August 17th

 The grief fades. The guilt recedes.

I would not have banked on it. But apparently I am more durable than I thought. I really wouldn't have given good odds of that.

Then again. I'm on maximum dose of mental meds. A hammer of chemical smoothing. Which probably has a lot to do with it.

I am sad. It lingers. I think of Ares a lot. I close my eyes. And lots of images of him flit through my mind. But the memories of him are softening. It somewhat appalls me. There is a part of me that is horrified that I am slowly losing him to a less painful memory. There is another part of me that is.. not grateful.. but.. understands.

Yesterday I spent most of the day in bed. My back/shoulder is brutal. In the scale of things - although it nearly made me pass out. It feels kinda... trivial. Even though it has stopped me dead in my tracks by and large. It's a "minor inconvenience". I am pondering if it's because my threshold for chaos and suffering this year is so high, that anything but suicidal levels of awfulness are merely meh.

Life goes on without Ares. Even with all other factors removed. It feeds back into my general nihilism about life. My problems with people passing away and their memories and impacts and uniqueness all rapidly disappearing turning their life experience into... nothing. An ultimately pointless endeavour. An enormous waste and loss.

For myself. I have doubled down on fatalism. If I die, I die. I don't care. Stopped struggling. Ares is not here anyway. That kinda thing. That being said. There is an inkling. An anti nihilism. If Ares loss - and loss in general - means that much to me. My loss... potentially has the same meaning to others. I say it doesn't matter. I value myself at nil. The evidence is there that that's wrong. I am thinking about it. I know I know. Logically its a duh. Of course. But. I am not at ease with it. Arguably for the first time my zero sense of self worth has met a rational argument for why that might not be the case ( beyond people just saying so - people will say anything :p )

Oh. I did some rough calculations in my head yesterday, of the odds of my dad and Ares coincinding like that. I got to a ballpark 1 in 450 million.

To put that in perspective.

Winning the UK lottery - 1 in 45 million.

Struck by lightning - 1 in 300,000

Hit by an asteroid - 1 in 250,000

Dying in a vehicle accident in a year - 1 in 20,000

So my dad coming to visit at that specific time, was like winning the lottery 10 times.

"Just a coincidence"

Uh huh. It seems implausible. Crazy odds do happen. Are guaranteed to happen. As the joke in Guards Guards goes, a 1 in a million shot is usually about a 50/50. Still. It is an enormously improbable coincidence. And one that isn't just some random statistic, but the most personal thing ever. Which I didn't even factor into the odds. If you factor that into the odds - of it being one of those major life events. The odds go into the billions.

Still not sure what to make of it.

To put those odds further into perspective. If an average person lives to 80. You would need 5000 lifetimes to guarantee that event.

But like I say, thats still lowballing it. Significantly. If you refine it by saying major life event. You end up needing something like 14 million life times. Over a billion years of time. A significant chunk of solar system time.

Uh huh.