New Year's Eve still. Plan on hanging out on the Discord server with the Game Knights. Since we can't hang out and play games in person. 

I'll walk as usual, regular routine. Then maybe have a glass of Plantation Rum. Do some dishes. Clean up in general. There's boxes of things to go through. Stuff I should let go of. There's a curtain rod I've been meaning to hang. I'd have to move some things out of the way to get access to it which is why I haven't done it before. It's certainly time.

I'm watching a British detective mystery show. Very interesting stuff. Everyone's like. "Pardon me, I think you are the murderer; won't you join me in the sitting room and we can discuss it?" It's as if they're operating under the premise that everyone has One Bad Thing they're allowed to do and once it's used up there's nothing to worry about. It's like the mystery is who ate the pie cooling on the window sill. Can't get eaten twice now, kennit? 

Was there anything I planned to do this year? I don't remember. Oh yes, there was a wedding but that has been postponed. Doesn't really count as the type of planning I meant. Goals, accomplishments, that sort of thing. The things we do in rebellion of time's inevitable march. Mostly I've been holding steady. 

That's a good thing, I think. I prefer it anyway, to the other thing. Chaos. Mostly.

Time is another things humans are bad at. New Year's Eve celebrations try to help. Being surrounded by snacks also helps. 

I dreamed last night, and enjoyed my dreams, and now I'm left with the feeling but no memory. How long has it been since I've had a nightmare, I wonder? I've felt afraid in dreams, surely, but I don't recall waking up and still being afraid in many years. 

Maybe because I have dogs and they demand my attention as soon as I wake. And food. No time for lingering emotion; there are practical matters which must be attended to.

I cannot explain the shore. The shore does not need me to explain it. The strand will wind, and so will I, and unwind also, should it please us.

Ocean of ideas stranding.

New Year's Eve approaches. Tomorrow I think will be for staying home and drinking online with friends. That should be fun. 

I dreamed last night. Quite a bit. A somewhat comical bit about people and animals switching minds so the animals were sitting around checking their phones and the people were bounding through meadows. 

In the waking world, there is a vintage/antique shop where fur clothing can be purchased very inexpensively. I pondered the idea of purchasing some, not to to wear, but to make into a kind of book, like a book of carpet samples, but of fur. To be able to feel fox and mink and other animal fur, for science? Seems like a better use of the fur than as a decorative article of clothing. I'm not intrinsically against the use of fur; in my own way I regret my disdain for cotton clothing and my own preference for synthetic materials. No plant-based clothing here, I demand oil. I suppose I do wear my clothing for a very long time; my oldest pair of pants is probably at 8 years?

The Big Book of Portable Animals: For Petting and Pondering

I rode an elephant once. I was excited to touch the animal, but I regret riding it now. I don't know if the elephant was really bothered; this was at the Phoenix Zoo. 

Elephants cost a lot to feed, so maybe charging well-meaning fools for rides isn't too bad in the grand conservation scheme of things.

I was talking to a friend about the kind of horror stories I read these days. Thomas Ligotti, for instance, I've been enjoying because the stories have a way of making you feel like you're losing your mind. He does kind of a baroque thing, repetition with variation, that is a perfect distillation of that feeling when I pick up a book with no bookmark in it and try to find the place where I left off. A moment where the act of reading is almost secondary and I'm outside myself a little, trying to see if I'm recognizing it. Memory being so closely tied to emotion; have I felt this before?

It's unsettling and good. Makes me empathize with the protagonist and that feeling that I'm missing something very important right at the edge of my understanding. And then, even more unnerving, is the feeling that I'm NOT missing anything and what is happening is just what's happening and I'll never get an answer.

It's unsettling and good.

There's a lot of disease of the body analogy to disease of the mind. Stomach problems. Which is a perfect, I think, because there's a sort of impending unknown fear with stomach pain. Your body still works, but something in the fuel of the self is corrupted and there's no limit to how far it can spread. Every new or imagined pain could be related to it, or not. Could be cramps, could be cancer. Could be anything, except anything good.

Lovecraft and Darwin both had digestion issues, didn't they? Hmm....

 

Instagram artist I follow draws to work through their mental issues. Writing can do that too, I think. One writing class I took said don't write creatively as a form of therapy. Or maybe it was just some list of things not to do while writing stories. Like have an opening scene with the character waking up to an alarm. I did have one professor who didn't allow vampire stories. Or at least he said he didn't allow them; as far as I know, no one tested him on it. He was a boisterous man at times, and he said "No vampires!" in the way a dad might say "Don't set anything on fire!"

Writing can be therapeutic; I think wherever I heard that was conveying that if you're trying to write for someone other than you, it's not a good idea to blur those lines. If you're expecting to get feedback on it as a story anyway. I can imagine a comedian telling a bad joke and no one laughing and then saying "That was my mother's favorite joke. She told it to me before she died." Which could be funny. "I'm glad she's not here to see it bomb so hard. I told her it wasn't funny. It was her dying wish that I use it my act. So that was for you Mom. I'm sure you're laughing. In Hell."

Using writing as therapy. Tricky indeed. Very easy to slip into that escapism. And a dangerous kind, because humans seem to be able to overwrite their own memories. There are times when I am reminiscing and I think "Stop. You can't live here." Okay not just reminiscing, but thinking of other paths I could have taken. Garden of Forking Paths indeed. It's the mental equivalent of using my finger to hold my place in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, except using all my fingers.

Touching all these moments of love and loss, while I try to turn the pages with my nose.