Alright, here's a small rant/ update.
There's something eating away at me, I don't know what. It's at an emotional level. Maybe it's just the damn weather or something in or at the job but I'm feeling very out of sorts. I'm dissatisfied with everything I write and nothing seems like it's good enough or of a high enough quality.
The Dark Defiles has been read and I loved it but I'm unhappy with what I've written about it and don't know what it is I'd like to talk about with it. Baltimore is done and I wrote a page and a half about hating its final 4 volumes, sat on it a day, re-read the final issue and realized I actually quite loved the ending and loved that it actually delivered exactly what I wanted and that the thing I actually hated was the group dynamic and delivery of that dynamic in everything post Cursed Chapel.
The Intimacy short story in the Wall is interesting but the write-up is barking up the wrong tree.
And I've also spent way too much time on the Wolf Riders anthology given what it really is and I even still need to read the three last stories.
I'm denying myself the small pleasures of watching a show or a movie outside of exercising because I can't seem to deliver what I would like. and that in turn seems to only frustrate me more.
My sleep seems fractured but there's no evidence for it. My days feel off and when I look in the mirror I fucking loathe what I see. All I want to to is just stop thinking and blot out the world. Drown myself in darkness until life chills the hell out or leaves me alone. I feel beat down and tired.
Usually I'd jump on my crosstrainer and exercise the frustration off of me in under an hour, get back on my writing chair and be at least reasonably pleased, or comforted that the project or even life's troubles or petty shit doesn't seem so insurmountable.
One thing helps the other and we end up with a happy Levi.
Thing is; my trusty Sirius 5000 broke down a few weeks ago, quite finally I might add. I broke the central axle; a construction flaw got worn down enough to grind through the iron bar at the heart of my trusty friend. No replacement of the part possible, due to its location and the model itself was off the shelves.
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| A memento |
Had it between 3 and 4 years and I used it as intensively as I could, aiming at at least 40 minutes every day.
I watched whole shows on the damn thing. The entirety of Black Sails, seasons 1-7 of nu-Who, the Shield (ugh, what a waste of everyone's time), Black Mirror, Spartacus, The Walking Dead, Masters of Sex (in the summer and I remember nearly passing out on a very hot day, I should've postponed or stopped but it was the series finale so I kept on pushing. When I finally got off my eyes had sunken down into my sockets and the space beneath them had turned blue. Stupid finale too, such unlikable people, really.), Father Ted, Taboo, Penny Dreadful, Attack on Titan and on and on, different shows, views and re-views.
I spent a lot of time on that thing.
There were the usual gripes at the start. Some part or other that squeaks or grinds. And you'll be buggered if you can actually find what and where the damn problem is.
In the end, the thing that seemed to have stopped all those fucking noises is the way the gears rusted just enough to fill in the blanks and keep the rest operating smoothly. Fucking bizarre I know but think of it as that time in the Simpsons where Mister Burns is told that all his illnesses are actively preventing him from dying because they keep obstructing one another.
So yeah, now it broke and the routine with it.
I needed the exercise, and before you ask why don't you just go jogging or something, Levi? Tha's cheap and like, the easiest you could commit yourself to.
Well, little miss or mister know-it-all. For one. There's days where I'm too terrified to even answer my doorbell. Where I have to screw up my courage to walk out the door to go to the shop or pick up a package from the corner shop.
Some days it's hard and some days it is just plain beyond me.
Second. I got shit feet. Flat feet. And a decade ago I tore a ligament in my right ankle. And that fucker still acts up when I go running regularly. I used to run quite alot, and quite hard and I loved it. Now every time I try to go running again I'm gambling whether I'm going to go work with a stiff right foot in the morning or not.
I need a steady, comfortable way to exercise at home.
I need a hometrainer. A cross trainer. because one of them walking things would tax the ligament-thing too much.
So I bought a new one. It was black Friday so hey, boom, nice.
Arrived quite soon and my first thought was. Fuck, that's a big thing, isn't it?
Turns out it was.
Setting it up it quickly became clear I'd have to radically alter my set-up, but hey; I spent enough fucking money on this thing so I went and did just that.
It's honestly a neat little set-up. optimum use of space while being relatively out of the way.
It's more out of the way than the Sirius was at least And it's good and comfortable for watching whatever I want with that custom-made dedicated viewing platform.
But goddamn, there's trouble afoot.
If you listen you can hear a little tinkling sound in between the gravelly death-aware tones of Leonard Cohen voice.
That sound signifies that there's a small bit of something in the right metal bar, beam, girder, I don't know the word... It's likely just a splinter of iron.
The bar itself is welded shut, so whatever's in there is there to stay. It's an absurd quality error and such a tiny one at that.
Anyway, that's the genuinely unfixable thing. And it's not even anything big and it's not the source that drove me up the wall enough to abandon my plans for the evening to writing out a self-centered, self-pitying trudge of a blog-post. I exercise with headphones on so a little tinkling sound like that gets drowned out by whatever's on the screen.
What frustrates me to no end with this thing is what always happens with these things.
Those grinding, clanking sounds are back.
Those sounds that no matter how hard you look and listen for them, no matter how many things you screw tighter or looser, smear in with lubricant or whatever the fuck, those sounds that whenever you buy a new device like this, always pop up again and compound the frustration every time you try.
It's nightmarish, because I've been here before with the Sirius and all I'm seeing is months and months of frustration ahead while I, in starts and stops, to the tune of endless internal cursing and screaming, try to fix my damn 600 euro piece of shit.
So much fucking frustration for something that will likely only end up either fixing itself or that, through exposure I will get inured to.
Speaking of nightmarish.
I was reading the Hellraiser comic during a dark day and I saw something that made my eyes bulge out of their sockets and my heart stop in my chest.
This one panel is almost literally like one of the nightmares I used to have as a child, except the view is a far too distant one, and the lights are blue instead of oily black, rust-brown and dead grey. The body horror in the comic doesn't do it for me, really, but this thing, this one picture evoked something in me that I haven't felt since childhood.
We all have nightmares growing up, bizarre, likely nonsensical, illogical things that aren't so scary if you try to explain them to someone else. It's a part of growing up.
My most recurring nightmare was of a one-dimensional view of giant black, oily gears, spinning and spinning, rotating in perfect and diabolical perfection. But then something changes and as if I'm looking at a draining bath-tub, a whirlpool-motion drags the fabric of reality askew and twists all those giant, steaming, viscous cogs into a swirling pattern. An ungodly screeching tears my sanity loose because this can not happen, this should not happen it is not right it is as if I'm looking at something that is ripping twisting the cogs in themselves, into themselves, to somewhere else that can not be and I wake up screaming taut in fear and tears and sweat.
That or I go into the Snoopy dream. Yes. Snoopy.
Where all I can see is a one-dimensional view, as if in a computer game, of that little yellow fuzzball-thing, slowly, haltingly picking one flower after the next as if he's dead or knows he's about to be. The flowers are placed equidistant from each other, on clear, light-green grass with a background of blue sky and small white clouds. Every time the yellow thing picks a flower I am dead. I will die. I end.
But then it does and I don't and then he moves on to the next. And somewhere at one point he picks the flower and a cartoon bomb goes off and existence ends in a horrible, grinding, clenching motion. The final end and it is horrible.
Anyway. Where was I?
Oh yeah, the frustration.
I mean, jesus, I just need a way to take away the frustration, not something that'll exponentially add to it.
I'll fix it in time, figure it out, but fucking hell it's just another stupid thing, isn't it?
You collect these little frustrations as you go about your merry day, and if you can't ditch some of them, alleviate them who knows how with god knows what then they are going to end up dragging you down.
Long story short: I am annoyed and I wish I wasn't.
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