Here I go again, wasting your time and mine with another daily blog post that accomplishes nothing for anyone.  I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived at the train station just now, literally seconds before the train prior to the one I planned to take arrived.  This is because I got up even earlier than I usually do, so I figured, “What the heck”, and decided just to get going.  I had some old trash and knickknacks I wanted to make sure to get out in today’s garbage pickup, anyway, and since I was awake anyway, I got up very early to take care of some of it.  I’m clearing out as much clutter as I can, throwing out unnecessary clothes, old Halloween costume stuff, beat up old books I’ll never read, magazines, tools…all sorts of stuff, things that just take up space and make a mess.  I gave my folding massage chair at work to my coworker who has a bad back‒it doesn’t really do very much for me, anyway.  And I’m going to give my colored pencils and such to one of my coworkers who has a young son who has used them when he was here with his father.

Oh, right, I was talking about the train.  Sorry.  As I was saying, I arrived at the station just in time to see the first northbound train pulling in, and my strong impulse was to rush to try to catch it.  I probably could have done so.  It would have required just breaking into a jog for a bit, and hoping the conductor saw me and wasn’t in too much of a hurry‒the train was, technically, slightly early.

However, I decided to fight that impulse, partly because I already get so sweaty, and partly because I didn’t want to have to stress myself out with that somewhat irrational impulse to catch the earliest train.  So, I strolled up along the northbound side of the station, figuratively gritting my teeth, watching the train come to a halt and then depart.

That turned out to be very stressful in and of itself, and I’m still stressed out about it now, especially as more people arrive at the track to wait for the next train, which is sure to be more crowded than the first.  I also can’t seem to help thinking about the possibility that this next train might run late, and that would mean it would probably be more crowded still, and also, just, well…that it would be more of a loss of time than I will already experience from not getting on the initial train.  Not that I have any urgent need to get anywhere very soon.  Work doesn’t actually start for five more hours.  But once I’ve decided to get up and get there, being delayed is just extremely stressful.

I get the impression that my stress doesn’t really show on my face or in my demeanor, any more than my depression does, because nobody seems to notice either thing, though I feel as if they must be glaring and blaring like a fire truck with lights and sirens going at maximum level.  Evidently this is not so.  I think I could probably douse myself in lighter fluid and rubbing alcohol and set myself on fire in the middle of the office, and people would just say, “Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’?”*  Or I could go to the roof of the highest nearby building or parking structure and step out onto the ledge, and anyone passing would just say to me something like, “Isn’t that a great view?”

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, really.

I am possibly going to push some of my “plans” back by about two weeks, unfortunately.  I have this weekend off, but the following weekend, when I am scheduled to work, my coworker and his wife are taking their daughter to Orlando, and if I weren’t available, he might feel that he ought to cancel that vacation to cover for me.  I don’t want that.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

[Okay, my train arrived almost on time just now.  I’m still torn about having skipped the earlier one, but I can’t change that now.]

Anyway, the weekend after that is, more or less, on or around my Dad’s birthday.  I guess that’s both more and less momentous than Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and certainly it is more directly personal to me.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, sorry.  I’m kind of all over the place.  And yet, I’m still going nowhere‒figuratively speaking, anyway.  I mean, okay, literally, I’m on a commuter train heading north at quite a decent speed.

Of course it could be that this is also, as Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, a train bound for nowhere.  I’ve always thought there was some pretty good poetry in that song:  “We were both too tired to sleep”, “We took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness, but boredom overtook us”, “If you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces”, “Because every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”, “And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even”.

Not Shakespeare level stuff, maybe, but still, there were some nice turns of phrase in it.  The chorus, ironically, has some of the weakest lyrics in the song, in my opinion.  They aren’t bad, but the verses are better.

Jeez, Louise, why am I writing about the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song?  It’s not a bad song, of course, but how have I come to be writing about it in a blog I originally started as a promotional venue for my fiction?  It’s bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.

Of course, there’s nothing truly mysterious about the whole thing; it’s just the product of stochastic, drunkard’s walk events.  It has no directionality, no purpose, no meaning.  But it’s still just quietly mind-boggling.  What a catastrophically banal, monumentally tiny, outrageously boring shit-show my life has become.  It’s enough to make you laugh until you choke…or maybe to yawn until you choke.

Anyway, that’ll do for today, I think.  I hope you have a nice day.  Try not to let my words and thoughts infect you with my way of looking at things.  It’s not anything I recommend, and I certainly don’t think I have any particularly wise insights; I can’t even manage my own mind.

*”Doc” is what people at the office call me.