Black Cat Blog

I have to write another blog entry tonight because I am feeling chock full of rage. I need to vent some steam in a healthy-ish way because I’ll explode if I don’t. I am feeling boxed in by poverty, the encroaching fascism in the United States, and a general feeling of living in a prison sans walls. I feel like I am living in the illusion of freedom and it’s absolutely making me crazy with rage right now. I can understand why people simply snap. Now before y’all get concerned, I am not going to snap and go on a mass shooting. Thankfully, I am nowhere even remotely close to that point and thought of slaughtering my fellow working class members is horrific to me.

Instead, I am trying to channel my rage to subverting the system in any way I can and assisting others in doing so. The goal is finding positive ways to channel the anger. I just wish more folks would be on board with active subversion of the system. Although I do understand and get the apathy. The apathy comes from feeling powerless and feeling like one lacks agency in own their own life. I certainly am no stranger to feeling like I lack agency and that’s one of the things that makes me stark raving angry.

I think if I could get some folks interested in computers, networks, and information security, I think I could shake them from their apathy and actually give them some agency in their lives. I would like to convince them of the value of learning to give them agency, or at the very least, help protect them against the evils of the Republicans and the MAGA Christofascists. Again, I am trying to channel my anger. It will be a challenge at any rate. I have some ideas. On Friday morning, a kind stranger is going to donate some old HP Compaq 5700s that he has lying around gathering dust. I am going to press them into service as routers and DNS servers for my experiment to see if I can’t begin a little something.

I’ve been reading about what NYC Mesh has been doing with some interest and I’ve reached out to them on Mastodon for ideas. I’d like to do something similar in Wilmington, DE. There is a lot of poverty in Wilmington and a lot of folks are using cell phones or tablets for accessing the internet. In my mind, this is completely inadequate and robs the person of the true experience of learning to use computers and technology. I wonder if it will be possible to get something like this off of the ground in my community. Verizon and Xfinity are greedy and resource hoarders. Wilmington is ripe for a major positive disruption.

I am sure I could get corporations to donate cast off, e-waste equipment to the cause. After all, they’re always looking for a tax write-off. I just don’t think people can depend on libraries alone for internet access. Besides, I’ve noticed that libraries in my community have actually begun logging and censoring people’s activity all in the name of safety and security and some legitimate websites have been blocked as a result. I know that I cannot reach my Mastodon instance from the public libraries in my county. They’ve blocked the .social domain entirely. People need internet access in the privacy and sanctity of their own homes or dwellings without the surveillance of government.

I guess before I get this far, I have to do some experimentation and learning about network building. I’ll need some help with that and I have to find some people willing to help. That will be the challenge. I don’t know of anyone off the top of my head with the both the skill and willingness. Well, one step at a time I suppose.

This morning I had to face the fact that the PTSD-related nightmares have returned. I knew that medications are not perfect but about 80-90% of the time they worked to keep them away. For the post 7 days, I have been having breakthrough nightmares every night. This means that something has to change because the medication regimen is no longer working. I reached out to my Psych PA over the patient portal to let him know what’s been happening. I really like and trust him so I am certain that he will respond soon and the two of us will hammer something out.

These dream are awful, almost like a horrific real life Salavador Dali-like painting; highly surreal dream of all the worst rejections in my life. I wake up panting, sweating, and completely startled. They’re so bad that I am almost afraid to go to sleep at night because the dreams are just that bad. The medication regiment I was on, Clonodine and Topamax, worked beautifully up until now. It seems like they just simply quit, almost like a switch got thrown and my evil brain said, “HA! I am not going to listen to that medication any longer. Here’s your horror movie!”

It has become a vicious cycle because I am now even more tired during the daytime, so when I need a nap, I reach REM sleep and it’s the same vicious cycle all over again. I get PTSD nightmares during the nap, I wake up in a sweat and dazed and confused. I am only working part time on the weekends but I am so tired that when I sit at my desk to try to work on a computer project I am literally falling asleep at my desk or if I watch TV the same thing happens. I am almost ready to cry at this point. I have got to get this nailed down before grad school starts or I will be between a rock and a hard place.

Dealing with mental illness is a constant battle and there are days when I grow sick and tired of it. There’s never any controlling the symptoms, there’s merely managing and reaching the acceptance that all I will do is manage them. That’s fine but the moment one thing gets a little bit out of management, the others start to fall like dominoes. I need to nip this one thing in the bud before this happens. Lack of good sleep is going create a cascading problem.

This morning I am experiencing some racing thoughts all about the secure VPN network that I want to design so I know I need to put some things down just to stop them. I wish I had some more money handy so could just get this thing started and stop the thoughts altogether. If I got this thing started, it would give me a good activity to do to learn and keep me productive instead of sitting here and somewhat mindlessly on Reddit. Oh well. At least I feel strangely cheerful but I cannot explain it and I am going to ride it out for what it is absolutely worth.

This week I hope to hear something positive back from the place I interviewed at last Friday, The Bridge Clinic. I like the mission of The Bridge Clinic and think I would enjoy doing the weekend administrative assistant job. At least I feel okay about not getting the job too. I won’t beat myself up if it does not materialize. I don’t really have any plans for today but I would like to read some more of my novel. The trouble is I get sleepy when I read but that’s not necessarily a bad problem to have. 😆

Last night someone supporting the Israeli Defense Force tried to follow me on Mastodon and that gets a instant block. The IDF is in the middle of a genocide against the Palestinian people and I am a Jew who supports a two state system. Not only that but I reported the user to the admin of the Mastodon instance that he was on. The fediverse should have zero tolerance for this kind of thing as it is an open and safe space. There are no “both sides” of this issue.

I am thinking that once I graduate with a Masters of Social Work (MSW), I am going to dedicate some time every month to volunteer for causes that I am passionate about. I may even start a a non-profit that blends social work and technology because the internet is the modern day equivalent of the printing press and it needs to be more accessible to people of low income. I don’t consider internet on a phone to be acceptable internet access. Children and adults need actual computers to participate, and be competitive in, today’s world; real laptops or desktops and not simply netbooks and Chromebooks. I had a pipe dream to start a non-profit ISP in my home town of Delaware. Maybe I could make this a reality.

Some days I feel like Bill Moyers in that I have got a world of ideas. Ideas are lots of fun to come up with. Dreams are lots of fun to come up with. Some days I would like to be better at the follow through of them. But really first I have to work on myself and get myself to a place where I can make these dreams happen. That’s going to start on August 26th!

I had high hopes that today would be a good day and I don’t know why I get my hopes up because inevitably they get dashed. This afternoon I had an interview for a weekend administrative assistant position that I was excited about because I thought it would be a good exit strategy from my present work as a security guard. While the interview itself went reasonably well, I’m a betting man and I don’t think the odds are in my favor on this one. There are going to be concerns about my qualifications on this one. Either way, I’m going to hear back in a week.

I’m really feeling salty about my current job situation. My boss wanted me to work at Wilmington Housing Authority tomorrow and I’m just not doing it. I flat out told him no thanks. I know he wasn’t happy but I’m not working at that shit hole. I don’t want to set a precedent that I’m willing to bend over backwards. I was really angry over how my boss tried to short my pay by a dollar an hour. I had to catch it and argue it. At first he wasn’t going to do anything. It took an explicit threat for me to go to the Department of Labor for him to quickly make the correction. I hate crooks.

I’m sure the heat isn’t helping any but I’m trying to look on the bright side of things. The bright side being grad school starting in only 30 days. Patience has never really been my strong suit. The Department of Vocational Rehabilitation ordered a brand new Dell laptop for me to use for school. This really made me happy as I would have been perfectly okay with a used one. I would’ve been grateful for anything given to me.

This weekend is going to be really too hot to do anything except stay in the air conditioning. I don’t even want to spend any time in my office because the A/C doesn’t reach that room. I’m just watching the local news and generally wasting time. I’m fine with this.

I’m thinking I’d really like to have an early to bed night. I worked 4 straight days of second shift and clearly I’m not used to this. My biorhythms are somewhat thrown off. No doubt that has contributed to my overall agitation. Hopefully my therapy session this afternoon will relax me some.

I am disappointed but not surprised by Indivisible ignoring my carefully drafted email to create a secure network for communications. They probably think I am one of the “tin foil” hat loonies but I was actually being quite reasonable and of sound judgement. But they made the choice to disregard my idea.

People are afraid of protesting because of the very real threat of being arrested and then disappeared. Indivisble is organizing activities out in the open which is practically an invite for law enforcement to keep tabs on their activities. Hell, it’s practically sending up a flare that says, “Please conduct your best surveillance on my activities.” It’s no wonder people are scared. The best protests are the ones that cannot be predicted. How do you plan them to be unpredictable? You use a private, secure, and a virtually undetectable network.

It’s like the idiots haven’t even read all of the briefings put out by the EFF. The EFF is dedicated to protecting individuals and organizations in the digital age. I just don’t get it. I want to offer Indivisible a service for free that would cost them tens of thousands of dollars in consulting and implementation fees. They blow me off as some nutcase. All I can really do is shrug my shoulders at this point and move on.

How do you convince people that the government really is spying on them without sounding crazy? I guess that’s the 64,000 dollar question. Maybe it’s going to take something happening to blow it wide open. I would’ve thought that event would’ve been Edward Snowden’s revelations; guess not.

I wonder if Indivisible will do anything at all to help individuals participating in events that it organizes. Will Indivisible help them or simply treat them as casualties of the war for freedom? This remains to be seen since they seem to be so cavalier about their communications and planning methods. I don’t really know and can’t really say but I may think twice about going to one of their events because it’s like a giant sonar ping for authorities and government surveillance agencies. I wish that were not the case though.

Today I really learned the implications of a post-privacy world. I have a Mastodon follower that is (or purports to be) a Meta employee. I don’t know why but I believe him when says that he is. There’s just something believable about it. Well he revealed some very angering things about what Meta knows about us; specific things down to our sexual orientation and how often we have sex and our political affiliations and leanings. I screwed up when I didn’t heed the warnings years ago when privacy advocates were railing against Facebook. I thought those guys were wearing the “tin foil hats.” I’m the sucker.

Now it’s just about impossible for me to disappear even if I really want to. Couple that with me feeling really salty about my employment situation. My existing employer is jerking me around so I don’t feel like working. Well I digress, I feel even more motivated to continue on my path to build CCURENET. But CCURENET is not, nor will it ever be, designed with mobile devices in mind because of location tracking. I won’t allow mobile devices to participate on the network in any way, shape, or form.

CCURENET is going to depend upon people having internet access and an actual laptop or desktop. I’m hoping this can reclaim some privacy.

Today I got some most welcome news. I’ve received a full ride scholarship to the University of Delaware for a Masters in Social Work! The scholarship came from the State of Delaware. I wasn’t expecting a full ride. I thought it would just be some monies and I would need to get FAFSA loans. So that put a real smile on my face.

I also got a 100.00 gift card from Verizon which was a welcome surprise because I’m trying to build out my home lab so this will purchase an OptiPlex 7050 to serve as the router. Then I have a lead on 2 more Dells which will serve as DNS servers, web, sftp, and maybe VoIP. Initially, this equipment will be for participating on DN42 to try a few things out. Once I have a proven concept, I will then build out CCURENET, my own network.

The only thing I wish I did not have to do for the next four days is work. But, the bills need to get paid somehow so I’ll grind through it. I need to set a reminder for Wednesday to reach out to my recruiter to see what’s up with my job interview that’s supposed to happen on Friday. In other news, I have to figure out how I am going to get some professional dress clothes for UD graduate school orientation. I learned it’s dress professional but I don’t do ties so they’ll have to deal with that.

I’m also thinking about just shutting down my Mastodon instance and going with one of the Mastodon instances already out there. It’s been a fun experiment but it’s a lot of care and feeding that I won’t have time for anymore. Running a Mastodon instance isn’t simply stand up and forget. It’s an appreciable workload. I’ll make a decision either way by the end of the summer. I’ve still got time.

One thing I will have to do is get used to being in academia again. I’m going to have to buckle down and study. I need to maintain a GPA of at least 3.25 to keep my scholarship so that means hard work. I also don’t want to let myself down. I’ve been given the opportunity of a lifetime and I fully intend to capitalize on it.

Life is challenging when you live with mental illness, post-traumatic stress in particular. While medications keep the worst of the dreams suppressed, they’re not perfect and last night was one of the worst nights that I’ve had in years. I would fall asleep for maybe an hour to an hour and a half with awful dreams and literally wake up and yelp; fall back to sleep and rinse and repeat. This hasn’t happened in a very long time and I am a bit alarmed that my medication regimen might need changing up. I may have to contact my Psychiatric Physician’s Assistant and let him know what is going on if this keeps up beyond last night.

My mind is looking back at last night before I went to bed. I didn’t go to bed agitated or upset although my thoughts have definitely been racing around this computer networking project I want to work on. But this networking project isn’t agitating or aggravating, rather it is an exciting learning opportunity. So, I really don’t understand why I am having awful dreams of falling out with my brother and mother and having awful dreams of getting seriously injured. I also have dreams where I am being forced to repeat high school even though I’ve already graduated college and it is hell. I mean so real that is hell. I wake up in night sweats.

My quality of sleep is so bad that I am often tired again by 9 or 10 o’clock in the morning and my eyes are closing in front of my computer; forcing me to need to take a nap. I don’t know why I haven’t revealed this to my psych PA. I guess maybe I haven’t brought it up because maybe I don’t believe that there is anything anybody can do about it? Do I not trust that anybody can help on a sub-conscious level? I think the answer to both questions is yes. I’ve been so used to having to fend for myself that I have difficulty trusting the people that it is perfectly safe and okay to trust. My brain is wired to believe that trust is a dangerous thing because my trust has, time and time again, been so wantonly violated.

Despite being so tired, I have some things that I need to accomplish this morning. I need clean clothes so a trip to the laundromat is in order and I fully intend to get this done this morning and not put it off because the sooner I get it done the better. I also want to shower and shave. I am embarrassed to admit I kind of let that go. I am not as good about personal hygiene as I could be but I don’t stink. This week is going to be a busy week and I am hoping that being busy will make me a little more naturally tired and help with sleep.

I’m sitting here at Dunkin Donuts on a Friday morning and I’m feeling okay. Yesterday I sent a proposal to Indivisble to design a secure VPN for them. I even offered to do it for free because I believe strongly in what they do. I just hope they take me seriously and not consider me to be some nut job but only time will tell. If I had to guess, they will probably think I am just some crazy shit house rat. The thing is, I believe Indivisible and its sister and brother chapters could benefit from the coordination through the communication that a network would provide.

I’m having trouble selling anyone on the concept of a private network right now. Nobody has any interest at all. Not even for fun or learning. I thought the homelab crowd would eat it up and boy was I wrong. I guess that’s the problem when you have some really niche interests. Most of the folks in the Reddit sub r/homelab were like why should I do this when there is Tailscale available. Tailscale is a corporate offering. It’s kind of deflating because I thought the entire ethos of the homelab crowd was a do it yourself, anti-corporate, and anti-cloud one. Again, I misinterpreted the mission.

Maybe I should make a Reddit post in the r/HomeNetworking sub asking if anyone would be interested and see who contacts me. I’m not optimistic though because, as I mentioned before, my interest is niche. People might express interest in passing politeness but never do anything. That’s even more frustrating. I guess I could prove it out myself through a simulation.

Well, in other news, I have an upcoming job interview next week with a social services agency which I am excited about because it’s an opportunity to exit from the contract security industry. That would be most welcome as I’ve had it with being a fucking security guard. Being a guard is miserable and even some retail jobs are better. The only advantage to security is that it pays a little better than retail on average.

I might need to get up and leave Dunkin soon because it is starting to get crowded and noisy. I wish people would use quiet inside voices but they don’t. I’m tired and really want more out of life but it’s going to take time before that happens.

So yesterday I had the kind of day which I simply refer to as an “autistic day.” This is a day when my symptoms are worse than usual. It seemed like every little sound and every piece of stimuli was amplified one hundred fold. I was trying to enjoy some iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts and every scrap of ever chair or every spoken voice was grating at my nerves. I wanted to just claw out my eyes and ears. It was a long time since I had experienced such intense over stimulation. It wasn’t a panic attack as I know the difference because I wasn’t feeling elevated heartbeat, nervous, sweaty, or shaky. I just wanted to go somewhere dark and void of stimulation.

I think some of the over stimulation might have been brought on by the stress that I am under to find better work than being a damn security guard and the beginning of graduate school. I know I am also stressing about things that I cannot control like the erosion of our civil rights and what is going on in the United States (the country of my citizenship) right now. But it does feel good to get this out on paper. I know there isn’t a medication that can treat this just yet and there probably won’t be any time soon. I need a kind of stimming toy but that would drive my girlfriend insane. Yesterday, someone sitting near me was constantly swishing his iced coffee drink and I wanted to rip it out of his hands.

At least my autistic symptoms are mostly sensory these days and do not really come out as difficulties with social skills, except in the workplace. I still have difficulties with the grey areas of the workplace. The unwritten rules are almost impossible for me to understand and the ever-changing social dynamic leaves me bewildered. I just hope that once I graduate from the University of Delaware in 2027 and obtain employment as a licensed master social worker (LMSW) that I can hand in there long enough to accrue the hours to obtain independent licensing. I believe it can be done. I just have to keep my head down and do this.