FULL BLEED: DON'T NEED A CURE

That post of mine from a couple weeks back, how this time of the year has its own resonances and effects? Well, it's going double over the next couple of weeks. I mean, sure, there's the relentless assault of news story after news story about how it's all fucked and everything's on fire and oh god won't somebody please do something when all we can do is yell at reps and yeah. It's exhausting. And then you're supposed to keep going, just keep on trucking. And the fact is that time will advancing even if you don't want it to and all you want to do is lie down and just have it goddamn stop for awhile. But you've got work to do.

I wake up in the middle of the night, positive that my current book is irredeemably screwed-up and I know it isn't. That if I just did these things right, my work would've been picked up and I'd be a real writer. Characters yelling at me that they're not important enough when the book isn't really actually about them. And maybe that means it should be, but I really don't think so. It's just doubt. But that doubt's always there, even after a pretty good four weeks coming off a cold start (of drafting, which is not the same process as outlining). Yeah, well even after spending half of last week formulating how to present what I know needs to go in from the outline, but not how to present it, I'm still working on it some. I'm also looking at flying across the country in a couple days (sure hope the air traffic system holds up) to see my daughter graduate from college which is not a thing that should even be possible, right?

Well, it is. I won't go on too long about this, other than to say that it's a couple of big old chunks of firewood tossed into the burning pit of free-floating-anxiety I'm processing over a number of things. I went out into the world of job hunting in 1990 and it was "bad" because there was a "recession." Now she gets to go out in the world and it's "totally fucked" because "late-stage capital turning work into upwards money funnels". So that sucks.

So, fun times here on the mothership. Don't get me wrong. I'm proud of her for getting through it and for what she's done. Just launching now is not a thing I'd be doing if I had any control over it. Anyways, just something else to get through over the next coupe weeks. Which also means my work schedule gets blown right to hell. Yes, I could sit down and write in the hotel room between graduation events, etc. That sounds like a thing that is likely to happen. Who knows. I've probably written under worse conditions, like in a hotel room the morning before my wife went in for life-changing surgery, yeah that's a thing that happened. So, again, who knows. Maybe I'll be insanely productive. I sincerely doubt it.

So, what else has been going on? I'm off physics lectures and talks about the nature of consciousness on YouTube, skipping on the quantum physics and cosmology refreshers. Maybe I'll get back to these, but it seems like the most interesting parts of these now is how these changes get rippled through individual and social consciousnesses. It's not like there's consensus on any of this. We're all back to the Copenhagen Symposia where physicists teamed up in cliques just like goddamn high school and picked idols and decided this was a good way to do things. Hell, we're still arguing over string theory when it doesn't actually work in De Sitter space (but does nicely in anti-De Sitter space: now guess which one of these we actually live in.) What looks interesting and intriguing on the quantum level simply doesn't survive the transitions of scale required to get out into classical reality (IE, where we live and spend our time all the time.)

Sure, plenty of interesting ideas, but not a lot of concrete. Which I guess is fine if you're a theoretical physicist but lacks for applicability. And I've already ranted somewhat on the whole academic hothouse of theory. There's lots of them that do great when kept under controlled conditions and in laboratories. And then they tend to wither when exposed to reality. But that's okay. I'm working in fiction. I can just take some of these ideas and sparks and work with them. Though the truth is that I'm likely to just do what I'm going to do and might not even use these things as window dressing. Funny thing is that there's always a little chunk of Hazeland that's been rooted in science fiction more than horror. I suppose that's my watching The Twilight Zone talking, where both those modes played side by side. Or John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which was a pretty clear influence on some of what went on in The Queen of No Tomorrows. But it's not a thing that gets a lot of attention (mostly because people would have to read my books to pay attention to them -- that's the joke). And Carpenter sure played with science in the horror there, to great effect. I'm not saying it was accurate science, but it's there, part of the language and texture, which changes things up.

I've caught up on Andor and I guess I'm going to have to get up early on Wednesday so I can get most of the last episodes watched before leaving on the trip and having it spoiled if I dare check into social media. I'm not here to argue about spoilers or not. Post whatever you want. There's such a rush to get the first opinions logged about these things now. I can't even be mad about it, though I do find it frustrating and counter to what the experience should be. But it's whatever. It's today. It's how things work now. Still, I'd just to like to watch the show and not know that such and such a thing is going to happen, here it comes right now. That never helps. (Also, it's bad enough when I'm watching things and there's obvious twists that are there obviously, not surprising at all -- yes, even in Andor.)

Also caught up on the first couple episodes of the second season of The Last of Us. I'm also done with the show. It wants very much to be Serious Television because it was based on The Only Video Game We Can Also Call art and I'm just tired, folks. There's a lot of tryhard instead of being mere entertainment. Entertainment is great. You can be somewhere else for awhile. Or you can slog through just sheer joylessness. Watching it I was struck with the thought "Why would anyone make this?" and I just slid away. It's okay. It doesn't have to be for me.

Finished reading Signs of Life by M. John Harrison and tried not to get depressed about the state of my own work. I know. He does what he does and very well. I do what I do and I'm trying to do it very well. I don't get to be the judge of whether I am or not. That's not for me.

Probably no other updates until I get back, nothing substantial anyways. See you in something more than a week.