The now has always been the thing

The 29 Capitol Limited to Chicago speeds through what I imagine are the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Once we stop there, there will be several hours remaining. I could travel this pathway every day working, soaking up all of the energy of the millions of people in communities I've passed through already.

The laptop battery is running out and I get the notice there isn't much time now and I want to try to get something in about this feeling I have about being taken across the country on rails countless other people have built over the years. I have spent the time so far working, working as hard as I can to get information out that I ant to get out.

I look up and we're going past a recycling center where so much life screams out to me, all of those cars people rode in, all of those individuals experiencing the same thing I can experience, just differently on account of me having my own origin.

But a same origin! I am heading back to Illinois for the second time in a year! I am fighting upstream against a pattern that makes no difference or impact on anyone who isn't me. 

At any point, the ability to write the words in this space will go away, but I will then look out the window and try my best to enjoy what I can. I want to know every single place I am heading past, want to know what comes next and how to make it all better. 

This will fade, like every other night will fade, and then I am not sure what happens except the rest of this journey and then the next one back. Until now, I will pass through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo between now and the next time.

For now, I slowly remove myself from the typing in order to hopefully rest. With so much stimuli, I wish I could keep it going but there are limitations, challenges, parameter shifts. 

Would you have it any other way? There is no choice but to comply with whatever needs to happen next. 

This hamburger is not going to eat itself. 

An access point to Charlottesville Community Engagement is now alive

I'm trying to do new things 49 months into the launch of the newsletter and I can feel the anxiety from not having someone to attend a party today. I work all of the time and would rather be alone than go to a party alone. This makes no sense, I know, but I am a human being and often times what I do makes no sense. 

In any case, now you can look at this QR code and get access to Charlottesville Community Engagement and I think I will put it on a QR code. 

In many ways I feel like I am at the beginning of this journey and I think I should continue it and find ways to get over the anger that happens occasionally. That happened in the last blog post and I'm okay with what happened afterward. I rearranged an important room and I was deliberately vague, the way I want to be as much as possible. 

Now off to do other things. 

The jumble of the unimportant riches

There are 33 minutes until my parents will go to the dining room in their retirement home. They live over 400 miles away from where they spend 43 years of their life. I have no reason to go back to the town where I grew up and find myself mentally uprooted, questioning why I'm still in a community where I feel perpetually lost. 

In about 31 minutes now, I will swap the locations of two pieces of furniture in my father's room. I will move a desk he has closer to the window and I will move the bookshelf to the wall. This will be an experiment to see if this works better and I have decided to do this to try to make his life more comfortable.

Until he and my mother die, I will travel here as often as I can to help them because it feels like that is the thing I am supposed to do. I am a single man in his early 50's who will likely never be in a relationship again, a person who lost familial connections to all three biological children. The guilt and loss I feel sometimes is overpowering, but dwelling on that is unproductive.

Years of cognitive behavioral therapy taught me to reframe unhelpful thoughts. This is a skill that does not always work, but when it does I am grateful to have been introduced to the concept. There are many things I would like to change about the way I live my life.

But in 27 minutes when they leave I will perform this task and hopefully set everything back up and then will go back to my sister's house to be productive. I have become a person who must always be doing something useful. I don't like to waste any moments until later in the evening when tasks have been completed.

Spending so much time with my octogenarian parents has... wait. I've been summoned. 

I'm angry. I'll stop here. It happens. I am a failure and always have been. No amount of cognitive behavioral therapy will ever change that. 

None of my life has ever been important. Nothing is important. It is jumbled. I don't know why I waste my time with anything. That fucking rock will always win. 

Paying for the past

We stood there cleaning up the apartment we'd rented nearly thirty years before. New words could be coined to mean "filthy" just by describing some of what we've seen. There were locusts that were not afraid of us at all. 

For hours I cleaned and threw things away, just going through it all and wondering where it had all gone and how impossible the task seemed to be. I began to fall into despair not knowing how I was going to pay for all of the clean-up and repair that needed to be made.

Then I found the box of checkbooks and the receipts and discovered I'd already done this action in the past, and there's no longer anything to do to clean up that mess. I could move on. 

But where would I go? 

Red payments and the eventual fading of this now

Last night I had several dreams involving an obscure scandal between two competing jurisdictions. Over the course of the night, I was aware of the implications of what I knew or at least I knew officials knew I was on to them.

I had receipts and I had a whole story written about what became known as "red payments" which had something to do with covering up a mistake. I was trying to figure out what it all meant, but kept worrying my notes would disappear.

They did disappear when I decided to wake up and all of that work will fade as I settle into another day of intense Olympics watching while also getting things done.

I am aware that much of what I write has very little consequence to the wider world but I'm told people actually get something out of it even though most of it fades away to me like the details of whatever reality I touched in my dreams.

The train station in Manassas

I was on the train back from Pennsylvania and it was full so I pushed through to the bar car. Not the café car, but an actual bar with wooden seats and people sitting there. It was full, too, but I found a place at the very front as the bar car was in front of the engine. The walls were made of something translucent. and I could make out the urban landscape I'm used to seeing as I travel.

I sat there wondering what I'd even done that week in Pennsylvania, as I had no memory. I dismissed this, though, as I've been going up so often these days. The train stopped to switch engines like always but something was different. For some reason, we were actually in Manassas and not Union Station so I got off to look around.

There was no announcement when the train departed and I watched at it moved southwest toward home. I didn't panic, and figured I would just catch the next one. So I walked through the station which was much larger than the one in real life. I found the ticket counter which was about to close and waited.

That was about it, really. It felt more real than my actual life which consists of staying home and working and waiting to go back to Pennsylvania. When I am here, there is nothing but work and that is by choice. Everywhere I look here is covered in memory and detail, and I can't just relax and enjoy myself.

Maybe I can find a ticket counter in real life that can help me.

Cocoon

I can only describe myself on July 20, 2024 as being in a cocoon. I am keeping myself away from people and cutting off ties as I contemplate what's next. My intuition tells me there are very dark days ahead and I am not sure what is going to happen. 

I do know I am not happy with the thoughts in my head and the sense that an entire civilization is about to completely break down. Perhaps it already has. The joy has evaporated from the universe and all that is left now is madness and chaos.

Maybe I'll be better tomorrow. I slept twelve hours hoping this would burn off, this feeling that I must reposition myself for the future. Hope is gone.