specifically for me but I just want a broad guestimate and don’t want to track down fuckin’ VINs for cars (and sign up for email alerts nagging me to buy things, holy crap) just so they can ballpark me. If anyone knows of any simple car insurance calculators I’d love it!
Things that would be a nice-to-have but not dealbreakers would include CarPlay. I wouldn’t call myself an Apple fan any more; corporations are doing so much damage in the world, but I still do need a phone, and I’m used to Apple phones as far as features go, so that’s what I buy. And being able to get the interface and apps I’m used to in the car would be super handy. Right now, in my ancient Honda, I have a very cheap head unit that my phone can Bluetooth to; it plays music and podcasts and lets me make and take phone calls hands-free if I need to (please don’t call me at all but especially in the car, thanks).
Sunroofs are nice, I suppose. When there’s sun out. Which does happen more and more often as I get older.
All wheel drive would be great because, y’know, weather extremes are happening more and more thanks to corporations’ damage to the world; feeling more secure on snow and ice would be keen, really. Hybrids look like they could save me money as the gas companies continue their intransigence and looting by squeezing every possible penny of profit while also damaging the world, but hybrids to me are a question mark as far as maintenance costs, so while I might include them in my shopping, they require extra research and pre-purchase investigation.
Colors aren’t a big deal, and with used cars you get what you get, but if I have a choice I’d like a nice, non-metallic primary color. A good green or blue would be awesome. Black is also high on my list. Interior wise I’d prefer a black or gray interior, something neutral. Not a fan of tan, at all.
I want a car that’s easy and cheap to maintain, and has a decent track record of safety. That points toward larger makes and popular models; having more parts available means lower costs of repair. No bespoke boutique brands, alas.
From these broad strokes, I’ll start drafting up a list of years, makes, and models. It’s a good starting point!
The point of a system
The point of a system, the reason for its existence, is the outcomes it produces. Not the intent of the people who designed it, nor the hopes and dreams of the people caught in it or forced to use it. No, you judge any system by the outcomes it reliably produces.
And that’s all I’m going to say about the debate last night.
My Half-Birthday 2024
Tracy was at a training today near my new job and she met me for lunch at a Thai place which is my favorite and she bought my lunch to celebrate my half-birthday and it was so great to see her it’s been way too long and hopefully we can meet for lunch again on a semi-regular basis.
G’night.
Half-birthdays should be A Thing™
Today is my half-birthday. I’ve been trying to make that A Thing™ for a long time. My friends and family haven’t taken to the idea, however. I’m sure they have their reasons, considering they haven’t celebrated my, or anyone’s, half-birthday for 5 decades, so I forgive them. I would still love to make today, the 28th of June, the day I celebrate my birth, for one major reason.
If you’ve mentally done the math you can immediately see the problem, right? Six months from today in either direction lands on the 28th of December, and having a birthday on that date just sucks. It’s smack dab in the wasteland between two major winter holidays; the hegemony ensures that everyone is aware of and probably celebrates (or at least observes) Christmas, and the calendar itself enforces New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, making them impossible to ignore. Those holidays are heavy hitters, imposing their existence on the entire population.
And my birthday just gets overwhelmed by the giants. Few people have the attention or even resources to put together a separate celebration for anyone. Look, I know I’m complaining a bit here, I accept that. It was more difficult when I was younger, much younger. Lots of kids (not all of them, of course) celebrated their birthdays during the school year or in the summer when more kids and their parents were available to put a party together. Not so in the doldrums of December. Y’all were tired.
When I got older, it became less of an issue but still an issue. Starting over 20 years ago, my family began celebrating Christmas by traveling somewhere warm and sunny. And so to be in that place on Christmas Day, but to avoid other heavy travel days, my birthday often became a traveling day. My finances haven’t been great recently, so I often stay home, house-sitting for those on vacation, or I am otherwise unable to travel. That means my recent birthdays have been either in airports, or separated from my family with only my closest friends to help me remain grateful for another year.
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve enjoyed some epic birthdays. One year me and my friends had an amazing dinner and then visited the Acropolis, a famous steak house in Portland (oh, and also it’s a strip club.) I do have pictures from that night but, respectfully, won’t be posting them. Several of my recent birthdays were celebrated in song, with karaoke. I love karaoke, even if I’m not a strong singer. A close friend once said that singing is about volume and enthusiasm, and when I want to, I’ve got plenty of both.
And I am, honestly, grateful for my life, my friends, and my family; it’s just the random circumstances of the day of my birth that I’m focusing on here, I promise. So yes I’m whining a bit but this half-birthday idea was my attempt to do something about it! What if we celebrated my one day a year (everybody gets one!) that’s all about me… in the summer? Wouldn’t that be great? Warm weather, grilled meats, no pesky overwhelming holidays encroaching… It would, it would be great. Let’s do it! If not this year, then next year!