I really didn’t have high hopes for Joe Biden when he was elected president. I honestly thought we’d be seeing more of the same neoliberal corporate lobby bullshit that both the Democrats and Republicans have been hawking for the last fifty years. The “trickle down” bullshit. The ass-kissing of the most wealthy Americans. It’s almost pathological how much impoverished Americans kiss the ass of the wealthiest. Few people truly realize that “The American Dream” was a lie sold to impoverished immigrants in order to lure cheap labor to the states. Through a rather rigorous propaganda campaign stretching through decades and generations, this lie has persisted to present day, and it truly is the forebear of MAGA in every way imaginable.

It keeps creeping closer and closer. Minute by minute. Day by day. It’s almost here and I’m insanely excited. I’m building a life with an amazing partner and we’re doing amazing things together. The excitement is really starting to well up and I can’t avoid just popping off anymore. I can’t wait. There are so many awesome things we’re planning and it’s going to be so much fun. I’m gonna network the shit out of the house with smart everything. It’s gonna be awesome.

My anxiety is through the roof these days. I’ve been working on the same massive project for nearly six months now. Maybe it’s been longer, I honestly can’t remember. It has felt like many eternities. As if that weren’t anxiety enough, I’m possibly being poached by our software development team. I love programming and tinkering but I really don’t know what to think.

Not only is all this going on, but we’re closing on a new house in the comings weeks. It’s a damned big place in a decent area and it’s a new construction. I’ve never owned a house before, let alone a new house. It’s wild.

It seems like we’re devolving again. It’s crazy to think that at some point we perceived ourselves to be quite close to becoming a space-faring species, at home amongst the stars. That imaginary society is so far removed from every society that thinks it’s important to regulate people’s genitals and bedroom activities. It’s all just so stupid, and the more you zoom out the dumber it gets. Billionaires are jockeyed into space on giant dicks that they could only afford because they don’t pay living wages or reasonable benefits or even taxes. Southern evangelical Christians feel as though worshipping a rich man is more important than the homeless guy who kicked over merchant and money changer tables at temple. Everything about conservatives is trash these days, but they have no introspective. They have no ability to analyze how garbage they are, and they’re incredibly effective at ignoring facts and information that they don’t like. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the left didn’t follow suit. Now we have a massive divide between two absolutely inane groups that have zero self-awareness. The world is going to be consumed by this before it collapses. We as a people have wholly lost our way. You can’t discuss this with anyone because they’ve probably aligned themselves with some hyperbolic side already. You have conservatives defending klansmen and liberals championing body mutilation and mental illness as “the new normal”. Both sides are hyperbolic psychopaths but finding people in the center is becoming more and more difficult. We get no reprieve from the cadent spiral into oblivion.

There are times when I can barely believe what my life is like. I have a partner who is my best friend and sexy as hell. I have wonderful kids. I have a career. I have everything I could wish for. I need to take time out to explain how appreciative I am for the privileges I am gifted. I’ve never had a love like this before, and I’ll never have another love like it. It’s important to me because it’s an immense source of my life satisfaction, and it’s only so satisfying because I was already happy before we met. The ability to take happiness and compound it the way my Amber has, I just never imagined getting to experience a true love that’s based on communication and boundaries and a real and working healthy relationship.

Sometimes it feels like people like me more or prefer my company more when I’m not asserting myself. I don’t know if it’s a me problem or if it’s just how interactions go. I’ve always been a pretty laid back person, and I really still am, but I’m trying to not be avoidant to a toxic level. I don’t really have anything outlined ahead of time to get off my chest, so the best I can do for the moment is some “stream-of-consciousness” style rambling. I’m just working with what I have.

I hope that one day my children can inherit my mistakes, that they not be required to make the same ones I had made in life, and can make their own mistakes and learn along the way in a less harsh manner than what I experienced. I hope that being an open book for them gives them the brevity they need to live better than I could. I don’t know that it will work out that way, but I can hope at least.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted in my entire life. I’ve worked third shift, I’ve had sprees of all-nighters, I’ve experienced illness that wholly prevents sleep- But of all the things to bring me to my knees, not having either of my sleep aids at the ready eclipses every incidence of insomnia that I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve self-medicated for insomnia many years now. Upon discovering that prolonged melatonin use can cause vivid nightmares, I had sought the assistance of a doctor to get a normal night’s sleep. It worked alright for a short while, but eventually I found a number of weaknesses in relying on Ambien and Lunesta. Namely, they only half work after a period of time. There would be partially prepared, partially eaten meals found randomly in the morning. At least on one occasion I drove myself to a corner liquor store in the middle of the night.