dreaming in flour

I don’t usually write about the tech-y things I do, because I’ve never done any of it professionally, and I feel like I don’t know enough to talk about it on the internet without getting snarked at. But I’m procrastinating and the world is on fucking fire and I feel like talking about nerdy things.

I’ve been daily driving some version of Linux for at least a decade at this point. Right now, Mint on my primary system (a kinda sad HP laptop from 2017) and Slackware on a similarly aged (but less sad) Lenovo Thinkpad that Stace rescued out of an e-waste pile. Running Slackware has been a huge pain in the ass but also I’ve learned more on there in the past 6 months than I have in the years I’ve spent on Mint. I would probably never run Slackware on a primary system because it’s just too wonky – hardware/network compatibility has been hit or miss, and manual dependency resolution is wildly time consuming. Having said that, it’s the most stable distro I’ve ever used – it never, ever crashes, has no bloat, starts up fast, and doesn’t use up a ton of system resources just sitting there. And I’ve gotten much more comfortable doing things from the terminal because it doesn’t come with graphic interfaces for all that much by default – if you want a thing, you have to go find and install it your own damn self, and as previously stated, installing programs kind of sucks. The result is that I’ve become much more confident mucking around in the file system, and also have a way greater appreciation for just how much shit Mint does for you under the hood.

Anyway. The aforementioned HP laptop is finally on its way out after 8 long years of service and many upgrades/fixes (replaced a swollen battery, upgraded ram from 8 to 32 GB, switched from a spinning disk to an SSD, replaced that piece of shit when it failed after a year). But now the USB controller is dying, and it’s leading to some annoying/bizarre problems (flaky power and connectivity for USB devices, possible cause of frequent system crashes) so it’s finally time to move on. Thankfully, Stace acquired an older but well-appointed computer tower for me last year, and it’s just waiting for some Linux or something. (Strongbad, is that you??)

So now, the eternal Linux nerd question: do I stick with the same distro, or try something new? I’ve done a fair bit of distro-hopping in the past (Ubuntu, PopOS, Arch, OpenSuSE etc etc) but I kinda need this system to just work, and do audio things with a minimum of jackassery. Currently leaning toward the Debian edition of Mint – I think I want to try something new without dealing with a complete unknown, and Ubuntu can kinda suck it anyway.

So… yeah. The world is a hellscape lately, but I’m still here being a snarky little asshole on my stupid little blog, which I will keep doing until morale improves. In unrelated news, we got a kitten over the summer!! Her name is Squid, she’s about 10 months old now, and she is a tiny ball of chaos, purring, and sass. I think Miso sent her – he knew we needed a bossy but loving sass monster in the house to balance out Zappa’s sweet derpy self, and to keep the humans in line. <3

{current music: DJ_Shah_feat._Adrina_Thorpe_-_Who_Will_Find_Me.mp3}

Just because people seem to be invoking the great recession a lot lately, and I keep starting to tell this story in comments on social media but it gets too long or too personal, here’s my little slice of how I got fucked by the recession in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s.

In 2007, I had been working in retail for a bit, and was getting very sick of shit pay and shittier managers. I responded to a Craigslist posting for a job at a small camera equipment rental place, and despite being an awkward 23 year old, I got the job. I ended up managing most of the day to day operations, fulfilling orders and cleaning gear and emailing customers and designing systems to keep track of everything. I worked alone most of the time, which was a little lonely but mostly great – after working in retail and having no control over when I took breaks, what I wore, or what music I listened to, this job was the best fucking thing. I would have stayed there forever, and honestly planned to. At that point in my life, it was the only time I’d really felt competent and useful, like someone other people could rely on. After all the bullshit of changing high schools and leaving college and feeling like a huge failure, this was what I needed. Even now, I credit this job with helping me understand that I could be self sufficient and productive even if I got super burned out being around people all day. It’s part of why I’m a dog walker now – while I can do the customer service thing, it totally exhausts me, and I end up enjoying the rest of my life less, because work takes up so much of my energy.

Anyway, the timing was shit. The recession hit in 2008-2009, orders dried up, I worked fewer and fewer hours, and even though the writing had been on the wall for months, I was blindsided when I got laid off at the beginning of 2010. I had no idea what else I could even do – I’d put all my eggs in this one basket, and it was such a unique situation. Who else was going to hire a 25 year old with no college degree?

The answer, unfortunately, was absolutely no one. I applied to at least 3 jobs every week for almost a year and half and got maybe 2 interviews the entire time. In the meantime, I went back to school for veterinary technology, which was a whole ordeal unto itself – interesting and rewarding, but a ton of work and a miserable (unpaid) externship, followed by a string of stressful, low paying vet tech jobs. It wasn’t all bad – I have a pretty marketable skill set now, and a bunch of experience, and I got a degree and certification out of it. But I haven’t been a tech in several years, because the industry just has so many systemic issues. The pay is crap, especially for how much skill and experience and education everyone wants; if you’re doing this, you’re probably a compassionate and empathetic person, and you WILL get burned out, and there’s basically no support for when that happens; and management is either practice owners that have no idea how to run a business OR people that went to business school and have no idea how to run a vet practice. So now I walk dogs, which I enjoy, and which pays about the same as being a tech, which is fucked up. But I’m also bored and restless and I wish I could use my degree and training for something without it sucking the life out of me. Open to suggestions.

ANYWAY, I digress. After I got laid off, Stace and I moved up to Gloucester, ostensibly so I could be closer to school, but also so I could run the fuck away from some awkward social situations that seemed so world-endingly terrible that they could never be fixed. It turned out that time and distance and not being 25 fixed most of it.*

This turned into a very different thing than I was expecting, but I guess that’s okay. I’ve been somewhere on the in a funk/depressed spectrum for months, and it seems like the way out of that for me is usually writing.

*I wrote a song about this period of time while it was happening that’s held up relatively well, maybe I’ll dig it out again

In general, I try really hard not to pull the “things were better back in MY day” crap. For one, they weren’t necessarily – a lot of my nostalgia isn’t specifically for the late 2000’s/early 2010’s so much as it’s for a time when I had fewer responsibilities and lived closer to my friends. Having said that, is everything just… kind of awful now? I mean there’s all the irl stuff – housing and everything else is stupid expensive, covid fucked up socializing for the better part of 2 years (and left everyone with varying degrees of anxiety/neurosis), and then of course there’s the fascism.

But what’s been bothering me lately is how totally unusable the internet has become in the past couple of years. Google is nearly useless – their AI summary thing is total bullshit, the rest of the first page is usually filled up with sponsored results and ads, and sometimes the actual results it does spit back are aren’t even related to the thing you were looking for. There’s way more examples of this… increasingly unhinged captcha challenges, the sheer quantity of different chat apps you need to stay in touch with everyone in your life, the untrustworthy shit show that google maps has become (I have zero sense of direction so this one especially pisses me off).

But the big one, the main event of current internet fuckery, is social media. I’m not on Instagram because I enjoy it – it’s buggy, ad-ridden, and filled with AI slop. It takes real time and effort to wade through the algorithmic bullshit and find your friends, or keep track of anything you actually care about. I desperately want to delete the fucking thing but I follow a bunch of small local venues and bands that don’t have web sites, or don’t keep them updated, and don’t have the option to subscribe to a mailing list. In centralizing and homogenizing everything, meta et al has succeeded in trapping us in a walled garden full of ads and slop, but because we’d lose touch with our friends and community if we leave, we continue to put up with it. There’s always been an exit, but no one is willing to use it.

People far smarter and better informed than me have said all of this, I just wanted to add my voice to the growing chorus of “it wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t always have to be like this.”

ETA: Just stumbled upon this post that does an excellent job of laying out the ways the internet has become an inscrutable shit show.

Last night we had to say goodbye to Miso aka Mr. Man aka Meese aka Meesey. He was tough as nails and could be a huge asshole, but under that was the sweetest creampuff of a cat, and Stace and I loved him very very much.

He came into our lives in on my birthday in 2007, through a friend of a coworker at Barnes and Noble, and lived in every home Stace and I ever shared. He thought he was a giant guard dog and intimidated the shit out of many a plumber/electrician/vet tech over the years, but also crawled under the blankets to flop across my legs every chilly winter night.

Despite being an only cat for his first 10 years, he welcomed Zappa into our house in a way I never expected. I hoped they would at least tolerate each other, but never thought they would become buds the way they did. They played tag up and down the hallway in Cambridge, shared window perches in Fitchburg, and slept next to each other more often than not.

He took absolutely no shit, but also made it very clear when he loved and trusted you. He both loved and hated with the heat of a thousand suns – progressively more love and less hate as the years went by. Stace and I decided a long time ago that Meese was fueled by spite – like our vet said once, “the meaner they are, the longer they live.” But in Miso’s last days, we realized that once he used up all that rage – once it had been replaced by love – he’d be ready to leave. He was here to learn how to love, and he did.

When he first emerged all giant and fluffy and majestic from a too-small pet carrier at the Empire, I had no idea I’d get to hang with this confident, dramatic, loud as fuck, sweet, snuggly, loyal dude for so many years – I was 23 when he showed up and 40 when he left us. Too much time to recount, nearly half my life. We’re so sad but also so grateful for all those years, and there’s a giant Miso-shaped hole in our home now.

I feel it crashing in
A wave, a weight, it’s harder when it’s soft
I talk about it way too much
But never get the point across
I see things how I want
But never truly how they really are
I think about it way too often
Death and dying’s just a part
But I am older now
I see my whole life inside your eyes
It’s spring time, forest, clouded skies…
-Weakened Friends

Things feel especially dire right now. I’m a really anxious person, so things feel scary all the time – but this feels different. People I trust – the adults in the room – are also freaking out.

I have no idea what I can do. I’m just one little human in a sea of humans on this weird planet, in this flaming trashcan of a country, going to work and making weird music and watching Star Trek reruns and doomscrolling and not sleeping enough.

The people that are supposed to be in charge have been checked out for a long time, but it feels so much worse now. Where is everyone? Where are these mythical checks and balances? Where are all the people we voted for? Are they really going to sit by and do nothing while there’s a fucking hostile authoritarian takeover of the US government?

I’m an elder millennial – I was in high school for Columbine and 9/11, my 20’s for the recession, my 30’s for covid, and now my 40’s for this new shit. I’m so, so tired.

I just want to live, and hang out with the people I love, and pet cats, and make art, and maybe find a tiny scrap of stability. I don’t understand how that threatens anybody.

Sometimes I feel like I lose the ability to be an active participant in my own life. When depression starts to creep up again, I want to want to do things – write or record music, knit, paint – any of the things I do that involves actually creating something. But I just can’t. I sit next to my knitting on the couch, or in front of a song I was already in the middle of writing, and nothing happens. Like the part of my brain that does these things has been walled off – inaccessible, dormant, being slowly buried in snow. It’s not a violent thing; it’s a sort of quiet, gentle loss – the way the air pressure changes when you close a door on a cold day; the solid thunk of a deadbolt; the crinkly sound of dry leaves in the wind, still clinging to their branches, just before they let go.

When did I become so complacent, so accommodating, such a helpless thing? Have I always been like this? Was I always so terrified of conflict that I was willing to do anything to keep the peace, even if it meant ignoring what I actually needed?

This seems to be a theme lately. People push and push and push and they expect me to just take it. Because I usually do.

I think I used to be… not like this. I have this fantasy that I used to speak my mind when pushed far enough. But maybe that was only when I was drunk. Maybe I don’t know how to stand up for myself otherwise. Maybe I never learned at all, and instead spent the time I should have been learning drinking and arguing with people and developing a reputation for being an impulsive, obnoxious person. It seems like, without booze, I’m actually neither. But cutting off the catalyst of hard conversations left a vacuum in its place – now I can never tell anyone how I’m really feeling, because I simply don’t know how. I said recently that I feel like I’m back in middle school – people can be shitty to me when they’re having a bad day, because they know I won’t fight back. They can exclude or ditch me without consequence because they know I’ll still be there when they need something.

I don’t know how to fix this.

I originally started writing this in an Instagram story but it got way too long, and also maybe too personal. It was in response to a post from mattxiv about a firefighter that came out as gay in his obituary. The last slide said, “Why do we have pride? So that no one ever has to come out in their obituary. So that queer people can have peace in life, not just in death.”

It hit me harder than I was expecting, and then I tried to figure out why, and now here we are.

~~~

Definitely had the thought years ago that maybe I could just go through the rest of this life in discomfort.

Like if I had already survived for this long, why rock the boat, why make a selfish decision, why risk alienating the people I love?

But at some point, I realized I was just watching the years tick by, waiting for my time on this planet to end so I could try again. (Apparently, I have a lot faith in reincarnation.)

Not suicidal exactly, but really ambivalent about being here.

I knew top surgery was what I needed way back in 2015 or so, but didn’t think it was for me, didn’t think things were bad enough, didn’t think I deserved to use up those resources – there was definitely someone else who needed it more.

But in retrospect, that was a symptom of the same ambivalence – why bother doing something difficult if I was just waiting for the whole experience of being alive to end anyway? Why go to all the trouble of finding a surgeon, arguing with insurance, spending a whole bunch of money, going through a miserable recovery process, figuring out how to tell everyone? What would be the point?

But now, here, just about a year and three months since surgery, it was so incredibly worth it. It’s like there had been constant low level static in my head since 2007, and suddenly it was just… gone.

Recognizing that static for what it actually was took FOREVER. And then I had to convince myself I was actually worth all this effort.

But there was so much ease waiting on the other side.

Things are definitely not perfect, but the baseline is so much better. Each day I stand a fighting chance of feeling okay, when before there was this unshakeable wrongness baked in to living.

Once again, up at 4:35 in the morning. At least this time it’s a Saturday.

I signed up to do Record Production Month again this year, wherein you pick a quantity of music you want to record (a single, EP, or full album) during the month of February.

This is the third year in a row I’ve tried to do this, and maybe the first one where I actually end up making the thing I set out to. In quantity, anyway.

I had intended to do some sort of bedroom pop thing, like the stuff I’ve been making the past while. I tried for the first couple of weeks, then got totally consumed with prepping for a gig I ended up playing mid month (which is a subject for another time). I only just got back to it today, with a week left, because the mailing list I signed up for originally sent out a “if you haven’t started yet, it’s fine! BUT JUST DO IT” email that I found strangely comforting/vaguely guilt-inducing. So I tried again.

What ended up coming out of my brain was three improvised pieces of ambient/drone/whatever the fuck, using my guitar and a bunch of pedals, most notably the Chase Bliss Mood and Walrus Audio Lore. And it was actually fun to make. I think I’ve been putting a ton of pressure on myself to make music in a very specific way, and it’s just not working. I keep saying “my brain is broken” but maybe it’s just getting re-wired again… I’ve decided this happens whenever I go through a period of being depressed and start to either come out of it or at least realize what’s going on and try to climb up to the surface a little, to get some fresh air. And right now that apparently means I have zero desire to write lyrics or otherwise address my current brain rot in a direct way. In retrospect I’m not sure why I didn’t just try to do something different in the first place. Or maybe I did try earlier in the month, but didn’t think weird improvised ambient counted as music, which is silly because I actively listen to this sort of thing.

Either way, I made a thing and I think it sounds decent and it made me feel less like shit for an hour so I’ll take the win.

Yesterday, at like 10pm, I got an urge to take out my very old and chonky Dell laptop. I didn’t remember quite how old it actually was – Stace was able to look up the service number, and it was purchased in November 2003. I used it regularly until about 2007, and a few times in 2009 from what I can tell.

It was a disorienting early 2000’s time capsule, which I expected, but wasn’t able to meaningfully access the internet anymore, which I was not expecting. Something about a bookmarks folder full of hundreds of dead links that I’d never be able to access again was jarring. There’s a whole era of the internet that’s just… gone. This is not an original thought, and the reason why the wayback machine exists, but it still sucks.

But that’s not the thing I came here to write about… I found a folder full of old writing. It’s definitely backed up elsewhere, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to read it in its natural habitat. I went through most of it, until 5am cause I’m an idiot, and like every time I do this sort of thing, by the end I felt very weird.

The weird feeling always happens, like I forget who I am for a couple of hours, like I’m reading about someone else. I don’t know if other people feel this way about their younger selves; maybe it’s a function of having so much written down. It has a “watching a car crash in slow motion” quality.

I kind of hate who I was from 21 to 24 or so. I was so fucking dramatic, and ungrateful, and self centered. But I was also deeply anxious and depressed, with some raging undiagnosed ADHD thrown in for good measure. One thing that stood out yesterday, in the disjointed chronology of poems and journal entries and AIM conversations, is how the systems that should have helped me out of that hole failed me over and over.

I’ve written about this before. The dismissive primary care doctors and school administrators, the unaccommodating and unsympathetic counseling department at Simmons. I kept reaching out, knowing something was really wrong, but kept getting told it wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t sick enough, until suddenly I was sleeping through all my classes and not leaving my dorm room and self injuring and getting blackout drunk all the time. But what struck me for the first time last night was one sentence, buried in a journal entry about the meds I’d been taking for a month at that point: “Also, noticing colors more. Things seem a bit physically brighter, I feel more ‘here.'”

How fucking depressed had I been? And for how long? No wonder I was such an asshole.

I still don’t really like who I was or how I acted back then. But having one concrete reason I can point to is comforting. I was trying to claw my way out of a hole I’d been in for years, without much of a support system, without the resources of the modern internet and, let’s be honest, some shitty attitudes about mental health that wouldn’t begin to change for at least another decade.

I said a long time ago that this blog wasn’t for drama and was only gonna be about crafting and baking and nice photos. But it’s good to have a place to write this out. Life isn’t all fun hobbies and good food. Honestly, it’s like 75% shit, at least lately. But being able to look back and know I handled things the best I could, and that I’m way, way better at handling them now, feels useful.