Somebody in the office building ordered pizza at 10 am and they are my hero.

My savings have broken $20,000. This is uncharted territory for me. I try not to think about it. It's invested, after all, so another recession could wipe it out. It's a concern, but what other options are there? Start an off-shore tax haven? Bitcoin? Meh. The meat grinder keeps on grinding. I'm still in it, and maybe if I get lucky I'll be able to hop out before it's too late.

The TV I purchased is one of those listening TV's. Voice-activated, it says. I avoid saying anything incriminating around it. All my careful plotting and scheming to ensure that I avoid world domination are done in silence. Things are going well, very well. I'm in an optimal position to ensure that I never achieve real power and influence. What a nightmare that would be.

I remember Livejournal had a field to enter what music you were listening to while journaling. This makes me wonder if I should note it. For the last week, I've been listening to Tom Waits, New Orleans blues, Gogol Bordello, that sort of thing. If there's a theme to the music, I'd say it's like being dressed in a once-fine suit out in the frigid cold, cradling an ember in your arms and blowing gently to keep it alive.

And occasionally flipping off the fat-cats as they look down upon you from their penthouse suites. It changes nothing, but their look of indignation makes you chuckle.

Random Word Generator.

Proof. House. Poetic. Sexless. Disturbance. Executive.

Hmm, that's a lot of random.

Proof makes me think of evidence, then alcohol. Also a little bit of the proofing oven at the bakery in which I once worked. Little croissants went in, and then big beautiful croissants came out.

House. Home. Close yet so far. Projects and opinions, grand aspirations and neglected details. My disorder.

Poetic. Not really.

Sexless. Without sex, like no sex chromosome? Bacteria-type living organisms, and inanimate objects in a language that doesn't engender them?

Disturbance. The current president. Ha-cha-cha. He's cracking.

Executive. The executive washroom, with golden fountains and marble sinks, with lush personal hand-towels and an aloof wandering peacock.

All stepped up.

Bonus word! DEFECTION

Where you say no, I won't be part of this world. And then magically transform into an aloof wandering peacock.

Random Word Generator go!

Pipes Companion Skull Rough Candy Starfish
Celebrity Parallel Analytical Deletion Crew

Deletion: Somewhere in the library of lost novels are all the words you've ever typed out and then deleted. Literary cherry blossoms raining down, changing the whole world for a moment, an ephemeral season, then swept away.

Celebrity: It's everywhere. Plenty for everyone. I suppose there may not be enough money to pay everyone for their celebrity. I feel like celebrity is presumed to come with profit. If it didn't, would it still be as desirable?

Pipes: Versatile building material for people too lazy to weld, and perhaps hamsters. Pipe mansions.

Companion: Partner in crime. Adviser. Strange bedfellows. Bulwark against despair.

Analytical: Yes. Reveal the connections, shared electrons, overlapping desires. Intent and the actualized. The tedious set-up before the punchline of irony.

Starfish: Radial symmetry. All arms, no legs. Named after the representation of the idea of stars. Celestial bodies with arms spiraling outwards. Radial symmetry.

The pain is less today. In my feet. The annoyance is less today.

Walking a lot. Not much else. The office is bustling today. Difficult to concentrate with all these lives swirling around me. Need my sensory deprivation suit, aka my winter coat and those horse blinders.

Tom Waits on the Pandora station. Grim and jaunty, just how I like it. 

Went to the online Random Word Generator. The words it gave me are as follows: crutch, approximation, vast, geometry, elbow, amoebic.

Reminds me of story cubes. 

Crutch. I've got one of those. Sometimes I think I'm mostly an elaborate exoskeleton of crutches around one working limb. 

Approximation. Everyone is an approximation. People have too many dimensions for us to sort them easily, so we flatten them out, prop them up. Organized and unknowable.

Vast. It's all vast. We are made of oceans. 

It was 4 am when I was pulled from sleep by a vestigial feeling of responsibility. In the dark and the cold were shadow shapes bobbing their heads to silent music. I knew these guys. They only hear unspoken things. They knew me too, and turned their heads toward me, still bobbing. I strained to hear what they weren't listening to, but I was too awake now. They drifted silently, in single file, out of the bedroom and down the hall. Still bobbing.

I cocooned myself in blankets and fell back asleep.

* * * *

The family has a relatively new tradition of getting pictures with Santa. I've not been a part of this tradition. This time, I went. It was fine. I was wary of becoming overly-emotional and making things awkward, but my family was just entertaining/annoying enough that I couldn't dwell on it. Also, I was carrying my niece, Noel, and she's only a year old so she doesn't give a baby poop about my personal temporal narrative. She was just trying to grab everything she could in Santa's workshop. It's a good instinct; I'm sure we'll get along great.

Another National Novel Writing Month has come and gone. I have written no novels. Maybe I'll write one on my week off. I won't be able to waste time with my favorite pastime, sleep, so why not write. I think I owe people a few short stories anyway. Genre stories. Maybe I'll dig up those requests.

My mother is not-so-secretly excited that she might get the chance to take care of me while I recover. Mothers must mother, after all. Perhaps I'll let her dote on me a bit. Maybe she'll get lucky and I'll be too weak to be an ass.

I'm halfway-excited to suffer. I blame my Catholic upbringing. No, not really. I'm intellectually curious about how much me I'll be able to be when I'm not in control. More me, or less me? Jorge Luis Borges wrote about his experience with a bout of what sounds like sepsis, after he was cut by the edge of an open window. He marveled how his friends and loved ones would come and talk to him so calmly, while he, he was in hell.

I should contact my surgeon's office. They'll probably want money and whatnot. I didn't write yesterday because I used my work break to contact another physician's office about a billing discrepancy. I'll be getting a refund.

Oh, I set up my 4K TV. (Samsung Electronics UN40MU6300 40-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV (2017 Model)

It's pretty. The higher resolutions appears to mean higher sensitivity on the controls and I am currently terrible at Destiny 2 PVP. The input lag is pretty low for this TV, but it might be that. There may be lag from the PS4 Pro itself, since the game is not a 4K game, but has some up-scaling thing happening.

I'll suffer through, and learn. Well, suffer definitely, and learn hopefully.

Mundane tasks are of vital import. Showering while barely awake, standing outside in the cold while the dogs deliberate on the best spot to pee, idling in the car at a stop light, all of these things are half-open doors to inspiration.

Then work comes and drains that inspiration. Sucks the color out of rose-red dreams and leaves a dull-grey husk. Left with just enough energy to work on whatever it is that makes someone else money.

I dreamed pretty well last night. My friends Donovan, Lauren, Matt, and Alan were all playing a game with wide, flat stones that they held in their hands. The stones were no wider than of the palm of my hand, except for Lauren's. She had a stone the size of a baseball mitt. They weren't all the same stone, either. No precious stones. The stone size did not seem to be the deciding factor in the game they were playing.

Still feel like I'm waiting. Maybe because of the upcoming surgery. I speak, and I sneeze, and I cough, and I sing in the shower, and I wonder if I'll do all these things differently afterwards. Will I sound more serious? I hope not. It's become important to me that I not be taken too seriously.