wandering the sheltering sky

Last Sunday when i said i was going to come back and finish that journal entry the next day, i really meant that i was going to come home from work and FINISH THAT JOURNAL ENTRY THE NEXT DAY. 

I’m in a trap and i’ve been in this trap for a long time. I don’t remember what i wrote last week and i’m too lazy to look at it but i think i outlined the general problem- weekdays are comprised of waking up at 04.30, starting my shift at 06.00, getting home around 15.00 and almost always in an absolutely depleted state. Just emotionally and physically drained. I might do some housework but it probably won’t be much and some evenings i don’t do any at all. Some nights i put together something to eat, provided it doesn’t take much prep time. 

This goes on Monday through Friday. 

Saturdays are a mess. You’d think they would be fantastic days because i don’t have to go to work but there’s something i haven’t explained. 

I am no longer able to sleep through the night most nights. I will wake up anywhere between midnight and 2am; give or take an hour. I will not be able to fully wake up but i’m also not able to go back into REM. I do not obsess or fixate on anything in particular and exercises like reading, breathing exercises, counting, etc… do nothing for me. 

It takes me about 2, sometimes 3 hours to fall asleep again. 

Then always, always, always, i wake up around 04.30. My alarm is set for 05.00 but i’ve only slept that late on a weekday maybe twice in the last 5 to 7 years. I just KNOW when it’s time to get up. 

Here’s what happens to me on Saturdays. EVEN IF i get a full night of sleep, i am stuck in this perpetual fugue state. I just cannot get out of it. I’m unable to be fully in the moment, i’m barely able to concentrate, my motivation is absolute shit and while i MAY get some things around the house done, they tend to be relatively minor, although i do mow one of the lawns if it needs it. 

Then Sunday comes along. This is the only day of the week where i feel fully present, mentally alert and motivated to do anything. And that “anything” is always, always, ALWAYS running for groceries in the morning, then housework, yardwork and laundry. 

And this has become a cycle of… i don’t want to call it self loathing because it’s not but it’s certainly self directed anger and frustration because i want to paint, i want to write and i have guitars, a bass and a keyboard and i never do anything to learn them because from start to finish on a Sunday, i have shit to do. And because i’m an Eternal Bachelor™, there’s no one to help me. Anything that i want to do, i have to do. Anything that i need to do, i have to do. I don’t have anyone in my life to help me and i don’t make enough money to hire anyone to help me. 

By the time that 4 or 5p rolls around, it’s time for me to shower, get my laundry sorted and wind down. 

This has been my life for years now. And i don’t know if it’s because of this or i’m like this for other reasons, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to connect with people. 

I don’t know if i’ve talked about this before and just as i was a few minutes ago, i’m still too lazy to look at my previous entries. But it’s the singular issue that makes me think of this journal and what i would say about it. 

I have to explain something so that statement makes sense. Very few people read this if any. I’m kind of a cul-de-sac on the internet. A tired, old house that has zero curb appeal and is about as inviting and enticing as a manual on dental tools from the 70s. And because my finances are so tight (adjusted for inflation, i make SIGNIFICANTLY less than i did 5 years ago, which probably deserves an entry of its own), i can’t afford a counselor. And while i’m certainly not against a counselor or psychologist, i’m also not sure what i could tell them because whatever it is that’s causing my growing separation from people isn’t specifically identifiable. It is a shadow that hides in my peripheral vision and doesn’t let me look directly at it nor does it offer any hints as to how it came to be nor how to dismiss it. 

And i suppose this would be yet another case of my general rambling into the void but something happened a few days ago that caused me to reflect on the distance i’ve traveled since 2012. 

I have some unused gmail accounts that have fallen into neglect. One used to be my primary account. After the breakup and some particularly bitter emails from my ex, i abandoned it. Ugh… let me come back to this account and some things i came across another time. 

But there was another account that i created before the breakup that i used for a Fetlife account that i don’t think i’ve logged into for 8 or more years. As a side note, if anyone feels the need to try to shame me for having a Fetlife account at any point, be aware that i am absolutely, 100% impervious to being shamed when it comes to matters of sexuality. That sort of shit is for insecure, broken little whining shits and they can fuck off. 

ANYWAY – as i was saying… i used that account to correspond with some women. There might have been one or two that were women that i corresponded with because of Fetlife but the others were women that i’d met through other means. 

It was a reminder of just how dark and broken i was back then. To be honest, i don’t really need much of a reminder for that. What i don’t like is having to acknowledge just how fucking desperate and stupid i was then. I used so many coping strategies to maintain a relation with someone that my friends and i now see as well disguised white trash who got pulled into a pseudo intellectual cult riddled with the human wreckage of broken people incapable of knowing how to distinguish getting fucked from being loved. 

I don’t know. Polyamory isn’t a cult, per se. Unfortunately it’s rife with people with cult adjacent behaviors, beliefs and who mistake both for critical thinking. 

That’s an albatross of shame that is difficult for me to fully forget. I’m not too ashamed of it mind you. I understand why i went down the path of polyamory, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is probably worth it’s own journal entry if i haven’t done so already. 

The thing that caught me; the thing that i probably could have just said outright several paragraphs ago now is that reading those old emails from the person i used to be – there was a certain brightness to him. There was hope, desire and certain flourish in the way he wrote. And while i have no desire to be that person again, i have very little, if any hope in my life now. The years of solitude and loneliness have carved and hollowed me into someone that wakes up, goes to work, is too exhausted to do anything fulfilling when he gets home, is too discombobulated and too busy on the weekends and never makes time to do the things that matter: paint, write and learn music theory. 

So there you have it. This is my casting my message in a bottle into the endless seas under a sheltering sky. If you’ve read this, know that just by virtue of getting this far, you’ve been my silent therapist. 

I do think of this site more often than my posts suggest. My life is largely sleep (and barely at that), work, then i usually come home absolutely exhausted and unable to think of, let alone do anything creative. When Saturday comes around, i’m usually emotionally depleted from work the previous week and i tend to just stay in this fugue state all day, then somehow manage to usually stay up too late.

Sundays are the only day in the week (usually) where i’m rested. And it’s filled with chores and errands and sometimes cooking large batches of food for the upcoming week.

All of this is about as exciting for you to read as reading a catalog of wallpapers but if i were to be honest about it, there is a larger point to be made. 

Unfortunately it’s getting to the point in my day where i need to transfer to my bedroom and start getting ready for bed. 

One thing i’ll say before i go is that when i leave for work, it is now pitch black outside. We are in this odd period of the year where it’s not hot enough to be summer nor cool enough to be autumn. Still, this afternoon, an awning of grey stretched across the horizons and it rained for a while. It was relaxing in a way that i haven’t felt since spring.

Oh, before i go- i’ve been trying to paint more lately. It has not been going well. I may talk more about this as this post develops. 

Welcome to my late Sunday afternoon ramblings of a mostly sane man with allergies, stopped up sinus’ and no script. Lots of pauses as the voices in my head tell me what to say next and the microphone is a cheap, headset mic. I’ll work on my production values in the weeks and months to come but i wanted to just hammer out something tonight. 

Note: i didn’t edit out the pause at the start that’s used for noise reduction. I’ll go back and edit it out eventually. Come to think of it, i’m probably going to edit out a lot of the pauses because listening to me speak sometimes is like waiting for a cold engine to finally catch. 

Also, i forgot that i was streaming SomaFM in the living room – so if you pick up some music in the background, that would be the ever popular Groove Salad helping out. 

Hi. I’m tinkering with a new template and the interface for modifying it is vastly different than what i’m used to. I’ll keep tweaking it but in the meantime, things are likely to look a bit garish around here for a while.

-s.

Two Saturdays ago, along with about two hundred other people, had a memorial for the life of Barbara Cramer. A lot of people shared their stories which is probably the biggest reason why i went. I wanted to hear the voices of others that knew and loved Barbara. I think the most remarkable thing was this thread that wove itself into everyone’s story – when you spoke to Barb, she was there. She was genuinely there with you to listen, to talk to you and to enjoy that moment.

In other words, she was sincere. She was genuine.

Continue reading “Saying goodbye to a friend | part two”

Updated 30 mar 25.

Some years ago a man that worked where I worked died of complications onset by the covid 19 virus. There were hundreds of people at his memorial and of those, a handful of us that gamed with him. I didn’t know Eddie well but i’d helped him several times (i’m a desktop support monkey in a heavy, industrial environment) and of the two LAN parties that Barbara hosted, Eddie was there both times.

Barbara and her husband, Cody, was there for Eddie’s memorial. I was a bit shocked at just how few of us from work were there because he was deeply loved by many where we worked.

Continue reading “Saying goodbye to a friend | part one”

I had a few things on my list that i was supposed to do this weekend; not least of which was to complete an entry here that i started a few days ago. Unfortunately i’m having difficulty sleeping these days and my three day weekend ended up being a three day stretch of being stuck in a fugue state.

There’s nothing newsworthy going on with me and whatever rants i may have in store are pretty tame (but hopefully amusing). More than anything, i’m making this entry to remind myself to get off my ass and start writing again. Writing is kind of like painting in that the less i do it, the less i want to do it. But writing is also like painting in that i need to do it because i need it.

To that end, i’ll make it a point to turn my focus this week toward those things that i put off this weekend – publishing videos from my converted ACTV tapes, painting and writing.

I have no doubt that i’m not going to finish this entry to the degree that i want it to be finished. I usually rehearse what i want to say for days before i put my fingers on the keyboard. I find the strands, i pull and tease them apart, then as i try to find a way to work them back into each other, i feel for a certain type of cadence; a rhythm to my thoughts and how they interconnect. Once i have that, i try to weave them back into a tapestry with some parts fitting into others with the hope that once completed, there is a cohesiveness and singularity to whatever it was that was on my mind.

This feels a bit loose and disjointed. Maybe it’ll congeal as i keep going.

I’m not sure i should be writing tonight. Technically speaking, i had enough sleep last night but i don’t think i had enough REM. So let’s see where this goes and if it holds together well enough as a rough draft, i’ll publish it but with the caveat that it’s likely to be revised a few times.

Parallel to everything that i’ve written about in the first two parts is something that has been growing in me for several years.

the disconnect.

Continue reading “the disconnect | part three”