Fifteen years ago

Tuesday 2/10/26

I wish I was the person I am now fifteen years ago.

That sounds like I'm locked in to something. I'm not. I change every day.

I've looked at the weather reports for the next week and as a result have gotten my hopes up that the Monument will reopen and I won't need to start over with the plan of 1000 circuits-in-a-year, though I realize this isn't smart on my part.

With less stairs of late I do what I can. Walked six miles both Sunday and yesterday. Face got windburned.

My mom did go to my sister's for the Super Bowl. Amelia wanted to go to bed at 5:30. Her reason: "It's time." She didn't, though.

I had my mom give her a message that both myself and the Little Ghost Girl were pulling hard for the Patriots. I like passing these things along. There was something else about the LGG donning the attire of a dead colonist she knows/is friends with in the beyond, but I didn't have time for that one.

I stayed up to 11:30 on Sunday night. I was back at the desk by 4:15 Monday morning, which is of course late for me.

Not long after the game ended on Sunday night, helicopters were in the air over Boston, and police sirens were blaring because that's how people are. How grown adults are. Rarely are adults adults.

Boston College prevailed over Boston University last night to win their first Beanpot since 2016. How did BC go that long between tournament titles?

One's mental strength determines so much. Life often wants us to give in. To be less, to be dimmed, to sour, to harden. In big things, and in smaller things like how we sound, our demeanor, what I call our "way."

A person has a way about them. How I feel with what I am going through and the way I have about me are not the same. I would have to tell someone how I feel. It rarely would be discerned in how my voice sounds. How I sound.

It's human nature to give up that strength day by day. Think of it like grip on a rope. The tightness of the grip lessens and this is how most people change from day to day and over time. If you don't pledge to yourself to maintain the firmness of that grip--that is, make a conscious, committed, daily point of this--you'll be less and less. Harder and harder. Brittler and brittler. Sourer and sourer.

Unfortunately, people don't have this level of mental discipline, and they often don't have any mental discipline at all, or the bare minimum that is required to do the most basic tasks, so that's what happens. And they don't remember. Having a good memory is on the verge of extinction as a thing.

I look at the world in terms of how an alien would see it if you were to host them for a day and take them around like a guide on a college tour. Hardly anything we do now is healthy, sensical, productive, "adult" and virtually all of it is ridiculous. It'd be embarrassing trying to explain how humans--post-humans, really--now work.

"And these influencers...are important?" the alien would ask you. "And these women..they just put up these thousands of photos of them and also complain how their lives are lacking?" It would be embarrassing even if you never did any of these things that people do and now are wholly about yourself. "And these people who say these unintelligent things, with their lack of education, their stuntedness, their venality...they are this thing you call followed by millions and lavishly remunerated and...why?"

I saw this post from someone today:

A lesson to those over 40. Do less. Give up. Self preserve.

And again I'd say, "Just be gone, then. Try the next world. Why bother to be in this one? You do no one any abiding good, including yourself. Move on if that's how you think." It isn't just thinking this way; people advocate for being this way. Their "views," and then the parrotings, spreads like disease. The disease becomes the norm. What is viewed as health by the masses that cannot think, won't think, and simply and always influenced by whatever is going on the most around them.

Such a person could never see that that doing less and giving up is the opposite of self-preservation. You must strive. If you do not strive, you are simply and only there.

Self-determination doesn't exist in the internet age. I believe I am the last of its practitioners, though I would rather be the first in a line. Is that possible?

I was saying to someone the other day that we feel most tired when we do less and cannot or do not rouse ourselves. We feel the converse when we are on the go. Being on the go in this context isn't necessarily a matter of ambulation. You need the buzz and whirl of life within you.

When we did what were called "suicides" at my high school hockey practices, the rule was that when you stopped you had to be facing the clock that was on one side. We did them at both ends, you see.

A "suicide" is when you start on a goal line, skate to the near blue and stop and go back to the goal line, then the red line and back, the far blue line and back, and finally the goal line at the other end and back. A second group goes as you try and catch you breath--or vomit, eventually--and then you go again.

I am struck now by this idea and its significance of stopping so that we were facing the clock. Failure to do so by any or us would result in doing the drill twice in a row. The coach would holler, "Mental discipline!" and all this strikes me as very apt.

Perhaps someday I will think, "I am glad I'm not the person I used to be," on account of what being the person I am instead has allowed in my life, rather than what the person I used to be helped to deny me.