If everything goes as planned, you will get watch your parents die when you’re in middle age.

I’m lucky. I was 57 when I lost my Mom, 55 when I lost my Dad. I had to look after my mom for 13 months. Dad had a bad week at the end; Mom had a bad month, and a few years of dementia that left most of her personality intact.

So it’s been 10 months. Over a hundred days. And I struggle daily now, with their memory, the memory of the indignity and misery of death, and my own and my kid’s mortality.

I’ve got a therapist and two kids and the partner; but one is away at college, my spouses parents both gone for 8 years, and our lives feel emptier in ways that are hard to articulate. You feel like you’re forgetting something. Most of the time.

So, I talk to my Mom and Dad as I walk, everyday, with the earbuds in, and the conversations are not that long; they hit the same notes mostly; they include stuff I never said when they were alive. And stuff I said all the time.

How’s it going? I love you.

Now I add stuff, about how little I saw them the last thirty years. About why that was. I say the things I wish I’d said.

Their voices dim. The conversations seem less and less real, less necessary. The pain recedes, merging now with my terror of my own death, which now feels really real. I meditate, walk, and fast.

Life is less fun. The world still achingly beautiful, but I look at the trees I have watched grow for twenty five years, in and around where I live, remembering how small they were, and think, if all goes as planned, the little trees I see how will get as high, but no higher, and that’s the last time that happens. I watched my kids for 25 years, and if I’m lucky I get to see them start to look like I do now, in 25 years.

And those 25 years?

Fucking flew by. Flew by. That’s the terrifying part.

My life is flying by, and I’m typing this note to a few friends and strangers. The people I love, that I fall in love with, that I used to love, that have written me off and drifted away; to the ones I love that I will never see again but in dreams and memories.

Hey Mom. Hey Dad. How’s it going?

We’re all Okay.

You had great lives. Could hardly ask for more.

But I miss you. I’ll never get to know you any better.

And I’ll admit now, which I  never do, in my conversations, that that was my fault as well as their’s.

A week of installs has made me realize that, yeah, if you hate system troubleshooting buy a Mac. Feels to me, about ten times worse, but I think a lot of that is my knowledge of the Mac and ignorance of Windows. Maybe Windows, underneath that, is twice as bad.

They’re both micro-kernal based OSes that work pretty well, with command line interfaces that can be used to shove the GUI out of the way to fix some stuff. Both platforms make the OSes we used to use look like stone knives and bear skins.

I’m using the same monitor on both systems in terms of size and resolution. The same Wacom tablet.

But now, I want to take a break from the 3D (I didn’t get more than a few hours past the system building and installs and widows troubleshooting.) and write more. I plotted the first day of nano-wrimo, and daydreamed. Now I have to start writing words, and finding the real story on the page.

I look forward to paying my son to troubleshoot this system while I work on my mac upstairs; my version of the sports car that sits in the shop while you drive your boring car. This was not an option ten years ago. For now, it’s a work around. Get me past my disgust for ugly text based error screens and maddening incompatibilities.

Windows 11 was breaking AMD processors, making them run 30% slower than comparable intel chips. Oops. Probably should have bought wintel. In the wonderful freedom of building machines from scratch, with windows, some parts are more equal than others.

Oh, this post was written on the PC. I can’t reach into my iphoto cloud storage and pull a photo in easily. Hm. I’ll have to look into the icloud interface… ugh. Web-based. Only Google can make a web-based application feel as good as a desktop app. (gmail.)

So, the weird thing about leaving social media is that you lose the metrics that let you know if you’re being interesting. Or if Mark Zuckerberg can use your post to elect evil politicians, which of course, is a problem with the platform.

The other problem being the addiction.

In the absence of this feedback, I end up writing what is more or less a diary of my own attempts at bettering myself, being more productive, mixed with memoire and commentary, kinda what I did with FB, but minus the politics. Of course, there was also the stuff I wrote inspired by other people in my feed, and the replies.

I find myself wanting to build this blog into something addictive, with more feedback, rising subscription numbers, greater reach, and more researched articles and pieces, more polished memoire… but again, I got out of FB in large part to write more fiction, or maybe business writing or creative non-fiction that paid more money, and do less conversational typing.

The conversational typing, I think, has slowly impacted my fictional voices, creating something that approximates effortless reading. So maybe it’s worth something.

Anyway, feel free to comment and share, which is of course, far slower clumsier than banging an emoticon. But that’s a good thing. Because it isn’t something. you do reflexively. Some people ‘like’ every comment by a friend, to be friendly. Some people like only what moves them. Your likes is his mixed bag, like halloween candy combining horrific orange and black taffy with delightful chocolate bars. Likes are the mechanism that FB and Twitter uses to create virality, and I think, how they trigger the dangerous levels of stickiness, engagement.

Facebook wants you to spend all your time in Facebook. All of it. It’s creators knew they were exploiting weaknesses in human psychology, and did it anyway, like Big Tobacco peddling their lethal, addictive product without admitting its well-known health risks for decades. Whistle blowers have been saying this about FB for years now, but the latest whistle-blower, post Trump, seems to have finally struck the resonant chord, in the same way #metoo bubbled along below the surfaces before getting big.

The like is the way they do it, the way they tune the feed, the way europeans distilled the coca leaves which were well tolerated by native users as coffee like pick-me-up for centuries, into the white powder and crack which can destroy a life in a matter of months.

Facebook turned social media into crack.

So, don’t like my stuff, heck, you can’t, there’s no button. Don’t comment unless you feel like it, and don’t share if unless you really like the thing you’re sharing.

I see the reads, which are hits, which mean… something, even if you skim a paragraph and go away, because you cared enough about me to actually click a link, and wait a few seconds. Which is a huge barrier. Donald Trump couldn’t turn his blog into any numbers that mattered, not even with a third of the country worshipping him as a God. So this blog will never blow up. Blog’s don’t blow up.

Only crack blows up. And crack, you know, is bad for you.

I was a Mac guy, back when that was something one could be unironically.

It mattered to me, what kind of computer you used. I was righteously infuriated if you dissed my superior platform. Sure, Apple cost more up-front, but, but, but… in studies of small business best practices we see obvious improvements in productivity and the total cost of ownership is actually lower… for fuck’s sake, you fucking philistine.

You don’t have to hire someone from Novel to get your three wintel boxes to fucking share the shitty non postscript fucking laser printer with no fonts in it. You can just plug the goddam macs together and BOOM, fuck, they’re sharing that four thousand dollar, that’s right that four thousand dollar postscript laser printer. It just works!

This is all so, so embarrassing, thinking of this now. God it was dumb.

One imagines hard core communists, the ones that insisted that Stalin wasn’t hurting anybody, that the lamestream media was making up that stuff about gulags and whatnot. And how, decades later, they must have felt, about the USSR, the socialist utopia which wasn’t. (By the way, I might have been one of those dumb leftists, too, and I cringe about that sometimes.)

Mac’s were far better for graphic art production for decades, the only platform for serious video editing and audio production; but, there was never all that much money in these tiny content creator niches, and so Apple systematically wrecked their products and pissed away their own competitive advantage, always shoving shiny slick machines at consumers–not creators.

In retrospect? The strategy worked. They’re filthy rich, and every bit as evil as every filthy rich company at their scale. But if you were a creator, and an Apple person? This metamorphosis sucked hard.

Sure, Apple’s consumer focus made many into a kind of creator, with Garage Band and the decent iphone camera and the halfway decent bundled photo editor, the easy video editor, and such, but at the pro level, eventually, macs started lagging. Again, why would you, Adobe, wanna optimize your product for 8% of the personal computer market?

It pissed PC people off if Photoshop ran better on the Mac, which it did, for a long damn time, to the point where it seemed, Adobe delighted in that moment when windows finally got good enough, and wintel started benchmarking better than Macs in every way imaginable.

So high-end PC workstations would now dominate the professional creator space, and running the Mac was, uh, kinda… quaint. You spent a lot of money, to get something that didn’t work as well, that ran a subset of software, and which you couldn’t game on.

3D content creation was a place where the wintel systems and applications were immediately and always far superior to anything  mac based. The exact same video card in a PC can do much much more, in a PC that the same card plugged into a mac. (Back when mac’s had normal PCI slots. Yes, for a while Macs were boxes you put cards in… I owned a mac clone!)

I did some 3d early on, when the platforms were closer together in performance, with a now elderly package called Strata Studio, and learned basic stuff about modeling, rendering, and animating 3d content. I created content with this package professionally during the first tech boom and made real money doing it. but I was never great at it, really.

But a friend of mine on Facebook started posting these wonderful renderings in Lightwave of spaceships and space scenes and I started using his stuff for book covers, and finally, I decided, Jesus, I have to buy a PC and learn this. The image I used for the Today We Choose Faces book cover that made me realize, I have to create content this way. It was created by my friend Graham Gazzard, who is a wonderful guy, a real artist who insists he’s just goofing around.

So, yesterday I shucked out 3k on PC parts, buying more of an AMD processor than I really wanted as I was impatient, and then had that choice ripple through the build making everything else cost more, and spent five hours with the 20 year old gamer building this thing.

I’m starting out with Blender and DAZ as my friend told me to skip Lightwave, saying, if he had it to do all over again, he would just use Blender. So, I’ll start out there, and save the thousand bucks.

Having invested, or perhaps simply spent, the money on this, uh, workstation, I now have to actually learn the software. Which of course, isn’t really about software. It’s about the skill, the art, of this. Knowing a tool is not the same thing as  having a skill. You can know how to saw and use a router and a drill press and not be able to make furniture. You see people who want to create graphic products say, “oh, I need to learn photoshop, so I don’t have to hire a designer,” and you think, “Buying a paint brush doesn’t make you an interior designer.”

Breathes heavily, angrily staring into the distance. Philistines.

Okay, I’m still an asshole. 

But seriously. 

I have a doctor’s appointment in a week or so and I thought I’d try to cut the sugar that has crept back into my diet out for a week and see how I feel, and what I weigh, though I am less focused on that than I used to be. As evinced by the ten returning pounds. A recent NYT article cited a meta study showing that, as the fat acceptance folks have been telling us for ages, movement, all by itself, lengthens life more than weight loss by itself.

So if you can only manage one thing, not the other, work on exercise first. I did weight loss by itself, with a few miles of walking daily, sure but no weight training, and got skinny arms… But the arms work fine and I feel better, so, that was a win, too, really.

The daily fast has somehow made me feel like I deserve AS MUCH SUGAR AS I WANT, which, you know, is a lot of sugar. More and more, in fact. So. Yeah. Whack-a-mole again. At what point do I get everything right… and start shooting opiods, I wonder. Darkly. Hah.

Maybe sugar isn’t so bad. So it’s just seven days. I’ll talk about this when it’s over.

Oh, and if you’re noticing how fucking boring this blog is, yeah. I’m trying to use social media to make me healthier and happier, this horse and buggy social media, that I have to actually fucking pay for, the domain name and hosting without the third party marketing built in. No ads here, you notice.

You’re welcome. Enjoy my boring first world problems!

So, looking back at the posts and my meditation timer app, it would seem that I have done this for 35 days. I have missed 4 days, so, yeah, 31 days of ass on the pillow, with a two day gap and two one day gaps. Two streaks of ten days or more.

I have attained a perfect state of enlightenment. My life is now all that I wanted it to be. I have lost ten pounds and I am volunteering in soup kitchens, filled with loving compassion for all of humanity, including anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters, and people who honk their horns behind me when I am stopped at a red light.

Not really.

Can’t say I feel any different. The habit of meditation has not been really created, I don’t think, as I was meditating at 11, after a short run in the rain to try to fill my apple rings, both with a midnight deadline so I could keep streaks going.

My friend Ron has suggested a meditation timer, a standalone device, which would be cut off from social media functions, my app’s pitches for paid services, and thumbnails of people meditating near me. I’m considering it. Using it would reduce my cell phone habit by 15 minutes a day. Heh.

I could, gasp, leave the phone somewhere, and just use the timer.

Looking into 12 step on the various forms of tech addiction. My son, the younger kid, is a video game, uh, user; the perfect child for the pandemic. Only online friends. Only gaming friends. Dislikes restaurants and doesn’t care about movies. Who now is in desperate need for some sort of intervention.

Then there’s me, trying to model better behavior.

I think I’ll stick with the app and try to keep this streak going, even if it means sitting in the dark at 11:30 at night. Maybe it will help me get to sleep, right? One thing at a time.

Fast. Exercise. Meditate.

I wrote 1600 words of, uh, stuff, yesterday, and spent 5 hours or so on the SF course I am working on with my friend Mike McComas. And did the three things above. So. Good day, right? Why don’t I think that? Why do I focus on all the stuff I didn’t do?

Coffee almost finished. TIme to sit. Bumped the timer up to 12 minutes, 4 interval bells of 3 minutes each. Three minutes is a pop song. Twelve minutes half a sit-com. A quarter of my green fitness ring.

And an endless abyss of quiet, boredom, and escape.

The one and only thing you can’t do poorly. As long as you actually do it.

A friend of mine quit video games cold turkey, because he wanted to be more productive. His blood pressure skyrocketed. The cold turkey was dangerous.

One of the signs of addiction, and I want to put air quotes around the word addiction, but won’t, is that after going cold turkey, you experience severe symptoms of loss and withdrawal; the usual ones you know about. Irritability, depression, withdrawal, sleep problems, eating problems, focus problems, etc.

here’s an excerpt from a site about video game addiction:

The video gaming behavior of gaming addicts and non-addicted problem gamers often looks the same. Both groups play a lot, neglect other things in life, and suffer some consequences in their relationships, health, work, or education. The differences sometimes do not appear until moderation is tried. Non-addicted gamers can take a break or limit themselves to certain games or hours, are able to attend to their lives and needs, and often feel much better in the process. Meanwhile, gaming addicts often are afraid of cutting back, fail with any kind of limits, feel too overwhelmed to deal with life, and feel worse when taking a break from gaming. Your attempts at moderation should tell you what you need to know.

So, you don’t really know you’re addicted to something, until you stop trying to do it.

You can swap ‘smart phone’ or ‘social media’ into that paragraph for ‘gaming’ pretty easily.

As much as I have struggled with 12-step programs and addiction models for things like technology, food and sex, I’m now poking at on-line 12 step groups, and see the following breakdown:

• Internet and Technology Addiction
• Social Media Addiction
• Smartphone Addiction
• Streaming Addiction

Of course, you’re not supposed to talk about the meetings, like AA, though I guess I could mention I just sat in on one.

Bumped into the higher power of course, there; it’s a higher-power kinda place, the 12 step group.

Sigh.

I let meditation go until after dinner, and then had a class at 7, which went to nine, and boom, felt like I’d done enough ‘work’ for the day, at some level, and failed.

So, I need bloody timers, which I hate setting, and which weirdly just never work, and / or I need a goddamn schedule to create a real trigger. 

I think it’s gotta be coffee. It’s the one thing I always do when I get up… after medicating the cat, myself, and cleaning the kitchen.

I’m gonna do it while drinking the coffee, which takes some random amount of time. After I’ve had Enough; before it’s done. It can get cold, that’s not a big deal. Or the ice can melt.

My meditation app wants a check in before I meditate, but not one after, which seems dumb; what I find interesting about meditation is that there are things I learn about my current state of mind that fly below the radar normally. How agitated am I? How accepting am I? Is that resignation, depression? Am I looking backward or forward?

Generally backwards, nowadays, as flashes of images of the places I’ve lived life flutter through my mind’s eye, a kaleidoscope I can’t control, except, perhaps, to linger in an image, a moment, and a feeling of the quality of that light. Lying on an oriental carpet, thick and luxurious patterns in blue and white, reading a christmas present, a hardcover Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the smell of the woodfire, the popping and cracking of the logs, and the scent of pine trees from the backyard, the muted conversation of adults, parents and grand parents and aunts and great aunts now all dead and gone. The translucent bars of neutragina soap in my grandparents big bathroom, the one with two vanities and the long wall mirror. My grandfathers shaving mirror, projecting from the wall on its brass accordion, and the boar bristle brush and its little round cake of soap. 

All these people now dead and gone. Murmuring voices echoing inside me.

Fuck aging. I want to be young again. I am young inside–and not in a good way. Trapped in this gently decaying structure. 

There are things I fear I will never accept.

I’ll slip into the void screaming, “NO!”

I have had a very hard time reading the last ten years. Maybe twenty.

I listen to audiobooks, which is like reading, but it’s slower and more time limited, so my overall book consumption has waned from peak reading in my early teens.

I think I retain a bit more, or at any rate I attend differently when I listen, missing bits and picking up on different bits I might have missed if I was reading as I used to, with the dead trees. Re-reading by listening is always fascinating, as you definitely notice stuff you really forgot.

I have a hard time getting though e-books, unless I am reading them out loud to others. They don’t implore me to finish them as does a paper book. In part because I’m never sure how how much I’ve read, and what’s left to read; enough publishers have snuck sneak previews of other books into the ends of ebooks so I’m never quite sure when I will suddenly fall off a cliff and be in some stupid preview I was not warned about; the progress bar will have been confusing me at this point, as I will have been thinking, “man, this feels almost done, but there’s 20% left?”

So, ebooks are rough, and audiobooks take a ton of time.

So I started collecting some old books, for the covers mostly, and was sort of amazed to pick up this paperback, Time for the Stars, and read half of it at a sitting. The way I used to. Now, I’ve read this one at least twice before, and listened to it as well, I’m guessing, but still.

So I am on the look out for stuff that was okay in 65 years ago, 1956, when this was written, but which feels politically toxic now, or just weirdly dated. Or just plain weird in a story telling way. Weird, or novel, if you will. Hah.

Let me preface this by saying I love these books and don’t yell at me about this list being negative, m’kay? Don’t yell at me for loving it, for that matter. Don’t. Blanket pronouncements about RAH? Yeah. Never mind. I know more about his failings than you ever will, bub. Been through the sadness there, and am out on the other side.

Here’s the bullet point list:

• Kids need beatings: RAH believed strongly in ‘loving’ corporal punishment; all the data from the last few decades indicate that corporal punishment doesn’t work, long term, for creating better people. It can work short term for extinguishing some behavior, but it creates more problems than it solves. Everyone agrees on this now, except for certain religious fundamentalists. Who are always wrong. But RAH makes this one point, not in this, but another book, that the first time the State can legally touch a child, in some cases, is after he is 18 and they insert the lethal injection needle. There’s this conservative idea, which many police hold, that beating someone, sometimes, is how you exert loving guidance; this isn’t even a Western idea; grandmotherly kindness, in Zen, is often portrayed as being hit with a stick by grandma when you are doing something dangerously stupid. 
• Newspapers are still a thing on interstellar space craft. Tons of paper in old SF. Nobody foresaw everyone walking around with networked computer displays in their pockets or built into their glasses / contact lenses. This is a weird part of the future that just didn’t occur to SF writers.
• The future has base income and POV characters are pissed about the taxes. This isn’t a complaint, really, but it is interesting that the conservative / libertarian writers of the 40s and 50s foresaw a socialized future where population pressures produced equally shared sacrifices creating a consensus around space colonization; calorie rations being cut for billions, for example. This generation lived through WW2, so I guess they foresaw this as inevitable in times of crisis. 1920s level inequality, staggering wealth and equally staggering poverty side by side, for a century, was never anything these old SF types worried about. At all. Ever. Not till Cyberpunk. COVID marks the first re-emergence of this kind of government response post WW2. The halfway decent early COVID response, to me, feels like retro-SF.
• Dangling unfinished plot threads raise eyebrows in short novel: the Panshin brothers, in their review of Time for the Stars, suggest that Heinlein had simply gotten tired of the book and wrapped it up quickly with a deux ex machina, faster than light travel, aborting many on-going plot threads. Why do the explorers never try to recover the landing team abducted by the lizard creatures? What happened to them? What really happened to the vanished ships that fall out of communication in flight? I was shocked, shocked at this explanation by the Panshins, that a writer would do that. For me, those loose ends made Time for the stars special. Magical even. Stories don’t always do what you expect them to, what you want them to do, what they seem to be telling you they will do. And that can be good.
• Single POC character is Singularly Charming: I honestly don’t feel like the single ‘negro’ character being saintly, charming, and the only religious character, is bad for 1956, but it does reflect the stylized, not fully rounded (human) representation of non-white characters in era. EE Smith would have made this guy a houseboy or porter or servant of course. And Niven would paint everyone purple, so everyone and no one is POC. But of course, none of Heinlein’s side characters are in any way rounded, so he is not doing anyone a particular disservice. 

I could go on and on but I won’t. I have stuff to do. I may keep this kid of post up, and give it a title, too, so people can sort through them by category. 

So, there’s always time to meditate—if I do it at the end of the day. Which feels dumb. I mean, shouldn’t I do it in the morning, and let the clarity and calm inform my fucking day? Huh? Shouldn’t I? What the fuck. Seriously.

But… there’s an appeal, to the gamification on my smartphone, to do it, so you can check it off there, and see a little streak.

What the fuck is that, exactly though?

So I am trying to tease apart the Quantified Self, aka total tech immersion, and use it for Good, not Bad. All these little things that turn into better health outcomes are worth, one would hope, this crazy intrusive wierd-ass smart watch smartphone dopamine machine.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s all methadone for my tech smack habit. Marginally better. Harm reduction. But don’t kid yourself. You are a barnacle on the ass of this big tech behemoth you helped dream into being. A citizen of Trantor gobbling down the Soylent Green and dreaming of the stars.

Still off social media. I think of things I want to say to someone, that are of interest to no one, that I used to post on feeds, figuring, eh, maybe someone cares. And now I think those thoughts and they float away without leaving a mark, and I find myself wondering, why does that feel like a loss?

Not writing them down?

Social media, I think, blogging a bit, turned me into a journal writer. The real reward of the challenges here is an excuse to write a journal. And my ego wants what I write to be read.

Sue Grafton, who wrote the alphabet mysteries that my whole family read, wrote two books at a time, one her book of the year, K is for Killer or whatever, and the other the meta book about the book filled with hugely boring details of the process. Some who read Grafton find her all hugely boring. Private detective work, and police work, is mostly boring–and she writes whole books of it, six to eight hours of boring shit, and then about twenty minutes of pulse-pounding action.

But yeah. You write a book for publication, as you write a boring book, that’s just you sketching, farting around, talking to yourself, because that is how you find things out, as they are written; every now and then some stuff goes from one book to the other, Grafton said, but not often. You mostly know which book you’re writing.

This is my boring book; I need to spend more time on the more interesting ones. What I am addicted to with social media is the instant gratification. I think many writers are. It’s a drug. Writing…. attention. BING! Dopamine! Instagram makes it even easier of course, you don’t even have to write something. Just be cute and take photos. BING! Eat a nice lunch. BING!

What I am fighting, learning to live with, trying to control, is that. The BING!

I’m terrible at this.

I met a tech writer at a company I was freelancing at once, and mentioned I’d sold a few stories to big-ish magazines, and he thought that was very cool. I wondered if I could do tech or business writing, and he said:

“Of course you can. Fiction is harder to write. If you can sell stories you can write anything.”

He’d tried to write fiction, and couldn’t sell much, and then he’d starting writing professionally in other capacities and he realized, he just liked typing about five pages a day; working on the five pages, getting them right.

It didn’t matter what the five pages were about.

I think of that, as I write my five pages a day. That anything not in the books, not in the novels, is eating that energy. This boring book is a more interesting book I’ll never write. So you have to find balance.

And do this as little as possible.