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mallorys_cameraSo cold out that I can’t open my windows, not even a crack, for fear of bankrupting L who likes to keep her central heating tuned to subtropical levels throughout the winter. This is good for my houseplants, and possibly good for my cats, but bad for me since canned air makes me positively claustrophobic.
This stretch of days leading up to the solstice is always the worst for me. So dark. So fuckin’ dark – my mental equilibrium really depends on light absorption. I do what I can, keep the light box on full blast, pop Vitamin D like marshmallow breakfast cereal, but it’s tough.
Day before yesterday I had a panic attack that was so intense, it was practically paralyzing. Catalyzed by one of those minor accounting errors that I thought well behind me. An accounting error, yes, but as I say, a minor one, easily rectified, so the voices in my head – You total fuckup, you worthless piece of shit, your life is meaningless, you have accomplished nothing – seemed a bit overdone. But there was no escaping them.
If humans came equipped with “Off” buttons, I would have pressed mine.
Exercise! I told myself. And went off running in the subarctic cold. It actually hurt to breathe.
Slee-ee-ee-eep! I told myself. And went to bed at 7. And woke up at 7. And felt better. Or at least felt capable of distracting myself.
Because, really. Who does accomplish anything?
Entropy always wins in the end. Edifices crumble. Empires rise and fall. Statues are buried by the lone and level sands. A significant portion of the names on both my LJ and Facebook flists now belong to dead people.
The best one can hope for is a life that doesn’t actively harm other living things. A life in which you hold up the umbrella and invite as many of those living things that can fit under that umbrella without a stampede to take shelter.
And, oh yeah – you look for bottles. So you can put messages in those bottles. In hopes that they’ll wash up somewhere and that your witness, your testimony, your instructions, will help someone who’s struggling to hold up their umbrella.
###
I swore I wasn’t gonna write about politics on the meta level anymore, but the revelation that Donald Trump actively lied about his graduate degree is just too funny.
Donald Trump does not have an MBA from the Wharton School of Business!
One assumes, of course, that he would have refused to hire someone else who’d forged a resume in this way. Or summarily fired them once the forgery was discovered.
Not that Trump’s lack of credentialing would have dissuaded anyone who voted for him from voting for him, I’m sure.
Makes him more of a prole, right?
Who the fuck needs those fancy dancy pieces of paper? Pussies, that's who! Real men just do!
Still. One wonders why this revelation is only just now coming out?
###
Also, the entire water supply of Corpus Christi – population 330,000 – has been contaminated with industrial chemicals. This follows several years of iffy drinking water in Corpus Christi.
I would call this a major news event. A hard news event.
And there have been a few stories about it. But only a few.
Judging from the headlines, you’d think invisible, odorless Russian hackers was a bigger story than the fact that cancer rates in Texas are about to increase exponentially over the next decade.
I don’t think it is.
Unless the hackers actually changed vote counts.
Did they?
The release of disinformation implicating one side and not another shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s been happening for years.
###
L had a medical procedure yesterday. She asked me to take her to the hospital. I felt honored actually – while very open in many ways, L is oddly circumspect in others. The medical procedure was a secret she was actively keeping from most of the people she knows.
In the hospital waiting room, a monitor played Christmas music. Except, you couldn’t actually hear the Christmas music because the monitor volume was turned down very, very, very low. Which raised the question: Why turn the monitor on at all?
Perhaps so people trapped in the waiting room could marvel at the series of increasingly bizarre “Christmas facts” that kept flashing across the monitor screen:
Each year, Americans spend eight billion dollars on Christmas decorations…
Irving Berlin, the composer who penned the Christmas classic, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” was Jewish…
In 1977, David Bowie and Bing Crosby teamed up on a version of “The Little Drummer Boy...”
In Sweden, it’s become a tradition for children, dressed in white, to awaken their parents on Christmas Day singing Abba’s “Dancing Queen”…
There were some very strange people sitting in that waiting room. They all seemed to know one another, and they all looked alike: dour-faced people with grey skin, beakish noses, and receding hairlines. Were they related?
“I electrocuted myself!” one woman was telling the others. “I take care of this estate for some people that live in the city –“
“The city!” said the man sitting next to her. He rolled his eyes.
“They have horses. Goats. Behind an electric fence, you know. So it was raining hard, and I was out there, refilling the water trough for the goats, and I slipped and my arm went up against the fence and ow!”
Why ever were you watering goats when it was raining out? I wondered. Do you not know that rain is actually water from the sky? Did you also vote for Trump?
It dawned on me that possibly these people I was eavesdropping on were all dead.
That would account for the grayish skin.
Though why they’d decided to migrate from the emergency room (where presumably they’d died) to the waiting room of the ambulatory surgery unit remained a great mystery.
In 1986, a 24-year old waiter in Seattle invented Pictionary, which became the top seller of that Christmas season, the crawl on the bottom of the soundless monitor told me.
And –
In 1914, there was a cease-fire on December 25th so that German and British soldiers in the trenches could enjoy the holiday.
Ghost stories! They’re everywhere this time of year.
This stretch of days leading up to the solstice is always the worst for me. So dark. So fuckin’ dark – my mental equilibrium really depends on light absorption. I do what I can, keep the light box on full blast, pop Vitamin D like marshmallow breakfast cereal, but it’s tough.
Day before yesterday I had a panic attack that was so intense, it was practically paralyzing. Catalyzed by one of those minor accounting errors that I thought well behind me. An accounting error, yes, but as I say, a minor one, easily rectified, so the voices in my head – You total fuckup, you worthless piece of shit, your life is meaningless, you have accomplished nothing – seemed a bit overdone. But there was no escaping them.
If humans came equipped with “Off” buttons, I would have pressed mine.
Exercise! I told myself. And went off running in the subarctic cold. It actually hurt to breathe.
Slee-ee-ee-eep! I told myself. And went to bed at 7. And woke up at 7. And felt better. Or at least felt capable of distracting myself.
Because, really. Who does accomplish anything?
Entropy always wins in the end. Edifices crumble. Empires rise and fall. Statues are buried by the lone and level sands. A significant portion of the names on both my LJ and Facebook flists now belong to dead people.
The best one can hope for is a life that doesn’t actively harm other living things. A life in which you hold up the umbrella and invite as many of those living things that can fit under that umbrella without a stampede to take shelter.
And, oh yeah – you look for bottles. So you can put messages in those bottles. In hopes that they’ll wash up somewhere and that your witness, your testimony, your instructions, will help someone who’s struggling to hold up their umbrella.
###
I swore I wasn’t gonna write about politics on the meta level anymore, but the revelation that Donald Trump actively lied about his graduate degree is just too funny.
Donald Trump does not have an MBA from the Wharton School of Business!
One assumes, of course, that he would have refused to hire someone else who’d forged a resume in this way. Or summarily fired them once the forgery was discovered.
Not that Trump’s lack of credentialing would have dissuaded anyone who voted for him from voting for him, I’m sure.
Makes him more of a prole, right?
Who the fuck needs those fancy dancy pieces of paper? Pussies, that's who! Real men just do!
Still. One wonders why this revelation is only just now coming out?
###
Also, the entire water supply of Corpus Christi – population 330,000 – has been contaminated with industrial chemicals. This follows several years of iffy drinking water in Corpus Christi.
I would call this a major news event. A hard news event.
And there have been a few stories about it. But only a few.
Judging from the headlines, you’d think invisible, odorless Russian hackers was a bigger story than the fact that cancer rates in Texas are about to increase exponentially over the next decade.
I don’t think it is.
Unless the hackers actually changed vote counts.
Did they?
The release of disinformation implicating one side and not another shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s been happening for years.
###
L had a medical procedure yesterday. She asked me to take her to the hospital. I felt honored actually – while very open in many ways, L is oddly circumspect in others. The medical procedure was a secret she was actively keeping from most of the people she knows.
In the hospital waiting room, a monitor played Christmas music. Except, you couldn’t actually hear the Christmas music because the monitor volume was turned down very, very, very low. Which raised the question: Why turn the monitor on at all?
Perhaps so people trapped in the waiting room could marvel at the series of increasingly bizarre “Christmas facts” that kept flashing across the monitor screen:
Each year, Americans spend eight billion dollars on Christmas decorations…
Irving Berlin, the composer who penned the Christmas classic, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” was Jewish…
In 1977, David Bowie and Bing Crosby teamed up on a version of “The Little Drummer Boy...”
In Sweden, it’s become a tradition for children, dressed in white, to awaken their parents on Christmas Day singing Abba’s “Dancing Queen”…
There were some very strange people sitting in that waiting room. They all seemed to know one another, and they all looked alike: dour-faced people with grey skin, beakish noses, and receding hairlines. Were they related?
“I electrocuted myself!” one woman was telling the others. “I take care of this estate for some people that live in the city –“
“The city!” said the man sitting next to her. He rolled his eyes.
“They have horses. Goats. Behind an electric fence, you know. So it was raining hard, and I was out there, refilling the water trough for the goats, and I slipped and my arm went up against the fence and ow!”
Why ever were you watering goats when it was raining out? I wondered. Do you not know that rain is actually water from the sky? Did you also vote for Trump?
It dawned on me that possibly these people I was eavesdropping on were all dead.
That would account for the grayish skin.
Though why they’d decided to migrate from the emergency room (where presumably they’d died) to the waiting room of the ambulatory surgery unit remained a great mystery.
In 1986, a 24-year old waiter in Seattle invented Pictionary, which became the top seller of that Christmas season, the crawl on the bottom of the soundless monitor told me.
And –
In 1914, there was a cease-fire on December 25th so that German and British soldiers in the trenches could enjoy the holiday.
Ghost stories! They’re everywhere this time of year.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-12-16 01:29 pm (UTC)I have a request, though: Do you think you could reupload this picture in a smaller format? LJ's scrapbook gives you that option.
It's so large now that it's threatening to crash my browser.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-16 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-16 01:35 pm (UTC)Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was also penned by one of our tribe. :-)