Monday, March 24, 2025
It seems like I have left this thing on, probably against my better judgment.
The last time I posted here was an extended low-value ramble about a smartwatch, back in December. I kind of thought that might be the last last one before I just turned the server off for good.
I had this idea that I was going to start sending out a snailmail newsletter instead. I even collected some addresses. And, well. Maybe I’ll still do that. But it turns out that the basic operations of the United States Postal Service are among those things I’ve taken for granted my entire life that are now on pretty shaky ground. I feel a sort of anticipatory sense of futility and dread creeping into every part of my relationship to the machinery. It makes it hard to focus on what I might actually do.
I’ve been writing p1k3 since I was a teenager in the 1990s. Something like 28 years. A lot has happened in these three decades, stuff I think of as system-level events, big world-historical shit. I’ve tried more than once to write things in the mode of tracking or analyzing or confronting something like that. Or in the mode of persuading. The results have rarely been good, and looking back I’m suitably embarrassed.
But then here we are having one god damned system-level event on top of another. I haven’t been able to look away from the scroll for months now, and I’m pretty sure it’s actually killing me. I’m angry and full of loathing. My resting heart rate on the smartwatch looks like I’m 20 entirely sedentary years older. In the evenings I tend to drink and smoke with useless, instantly-regrettable abandon. My back hurts all the time from hunching over my desk. My eyes are so fuzzed out from the screens that I can barely focus to read anything by the end of the day.