Labour

I should be clear about this: I'm not too busy to write. I'm too miserable.

The shock of coming back from something like the Expo to a world where I'm cooking for a living has been hard to suffer.

Why? Because of answers like I heard the other night. Someone expressed a desire to holiday in Jamaica and immediately received the answer, "The drugs are great there."

These are not my people.

I'm am increasingly of the conclusion that the real trouble with marijuana is the potential it has to encourage people to remain uninformed in a world where the only subject that holds their interest is when the next opportunity to smoke comes.  I do have empathy for these poor people.  The time they spend working is, in some ways, worse because on the whole they're jagging for their next hit.  Which explains why they talk about it constantly.

On the other hand, I'm thoroughly convinced they are blessed with less brain activity overall . . . while I am stuck in endless fleeting thoughts I can't sit and evolve in my mind due to small, endless distractions.

Maxwell mentioned in a comment yesterday that the Burma map was probably a matter of grind, grind, grind.  He's right.  The Burma map proves I have time to write blog posts.  I'm drawing back from these because I know - as this post is already proving - that I'm becoming more single-minded about certain issues.

Really, how much of this self-describing shit does the reader need to see?

So the days go by, I work on obsessive projects and wait for the economy to change, so I can find an office job again and get the hell off my feet, returning to a world where people are polite to one another and speak in whole sentences.  When that happens, my stress will fall, my bank account will grow and I'll find the motivation to think through a creative process, building arguments and proposing functional changes to my world and the greater game.  Just now I feel so dry on those matters that it has become a form of misery.  I want my brain to kick in and think of something new - which it would usually do, as people who have read this blog can attest - but the brain has run down and there is no foot around to kick it.

Physically, I'm great.  I've lost about 25 pounds in six weeks, most of it around my waist.  I'm tightening my belt two holes smaller than I did in August.  For all the lack of energy I have, shoving it into the workplace, overall I'm stronger and probably fitter.  It's a terrible exchange.  I'd rather be fat, on my ass and thinking than thin, on my feet and dead-headed.  On the other hand, my partner has expressed her pleasure at the new, smaller me.

So there's that to be grateful for.