Well, it’s Monday again—the 21^st of August—and today I am writing this on my mini-laptop computer, as I said in my Saturday post that I would try to do.  So, at least some of my intentions do end up happening in the world, if they are minor and mainly inconsequential.

Of course, most of what anyone ever intends, or does, or does not do, is from any kind of serious perspective inconsequential.  One can also make the argument that, since pretty much everything is inconsequential, then everything is consequential, from the corollary or converse or obverse or whatever the term is of Dash’s point in The Incredibles*.  And, to stick with Sci-Fi/Fantasy worlds, the 11^th Doctor more than once made the point that, in all his travels through time and space, he’d never met anyone unimportant.

So, congratulations, your decision about what to have for breakfast—and whether or not to have anything at all—is just as important to the cosmos at large as any decision that might be made today by any head of state in the world.

Does that make you feel important?  In what way?  Or if not, why do you think it doesn’t?

[Sorry, somehow that felt like the proper moment to pretend to be a cartoon-style psychotherapist.]

Speaking of psychotherapy and its targeted problems, I missed yet another potential stop-code among the recording numbers in the verification system on Saturday.  As the day started, with the first deal, we were coming close to a potential palindromic sequence, and we had two deals in quick succession, so it seemed we might just land on it this time (although there was never very much of a chance).

Anyway, there was then a long gap between deals, and we blew right past the next potential one by well over a hundred by the time we made our next deal for the day.  There won’t be many more opportunities between now and my semi-planned final takeoff date.

Even if a palindromic number sequence were to come up, I’m not sure what I would do about it.  I don’t truly believe in any kind of mystic notion relating to numbers, I just find them mildly amusing to play with, and so gave myself this notion of an “abort code”**.  But if such a number came up now, I don’t know that its occurrence would sway me one way or another.

In any case, I’m the only one who would know, since no one at work seems to have even the slightest clue that I feel self-destructive in the first place, let alone that I set myself little escape hatches or potential self-messages to give up on ending things.  It’s not for want of wanting to get the idea across to people—without being unnecessarily melodramatic or intrusive, anyway—but I don’t seem to be very good at crying for help.  I guess that’s a pretty big weakness.

Still, if a palindromic number sequence were to come up sometime between now and, say, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, I think I would just find it a curiosity.

I think I’m going to start to phase out even the few little things I’ve been doing to try to improve my mental health to whatever limited degree I am able to do it.  As regular readers will know, I stopped taking any form of anti-depressant, since it wasn’t working for me at all, and the side-effects were annoying.  I think I’m going to stop even trying to improve my sleep anymore.  Talk about tilting at windmills; I haven’t been sleeping any better than I used to, and I certainly don’t think my mood has improved.

But if it has, it’s done so in a tiny, miserable little way, which in some ways could be a curse.  It’s a bit like taking a disease someone has that’s killing them and pulling back its intensity just enough so that they can stay alive indefinitely, but not enough to make them feel any better or be any healthier.

Come to think of it, it’s not a bit like that at all; it’s exactly and literally that.

[Brief side note:  I’ve noticing that my laptop is very laggy—at least, my laptop computer is—as I’ve been using it today, especially once I activated the auto-save.  I don’t know why it’s especially slow at this point.  I haven’t upgraded it to Windows 11, since I worry that it wouldn’t handle the change that well, and I don’t like unneeded change myself if I can help it.  Also, I don’t really think that’s the problem.  It was never meant to be a speedy and powerful computer, since I got it just to write stories and blog posts.  Oh, well, maybe it’s just that I haven’t used it in a while.]

So far I’ve resisted the urge to get an Uber to the train station; my plan is to try to force myself to take the bus to the train, and then on the way back this evening I intend to try to walk back to the house from the station.  The only real impediment to the walking is the heat; the exertion itself doesn’t intimidate me.  The potential for added pain is sometimes a concern, but I think I’ve adjusted myself, shoe and knee-brace wise, in ways that keep that stable, so the walking doesn’t make things worse.  Knock on wood, if you do that sort of thing.

Soon it will be time to close out the first draft of this post and head for the bus stop.  I guess I’ll try to listen to some podcast or other on the way.  I don’t have any real interest in listening to any of the audio books I have.  I don’t have much, if any, interest in reading any book books, frankly, digital or paper.  Even non-fiction is getting unworkable, and I’ve long since lost my ability to engage in fiction almost entirely.

I’m also getting bored with the Euchre app game that I play, and with the Sudoku app that I play, and frankly, with everything else.  YouTube is getting boring, the various news sites and blogs I try to read can’t seem to catch my attention or lift my spirits.  Nothing seems to be working, and the days are getting shorter now, so to speak, so the seasonality to my mood is heading into worse territory.  This whole game is getting more uninteresting by the moment.  In the words of the WOPR from the movie War Games, it seems that the only winning move is not to play.

But of course, once you can choose your move, you’ve already been forced to start playing.  It’s all rather unfair and unkind, but that’s reality for you.  You get squeezed into the game without being consulted (since you cannot be consulted until you’re already in the game) by people who were themselves squeezed into the game without being consulted, all the way back to the beginning of the whole thing.  So, I guess none of us should feel too bad if we fail to live up to some expectations or ideals or something along those lines.

That’s enough half-assed philosophy for today.  I hope you all are starting what is going to be a good week, and that you have reasonably good weeks from now until the end of your days.  Why not?  I might as well hope for that for you.  You deserve it as much as anyone does, and probably more than most (from my point of view) since you are people who read.

*When his mother told him, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” he replied with, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”

**Though, in sense, it should be considered an anti-abort code, like the process needed to turn off an auto-destruct sequence for a spaceship.  Why would so many imagined futuristic civilizations make spaceships with self-destruct systems, anyway?  Are they all carrying state secrets of some kind?  We don’t put autodestruct systems into cars or trucks or trains or planes or even warships, tanks, and fighter jets.  It’s a weird thing to do.  I suspect it’s usually just a rather ham handed plot device, and once it happened prominently in one story, other stories mimicked it.