Not sleeping…just dreaming. I couldn’t write any more, my eyes burned. I closed them and a face tried to eat me. Painted in motive watercolors in the noise behind my eyelids, the noise of randomness and neural crosstalk and every bright light I’ve ever glanced at. I folded myself into my bed, just for a little while, closed them again to commune with a man standing in the grainy darkness in a flowing robe, his three large tentacles waving slowly behind him in the nonlight of where my window should have been. I wondered what he was standing on.
* * *
These last couple weeks have been unbelievably stressful, between dealing with lawyers (cexx.org, and, ahem, “Unsolicited Commercial Software” research in general, is a legal lightning rod), work (all the usual overworkload plus several government research proposals, due tomorrow night), and good friends in bad situations. I feel like a dog chew toy, being jerked this way and that way from day to night to day. I always consider myself indestructible, ignoring my own needs to be there for someone else, no matter how it hurts me in the process, cleaning up the mess each time as the same cyclic scenes play out over and over again. I swear just once, sometime, I will worry about me. But being there gives me a sense of purpose, a little nugget of enduring warmth in a cold world, in a way that assembly hacking, grinding through equations and 1000 hours of circuit board layout never will. I could do it ’til it kills me and die smiling. (Speaking figuratively here. Don’t all go calling 911.)
Many blog entries forthcoming, and emails to those I’m neglecting lately, when I can find the time to write them.
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