Oh no, not again

the &c. cable: some extremely minimal notes

All of it is, basically, junk.

I should probably just throw it away. Only of course I can't stand to do that. There's the whole sunk-cost thing, because this is stuff that I cared about enough to pack away and hang on to, that I was interested in, that I was in the middle of working on, that I was sure I would be able to return to someday and finish. It all meant something.

Does it mean anything now? Massive regrets, mostly. There's hardly anything I've ever made that I don't regret, sometimes very painfully. None of it ever found anywhere to go. Nobody ever wanted it. I never found a buyer or a gallery to take me on. I never found a working group to be part of. I never figured out how to market myself, to become a brand.

And now my life is so full of other obligations, that I don't want, but that are more or less required for my survival (and other people's), that it doesn't seem very likely that I'm going to be doing a lot of dedicated creative anything, any time soon. I'm surrounded by all the no-longer-relevant detritus of the last twenty or thirty years of my life, and going through the boxes feels like sandpaper on a sunburn.

if I'm functional enough to sit down and type something and post it, I'm doing better than I was.

realistically, many interactions are not a-bucket-of-green-slime level of bad. they're more like being pooped on by a bird.

The algae-filled pool is a beautifully literal piece of symbolism, isn't it. A metaphor made real, for everyone to look at and laugh and point.

From there, though, the conversation nearly always goes in the direction of how bad everything is, and how it's inevitably going to get worse. Everyone I talk to wants to wallow in misery all the time. I've gotten extremely wary and gun-shy about talking to practically everybody, at this point. I never know which secret word or phrase is going to trigger a sudden deluge of grievances, which I'm expected to absorb and validate, and then follow up with some kind of reassurance or cheering-up routine. And then the person I'm talking to feels better. Hooray.

Does anyone remember the Nickelodeon show where kids got buckets of green slime dumped over their heads? They knew it was going to happen. They knew they were standing in the spot under the bucket. We never actually had cable when I was a kid, so I only ever saw the show a couple of times, and I don't know all the specifics. Was there a particular word that triggered the slime? Or did the magic word change from one episode to the next?

I know that any conversation I get sucked into is likely to suddenly dump a bucket of green slime all over me. I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day, or the next several days, metaphorically cleaning myself off, scraping gunk out of my hair, my eyes, my nose. I'm going to have to put in all the extra time and work it takes to recover from a sudden brain-dousing in cold foul goop.

I'm so tired. I'm so incredibly depressed, for all the same reasons the people around me are perpetually in need of a receptacle for their mental garbage juice. Plus some more individual reasons of my own, because we all have those in addition to the larger-scale crap going on in the world. I know how to be depressed; I've been depressed for most of my life, and I mostly have methods for dealing with it. But none of them are working anymore, because I'm too overwhelmed.

nice days are almost the worst. when the temperature is perfect and the sky is beautiful and the humidity is mercifully low, then I feel like I should be doing something. but I don't really do things, not anymore.

I used to be a person who did things. now I am a person who used to do things.

ERMAHGERD