Warm Coffee Is Really Fantastic In the Fall

Blockage is the worst. Sounds like a digestive problem. It’s a mental problem. Maybe not a problem but a hiccup or a delay. Can you really come up with new ideas every day of your life? Seems a bit of a high standard. I don’t think you notice the days you have good ideas. It’s best to write shit down or record it because you will otherwise forget that feeling exactly.

I always think, “I will write that down later, I won’t forget, how could I forget something so brilliant?” And yet then it is gone. I feel like I have nothing to write if things are good. Is that why there is a tortured artist stereotype? Do we deliberately make our lives miserable or do we exploit the misery in life for the sake of art or laughter. Most of the art I like makes me laugh. Either that or it makes me cry. 

Now we waste so much artistic talent on advertisements made by people who don’t even garner credit. They hire you to do the job and decide what to pay you and if they will change it or if you did it to their standards. What is the standard in emotional availability? What is the standard of open realism in art? There isn’t any at the moment. 

The stores are overwhelming places for me. I loved to spend money as a kid. It wasn’t my money. I find even myself knowing all I do in a market overwhelmed by the urge to look at and buy pretty things. This world is full of pretty things you can have if you have money. They don’t last and they don’t actually make you happy but you can have them. 

I like to take care of and appreciate even all the silly shit I’ve acquired. Kyle and I are teaching Zack how to read a real clock on the blue LED lined wall clock we bought upon living in our first house and realizing it would be nice to have a clock that worked on batteries even when the electricity and the cable did not. When we moved here we also had a cable box with no clock which I found bizarre. We don’t have any cable again due to financial reasons but I don’t miss it. I prefer it. 

We still have the real clock and now Zack knows how to tell time. It has readable hour numbers and little tick marks for the minutes, making it a good learning clock. We didn’t really consider that when we bought it. He was one and a half, maybe we did it subconsciously. I think we just like that it lights up blue. We haven’t plugged the LED light back in since we moved the living room furniture. We should plug it in, it’s the little things. Simple technologies are worth taking care of and appreciating. After the hurricane you learn to have a working radio, a clock, and candles if necessary. 

I found out the blue light of the clock is plugged in. Huzzah! I turned it on. 

I feel like I never have enough time. Weeks go fast. Weekends go faster. Days go whizzing by. I basically have to be forced to see people. I don’t think that is normal. I never claimed to be normal. Maybe it’s just the grass is always greener. People who have a lot going on and a lot of people around want more time alone. Lonely people want to be around more people. Maybe loneliness is a perception. 

Waiting for shit, no matter how mundane makes me have the worst anxiety. Even though I know everything always winds up fine. There aren’t usually too many awful dramatic things back to back. People in my life handle things well. Better than me. I always feel like all the people I know handle things better than me. We probably just all do most of our suffering alone. Or tell few people about it. I tell everyone about my suffering. Does everyone realize when I say things like that I think it’s funny? 

People who appear fine don’t really interest me. They do ok at their job, it is easy and they won’t get fired, they make enough money to pay bills and have fun without consideration, they go on vacations and to weddings. Those people don’t really interest me. Everyone else has always interested me. Not the homeowners on Cribs. Not the parents on My Super Sweet 16. Those people are the buffer class. The class of people that keeps in touch with the managerial class and exists to fully insulate the ruling class from people like us. The Political class, the just rich enough to not give a damn about anyone but yourself and not wealthy enough to have real power, class doesn’t really interest me. 

I always feel bored in the morning. I love to sleep. I like to wake up and go back to sleep. For some reason I usually dream and remember it if that happens. It rarely does. I go to the bus stop and then I do shit all day and nothing is ever done. Laundry and dishes every day, sorting, organizing. staring at shit, “where to begin with this disaster?” 

My handheld Oreck just died, it was the saddest fucking thing. I use it a lot to clean shit. It overheated. Maybe it will work once turned off to cool and with a fresh bag and a lint filter cleaning. This is my life. 

I just want less stuff. And the stuff that remains more organized. It will happen and then I’ll be dead. Life is a constant list of things to do. I just try to stay focused on what I can do today. Once I get rid of all the clutter in my house I can get rid of all the clutter in my brain. This shit isn’t important. It occupies all of our thinking space. Worries. It distracts from legitimate problems, right in front of us. People we see all the time, people we love who we can’t afford to help or who don’t want our help that we can give. 

So in the meantime I just organize and wait. And I write every fucking day. Someday I will have something good to say and all this shit that came before it will have been good practice. 

I like my slang. I like that my slang annoys a lot of people. I know a lot of not nice people who don’t use any “bad” words. Or at least act like they don’t. 

I find if you always speak in perfect grammar of one dialect you have a harder time communicating with more people. I can’t believe I don’t know any other languages. American English is so archaic considering we stole most of our words from other languages. Why didn’t we choose the simplest spellings for words? I should probably be writing this in my handwritten pages. This is some crazy bullshit. I usually try to keep that and my complaints to the pages. 

I try to focus on a topic in the blog. I just vaguely remember while I am writing, this is the topic this one is about, and that keeps me on track. Sometimes I am just talking to you because I haven’t figured out what to say today. But in the way someone practices for an Olympic sport or dancing, or aerial acrobatics, I do this shit every day whether it’s a good day or not. 

It’s a lot harder when I’m just in my house cleaning and hanging out with my fam. I try not to write about them but I do a lot anyway. I try to leave them their privacy. That’s always my goal. I like to tell other people’s stories and not tell exactly who it is. Who is was is not the important part. Crazy shit happens to everyone is the important part even when our lives seem silly and mundane. 

The goal in life should probably be silly and mundane. The alternative is when shit hits the fan. This will probably be one of my favorite times of life. Kyle’s achieving a goal. Zack is still little enough to care we are around. I might someday be the person I want to be. I think I will always be a work in progress though. I like knowing what I am. A writer. I will just keep writing until I look back and find I’ve had something to say. 

Orwell’s Letters are new at the library. I haven’t finished Vonnegut’s yet and I have a book to finish this week and 4 after that. I read short stories and letters sporadically in the process of reading books when I am having focusing problems. I write a lot of letters lately.

That was probably the worst part about baby brain, not being about to read and to focus. Not being able to focus long enough on something that wasn’t related to your child and actually retain what it said. I did read 4 books on being pregnant and 5 on having a baby. We need to admit women need help when their babies are young. They don’t really need help when pregnant, they need to keep moving as much as possible and eat healthy. 

People would have more energy and be happier if we could all afford to eat healthy. The ground and the water would be better as a result. The plants and the cycle of water cleanse what we need. The water we drink is the same water that has always been drunk. Do we really want so much of it sitting in petrol plastic bottles on shelves or in trucks traveling across the world? 

We are poisoning ourselves and we are too stupid to know it. It has happened before. Marie Curie discovered the elements that killed her. Back then you had to separate new elements out of sediment with science. BOOM. 

We need to get back to basics. Kids today don’t know how their technology works. How does the AlphaSmart3000 really work? What kind of gadgets and gizmos inside? I wouldn’t take it apart; I don’t want to break it. It is far too valuable. It doesn’t work without a computer though. Wouldn’t work to communicate with you without electricity to send messages on the internet, FROM SPACE! Ok, I stole that joke from Louis CK. You should know that, or you’re a disappointment. 

Warm coffee is really fantastic in the fall. I drink it cold in the summer because it is hot out. The first cold days are the suckiest probably. I am already pretty used to it. By the time the summer leaves I am always sick of its humid days and fucking mosquitoes. I want to move somewhere without mosquitoes and without sweltering heat. It’s cold already and it’s only in the 50s and later 60s today. My house stays relatively warm from the shower, oven, dryer, and dishwasher; I try not to waste heat. 

I couldn’t figure out why my gas budget was so high this past year. I am super with the conservation. I cut my electric bill in half. None of us take insanely long or insanely hot showers all the time. I keep the heat really low when I finally turn it on. Last winter my dishwasher was broken and I had a guest who liked to wash one dish at a time all day long. That is unnecessary. Ok if you’re gonna rinse it for the dishwasher, fine, but if it’s dirty, let it sit in the sink or basin with water and wash all the dishes at once. At least the mystery has been solved. There are ways we can all conserve on the energy we use day to day. 

I just realized more women use the internet for social networking. I run into many female moderators. I usually can tell the difference. I think. The internet is still full of a little anonymity. But I know many females highly invested in the internet, well versed in text, email, and Facebook etiquette. Some people don’t realize these things should have social rules. Women or the feminine aspects of life because no one is entirely masculine or feminine need to be more recognized for the contribution they make to the world as it functions. We are largely underpaid and under recognized for it.

My generation created our own set of social rules because we were first, the first teenagers with instant messaging. I don’t remember a lot of anonymous bullying or just general verbal harassment. Only nerds loved computers and we all communicated through LiveJournal and message boards. We had knowledge of privacy settings and how to make sure varying levels of information were received by varying levels of people you interact with. 

I was mostly public back then, but kept stories with personal information for friends. Most of my LiveJournal friends were girls. We love to journal, we record history. We are the artists behind the scenes. We are the masters of language that have to teach and explain language to the next generation so we can try and understand them. 

The times are changing. In this world sometimes the first draft is on the internet. People need to learn to admit they are wrong. I am very good at admitting I am wrong and saying I am sorry. I don’t just plainly say I am sorry anymore. I usually want to talk about shit. And I do. 

I think we have all these internal body illnesses partially because we internalize ourselves. More importantly we internalize our stress and our disappointment. You can’t burry something down and expect it to go away. You have to get it out somehow. Some people like music or painting, things expressive but less verbally specific. Emotional language is equally expressive but lacking in the definitive feeling of language. 

When did we decide to make a word for having words? That must have been a moment right? At first someone was like, we make all these noises to call things so we can tell each other about them when we can’t physically see them, what is THAT called? I bet it was after the plant based extra cannabinoids had evolved into being. 150 million years after we evolved. 

I think quite a lot of people are suffering from anxiety. There are a significant number of people who admit it and take medication for it or do something active to combat it. There must be a silent portion that doesn’t. Shouldn’t that mean there is an epidemic of fear? I think that is part of what cannabinoid receptors are about. I’m not the only one; I have read. 

It is true that cannabis reduces your ability to feel fear. This is why teenagers who smoke do stupid things. Teenagers already suffer from poor impulse control from an undeveloped frontal lobe. Adults don’t do stupid things when they use cannabis because we have knowledge and fear. Adults understand death much better than teenagers and children. Some children understand death too well in this shitty world. As a whole, younger people have an easier time romanticizing death as an escape. Those who have encountered it know its finality and don’t ever lose that fear. Not even from smoking cannabis. 

There are other things you can benefit from losing fear over. You can work harder and do better. People have won Olympic gold medals who smoke cannabis because it makes you unafraid. A lot of adults tell me it makes them paranoid. I wonder if that has to do with the strains available because you basically have to take what you can get, IF you can get it. Really? When you can go to any doctor with chronic pain for the first time for a legitimate reason and they can hand you opiate candies. But you feel criminalized for wanting to make pot brownies or smoke a bong. 

It changes your focus from what do people think about me… to what do I think about. This can be bad when you think about how you could go to jail and it could ruin your whole life because someone said you do drugs because they saw you smoking a joint and think that makes you a bad person after they drank a half bottle of wine and took a Xanax, projecting much?

So I have a solid theory that the paranoia associated with cannabis is created by its illegality just like the gateway. If it wasn’t illegal it wouldn’t be a gateway to a world of cash drugs and heroin. If it was in a pack of cigarettes at 7-11 kids would have to be 19 to get their hands on them. Now high schoolers have a hell of an easier time getting it. Adults can drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. Cannabis is like two bad habits minimized to one. 

Would you smoke pot if there was no stigma? Or if you never developed a habit for smoking, cook it into your food? It makes everything taste better. It helps you forget about the schedule you are on. It helps get through that one day or one moment of the day you do get to relax. Personally I think we should be relaxed every moment of the day. Does anyone actually get that luxury? When I say relax because I mean relax your mind. No one can win gold medals with their brain full of muck. 

Those people have taught their minds to focus at an early age. The human body is capable of AMAZING feats. You really can handle a lot more pain than you think. Pain is a constant. It is the force driving you to stay in motion and not be so rooted in place. People in deep meditative states even sit actively. How many of us ever sit actively let alone always? Some of us practice good posture through sports and activity. You have to make an effort to accomplish it. 

We don’t schedule life for recreation. We don’t play games on break, or even have time to think about games and the things in life we used to love to do. I think about these things. I have a lot more time to myself than most people do. But I had to force it. It wasn’t and is still not easy. I daily have to remind myself not to feel guilty for being happy. 

I can be accomplishing things and be happy because I am in motion. As long as I am in motion and moving forward I can be better than I was before. I try to stay in balance but sometimes life goes one way and sometimes it goes another. Nothing changes overnight. Even death naturally is a long and drawn out fading of someone’s time on this earth. Sudden deaths from tragedy are harder to bear. 

Even babies don’t come into this world on a day like how we celebrate it. What is the difference between a baby 2 days before birth and 2 days after? Just its location. Babies gradually become conscious. We teach them how to be from the moment they are born. They are born tiny covered in muck screaming and not being able to see. 

By the first year they can walk upright, while holding onto someone or alone and they can talk, if word formation is a problem usually their parents can understand them if nobody else can. WE teach children entirely how to communicate. If you kid is screaming at you, do you scream at your kid? How do you want to be asked to do things or taught to do things? 

I love learning new things, but I certainly don’t learn well from condescending jerks that yell at me or scorn me. I try and tell my son that he can do anything. It is going to be up to him how hard he tries. I can teach him anything he wants to know, if I can’t, I’ll find out. The internet has made the access to information so much easier. I think it should be easier still but we will get there someday. We had books for a long time before the public had libraries. 

Learning should be free. Maybe the teachers of the future will be on the internet. Maybe children could read independently and hail a teacher for a chat session with instant messaging or Skype even where they could see one another. There are too many kids per teacher per classroom and not enough hours in the day. What if we had a collective database of teachers during school hours to help kids in class who need extra help? Most children just want and are lacking in attention from adults. 

Why doesn’t ever kid in every school have their own computer? Some kids have AlphaSmart’s actually. My friend’s mom has older ones than mine in her classroom. An understated device but in the world of iPads and tables, I’m sure it seems archaic to most kids. There is a typing tutorial on this that my son likes but it is no tablet computer. 

Imagine every kid with a computer of their own to learn to take care of from kindergarten on. So many people don’t teach kids to take care of things. Shit is always broken and they just throw it away. Like somehow these things disintegrate when you put them in a trash can. 

Someday all the minerals we need will be buried in the heaping mounds of shit we have all over the world infesting the oceans and land, and then we will have to pay more people than the ones who currently do sift through the garbage of everyone in modern society for the remnants of valuable things. 

There are a finite number of resources on this planet. Like the water sitting on shelves in petrol plastic bottles. It’s all necessary in the cycle and we have far too much of is bottled up. 

Occupied. 

Like our buried emotional states and the traumas we never feel fully addressed. I have been addressing mine, who’s next? 

I am very proud of the quality of the people I keep in contact with. I don’t feel like I am surrounded by people who think like me or yes men who tell their friends what they think they want to hear instead of what they think. Being me makes it easier for people to be them. I don’t claim to be perfect. More importantly I don’t think anyone is. If you say everything is perfect I know, on some level, you are lying. And more likely you have tons of secrets just like everyone else. I suppose some people’s secret is that they have no secrets. 

The secret is the longing to do more, the most shameful secret of all. The human body is capable of amazing things but only when your mind is on board. The media as it currently stands is a sickness that has infested all of our minds. I am not alone in this. 

We need new laws about intellectual property. The computer makes it possible to find out where something was first published, the original author will have the first public posting on the internet unless the idea was stolen IRL. It seems like most intellectual property thieves would be more into copy and paste than data entry. 

Impactful images as well will someday have a date of origin most likely, the first time they were uploaded. How will future generations sift through all this information we have compiled and left behind? I am guessing we will need super computers for that. I’m sure the possibility at least is already out there. No one has tried yet to quantify the data on the internet and talk about who should own what. 

We should own our interests. They shouldn't be sold to whatever advertising company need them to sell us more shit. The internet should be our platform for communication, because it is. But we need to have a long social discussion and figuring out of what is and isn’t accessible. Should someone’s sexting really be allowed publication without their consent? 

Copyright laws currently are a joke, as are patents. The people who come up with ideas don’t get to keep them. Some corporation buys them, if they even get that much recognition. I wish there was a standard tablet learning tutorial for all kids. Not for teaching them what to think but it could be a search engine of sorts as well. So they could learn how to think, how to keep asking a new question when the last one was answered. This could be to teach how to read and type well. 

We need to get back to teaching kids how to learn. We should be tailoring things to their interests from day one. We know they are interested in everything, as long as it isn’t forced. Nature and history are interesting but everyone learns that in their own time and in their own way. Imagine they could read about anything they wanted at their level on a school based program where they were safe from awful shit that exists on the internet. 

Kids learn kindness IRL in school but they should also learn kindness towards technology. They should respect things because things are valuable and tools help us accomplish things we otherwise couldn’t. Wouldn’t it be good if kids would interact with each other silently in the classroom? We figured out how to do it anyway on the high school system, but by the time I graduated we had texting so we didn’t need the computers anymore. 

What if instead of them texting under their desk, they have a way to communicate with each other in class, or other classes around the country who are working on the same subject and are at their level? They can only not all talk at once because it is loud chaos. But kids only love school because they love to be social and they want to see their friends and talk about things. The only reason any adult may still love their job. What if they could communicate silently? 

Have it be monitored since they are children in case anything bad gets said. Make sure no curse words are allowed and things can be flagged as bullying and it would be just like what they will encounter as soon as they go to high school and college and enter the necessary world of social networking where there will be fewer moderators to weed out the bullshit. 

Bullying is rampant now without being monitored so it can’t be worse. Middle school is the worst age for it, all the hormones and changes happening for kids, finding out about reality. Now they have cell phones so they are in constant contact, never alone time to just read or write or be alone with oneself. 

By high school even the weird people have weird friends. That’s ok, that is how life should work, you aren’t going to like and agree with everyone and that is ok. Why not make it easier for kids to communicate and teach them the tools to do it instead of teach them to sit down and shut up? 

We need to find a way to teach them to be respectful since I see so many adults who cannot handle respecting their friends and family. They need to be able to express and debate their ideas and opinions. Teach them how to learn what they want to know about their interests and they will do the work of fixing the world themselves.