~*~ 2026 | 08 | 13 ~*~
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today, i had a pretty good day. everything went very swimmingly, & i felt uninterrupted & in good spirits, carrying on productively all the way through. it has been two productive weeks in a row, & i had even made another sale on ebay today, so i was feeling quite content & pleased with myself. i have spent the week just relaxing & taking care of myself. i did everything in precisely the way i wanted to today, deciding that i'd cap it all off by drawing myself a bath after i was finished warming myself by the outdoor wood stove i've been keeping myself occupied with lately. before i washed myself, though, i took a small peek at the two USB sticks hanging out of the side of my laptop. i have been punished for leaving these hanging around in there before, but only by way of knocking the thing off of my bed in my sleeping, sending it crashing to the ground in ways where the physical devastation of such electronic instruments is obvious & visible, audible. i have been making an effort out of removing them & throwing them to to the bedside table or whatever when they are not in use, but today i noticed they were still in there, & i simply decided oh well, i am quite consciously aware of them, & i'm not going to bed anytime soon, so i'm not going to knock the laptop over.
instead, this time i somewhat innocuously sat down on the laptop, not really noticing anything awry. it's hard to say whether it was even an accident from how unthinking it was, but i did momentarily consider that i might have broken something - or rather than if there were any reason for things to not be working afterwards, that this sitting down would be what did it.
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you see, there is a certain sense of unease & ceaseless fear & self-criticism that pervades pretty much everything i do. it screws with my sense of survival & self-worth, self-preservation. i don't think it's to the extent that i'd say i have OCD or autism or some kind of clinical pathology, but i suppose i am not really accredited in those fields. does such a thing really matter? i don't really think so, but it's not the point of this blog post, so i am going to glaze over that issue & talk about it at a different time. for now, the focus is exclusively on what i know about myself for certain: i have a pretty decent, dare i say "stable" understanding of what to do with my life at this point. i'm unemployed, but i still receive just enough money to get by, so i break down my weeks & days by making lists of stuff i want to do by certain dates, & generally the priorities of what i do first tends to be decided by whether or not it'll either save or make me a little bit more money, which allows me to pursue passion projects or otherwise spend my "disposable" income on things i otherwise wouldn't be able to. people tell me my life is "austere" & that i am very "efficient", & i think to some extent it is true that i don't really consume much, & i do suppose it is quite extraordinary for a person to be able to break even living on the dole, & even moreso for them to be able to support a 4-bedroom house all on their own. what people say gives me the impression that most people would break down & cry that they aren't allowed to order a pizza & give money to netflix or sony or steam or whatever people do, but i do not think people would be doing that if they weren't living under late-stage, america-brand capitalism (the one where you eat the microwave oven'd cows & look at the colour teevee). i think it's more realistic to say that the way that i'm living reflects how the material living conditions of welfare-capitalism are far more restrictive & starvational than life under a socialist planned economy. what people imagine - breadlines, bureaucratic timewaste & paying tribute to feudalistic grain hegemony lest i be starved to death - these are all just features of capitalism; primarily feudalistic, american, small-government capitalism, the kind that spends more money on healthcare & public services whilst offering the worst healthcare & public services in the world. the only difference for me is that i am lucky enough to live in a welfare-state, benefitting from social-democracy under the same kind of empire.
to get back to my story, the reason i use the wood stove is because during the hours of 4pm - 9pm, the electricity company charges me 41c per kWh instead of 14 or 11. at 9pm, the cost goes back to normal. so, by 8:30pm the bath was filling, & about an hour later i was drying off & heating the house off its own grid systems again. after my ablutions, when i initially sat down (half on my laptop, fully knowing that the laptop itself, but possibly not the USBs would survive the meagre weight of my bony ass, as it has done & will do for many years,) i was going to just put a pair of socks & a 2nd pair of pants on, maybe reading something whilst drying my hair in the chicken lamp, but i got sidetracked replying to some messages, & decided i'd lie down for a bit instead, seeing as times were peaceful & i was feeling contented enough to. i fired up my laptop & saw that my USB was indeed broken, showing 0 bytes on lsblk. the thing is, this usb doesn't do anything for me really. it's not really essential to my life at all, it's just a thing i store data on, but i was still pretty upset, sighing as i ordered its cheap replacement. i cracked the old one open with my teeth & inspected its guts - the pcb was cleanly snapped by my sitting. it was a new-looking, space-saving pcb, with all of the chips & components baked into it. zero way for me to save it. i tossed it out & just sat there thinking. i thought about the data i lost, i thought about the good day that i had. i sat there & marinated in the weird sense of displacement & uneasiness i felt at knowing nothing was really going wrong, that i was, if anything, only really being temporarily inconvenienced. even on pleasant days, even when nothing is going wrong, even when nothing actually goes wrong, there are still plenty of pitfalls of tragedy to sink into. they are like excuses, & everybody has them. to be truly content is not to worry about these kind of things & continue on, but admittedly i still feel a substantial emotional miring from this. it is certainly not world-destroying or catacylsmic, but i still feel the need to write about it here, i still feel a compulsion to honour & notarize this object's "death".
the sensation of those two combinations of feelings mixing, as in elation, contentedness & control mixing with error, uncertainty & a reluctance towards both chastising & forgiving myself at once over a totally innocuous act, it was all quite strange i suppose, but it is not at all something i am foreign to. in fact i would say i experience this kind of "balancing of balances" to a nauseatingn degree every day of my life. it reminded me that only yesterday i'd made quite a long & excessive car trip to pick up some import confectionary that i'd ordered directly from a wholesaler at 2am. again, whilst i did not make that decision irrationally, & whilst there is plenty for me to live off of & not be rendered starving or homeless, i still feel like the entire escapade was an avoidable & dumb mistake. there was one moment in that drive which really summed it all up - i was excitedly speeding along the freeway, once again very contented & satisfied that i'd made it almost the whole way without being detected by any speed cameras, only to zone out in my joy, forget my foot on the accelerator, & zoom straight through a set of cameras at about 115kmph. much in line with the running theme, this was a totally innocuous thing, but i still fucked up, & there is a bitter sting salting the wound in how unnecessary & easily avoidable it all was. why did i decide i wanted that particular confectionary? why did i decide i wanted confectionary? why did i have to zone out at that particular time? i enjoy long & pointless drives. i enjoyed every second of that day, & i enjoyed every second of today, but i still feel pangs of genuine guilt & pain. i honestly feel i am not worthy or good enough to use a computer or car. do i have some kind of sick craving for structure? am i yearning for punishment? do i want to be held accountable? not really. i kind of just want to work & be useful & effective, but i live under capitalism, i live in a welfare state. so forget working, i refuse it, & forget a normal life, because i'm incapable of it. am i just fated to teeter the edge of normalcy like this forever, alienated by my material conditions? probably, at least that sounds more accurrate to me. i think i deserve a lot better than that, despite my self-criticism.
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part of me living under this welfare-capitalist constitutional monarchy is learning to be content with myself when i break USBs & potentially get speeding fines. if i want to look after myself, i am going to need to find a way to actually communicate all of this to a professional & address these consistent issues with integrating into society that i've seemed to have since forever. that seems to be the next step for me. i want to write more structuredly; it would have been nice to expand into a few more paragraphs here. i feel like 1.5k words is "okay" for a "short" blog post. i have two more pieces that i will be retroactively adding to the site, they were started all the way back in june/july. the time is passing quickly & i am quite comfortable, but i would benefit from a kick up the ass regarding a few personal projects, which i suppose is only natural after spending a while focusing on tying off other loose ends.
overall, it's been pretty good to have spent this week just chilling, compared to the at-home bustle of clearing out my garage & other such boring-sounding tasks of home maintenance & gardening, the prospects of which excite me beyond any of the stimulation or fake-worldliness afforded to me by art or videogames. simulacra is important because art imitates nature i think, not the other way around. perhaps i can read on this, i know there are books about it.
:) :) :) thanks for reading :) :) :)
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