July 16th

 A better couple of days. But it's a struggle. Fighting hard. Wavering between isolation and not. At times I get the teeth gritted will to push myself, others I just slump.

It comes in fits and starts. I am fighting very hard.

The meds are absolutely helping. Without them I would disappear down a rabbit hole for months. But still. A hard grind along the floor even with meds, which is.. new.

Thursday I teetered on the edge. So I went swimming again. Was good. Tired. Shaky. But good.

I doubled down. Went round to Hazels to fix her broken wall. Even though I was tired. And shaky. Fuck it. 20 minutes later I was back home. And took Athena for a walk.

I was aware I was taking the piss. Hard burn for me these days. But I seem to have scraped through. Although Friday. Friday I ended up mostly doing nothing and bouncing in and out of crappy sleep. So. Maybe that was the CFS price. Maybe. It certainly seemed to do my mentalry good, if not my physical. Hilarious rock and a hard place.

Haven't spoken to my family in a while. I have dropped off the radar it would seem.

But a few people have pinged me now and again. Checking if I am ok. Despite my best attempts at isolation.

I feel like I need to embrace the isolation. That few really give a shit push comes to shove. Lives to lead. Yada blah. Still.

There is a thread in there I think of a distance from my family. Sometimes closer, often times not. Don't know. I think there are good intentions there. But. We just don't know how to hang together. There is a lack of ... checking. Involvement. Perhaps I am being unfair. But then. I see different levels of engagement with different people. I can tell when people really care.

I don't know. I shouldn't read too much into it all. 

Still.

Despite not feeling lonely. It makes me wonder if a lot of stuff going on is just that utter void of closeness. That fucked up dysfunctional family thing we have that has caused us all to have a certain pattern to us.

For me. In my relationships with others. I am the antithesis of that. People matter. How they are doing matters. If they are struggling then offer an ear at the very least.

Does it matter ? I like to think it does.

Perhaps it doesn't really.

Well. Anyway. If nothing else. In isolation, I think the swimming is doing me good.

Nausea et al has been mostly stable. I am avoiding a whole bunch of things in my diet. Eating hap hazardly. And on a half dose of my stomach meds. Not sure if its the half dose. Or my avoidance of other stuff, or both ( I think it's both ), but things seem to be slowly stabilising. I am managing to avoid the worst of the nausea, and the worst of the whateveritis IBS type stuff. So. Good. I suppose. But my eating is very headspace. I have to think about what to eat. It's not easy. Sometimes I can't be bothered. It's too much work to sit and think about what to eat next.

Moving on from me.

Stuff in the US seems to be going from bad to worse. I am ignoring it mostly. But still. The unstoppable ball of crap rolls on. I see people - serious, academic, thoughtful people, who study such things for a living - talking more and more about a US civil war. It's beginning to become apparent which way things are heading. I watched one video from a professor who has studied this kind of stuff all his life. Very objective. Non emotional. Factual. And it was heavy. The likelihood of bad shit coming is serious. Not only for the US. But then the repercussions of all the other poised levers. The world is going to change. Surprisingly quickly. There is likely to be a lot of blood and suffering. Major wars. And the old order is going to wash away. And be replaced with something.. a whole lot less nice.

I have seen this forming for sometime. But there's a very heavy feel to it when you start seeing all those things discussed as significant possibilities by academics. It becomes very real.

The academic analysis upshot basically is, the rules are written by the winners. Those with power. Attempts at having a world police, and an order not based on power have to date, mostly failed. The UN is toothless. Up til now the US has set what the rules are. "Democracy". Or rather the US version of it - IE exploitative capitalism and your markets must be exploitable to our rich people / corps. But also a notion of freedoms and choices. Ish. The US is set to fall - it is divided like almost never before. A tampered election which neither side will admit to losing. A civil war - where people are going to be drafted in - quite likely which wont end decisively. A fractured and bloodied US that is no longer united. China is already at parity with the US in a lot of ways. China will set the rules for the future. Expansionism. Empire building. Russia and Europe are locked in a squabble. Over culture. Empire building. Money. Influence. In an uncertain world with the US gone and China the world power, who knows how that pans out. Probably not well for Europe. That's not my analysis. That's the academics. I see no flaw in it.

Eh, enough doom and gloom. Perhaps the world will zig instead of zag. Poised on a knife edge. Oddly enough it all starts with the rot at the heart of the US. I suppose all empires fall. And often it's horribly messy.

Ignore it. Move on. Let someone else deal with it. I am too old and too ill.

That being said.

I saw something today.

Something I often repeat here. That I am not built for this world. I don't fit. I am fucked up. A broken build that feels too much. Yada blah.

I saw something. First half was so familiar. The second half. Not familiar. And very heavy.