Trying to make the text a little more easily readable on here, as the canned setting is a ghostly grey that I find challenging. Yeah, this is a sign of old age, I'm sure. Also, I have no idea why themes like OceanWP don't incorporate line and paragraph breaks in a logical, text-oriented way. I have to compose in html mode and manually add paragraph breaks. I tried Googling how to solve this, but all of the answers are fucking ridiculously complex code block things and dumbass "instructional videos," which I hate. The advent of the instructional video over a simple set of written directions is one of the reasons civilization is coming to an end.
I have had several nights of stressed out dreams, including one where I was in jail, another one where the temperature was predicted to drop to 30 below zero and I was camping with some students of mine and we had to try to find some caves to hide out in, and another one where nanobot drones were raining down on Earth and M and I had to hoss a giant mattress into a protected room. Later in that dream, I was solo, and I turned into a porcupine-like beast, and realized I was actually in a computer game simulation and my "operator" had decided to change character classes from human to some kind of wild animal. I was surprisingly absolutely fine with that.
I guess these are all just end of the year anxiety dreams. I contacted my landlord about renewing the lease and he is cool with it, and there's no rent increase, which is remarkable in LA. I got the car serviced yesterday, including replacing a stripped wheel stud, replacing the front brake pads, rotating the tires (which always makes me think of that dumb joke, "don't the tires normally rotate whenever I drive?") and an oil change. Tied up a bunch of loose ends around M's visit. M is one of those people who has to eat a little something every 2 hours or so, as opposed to my usual style of eating a protein bar in the morning and then often not eating again until 9 pm, so I switched up my usual grocery order a bit. I've gotten super spoiled by having groceries delivered, which I justify by tipping 15%. This lazy ass behavior should probably change sometime. But damn it's luxurious.
I've also started luxuriating in the restaurant delivery deals in my neighborhood. It's a remarkable world where you just sit in your little apartment, and Chinese food shows up at your door, often with zero delivery fee because places are so close. The latest was Moon House, last night, amazing fried chicken dumplings but kind of bland black pepper chicken. I think they specialize more in Cantonese style and I'll try some new things along those lines next time. It's often a mistake to order Szechuan from a non-Szechuan place.
Music birthdays today: The great Marshall Allen is 97 years old. Here's a performance with some of the Sun Ra Arkestra members in the backyard of the Sun Ra House in Philly:
The great photo indexing project continues. I found folders going all the way back to 2009 and I'm slowly going through those. I was talking with M last night about how heavily documented our lives in general are these days, thanks to digital media. I have a single shoebox with photos spanning my entire life from age 3 to about age 45. After that, there's an incredibly prolific documentation of every trip, relationship, etc. A friend of mine jokes that we are now at the point where there's an order of magnitude more documentation of life now than there is actual life. It does seem that way. But the good thing is I have a wealth of high resolution cactus and wilderness photos, and it's been crazy trying to pick and choose the ones to be indexed. It is mentally exhausting, since each folder and sometimes each image is subject to that basic question: index or not? Constant low level aesthetic judgment is tiring.
The above a big old Homalocephala polycephala near Death Valley, from years ago, after a rare rain. Wet only on one side.
M and the 2 hour eating…I’m right there with her, about 3 hour intervals. D learned to carry snacks with him when we were dating, because my, “I’m getting hungry,” often meant we needed to have already eaten 20 minutes ago. I’ve learned to tell him I’m going to be hungry in about an hour.
I probably should eat smaller amounts more frequently as a form of blood sugar management and mood control. But I have been saying that to myself for 40 years. haha.