16th Jan

 A good couple of days, been feeling better, weird chest pressure shit in the mornings, but, huh, uh huh, part of the Ongoing Bullshit, I'm just kinda.. ignoring various flashing lights as they flick on and off. Part of the new normal.

But overall, good. Didn't do shit yesterday except stream and play games. Chill out. Probably no bad thing.

Checked the butt situation yesterday. The hole.. is almost gone. More like a.. a.. shallow crater now. Ha. Pretty impressive though, surgery seems to have worked a treat. It has been quite the time since my ass has been normal. Huzzah.

This coming week is going to be quite a busy one on top of the usual work malarkey. An Athena walk with a friend, GP appointment, another friend is gonna drop by and have a chat - he's feeling the crunch, and a tentative return to the chiropracter, which, whilst I've agreed to go back, I think I will do it for another month then be done. We've wandered off into quackery at this point I think and as I'm gonna cut down work, I could do without extraneous expenses.

Not feeling inspired at all today. Very little creative energy or va-va-voom. I do want to noodle with a bit of artwork I briefly toyed around with, but ehhh. I don't particularly like flat days like this, nothing is terrible per se, but little inspiration to do shit. From experience I know these patches can last anything from half a day to a few weeks before they blow over and I want to do shit again. Depending on exhaustion, work, mind state et al.

Ares is still following me around a lot lately. Every day. Sometimes I do it on purpose. Kind of thing. Look at where he used to sit if I was in the kitchen. Ho hum. I am realising that the thing I have for him is super personal. No one can really know. No one can see all the time we spent or shit we did. In some ways it makes it feel unreal. The line between your imaginary friend and a real one. If no one ever really sees your real friend, are they just imaginary ? I get the difference. But. Eh. I am still processing the whole, what the fuck is this bit of life about, trying to find a meaning that I know doesn't really exist. I know I will never really process the whole nihilist reality of the universe, as in, never really be at peace with it from a human experience point of view, and processing death just fits into that bigger picture. Senseless. I don't get it. I'll never be happy about it. Or accept it. Cruel.

On that note. Getting mixed messages from down South. The care home spoke to my brother with a fairly dire warning about her breathing. Wasn't over it. Struggling. She had slipped into a coma. Ambulance called. The brought her round with "something they don't usually do". But. The struggle is real. They said if you wanted to see her, don't wait. A day later, her breathing was a bit better.

But it seems. She is badly wobbling at the moment with that fucky chest. All of us are prepped for her to go. I asked if my Brother was ok. He was alright. Fine. No doubt that when she goes, it will be another small bomb placed under the family. We've been through a lot of shit the last few years. This will be another pivotal moment I think. It will draw a line under many many things, most of them, not great at the very least.

There was a time, before shit kicked off, that I would talk to my mom almost every day. I would keep her involved and thinking, not leave her alone in her prison of an MS body, and I would get to talk to someone every day, talk shit through, be sad, be honest, not have to guard myself too much.

I kinda miss the normality of that, even though, at that point it was far from a "normal situation". But all those things slowly disappear, sand through your fingers, eroding who you are and your life until nothing remains. Very nihilistic. For me the first.. quarter.. of my life seemed to have a point. A destination. Do the thing. Build better. Full of possibilities. As time wears on the understanding of the impermanence of everything heaves into view, the things that you think matter, do not, everything turns to dust, you can look back through past generations to see the memory of them nothing more than a shadow. All just a crazy commercialised game of Buy The Shit. Collect The Kitchen Appliances, before it resets, gets wiped down, and no one knows, or cares, just how many appliances you collected. Doesn't matter if you won or lost. Succeeded or Failed. Just blown away in the wind.

Brutal.

You can see why humanity keeps on insisting there is an afterlife to negate that brutal nihilism.

And as for my mom. Let's focus right in on that. Her life. Her experiences. Will disappear. Her life as a young girl. The cherry tree that as a girl she grew from a pit that was thrown away by her mom. And ho much that meant to her. Even 75 years later. Running home to sit on her dads lap whom she loved. Her relationship with her dad - good. Her mom - complex, bad. Her brother - good. All those events. Stories. Struggles. Things that only I know about her ( that my brother and sister dont know ). All will dissolve into nothing. A passing stranger on the street will never know she existed. Or her struggles or story. The good things she did. The evils. The only mark of her passing will be the three kids she had. A repeating pattern of impermanence driven on by biological hardwiring to replicate. That too in time, fading to dust.

Seems an awful lot of effort, pain, suffering, LIFE, to just.. be gone. No point. Much struggle. Nothing to show for it. In any other situation, people would - and do - give up.

I read an interesting academic piece the other day tracking our awareness of nihilism as a concept. Or more precisely. Our understanding that our place in the universe was incredibly fragile and almost certainly doomed. It's a fairly modern idea. Up until around the 19th century, most of humanity was still pretty convinced it was A Number 1, and irrepressible, inevitable, and the master of all ( and the earlier back you go, the more convinced we are that we are the center of the universe ). Only as modern science started to show us the record of other lifeforms wiped out on this planet, extinction events, and we learned math at how to work out probabilities and watch the stars that we realised, oh shit, our odds are unimaginably long. So, very, very, very long. We are not the first after all. We are not going to be the last. Uh oh. 

Perhaps it is akin to the child losing its innocence and starting to realise the actualities of the world it lives in. No happy endings. No neat solutions. No guarantees. Dark. Dangerous and liable to fuck you for the laughs. Perhaps thn as a species we have started to grow up a little, leaving our naive fantasies and superstitions behind to enter into a colder understanding of the universe. Many of us are not ready for that. Still holding onto an idea of heaven. Of a referee judging our actions and handing out gold stars to make everything have a point. But. Science. Dismissing the fairy tales. Knowledge. Information.

Better information. And. As we all know. The more you know. The less happy you become.

Damned to a surprise fiery end if you don't learn, knees in the dirt praying to your sky chariot to deliver you from the extinction event, damned to a miserable nihilistic end if you do learn how to swat away the planet killing asteroids, but realise you dont matter, and will die out anyway, trapped by physics in an infinitely large wasteland of emptiness and time.

Pay your money, take your choice. There were never any guarantees or happy endings anyway.

Uh huh.

Round and round the philosophical hamster wheel you go. Nothing matters. Nihilism. If it doesn't matter. Just enjoy it. Do things you like. Screw everything else. Hedonism. But what's the point. Misery. Lack of motivation. Nihilism. Well. Make up a reason. Existentialism. You make the rules. In a pointless universe ? You're inventing pink fairies to please yourself ? Basically a more complicated and tortured hedonism. And super subjective. As subjective as it gets. Where is your scientific objectivity. None of it really matters when you study it. Nihilism. 

No answer. Well. One. Possibly. Impossibly far off. Far fetched. Full of what ifs. But. Maybe. But. We are so far away from that, like an amoeba is to a space shuttle.

Eh. Meh. Turn the brain off. It doesn't help at the higher altitudes. Turn it on enough to make the tea. Then switch it off.

So. Meditation then.

Ha ha.

Nietzsche was imho, the most on point philosopher of "modern" times. Forget everything else. Nihilism is the monster you are going to have to beat. Or be eaten by it.

On that cheery philosophical ramble, I will sign off. Going to make a chicken stew today. Let it cook for Many Hours. Make the house smell yummy, and have a nice dinner to look forward to.

The simple things.

Chicken Stew Philosophy.

A house that is full of yummy smelling food tends to make you feel a good deal better about the universe.

Discuss the influence your subjective biological hardwiring has on your perception of the objective universe. 

AKA, things are better with chocolate.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas