Sorry to interrupt the Phone Guys marathon, but I really ought to be posting something here, I suppose.

I am in the midst of a twenty year low, as far as my mental health is concerned. Twenty years exceeds the age of this website, so if we take the Book Of PDR as the record of my adult life, I am at my all-time low.

I feel like anyone who happens to read this can see the many ways our society is being ruined by those with power and whose only concern is remaining powerful. Obviously that is a big part of the problem for me. I wish I could do anything about that, but I don’t see how. People who function in society more successfully than I do would probably say something like “if you’re upset about things you can’t change, just focus on what you can.” And that sounds like solid advice, but I have lost faith that I can change anything.

I don’t have the mental energy to get through my weekly obligations and have energy left for the things I want to do in life. And that only causes a feedback loop because back in 2012 or whenever I quit a job I hated with the intent to go back to school and find my path to a more creative career. Now, thirteen years later, I seem further from that creative career than I was then. My life now consists of trying to pay off a student loan for a degree I did not manage to get and trying to pay for a vehicle I only have because I need it for the job I have to pay off the student loans and the car I have for the job. And, of course, rent for an apartment where I have no choice, but if I go anywhere else I’m paying far more. I’m trapped in a cycle. And, as I get older, that distance from what I want to be doing and what I am doing makes me lose more and more sleep which just makes me more and more tired as I continue the cycle.

And I want it on the record, I have a three day weekend! It may not fall on the days I’ve repeatedly asked for, but it’s still three days off work every week. Most people don’t have that and most people seem to get by just fine, so I’m left assuming that I’m just broken in some important way. I don’t understand how other people get by. At least one friend of mine said it is alcohol that helps those people, but even if I wanted to start drinking (now would be a better time than ever before, I suppose) I also don’t understand how people can afford things like alcohol or cigarettes or the other addictive mollifiers that are so popular. I don’t understand how people manage to be people in general. Whatever training people got to get through life, I did not get. Or, as I said, I’m just broken.

Every week, creative stuff has to be the lowest priority on my schedule. There’s work. There’s fucking sleep. Anything else has to be crammed in the available slots. If I visit my friends or my family, that’s most of an evening gone, so I can’t do my creative projects. Especially when I visit my niblings. They may be the most important people I know, but it is simply exhausting for me to spend an evening with them. As a result my options are to NOT visit my friends and family, which isn’t a real option, or to do that instead of working on my stuff and then have a little resentment that I spent that time with loved ones. And even this was easier when I had my weekends falling on actual weekends…

Or suppose I want to relax by reading a book or watching a movie or, heaven forbid, playing a computer game. These are the things that actually make me feel less exhausted. But they still take time. If I spent a day playing a cool mystery game (like The Roottrees Are Dead, to name one I did during this depressive period) I come out of it feeling great, energized, ready to work on something of my own. I want to take that energy and channel it into something, but before I know it, my time off is over and that energy gets to be channelled into my job instead. So I resent playing games, or watching movies, or reading, because they aren’t what I want to do either.

I come to resent time spent cooking. I resent time spent cleaning. I resent time spent going for a nice walk or catching up on the news (okay, maybe that one I’d resent either way). Anything I have to do that isn’t being creative, I come to resent. And since all of that has to be prioritized above creativity, I wind up resenting everything I do. I have to do all that stuff and maybe by the end of the week I have one new page written, one new page for a colouring book, one more small whatever and then at the end of a few months like that I notice the year is almost over and I have ten pages of writing and three pages of a colouring book, and that isn’t enough. It’s not worth the exhaustion.

So these last few months, I’ve just given up. I don’t even work on that one page a week anymore. All my biggest project ideas are now revealed as pipe dreams. I still idly tinker on things, I don’t think I’d be physically able to stop that, but whatever it will take for me to get back to working on the things I want to work on is something I can not currently fathom.

Maybe I need someone to explain the secret of how humans live or maybe I need an end to fascism. Who can say?

If nothing else, this website needs to know that I, Patrick D Ryall, discovered my first grey pube on Monday, July the Fifteenth, 2024. Update your files accordingly.

Every now and then I remember that this website is supposed to be a record of what goes on in my life. I mentioned some time ago that I grew a beard during my bankruptcy. What I don’t seem to have posted about is that after the bankruptcy was over, I did indeed celebrate by shaving, but then I grew it back. I still have it:

The thing is, I got a lot of compliments on the beard at the time, plus it is actually easier to have a beard than to fully shave. I’m lazy, so that appeals. But what really cemented my role as a beard-haver is that I have two little niblings now who only know me as a bearded person. I want to be the uncle they recognize, so any sudden changes to my style are not welcome. The only time I’ve fully shaved in the last few years was when I knew I had two weeks without work or family commitments, so I shaved it all and let it grew back over that fortnight.

I’m not saying I’ll be bearded forever on. As the kids grow they will be more accepting of varying levels of hirsuteness. And if some weird scenario happened, like the President of Star Trek saying I’d be allowed to play an alien on Star Trek but I had to shave all the hair on my head, obviously I’d do that. But for now, I guess I’m a bearded guy.

Even though it is perfectly common for me to go weeks without making a non-scheduled post on the site here, I feel like I should explain my current span of weeks in which I won’t be posting. I’ve had to move again, and as a result I am currently without Internet for a while.

For the last few years I have lived in an apartment above what is, to my generation, still known as the Video Difference building in Halifax. I liked it and it was nice to live in a Haligonian landmark of sorts. And for the fifteen years prior to that, I had an apartment just across the street from that, so for almost half of my life I’ve lived on Quinpool Road. I like it there and still think of it as my neighbourhood.

But, a victim of the whims of capitalism as I am and as are we all, I have had to move about two blocks away. It’s fine, though inconvenient. I’ll get by, because what other choice do I have?

Haiku!

Why can’t turtles fly?
Because if they were up there,
they would not be here?

Anyway, I am also about to change my Internet service provider, which is part of the reason for the delay I am currently going through. I would have happily continued to pay the city’s most expensive provider if they’d managed to make the switch right away, but they didn’t so I’m going with someone cheaper. Hopefully in the long run, that will help.