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A brief timeline of recent events:

August 2016: Graduated from university, the culmination of several years of intense and prolonged hard work towards a goal.  I feel proud, but also at loose ends.  What to do now?

September 2016: Boss offers me a nice apartment, only a five-minute walk from the office instead of a forty-five minute bike ride.  This is great, or would be, except that I still think that it's okay to eat two cheeseburgers, a big bag of Calbee chips, two tallboys of Yebisu, and an ice cream for dinner, despite no longer burning off 1600 calories a day in exercise.  Weight begins to creep up.

October 2016: My father dies after a four-year-long battle with cancer.  I can't be there.  I decide that a good response to this is to cut out the cheeseburgers and ice cream from my regular meals and replace them with another couple of tinnies at night.  Every night.

November 2016: The worst president in the history of the United States of America cheats his way into the office.  I add pizza to my evening meals.

December 2016: Christmas in Japan, a nation that traditionally treats Christmas as a sort of dating holiday.  So if you're depressive, single, and without any family or friends around, well, at least you can eat.

January 2017: Towards the end of the month, I wake up one morning, drink a venti black coffee at Starbucks, and a blood vessel near the base of my skull goes, and I quote, "pop."  I spend a week at home in bed, unable to get up or even sit up properly, before the boss comes and orders me to the hospital.  I grudgingly go to the ER, insisting that it's only a sinus infection, before a CAT scan reveals the truth.

February 2017: I spend a large portion of this month in the hospital learning how to walk again.  To this day, I still occasionally have the slightest bit of trouble walking up and down stairs.

March 2017: I am cold all the time.  I go to the gym every single night and eat very little.  I walk with a cane for a little while, and then throw it out.

April 2017: I turn 53.  I've managed to lose some weight and I'm looking better.  As long as I stick to this strict diet, everything will be okay.  No drinking, no chips, very little carbs, lots and lots of exercise.  I don't lose the weight very quickly, but it's coming off.

May 2017: Struggling with my weight, struggling with depression, struggling with loneliness.  Still on the strict diet, plus I wake up every morning at 6 AM and ride my bike for an hour.  Hit the gym at night.  I hate the way I look, but I'm seeing progress.

June 2017: I maybe look... okay.  I go to commencement and walk for my diploma, even though I graduated the previous year.  I wish Dad could have seen this.

July 2017: An old friend from high school and my 20s and 30s just completely loses his shit, seemingly overnight, and ends up killing himself.  Shit.  He had a good job and had just paid off his house and had loads of friends.  What if that happens to me?

August 2017:  Mom is in a home and has been there since before Dad died.  She has been losing her memory for some time now.  She's lived a lot of her life in fear, and now she's lost and even more afraid.  I won't even be able to retire.

September 2017: The boss, who has been watching over me like a second father for several years, dies suddenly in an accident at the beach, along with his nephew, another one of the company directors.  The company is not thrown into chaos, but none of us really have a chance to deal with it, as we have to keep our customers happy while reorganizing the operation and making sure everything stays together.

October 2017: I don't remember anything here except just being sad all the time.

November 2017:  Ditto:

December 2017: I manage to make it through Christmas somehow.  I'm not going to the gym any more, but I've discovered running.  Running is great.  It just shuts off all the other parts of my brain, all the worrying parts, all the thinking parts, all the parts that just run wild and imagine horrible scenarios that never come to pass.  All I can think of while I'm running are simple things like, "Lady, please get out of the way," and "I wonder what a ruptured aorta feels like?"

January 2018: My best friend Mike comes to visit for the New Year's holiday.  This is wonderful.  We go places and have fun and eat food and drink and watch RiffTrax and play Xbox and all sorts of other stuff.  The downside is that I start having panic attacks pretty much the minute I pick him up at the airport, thinking, "Oh, he'll be leaving in 14 days."  I start talking to him and realize that I haven't been able to properly talk to anyone, at all, about any of this.  The words come out and don't stop.  Mike is really good at listening.  He eventually returns to Seattle and I go back to work, trying to complete a big project.  We get it completed, but I'm only barely holding it together.

February 2018: Things get, words fail me, bad.  I gained a bunch of weight over the holidays and I can't burn it off, even when running every single night.  I can't make it through the day without crying.

March 2018: I look back on the previous month with fond nostalgia for a time when I wasn't experiencing suicidal ideation on a daily basis.  Running more.

April 2018: I turn 54.  I'm single, broke with horrible student loan debt.  My job has been reorganized out of existence and into something I don't care for.  I look back on my life and realize that pretty much everything I've ever set out to do has been half-assed or a complete failure.  People tell me, "You're too hard on yourself," which a) reminds me terribly of my father, and b) is patently untrue, because otherwise I would be achieving my goals, wouldn't I? 

May 2018: Mike suggests that perhaps I could get a bit more support and some better options if I moved back to Seattle, and I agree almost instantly, desperate for any sort of lifeline that I can grab.
Towards the end of the month, I injure my leg while running, in a scary way that means maybe I can't run for several weeks.  (I still haven't started up again.)  I put in my notice and start applying for jobs in Seattle, a daunting process.  I've never really had to apply for work; it's always just sort of found me.  Now I have to deal with HR people and constant rejection, which is just like dating.  Yay.

June 2018: I still can't run.  I'm trying to keep some sort of exercise going so I don't balloon up like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float.  I'm trying to arrange to ship my stuff back to the US, but I don't really have any place to live or a job, so I'm just shipping stuff to a friend's house in West Seattle.  If I eat four ounces of food, I gain three pounds.  I'm rapidly running out of money and I don't know how long I'll be able to survive in Seattle.  I stress-ate a huge bag of 7-Eleven cookies the other night and gained two pounds the next day.  I don't know what sort of job I want or what sort of job I'm qualified for.  I'm aging, alone, unattractive, and have not so much a safety net as a safety Dixie cup half-full of water.  I'm scared of losing my mind, scared of losing what little health I have left, and scared of spending the rest of my life being scared and alone and missing out on some really great stuff as a result. I'm scared that I won't be able to run any more and scared that I won't be able to ship my guitars back to the US safely.  I broke my TV by accident last night and I was going to sell it for a little money.  I'm scared of dying and I'm scared of being alive and I'm terrified that I'm too damaged to be a decent partner to someone, even if, mirabile dictu, I was able to find someone.  Everything is completely and utterly fucked, and I have two ways out, and neither of them is very appealing.

That bag of cookies is not the problem, is my point.

Gotta Run

On the way home for lunch, I ever-so-gently jogged, lightly, for about fifteen steps. Then I went back to walking.

Let me explain why this is important. I was never a runner. I played sports, but usually stuff that didn't require extended periods of running. A big part of this was because I was fat and was very embarrassed. Later, I started smoking, which gave me an excuse (albeit a stupid one) not to run.

Then last year I had a stroke. I know I keep going on about this, but I spent three weeks in the hospital progressing from being able to sit up in bed to being able to stagger down the hall to the restroom to being able to make my way down some stairs with the aid of a cane.

At first, the doctors weren't sure how much walking I would be doing in future. I went on a strict diet and started hitting the gym, building upper-body and core strength. I used the stationary bikes at the gym for cardio. After a few months, I was able to ride my bike outside again, as I got my balance back.

But I couldn't run, for some reason. There was some sort of signal disconnect between my brain and my right hip; whenever I started to try and break into a trot, the lag time was just enough that my right leg wouldn't get the news in time and I would stumble.

Finally, last summer, I decided I'd had enough. I had managed to overcome all the other stuff going on, and now I was going to run. I bought the C25K app and just started doing what it said. I would walk when it said walk, and run when it said run.

I got to the point where I was running a solid thirty kilometers a week, and I really enjoyed it. What's more, I'm pretty sure that running saved my life last winter, when I was going through one of the most profound depressive episodes of my entire life.

When I'm running, I don't have to think about anything else. (I'm not one of these guys who can listen to music or a podcast while I run; I need to be aware of my surroundings.) I can burn off whatever craziness and anxiety has built up in my system, and burn off a bunch of calories as well.

I can't run this week, because my leg is injured and it needs a little more time to heal. It's coming along nicely, though. But I needed to know that I'm going to still be able to do this, and move forward.

A dozen or so steps seems like an okay start, I guess.

Darn Good Question

So, for those of you just tuning in, I had kind of a rough time over the holidays. 

The short version of the story, which is really all I have the energy left to tell at this point, is that I had never properly dealt with the emotional fallout from Dad's death, my stroke, Gordon's suicide, and then Mr Ali and Zamith's deaths. 

Part of the reason I had never properly dealt with this was that I had no one to talk to about any of it.  I came to realize, right around the time the holiday season started, that I was basically alone here.  All of my friends that I would ordinarily discuss this stuff with were gone.

So when I finally got holiday time off from work, I had the time to finally deal with things, and then Kent Kangley arrived, and I had someone to talk to about them.

And I came unglued.  Everything I'd been putting off dealing with for the past two years came out.  I was worried that once I started crying I wouldn't stop, and I sort of couldn't; it went on for days, and didn't get any better when Kent went back to Seattle.

Today I was walking from my place to Higashi-Kanagawa and back, a mere ten kilometers or so, and the solitude got to me again, so I texted Linda.  She was very comforting and helpful, and I only had to stop a couple of times to pull myself together.

She did ask a couple of interesting questions, though.  The first one was, "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" (short answer: fear.  That's a subject for another entry.)

The second question was, "What keeps you alive?  What makes you come alive?" 

I legitimately don't have an answer for that right now.  I don't feel alive at the moment.

But it sure makes me think. 

Anxiety

So, here's what was going through my head today, as I walked through Oguchi on a Sunday afternoon.
I am starting to have some real trouble dealing with Christmas decorations and music around here.  Any sighting of a wreath or a tree, or hearing Christmas music playing in a shop, can send me into a despair.  I get really sad and lonely, and very depressed.
Lately I'm just feeling like I will never have real intimacy in my life ever again.  Getting a girlfriend would be tricky enough back in the US; getting one here, with the language and cultural differences, not to mention my own numerous and complex personal issues, is basically a non-starter.
So I just walk around by myself, with no one to talk to or share anything with.  This sucks most of the time, but extra sucks at Christmas.
I'm continuing to gain weight, not at a rapid rate, and I'm still in very good shape, but seeing that number go up still gives me anxiety.  I don't want to go back to where I was.  I mean, I'm running 30 kilometers or more a week, so I doubt I will, but it's still scary.
All of this is ganging up on me and giving me anxiety.  I hate it.

Saturday Writing Prompt: Ransom Note

Ransom Note

“So read it again, please,” said Caroline.

Elena shook the flimsy piece of paper.  “That’s it.  There’s nothing more to read.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Elena handed the note across the plain wooden table.

Caroline took it and examined it.  The paper seemed old, and thin, and a bit fragile, but nothing too extraordinary; the sort one might find in a child’s notebook.

Caroline and Elena had woken up, or regained consciousness, or simply begun to exist, in this room at about the same time, forty minutes ago.  Neither one had any memory of a life before, or of each other, or of themselves.

Caroline was shaping up to be the more inquisitive of the two.  She looked at the note.  Printed in the center of the page, in block capital letters, were the words:

WE HAVE YOUR REALITY.  IF YOU WISH TO SEE IT AGAIN, FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.  THIS IS NOT A JOKE.  WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE CONVENIENCE.

“I don’t understand,” murmured Caroline. 

The only furniture in the room was the table and two chairs.  There was a door, about which nothing much could be said, and that was it.  Indirect light filled the room, from no ascertainable source.

Actually, there was one thing you could say about the door: there was nothing on the other side of it.  Absolutely and literally nothing.  Caroline had opened the door to exit, and there was nothing there.

“Nothing,” she muttered.

Elena paced nervously.  “I’m confused,” she said.  “What’s the deal with this note?  Why are we here?  The only thing I remember about myself is my name.  And who apologizes for the convenience?”

“The person who wrote this note, apparently,” answered Caroline.  “You don’t remember anything before you woke up?”

“Not a thing.  My name might not even be Elena.  That’s just what popped into my head when you asked me.”

“Same here.”  Caroline glared at the door.  “What do you know about us?”

“I just told you.  Nothing.”

“Yeah, but think.  We’re talking, right?  We have a language; we’re using it to communicate.”

Elena considered this.  “So we have a common vocabulary.  This means that our thought processes have some similarities.”

“Right.”  Caroline looked down at her body, dressed in the same simple white singlet and loose trousers that Elena wore.  “I also know that I’m a female, and that you are, too.”

“Which implies the presence somewhere of males.  Which further posits that we are not alone.”

“Or not meant to be.  Correct.”

“The note is written in our common language, which indicates that we have a society.”

“One based on rational thought.  At least based on our conversation.”

Elena smiled.  “You never know.  We might be the only two smart ones.”

Caroline grinned in return.  “So, we’re on the right track.  Whatever that means.”

“It’s a shared idiom.  I understood the intent, although not the literal meaning.”

“That would mean-“

“-That we had an existence prior to this, yes.  I suspect our memories have been blanked out by whatever entity brought us here.”

“Hmm.”  Caroline’s brow furrowed.  “Have we been ‘brought’ here?”

“Good point,” Elena conceded.  “Everything else might have been taken away.”

“Ooof,” Caroline said.  “I do remember one thing.  I’m hungry.”

Elena rubbed her stomach.  “I think I am, too.  I wonder what we eat?”

Both of them thought about this in silence for a moment, right up until a plate with some cubes in various colors and textures appeared on the table.

Elena picked up a red cube, about an inch across, and sniffed it, then nibbled a corner experimentally.  “I think we eat this,” she said.

Caroline broke a piece off of a larger cube and took a bite.  “I suppose we do.”

The two ate for a moment in thoughtful silence.

“So,” said Elena.

“So,” said Caroline.

“We thought about food, and some showed up.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“What if we thought about something else?”

“Like what?”

“Like something to drink,” said Caroline.

They stared at the table.

A decanter of fluid appeared, with two glasses.

Caroline considered this for a moment.  “So someone has taken away our reality,” she said finally.

Elena picked up the idea quickly.  Caroline was starting to really like her.

“But they didn’t take away the source of the reality, just the design,” she said.  “Like taking away the clothes, but leaving the fabric.”

“Which is why we can think up this food and drink,” Caroline agreed.  A slow grin spread across her face.

A knock on the door startled both of them.  A piece of paper slid under the door.

Elena collected it.

“What does it say?” Caroline asked.

“It says, ‘WE STILL HAVE YOUR REALITY,’” she said.  “’FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS IF YOU WISH TO SEE IT AGAIN.’”

Caroline and Elena looked evenly at each other.

Caroline turned and looked at the opposite wall of the room.  A moment’s concentration, and-

“Ooh, that is nice,” offered Elena.  “You’ve doubled the size of the room. It looks much more comfortable, too.  Let me try something.”  She waved a hand.

“Very pretty,” said Caroline, as another wall became covered in lush, green plants.  “I think we can expand the house further, don’t you?”

“I don’t see why not,” agreed Elena, as the plants flowered and began to bear fruit.

“I seem to remember something called a sea,” said Caroline.

They were well into creating their third continent and had deduced the existence of cheese and quantum foam before another note was slipped under the door, which, despite all other expansion, was still there.  This time it was Caroline who picked it up.

“Well?” questioned Elena. “What are their instructions?”

Caroline rolled the note up into a ball and tossed it over her shoulder.

“Who cares?” she said.

Saturday Writing Prompt: Cameron Allen's Perfect Day

Cameron Allen woke up on his own, about fifteen minutes before the alarm clock on his watch was due to go off.  A slight breeze, rustling through the bamboo grove, blew a fallen leaf past his cheek; he brushed it away.  

He sat up.  He had fallen asleep in the bamboo forest again.  This would be the last day he could do that with impunity.  He looked down.  He’d have to start wearing clothes again, too.  The new neighbors weren’t going to appreciate a naked guy wandering around and sleeping in the forest.

A drone trundled up, holding out a set of underwear, some trousers, and a short-sleeved shirt.  Cameron pulled on the clothing while gazing absently into the distance, hoping to see a sign of the new neighbors.  He squinted into the sun, and then stopped, chiding himself.  They weren’t coming from that direction.

“I don’t suppose you have any breakfast,” Cameron said to the drone.

The drone, for its part, squatted on its six wheels, managing to indicate in doing so that no breakfast would be forthcoming. Cameron sighed and walked out of the grove, turning left along the path.  It was only a short walk of a few hundred meters to a small orchard.  Cameron pulled an apple off a tree and chewed on it happily while grinning at not very much at all.  The sun was bright in the sky and the breeze was pleasant.

Cameron walked on, a slight spring in his step.  If he had felt any jauntier, he might begin to whistle.  Soon, he came to a tidy prefab cabin, surrounded by a small garden, next to a little burbling brook.  He stepped inside.  The cabin was rather spartan, but pleasant, looking for all the world like a countryside cottage, except for the modern communications terminal on the kitchen table.

A light was blinking on the terminal.  Cameron tapped a key and it came to life.

“Good morning, Mr. Allen,” the captain smiled out from the screen.

“Good morning, Captain Khatchaturian,” Cameron smiled back.  “How are you today?”

“Ready to get out of this ship and stretch my legs.  We’ve been on this ship for three months, trying to get out here.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Cameron said warmly.  “That’s a big ship to fly all the way out here.”

“You’re telling me.” The captain was very pretty, with dark, intelligent eyes and short, curly hair. “Four thousand colonists, animals, and supplies, all ready to move in.  I hope you’ve got the station all ready for them.”

“Oh, absolutely.  Twenty-five thousand square kilometers of ready farmland, fresh air, and clean water.  A completely self-contained ecosystem, all ready to go.  Just turn the key and move in.”

“Fantastic.  I hope you’re ready for some company.  Lots of company.  It must have been lonely, living on that place by yourself for four years while the station was going through assembly.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad.  The drones did all the work, and I got caught up on my reading.”

“Still, being the only human in a big place like that.  Nobody on Earth has that much free space to themselves any more.

“Why we’re building these.”

“True, true.  Well, we’re lining up for docking.  Talk to you soon.”

“Yeah.  Heading to Access Control now.”  Cameron switched off the terminal and looked around the cabin for a bit.  He’d spent quite a bit of time getting the place just right.  In the past four years, he’d done a lot of gardening, some meditation, and had finished the research and coursework towards a Ph.D. in sociology.  Soon, the place would be packed with humans.

Well, not exactly packed, as such. One person for every six and a quarter square kilometers wasn’t exactly Mumbai, in terms of population density.  That was the point of these stations: Get the humans off the planet, give them farms, get them growing food for themselves and export the surplus back to Earth.  The stations were designed to be easily expandable.  In fact, Cameron had sent most of the drones off to work on a second section that would double the land area.  Raw materials were delivered from the asteroid belt by drone refinery craft and arrived already processed.

Still, Cameron had grown to enjoy being alone.  With Earth’s population at right around twenty billion, “alone” wasn’t really a concept that happened much.

Cameron strolled up to a bulkhead and looked back, along the curvature of the station, at the vast fields of crops, tended to by farming drones.

He sighed, and stepped through a door marked ACCESS CONTROL.  He sat at a desk and flipped a switch.

“Captain, can you hear me?”

“Yes, we copy.  Braking maneuver was successful; no residuals.  We’ve matched relative velocity and orientation for docking.”

“Ready to transfer control?
The captain reached out to some controls off-screen. “Yes.  Transferring control to station.”

Cameron smiled.  “I have control.”  He swiveled his chair to another terminal.  “Docking controls online.”  He looked levelly at the docking controls.  Cameron was now in command of several tens of thousands of tons of spacecraft, drifting slowly towards the docking ports at the center of the station.  He carefully took the controls in hand, and applied a slight thrust to the spaceship.

“Closing at two meters per second,” the captain announced over the comm.

Cameron’s hands tensed slightly on the controls.  Just one swift movement and the entire craft would be thrown out into deep space; the ship didn’t have enough fuel to shift that much mass back into position.

Just one swift movement and Cameron could go back to being alone.  Solitary.  

Peaceful.

“Still at two meters, Cameron,” the captain said.

Cameron shook his head.

“Cameron?”

…

Several hours later, the Captain rolled over in the cottage’s small bed.

“What the hell was that all about?”

Cameron did his best to look sheepish.  

“Oh, you know.  I’m a bit rusty on the docking procedures, that’s all.”

His wife looked askance at him.  “You kept us at 2 meters a second for quite a while.”

Cameron grinned in the dark.  

“I guess I was just in a hurry to see you.”
Captain Khatchaturian snuggled up to her husband, reunited after four years.

“Well, we’re all here now.  You won’t be lonely.”

“I sure won’t.”

“And in the morning we can do something about that garden out front.  It’s a mess.”

“Sure thing, dear.  Good night.”

“Good night.”

The lights went out in the cabin.

After a few minutes, the sound of whistling could be heard.

Interfaces: Power Plugs

This is actually quite a literal one.  I travel for my job from time to time.  When I do, like so many other business travelers, I find myself taking an ever-increasing amount of tech with me; some of it for work, some for communications, and some just for fun.  So I end up with a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, a PS Vita, an Apple Watch, an iPhone, Bluetooth headset for the phone, proper Bluetooth earphones for music, a nice set of plug-in headphones for when I'm playing Minecraft on the plane, and so on.
Of course, I also end up bringing along about four hundred linear feet of charging cable, because each of these things has its own gimmicky way of charging up.  A lot of them use Mini-USB, which is handy, and the Apple stuff has its own proprietary cable design, and the watch has that weird magnetic induction thing.
The real problem is that each of these things needs a power outlet.  Now, about half the time this isn't a real issue, since I'm probably traveling somewhere in Japan or North America, or even Trinidad, where they all use the same 100/110 volt system with the same plug.  But last year I went to Mauritius, which used to be French, which means that the house current is about a billion volts.  There aren't even any wires in a building in Mauritius.  If you open up the cover plate on the power socket, you just see random lightning bolts shooting around inside there.  I had to buy this weird adapter thing the size of my fist that cost about fifty bucks just to plug in one piece of equipment.  No way was I going to be able to keep all my electronics alive for the whole two week trip.  I looked at all the charging cables, bound up into a wad the size of a child's forearm, and began to despair.
And then just as quickly began not to despair, because I realized something.  All these devices are weird and different formats at one end, but at the other they are all identical: USB jacks.
I went down to Don Quijote and bought a four-port wall-to-USB adapter for about five hundred yen, and then a four-port USB hub for about two hundred.  I could plug the adapter into the power converter, and plug the hub into the adapter.  Anything left over I could plug into my laptop, which has extra USB ports.
It's convenient when something lives up to its name, and the Universal Serial Bus does just that.  It's supposed to be for data transfer, but since it carries power as well, it's just too handy.  I've started seeing, in newer homes, USB ports in wall sockets next to the regular outlets.
Power cords haven't always been so uniform.  I can remember seeing older appliances with the old braided insulation, which reminded me too much of a fuse for me to be very comfortable in using.  As a musician, most of the cables I dealt with (and still do) harken back to the glory days of radio: 5-pin microphone connectors; quarter-inch audio cables; eighth-inch headphone cables; RCA plugs; coaxial cable; and the like.  There was a legitimate reason for each of these designs to exist back then.  5-pin provided better audio recording and broadcasting quality.  RCA plugs were difficult to knock loose.  Quarter-inch cables could handle repeated connecting and disconnecting.
I'm starting to think that just about everything worldwide should be USB. It seems to be able to handle just about everything, except the heavy power load of larger electrical appliances, like clothes dryers and dishwashers.  A Microsoft Surface Pro is pretty much the same device no matter which country it works in.  By the time the electricity gets to the actual device it's been stepped down a fair bit.
Maybe we'll see the USB become truly universal, until induction recharging gets up to speed.  This might not be a particularly profound topic, but I'm fascinated by it.
Maybe they'll even solve the mystery of why it takes three tries to plug one in.