life

Happy Birthday

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Supposedly we are supposed to seek out 3rd spaces. Places that aren’t home and aren’t work where we can just be. The idea being that these serve as social gatherings where we can just be rather than be something. Rather than the system administrator or the boyfriend, the brother, the sister, or the wife. Somewhere we can throw off the obligations of being and just be.

But our choices…our choices in the USA, all come with price tags. The closest we come. Is the neighborhood bar, but what if you don’t drink? All of these places we might suggest all feel like liminal spaces to me.

Somehow not one thing or another but just this endless maybe which exists to draw us out.
And once we are there, we are what? Forced into socializing? Why? Because we don’t have time to just sit back and read a book and drink coffee. We have maybe 4 hours before we turn back into a pumpkin.

But, I don’t want that. I don’t want to change back into anything. I just want to be myself without the obligation of being what others need me to be. I want to be free.

But, here, we are never free. We need that money. We mortgage our lives for the possibility of retirement. To enjoy our life at the tail end. When it no longer matters. When what’s mostly possible is done.

I wish I had done things differently.
But I’m just as trapped as anyone. Because that’s what they don’t teach. That if you want to be free, you gave to carve out your own spaces.

Because, America was never meant for that. It has always been the place where money was the only currency. And we spill our blood on the wheel. One more revolution. One more failure. One last glittering lie.

A rededication of purpose

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There is an aspect of my life I’ve allowed to fall away. Thinking that with a purpose served there was no use to learning; to changing in that direction.

However, it was through learning and wielding in those aspects that I felt most alive. Most happy. Leaving. Taking a vacation for my, for the rest of my life, has left me without purpose. Having had purpose for half of my life, it felt like setting a burden down. Like I was allowed to breathe in full measure without labour. And while it was that, one loses focus. Loses the path when life becomes an endless parade of distractions. Hoping to fill the eternal empty of endless days.

Distraction, for a time, was nice. My soul needed it. But that time is past. My soul needs another path. An old path. Its steps chosen again and again. As the wheel breaks and turns. As the thin hopes of a hundred years crack, revealed to be naught but facade.

Only the storm remains. The deep night. And the eternal winter.

Missed a post deadline

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The nicest thing you can do for yourself is to forgive yourself for the missing of deadlines. Forgive and try to do better. Because once you have failed at something you’ve set out to do, it’s too late. That iteration has failed and all you can do is move forward. It’s trite but still true.

I know I’ve been missing a few of these. My brain feels empty. My heart placid. Without the roil, without the sturm and drang, without the churn, it’s hard to write anything. I miss the passion. The surety of purpose. The faith in hunanity.

Where are the songs about the courage to keep existing despite(instead of the one’s promising a better)

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Some of us never make it out of the storm
Never get to the other side
To the promise of sunshine
To the promise of better days
It’s no failing
To be stuck in the storm
To see the endless expanse
To be stuck
Screaming into the howling wind
Some of us
Never make it out of the storm
Stop promising us a world we’ll never know

Hard to stop bleeding, running through razor wire

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Can’t listen to music
Even the sad songs sound too upbeat
Feeling that burnout
Feeling that feral thrill
That fuck it all
And watch it burn
Except it would be my life
And I don’t have the stomach to sift through the wreckage
So I lay in bed in the late afternoon
Wishing for that lottery money
Just so I can stop worrying all the time
I can rock in a crisis but when life’s a crisis
I’m just crush under the boulder
Just want some stability but what’s that look like
Jobs a job
Writing was the cure
But its all fled now
Why bother with anything
Why not light the match
All you can lose is a life

Feeling the blood in veins; they say it’s impossible

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Missing everything good
Life just keeps rolling by
And each step
Not getting any closer
Missing that energy
Happy to be out
Happy to be
Waiting for it all to come together
Waiting for that chance
So far from what is wanted
Rail against the system
It’s easier to shout
About things that are so intractable
Than to face the challenges
Which seem immovable
So close to home

Adventures of a computer worker (conclusion)

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After taking a nap after work, as you do, I woke to find my new power supply was awaiting me. This time, I checked the box over thoroughly to make sure it was what I ordered. Platinum, check. 750 watt, check. And…(sigh of relief) modular. Triple check and all good.

I unboxed it and made sure that all was advertised and finding it was, set to comparing the plug placement. If the arrangement is too different from my current setup then I would end up doing some recabling anyway. While the arrangement is a little different, it is a better setup and will make it easier for me to seat the cables. All good.

I open my case, being careful to detach the fans at the midpoint rather than at the motherboard. No removing the radiator this time, thanks. I unseat the cables and it sucks just as much as I remember. Hurting my fingers yet again. I console myself with the thought that it’s just one more time.

I unscrew the old supply and remove the now mostly dead object. The fan stopped spinning midway through my work day yesterday and I’ve been ramping up the anxiety since then. I grab the new psu and align it so that the fan will spin and intake air properly. Then I put all of the cables in. They click into place much easier than the did with my old psu, except for the last one.

This is the cable that had a slight offset arrangement from the original psu and it slides in reluctantly. I push and pull but the cable won’t seat to 100%. Fuck. So I trace where this cable goes and… It’s to the DVD drive that I haven’t used in 4 years. So, fuck it. Good enough. But I’m not going to screw everything back in place without testing it. Because wouldn’t that just take the cake, get it all set up and it doesn’t work? No. Gotta test it. So I plug in the power cord and the passive lights come up. I set the power rocker to on and I hit the power button.

It boots right up…but the fan doesn’t turn on.
I check the documentation and it says that it has to reach a 40°C operating temperature to flip on the fan. So ok I put my hand to the exhaust vent, and it’s a little warm but not very. Huh. So I kick on 5 simultaneous instances of blue stacks and then kick on a graphics intensive game(Vermintide 2). After an hours worth of running the fan kicks on.
I have to check to make sure it’s spinning because it makes zero sound. Heavy sigh of relief.

I shut it all down and put the side panel back. I’m careful and don’t accidentally pull the fan cable like last time and get the midway cable reseated. Then I set it up in its normal position and boot it up. Just testing that the case fans come on, and they do! I shut down again and go to sleep. Anxiety averted at least for now, I find hours of sleep that I normally am wide awake for. Hopefully this means my sleep schedule will be back on track.

Adventures of a computer worker

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My computer is the primary source for entertainment, news, work, and just general time wasting. So when my power supply fan started grinding and stopping, I stopped and assessed. I can’t afford a new system right now. But I could replace the PSU. But I’ve never done that before.
I’m lucky in that my current PSU is modular. So as long as I got a similar PSU that was also modular, I’d be ok.

So, I did some research and found my original purchase was for a 500 watt silverstone Gold. All good, I found a good price for a 650 silverstone platinum. It got delivered on Thursday and I unhooked the cables on my power supply, bruising the crap out of my fingertips in the process. Those cables hadn’t moved in 6 years.

So I get the power supply out and I immediately notice that it is larger than the one I bought. No big deal, it’s been awhile, maybe technology has changed. Then I see that it is a 750 watt supply…shit. I’ll need to return the one I bought because I’m looking for parity here. So I put it all back, bruising my fingertips some more to get it reseated and screwed back in. I had taken the opportunity to really blow the dust out of every nook in the Psu and while I had dusted it just recently, more dust blew out.

When I reinstalled it, the fan was working fine, no grind and no stopping. So great. Maybe I had more time to replace the psu. I returned the psu(power supply unit) and got my money back as credit. I located the right size, a 750 watt platinum silverstone modular. It’s set to arrive on Saturday. Ok, I can eak it out till then.

On Friday the computer works fine. No fan problems but the fan wobble is back. Ok, I can deal. By Saturday the fan is grinding and I need to replace the psu. The new one comes, it says it is 750 and I pull the old psu, further bruising my fingertips. I open the box for the new one….and it’s not modular. It’s fixed. Which means I would need to rerun all the cabling in my computer to use this psu…and it’s bronze instead of platinum. It’s the equivalent of buying a car that is supposed to be an automatic suv and getting a manual gremlin. Fuck!

So I go to put the psu back again. More finger bruising and while I’m putting the case side back and plugging the case fans back in, the power cable to the fans which connects to the motherboard comes loose. That connector slides underneath the radiator for my liquid cooling setup. And it’s impossible to plug back in without unseating the radiator and fan setup. So I remove that, plug it back in. Then forget how the radiator was situated and spend 5 minutes figuring out what side is up on it. Then get it installed. Everything is hooked back up and plugged back in. Second time in as many days.

I setup the return of the wrong psu and get a new one ordered. It arrives on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the fan continues to grind and it full stops. That’s super bad. Like potential to catch on fire bad. I turn off my computer and leave it off. I need it for work on Monday and Tuesday.
I place the whole rig on it s side so that I can monitor the psu fan and kick start it my manual rotation with a non reactive poker. In this case a long q tip(the wooden end) which I use to clean other electronics. All day Monday I’m filled with anxiety. I CANNOT afford a new system. I have my huge standing fan pointed directly at the intake for air on the psu. The fan stops multiple times throughout the work day. And I manage to kick start it each time. But I can tell, its on its last legs.

I turned off my system as soon as I got through the work day. And I will do the same tomorrow. If I dont get the right one tomorrow, I’m gonna break down. Then I’m gonna have to go to best buy and hope. Because there is no way that the psu lasts the week.
So a ton of stress, but at least I finished 2 books in my reading back catalogue.

A yellow wood

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I once said, “I have no regrets.”
And meant it
But that all came crashing down one fall night
Then regret became everything
So much so that it eclipsed everything
Until I was nothing
Just an open wound
Pulsing pain
Looking for anyway to feel
And there again I felt no regrets because I was so deep in regret
That nothing felt different
So with no differentiation
Nothing was the name of the game
Eventually, I began to feel again
And I would say that I regretted the things I hadn’t done
The actions I failed to take
So I resolved to risk
To hold forth my heart entire and burn rather than smolder
And I hurt some people
Because I was still hurting
I just kept the thorns turned inward than out
So I began to regret those actions
So actions taken, actions failed to take
And neither safe
So I became mindful
Tried to be honest
Always honest
With myself most of all
And I found myself with even more regret
Not of action or inaction
But instead for being unable to act
Constrained by my word given
Once to let my partner dictate pace
And so unable to make moves for both of our benefit
Once to say that two masters cannot be served
And instantly regretting it
It’s what I thought but if life has taught me anything it’s that new information brings new thought
I wish I had that confidence, that ignorance, of youth
That I could enforce my will and bedamned to all other consequences
If I did, for brief moments, I would be happy
Content
But instead, I wage this long game
Hoping that my choices now will lead us well
And not to regret

Walking down the road, always forward

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Words seem inadequate now and I
At turns
Want to dance and laugh
Or scream and cry
No calm thing seems an adequate response
And yet that’s all I can do
Singing lullabies into a microphone
Recording future missives
And hoping tomorrow will be a different story
But sometimes the same
Because it’s not all bad news
So I want things to change
But be the same
But different
Life twists you about
And getting untwisted
It’s less a goal
Than something that just happens
In brief moments of
Clarity quiet
That soundless void between was and will be