It’s Wednesday, now.

At some level, I feel as though that’s all that’s worth writing about today.  But of course, if people only wrote what was worth writing about, most of the material online—including the online versions of venerable print media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the various other big newspapers and magazines in all their incarnations, and many books—would never exist.  While that often seems like it might be a good thing overall, when I think of the matter soberly, I think that’s probably not true.

While it is true that, especially in the era of anti-social media, much of what is written in the world is at best noise, at worst anti-information, I suspect that reducing the overall amount of it wouldn’t improve the net amount of good or useful stuff.  It would just shrink everything in proportion.

I suspect that most of everything that’s ever been written or said (or drawn or sung or what have you) is probably forgettable and pointless.  But the way the forgettable is sifted from the memorable is…by memory.  I don’t just mean storage, obviously.  Somewhere out there, I’m sure one can find some stored version of a significant fraction of all that’s been written, for instance, in the twentieth century and later, and even on back into, say, the sixteenth century, though we’ve lost more of the latter, I’m sure.  Nevertheless, back then, when writing was not as easy as it is nowadays, there was probably a greater pre-writing filter.  But even so, it’s only a tiny fraction of the stuff then written that survives, in recollection and in use, to the modern day.

For instance, I’ve read at least one play by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and although it was good, it wasn’t great.  But, then again, not all of Shakespeare’s stuff was truly great.  Some of it survives just because it was Shakespeare.  But the truly great Shakespeare stuff—well, wow!  There’s a reason people are still reading it after four hundred years, and even still making movies of it.  It may be that even greater writers’ works have been lost entirely, but that doesn’t seem as likely as the possibility that the work of more mediocre writers has been lost.

Anyway, I don’t know just at what I’m getting.  Certainly, I don’t expect that my own thoughts or writings will survive me.  They probably won’t even survive as long as I will, which is a rather sad thought, and one that I hope is wrong.  Still, I don’t really expect that I’ll be some newer instantiation of the old Herman Melville, Moby Dick situation, in which a work is barely noticed during the author’s life, but is later considered one of the greatest works of its era’s literature (especially if you leave out all the trivia about whaling…of which, by the way, there is very little in my writing).

Even if it turns out that my fiction and/or my non-fiction writings not only survive me but endure into the centuries of the future, it’s not as though it will do me any good.  I’ll be dead either way, and the world will almost certainly be better off—and certainly no worse off—for that fact, even if it happens today or tomorrow.

Of course, today I’m going in to the office, because it’s payroll day, and so I need to be there no matter what.  Though yesterday, during the part of the day when I was feeling most depressed and stressed and despondent and miserable—you know, most of the day—I considered just not showing up, not coming in, not doing anything ever again.  I’m not really much more enthusiastic this morning, but I don’t like to leave people in the lurch, not when I’ve allowed them to depend on me even to a minor degree.

Of course, letting people down in the long run is something at which I seem to be exceptionally skilled—or perhaps “talented” is a better word.  I certainly seem to have a knack for disappointing the people I love the most.  I suppose that I may also have a knack for disappointing people about whom I don’t give a flying shit, but, well, in that case it doesn’t exactly weigh on me much.  Let strangers and would-be users be disappointed in me.  I don’t really care.  I’m disappointed in myself, too, but I don’t like myself anyway, so I don’t really care what that asshole thinks about how much I’ve let him down.

But I do feel horrible about having let down my parents and my ex-wife, and especially my children.  Many of my strongest feelings and memories are those of loss and horror when those people have found that I was not worth keeping around in their lives…not too close, anyway.  I can’t actually blame them; it’s hard to live with someone who has chronic pain and dysthymia, let alone (apparently) some form of neurodevelopmental disorder.  But, of course, I disappointed and alienated people before the chronic pain, and sometimes when the dysthymia was not fully active and/or hadn’t dipped down into its many occasions of full-blown depression.  As for the other, well, if it’s there, it’s always been there and always will be there.  I don’t know how much it’s contributed to me being an allergen to people (metaphorically), and it’s a bit of a moot point, since there’s not much I can do about it.

Anyway, I’m very tired.  I don’t even know what I’ve written this morning, or why, but I have to go in to the office because it’s payroll day.  We’ve had a prosperous and productive few weeks, but for me that just tends to mean that things have been busier and I’ve had more work to do, and—worse—there has been more noise and chaos and more interruption in routine work.  This doesn’t help much when I’m already frankly veering even more than usual toward violent self-destruction.

But I can’t do anything much about that except try to continue and try not to inconvenience and be a bother and a detriment to the people around me if I can help it.  That’s about as high as my aspirations go anymore, and I don’t think I succeed at many of even those not-so-lofty goals very often.

Oh, well.  I hope this will all be over soon.  I need this all to be over soon.  I want everything (from my point of view) to be over soon.  I can’t tolerate it all much anymore.  At least it feels that way, though who knows what my breaking point actually is?  I’ve felt many times before that I was approaching it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It has to be there, though.  I’m finite, I’m mortal, so there is a point at which I will no longer be able to endure, and I will finally and catastrophically and permanently break.  I’m kind of looking forward to it.