I’m about to usher in another challenging week trying to negotiate and mental and physical hellscape that is the United States. I’m now waffling between Uber and upgrading my security license. I cannot make a choice that doesn’t feel like an all-encumbering decision. Perhaps I would do simply better not to fight it and just let the phase pass. There are some things to fight and coping skills are not working now. So I may have to simply ride the unpleasantness.

I want to relax today but knowing I have to work at my security job tomorrow ruins everything. I just feel like being stupid and worthless and I feel like I’ll be okay with that for today. After all, tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday are going to be painful. I wish life would get easier but it’s not. It’s getting sadder.

The bright spark is Denisse. Without her I don’t know where I would be. This is going to be short because the day will not be easy.

While on Reddit today, I was reading a posting in the r/smallbusiness community. Someone posted that they were having difficulty launching their business doing bookkeeping for other small businesses. They were bemoaning the difficulty of getting people to trust them. Someone else posited that soon a bookkeeper’s job would be gone to AI. Those words might well be prophetic. They struck a chord in me today because I used ChatGPT to create a chart of accounts for the business I just started. Next thing I know, my accounting system based on “Generally accepted accounting principles” has been set up.

I did not even need an accountant or bookkeeper to get started. ChatGPT distilled everything down for me and it worked. While I should feel good for accomplishing something of a personal milestone, I feel quite the opposite. I feel worried because it dawned on me that one of the services I thought I might be able to sell would be remote bookkeeping. Well, clearly I might be very wrong. This lead to some deep thoughts.

What does our society do when AI replaces many professions? What do we do to earn a living to pay for our needs, wants, and desires in an economic system that depends on consumption? When nobody has money to spend to make the gears of the economic machine turn, everything grinds to a complete and devastating halt. Soon the only jobs left will be working in fast food. Even those jobs disappear as robots cook the burgers, chicken, and fries.

When the middle class occupations cease to exist, we go back to feudalism, a 180 degree turn in human history for the worse. I wonder if AI will usher in a dark ages for this millennia. My present job, being a security guard, is being replaced by technology. This has now dawned on me. The very fabric and underpinnings of our beliefs and culture are about to be torn to shreds.

I hate it when I have dreams about all of the things I have regretted doing and all of my personal failures. It’s even worse when you wake up in the middle of the night thinking that the nightmare is over, only to have it resume upon falling back to sleep. I know these dreams are definitely related to the inordinate amount of stress that I am currently feeling. Today needs to be an easy, relaxed day where I work on things/projects that provide enjoyment.

I do not think this week is going to be as bad as last week though. I believe it will be somehow just a little bit easier. I am not taking on any additional shifts at work, even if asked. While I know I need the money, I need to relax and recuperate so I do not have another week where I teeter on mental health collapse. It is incredibly hard to talk oneself down from the ledge once in a week, let alone three times. It was entirely too much.

I don’t know what I am going to do today. I think I have some grand plans in trying to start this free class on Intuit QuickBooks. I don’t know that I will have the concentration to do so, but if I do not try, I fail by default. I may even feel better for just getting one of the lectures completed. At the very least it will be something. I notice that I am feeling very angry right now. Explosively so! I don’t know why but my patience is nil. Being angry is easier than breaking down and crying.

I also have a feeling that I will be written up at work today. I was so mentally done on Friday that I called out of work. I didn’t even want to think about going in. So, I am waiting for the supervisor to hand me the write up form on Tuesday when I go in for my 10am-6pm shift. Of course I will refuse to sign it because I never sign those things. Maybe I should search for work today instead of trying to build a business.

It is brutal cold! It’s the kind of cold where even the sun burns cold. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I’d be living on that icy planet Hoth. I went to the library and I was not productive at all. I couldn’t focus on anything other than my own personal woes. I did manage to get my blog somewhat more secured behind a proxy server and it took a while because my concentration level was that piss poor. I really just want to be able to take something like fentanyl and let myself drift away. But nothing good will come of that; quite the reverse actually.

What’s a man to do if he has ideas and goals but is otherwise unable to follow through? This is why I feel like I am failing my legacy, a legacy of successful businessmen. I suppose these feelings are contributing to some of the exhaustion because that is depression in a nutshell. It makes everything ten times harder. Even things I normally enjoy are hard and I find excuses not to do them.

I just realized today is the last day of January and I have little to nothing to show for it other than ideas, lost opportunities, and expensive realities. I guess I am trying to think of how February could be better but I am just not seeing it. I want to crawl into bed and sleep. I want to retreat from this bone-chilling cold and depression. I wish I had a hot fire to curl up next to and fall into a deep sleep – but I don’t.

Well, maybe there’s some promise of tomorrow and being able to concentrate on what I had in my mind. It’s good to have goals and it is good to want. I guess I need to carve out some time to at least watch one video or make it through one unit of the class that I intended on taking. I have to tell myself that even one hour is a form of success. Each time I tried to get to the learning management system of edX, I found myself distracted by something else.

On my way in to work, I had a bad panic attack. I know this was brought on by my worries about money and making ends meet. My heart was racing and I was shaking. I did the best I could to bring myself down from that awful feeling. In the end, I succeeded but it sadly set the tone for the remainder of the day. It doesn’t look good to have a security guard have a panic attack but I think I masked it pretty well. When I got to work, the tears kind of started flowing a bit but I didn’t break down sobbing.

I have a guaranteed shift on Thursdays and Fridays from 4PM-12AM and I am lucky that I don’t have to worry about relief coming. My shift closes out the day so I can go straight home afterwards. The Dart bus service was all kinds of messed up today due to ongoing post-snowstorm cleanup efforts which meant that I was stuck taking a Lyft through my company. It really and truly hurts that I had to spend another 40.00 to get home. This means my company made money off of me and I lost 3 hours of income to simply get to work. This hurts emotionally and physically. It takes a real toll.

I am still thinking that I just might be able to get this Uber thing off of the ground. It’s going to take grit and determination. I hope this does not become like the donkey and the carrot for me. I wish I had some better ideas for earning money but I feel like I am all washed up and that I’m just being deluded if I think I am going to get an IT training business off of the ground. Maybe I need to think of other ideas. Maybe these ideas will come with watching more YouTube videos.

I have another idea how I might make money. By no means am I a financial wizard, but I think I could learn bookkeeping and potentially do that under my business, Avvira Global LLC. I’ll have to look at some other things and brainstorm. It’s hard for me to come up with ideas so I may need to make use of ChatGPT for ideas. I am really feeling the aftermath of my panic attack and I still have 2 full hours of work left. I just want to crash and crash hard.

The cruelty of state and federal governments in the US knows no bounds. I’ve done everything right and by the so-called book. Then life happened, my business failed, my finances collapsed, and I became dirt poor and living on Social Security Disability. Now prices rise due to inflation, and ready or not, I must work full time again. My country sees me as a drag on it yet demands my love and patriotism. What kind of psychologically unstable situation is this!?

Yesterday was really hard for Denisse and I. On top of that I drank way too much last night. I haven’t drank like that since my college days. I had to drag myself across the floor and into the bedroom. I slept like crap as a result. I was so angry last night that it ended up leading to depression.

The country l live in is cruel to the working poor. Wages are far below what it actually takes to afford even the most basic needs. There is no help for the people that need it and the red carpets are rolled out for the wealthy in the form of tax breaks and incentives so that there is even less money in the coffers to help. It’s socialism for the wealthy and austerity for the poor; shouldn’t be this way at all.

Instead we have a carnival barker for a president that makes Calvin Coolidge look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison. The one party that is supposed to care about the poor and working class just pretends to. It’s only performative. Both parties are committed to hyper capitalism. Both are committed to rigging the system in favor of the capitalist class.

It’s even sinister to the point where we no longer offer classes in personal finance to high school students. I’m 48 and back when I was in high school they didn’t teach it. I suspect that was simply because there wasn’t money in the budget. Today, it’s been discovered by the financial wizards that by not teaching people personal finance, they more readily go into debt through excess spending (and buying what they do not need) by marketing these goods and services such that they feel like psychological necessities.

Navigating financials and financial planning is confusing and I am just plain exhausted and stressed. I’d really like to have access to THC right now but I cannot do it due to potentially being drug tested. I am about to become my own business operator and I am nervous as hell; jittery as a junebug. I am scared that this Uber venture will not work out and I will be left with yet another notch in the belt of failure.

I know that I need a bookkeeping means but I cannot even afford QuickBooks for the self-employed. It’s going to eat too much into my income. I am going to try GnuCash instead. I hope that it can, at the very least, keep me afloat until better times come. I just feel like crying again. Crying because I feel the world really deeply. I discovered that I might reasonably be considered a highly sensitive person. Is this a harmful label? I don’t really know.

This is just going to be a quick entry because there’s not much to say other than I am exhausted and stressed. I am not looking forward to the hustle.

Yesterday was a mentally and emotionally tough day and there is no other way I can really explain it. The stress of money is real and I am worried about how I will make ends meet because I am going to lose my Social Security Disability Insurance when combining Uber and a part-time security job. However, I think I can really make this happen, but only if I hustle. The good news about Uber is I can stay local and turn off the app any time that I need a rest.

Last night after work, I was fighting a mental breakdown. Today I am proud of myself for winning the fight and not succumbing to all of the thoughts swirling in my head. It helped tremendously to simply and gently rub Denisse’s back. The simple act of caring for another being helped me to relax enough to fall asleep. Last night was a combination of anger and saddness. Being poor and working is tough.

I had to work an extra two hours yesterday to cover the transportation between work and home. Since no public transportation was operating, I had to depend on my employer for the discounted Lyft rides. If I tried to do this on my own, the cost would have been prohibitive. I feel like my employer should be giving monetary recognition to those that made the effort to get to work despite the obstacles. My employer probably won’t because they see a dollar figure when they look at me; not the human being that I am.

I am fundamentally convinced that my employment as a security guard through a security company means I am the whore and they’re the pimp. The company definitely gets the better end of the deal and we are subject to abuse through threats of write-up, discipline, and termination. When we do make an effort to go above and beyond, we instead increase the expectations placed on us as individuals. The whole thing feels inescapable.

This was quite the storm and so early in winter because February is statistically the snowiest month in the area I live in. This storm hit in January. I wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come. All State of Delaware offices are closed today and non-essential employees have been told to stay home. How the state does not consider its transit system non-essential, I will never know. This leaves me in a pickle because I don’t know how I am going to make it into work for me 4pm-12am security guard shift this afternoon.

I told my boss and he offered me two options: (1) I make it to work or (2) I get written up for a no-show. I wanted to use some snark right back and ask him they invented a teleportation machine yet. I looked at Lyft and Uber prices but they’re out of sight! They’re charging between 45-50 dollars for what is tantamount to a 3 mile ride. Gotta love capitalism! There is no way I am going to Uber round trip at that cost. I would only earn 36.00 an hour before taxes. After taxes, that would be a statistically insignificant 9.00 for an 8 hour shift. Yeah, um, no.

So obviously I am going to take the write-up. At least, I have a phone interview with a hiring manager for another security company tomorrow at 9:30. It also pays 5.00 per hour more. In these days and times when employers will easily discard their employees without notice, you have to look out for yourself and your own needs. In a hyper capitalist country, no money means no food and no shelter. Be damned if I am going to end up on the streets.

The one thing I can look forward to are my state and federal tax refunds. Once I get my federal refund, I might just give the proverbial middle finger to security and Uber full time with a rented car. This will most likely be a better way to reach my ultimate goal of starting my information technology education and training business. I’d have to hustle but if I could average a gross of 1-2K per week, I just might be able to make something happen. I’d have to run some numbers.

The United States tends to be unusually cruel to the poor and middle income working class. I am not a young man anymore and I thought that my hustling days would be long behind me. Alas, I find myself in the sad position of having to hustle. It gets harder to do as we age. I am going to be 49 this year and my health is really only fair at this point. I will hustle and see how long I can do it. The secret will be really adequate sleep and hydration to recover.

My best case scenario may be to hold down a part time job 2 days a week and Uber for the other 4-5. I still have yet to run the numbers.

Last night, while watching The Conjuring: Last Rites with Denisse I got an inspiration of things that I can do to build my business. I am beginning to form a plan in my mind but it is slow going. I even started thinking about designing curriculum, etc. I will have to design some of my own curriculum because I will be going off script a little bit. My IT training and education business is going to be more than simply getting folks ready for certification exams: it’s going to make them well-rounded in the underlying technologies.

So I need to brainstorm some curriculum and labs for DNS, LAN/WAN networking, setting up web servers with NGINX and Apache, plus more. The idea is to have everyone really ready to enter the workforce, not simply getting them specialty knowledge of a vendor’s product that could become obsolete or even discontinued quickly. Technology is so rapidly advancing that it is almost obsolete by the time that it comes to market.

I am also thinking about teaching some state of the art, not yet generally used technologies to showcase the possibilities of what can be done. I want to attract the kind of student that is not just seeing dollar signs in front of their eyes, but wants a solid foundation in not just how corporate networks work but how the internet itself works. Hence it makes sense to teach protocols.

I usually detest ChatGPT and other AI platforms but they can have a real use for things like outlining and brainstorming when writer’s block hits. Writer’s block usually hits me before I even get started, LOL. So I am slowly learning to see the value of AI in helping get past writer’s block. That much said, I will never trust it for accuracy; simply ideas only. Today’s mission is to start thinking and actively planning curriculum and courses.