Not in Luton Town

I'm watching Luton Town play Grimsby in the fourth round of the F.A. Cup. An alternate version of me in an alternate universe is an alternative of the stands at Kenilworth Road.

Instead, I'm in this one, where I didn't move to England but instead stayed in Virginia to commit to the work I do, writing about all sorts of things.

I would feel like an outsider there, but I always feel like an outsider here, too. Today I'll likely not talk to another person except maybe the clerk at a store. I've become the sort of person who would rather just be alone.

This time last year I drove to Vermont to explore a potential move there. I no longer feel like leaving here and plan to stay here, going through the motions and waiting for someone to take away what I've built.

While most people like what I do, I know how power in Charlottesville works. It smiles at you while calculating exactly which vein to cut. I am well aware there are many who would like me stop doing what I do, which makes me want to work much harder. So I will.

All places are like, I think. Humans are infused with a sickness that allows some people to dehumanize others with the click of a switch. I don't want to be like that, so I spend a lot of time alone., watching people 3,280 miles away kick a ball around a stadium I've only been in once in my life, nearly 40 years ago now.

I look forward to the spring when I'll go to City Stadium in Lynchburg to see as many games as I can. I sometimes lament that I didn't fulfil my dream of living in England, but I know enough to cut my losses and be content with what I have: A hermit life with very low expectations except work, work, and feeding cats.

Thoughts for what the world is now

For me, it's doing the work. I somehow have found a way where work is the path everyday and when I travel upon it I find I have taken good steps forward. 

I don't write about much of it. At the moment I am archiving segments from Charlottesville Community Engagement to Information Charlottesville. I'm also skimming through election paperwork to write up a list of candidates in the Fifth District for this week's Fifth District newsletter. I really like doing that one. 

For much of the day I've just felt off. For most of the fall, I was motivated by early rising, but since the solstice I feel myself wanting to sleep more. That rest allows me to eventually get to the work when I am ready to do it.

Is the archival work I'm doing now serving an actual purpose, or is it all in the name of satisfying my ego? After all, I want prove that I existed and that I had purpose. 

Today I changed the name of the blog again. I took the number down by about 400 million. The idea is to have a rough estimate of where I am if you were to list everyone alive in birth order. I started off in the 3 billions I think when I started this back in 2004.

This is the second blog I made. The other was on Geocities and I still have it somewhere saved on a hard drive. Even that's an extension of work I did with bulletin board systems in high school. 

I keep it going for some reason. At this point I have stopped using Twitter, but I'm able to make a living off of a Substack newsletter, and am working to expand all of that. I'm very glad to be doing the work, even though there's always a need to be writing now. I don't have much of a work life balance but maybe that's a comfort that I can't really afford at the moment. 

Anyway, things are pretty good. I've often used this blog to be pretty dark and weird and express those thoughts. I do that to vent those feelings and once they are in words I am free to move on to be myself in some other fashion. I am a kaleidoscope of many thoughts and I have chosen a path of writing to try to capture them so I can understand myself. I'm alive and it's a magnificent feeling sometimes.

But, it's also not magnificent a lot of the times. There are times when certain losses make themselves known in the fiber of my being. I've learned to try to get through these feelings because I don't want to be ruled by the sad things that have happened. I want to concentrate on the positive and work toward it.

And that's why I do what I do. I want my life to have meant something and I always have. Right now I want to spend as much of it as possible doing the work researching a place where I live, and where I have lived. I am alive and I have done a lot of writing to try to figure out as much as I can, and that's what I am here to do. 

I spend almost all of my time alone now. I have two cats who keep me company but I've mostly retreated into a life where it's just me. I had a housemate for a while but I couldn't work when he was here. He's doing well. 

It's been a life and a lot of it is here on this blog. This is my blog as a private citizen, as much as I can be one. I don't promote it anymore, but may in the future. I want to keep writing somewhere that isn't Facebook, and I want to also connect back to all of the other times when I didn't know who I was and I sat down to capture it, so I could remember who I was. I have a hard time sometimes remembering who I am, knowing I could be end up in a different life one day doing something very different from this. 

It's just that the opportunity doesn't come up.

Anyway, I guess this is a bit of a blog reset.