I am doing a lot better today than I was last night. Last night was rough because of the situation with my mother. I got a good long cry in and I feel better. I just wish I wasn’t so exhausted. I am going to have to stand up regularly so that I don’t fall to sleep at work. I feel like I am nodding off. A security guard that falls asleep is no good to anybody and does the profession a real disservice.

I got back on Mastodon after a hiatus from it. I found myself really missing the interactions. Of course, I will need to rebuild an audience from scratch but that is very doable and I’m in no particular hurry to do so. I like the decentralized nature of the Fediverse (Mastodon) and that, to a certain extent, I have a little more control over my data. The only way to have almost complete control is to run my own Mastodon server and I am not going to do that this time around. It’s just too much work and I don’t have the time.

The coming week is going to be a fairly long one. I have to work an extra 4 hour shift tomorrow so I will really be only off for 2.5 days. Next week, I will only have a day and a half off. It looks like, for the foreseeable future, every other week 2.5 days off. It’s going to be its own form of hell but I’ll take it. I need the money as Denisse will need more help in the coming months. I don’t mind because I love her and once she gets on her feet, I know that she will be able to reciprocate more. I am excited for her phlebotomy schooling.

Denisse and I are going to make the trip to see mom at Lodge Lane, her memory care facility. She doesn’t know that we are coming and that is for the best. Sometimes, I think mom tells me to stay away because she doesn’t want to inconvenience me and might experience some shame and remorse about her condition. Ethan, my brother, helped me to realize that mom really needs family now more than ever.

I hope that my relief is on time and won’t lolly gag around. I’ve got to be back at the worksite at 7am tomorrow morning. I hope that the supervisor won’t be in a foul ass mood and stick me on the x-ray machine. If he does, I will most likely tell him politely but firmly that I won’t be doing this. If he gets an attitude about that, I’ll tell him to speak with the manager, Chris. Chris told me the shift would be a dock shift and I get to sit down and raise and lower the dock entry door. Those are my expectations/boundaries and I will stick to them.

Tomorrow evening will be a date night for Denisse and I. I am absolutely looking forward to it. We are going to watch the latest episode of The Pitt and catch the franchise finale of the Halloween movies. The finale is called (with an utter lack of imagination) Halloween Ends. Still it should be entertaining. I like the cheesy horror genre. The shows don’t frighten or scare me anymore but I still enjoy the story lines.

Well that’s about all I have to write for the time being. Stay tuned for another exciting entry tomorrow – LMAO.

My mom is dying from Alzheimer’s. She’s my rock and we always had a special relationship. She may not make it through the summer. Mom had another fall and was hospitalized. Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and I am beginning the mourning process. Is it bad that all this sadness has me looking back on my life at the missed opportunities and everything I did not complete or do.

I’m growing older and I am realizing how finite time is. I’m filled with remorse for the way I treated my body. I’m not honoring my mom. I am sick mentally and physically. I have to see a vascular specialist because I’m losing feeling in my feet up to my ankles. Maybe the best thing to happen to me would be a stroke that kills me. At least I would not feel any pain. Few would miss me anyway. I did nothing noteworthy; accomplished nothing. I ran away from every opportunity in fear.

My life has passed me by and I have nothing to show for it. I’m just old. I’ve lost friends and lost touch with people. I have little of value and I’m learning that having some material things can be helpful – short of hoarding of course. I miss my stuffed seal which I named Sealy. I loved that stuffed animal. When I was a boy and had no friends I played monopoly with Sealy. I’d roll the dice for him and play the game. Stuffed animals are wonderful.

My mom is a salt of the earth person. I am hurting so much. I always assumed I’d have her into her 90s. She’s turning 81 in August. She might not make that. I’ve never been impacted quite like this. Typically I deal with death by celebrating a life versus mourning. But I am mourning because this is hitting me hard. Hell, I thought my mom would outlive me and part of me had hoped that would be the case.

I feel like a child in an adult’s body. I don’t understand how to grapple with this. I know that being autistic and developmentally delayed might explain the difficulty. Maybe it is better if my mom passes quickly versus suffering from this god awful disease. We had great hopes that an infusion treatment would help mom. The infusions did absolutely nothing other than give us false hope.

I am scared that I am headed towards addiction and substance abuse. It’s just going to take time. I have a good therapist at that’s going to help with distress tolerance. I am just listening to some music to help get the emotions out. I now know why my cousin committed suicide. He and I are so similar in that we are both on the autistic spectrum. He had much of the same difficulty that I have. I feel his pain deeply. I sometimes hate the empathy that I have.

I wonder if my cousin simply overdosed and I am hoping that is what he did because that is the least painful way to go. But his generation would probably have hung himself. That’s more common in the late baby boomers. I am not ready for mom to go. I am losing my precious mommy. I have no relationship with my father. I feel so alone, helpless, and adrift. I don’t see how I can keep on living.

I really scored some neat stuff at the a really free flea market that was held in the parking lot of the Bellevue Community Center nearby me. This is just a way for people to get rid of things that they no longer want and benefit the community. I got some DVD-Rs, a good quality bluetooth speaker Tribit speaker, and a Logitech web cam with the Carl Zeiss lens! I made out like a bandit.

Denisse was with me and she also scored some stuff. She likes collecting squishmallows and some stuffed animals. She also spotted a great Christmas decoration and a really unique handbag labeled with Asshole and Emotional Baggage. That was hilarious and screamed her personality. We got some playing cards. In the end we filled a small cart.

I am at work now and pretty happy about it. I am at my favorite site which is a locked down building. I can relax and enjoy. It is literally collecting an easy paycheck for watching over things. I am really grateful for this gig. In an ideal world I would do double shifts here on Saturdays and Sundays because this is easy and peaceful.

My favorite distro of Linux, Arch, is really frustrating me. My desktop completely petered out after the last power failure. It corrupted a whole lot and basically I needed to rescue my system. I was able to get all of the data backed up but I need to reinstall Arch. I am okay with that because it was an old install.

I decided to work on the reasons for my failure to get Arch Linux going. So I set up a VM on my laptop and fired up the installer. It turns out that I did two things wrong: (1) I never added the lvm driver to the boot loader and (2) I used the wrong partition UUID. Both are critical for my setup to work. I use full disk encryption for my desktop stuff because I believe in the fundamental right to privacy for “digital” papers and effects.

I often write a fair amount of controversial things and I could be in the cross-hairs of the tRump Administration. Fortunately, the courts have generally ruled that someone cannot be forced to give up a decryption passphrase. However, courts have ruled that people who use devices locked with biometric data can be forced to provide that. I keep all my stuff encrypted with passphrases just for that reason.

Good golly I am tired tonight. I really want to go home but I still have 2 hours left on the clock. I really want to hit the 10:15pm 13 bus to get home for only $0.80 versus a Lyft which is easily $15-$20 on Friday night. There’s no love for the working man. Buses stop at a ridiculously early hour for route 13. I need a vehicle badly!

Yesterday I discovered 7-OH, a kratom alkaloid and that oh stands for oh my god is it good! Unfortunately, it’s made me very stoopid today but I did enjoy the opiate-like high I got. I felt all warm and fuzzy inside in much the same way that morphine did when I was given it in the past. I really do need to be cautious with this stuff because it can be highly addictive. Given that it came on quick and strong, I am not surprised. So I will wait about a week before I do it again.

Strike that! I am going to wait a lot longer than one week. According to this blurb from wikipedia, I am going to pursue this even more carefully.

7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) is a highly potent, psychoactive compound found in trace amounts within the kratom plant (Mitragyna speciosa), but in recent years, it has been isolated, concentrated, or synthesized in labs to create products that are far more powerful and dangerous than traditional raw kratom leaf. While natural kratom acts as a mild-to-moderate stimulant or sedative depending on the dose, concentrated 7-OH functions as a strong opioid-like substance with potency reported to be up to 13 times stronger than morphine.

This stuff should not be trifled with. When I read, 13 times stronger than morphine, I cringed. In fact, this is going to be something for a once-a-month-only fun time.

So I did in fact get absolutely nothing accomplished and it is a really good thing that I am working in the evening instead of the day shift because there’s no way I would’ve been good to go for an 8-4. 2nd shift is much more manageable today. I think I am going to sleep well tonight. I’m hoping to get 6-8 hours of serviceable rest.

I’m not even going to try working on a website tonight. I’m going to coast through this day.