The happy place

It’s an evening again. Abruptly last week there were thick layers of snow coated everywhere, but now it’s hot summer and already it’s time to mow the lawns. So abrupt this transition was that it seems like a glitch in the matrix or something.

1135

Right now there’s this endless list of tasks ahead of me. Tasks I ain’t looking much forward to at all but life ain’t supposed to be fun all of the time.

You can’t have the yin without the yang.

Life is hard from time to time and then the trick is to be harder because what is the alternative?

A world where people can be 100% soft is an utopia I think, because then it’s enough with one hard bastard in the mix and that one will dominate the others.

That’s why my strategy is to be hard on the outside, but to have a soft core, like a hollow diamond filled with gold.

There’s been an ebb in my brain and so therefore I’ve not written.

Some days words and thoughts erupt out of the brain with a force of that volcano which drenched Pompeii in lava.

Today is not such a day at all.

Instead I’m feeling like a glass of carbonated water forgotten for so long that now it’s just plain water. Even it’s Lukewarm and half empty.

But that does not mean I am unhappy.

I’m the luckiest man I know.

Hey I’ve had surgery in my sinuses on numerous occasions (two), and I’m likely due for a third one. When they anaesthetized me for the first time with that mask, you know, I was on the brink of panic and the whole ordeal was not a very pleasant one at all, but worst I think was waking up because then I did panic for sure: disoriented I woke up having an asthma attack and started pulling on the tampons they’d stuffed up my nose.

I find that funny today that I had two tampons shoved up my left nose, and one up my right one. The strings taped to my chin, and a menstrual pad under the nose, fixed behind my ears as a the cherry on top.

I sure did have a fine time on the train back from the hospital that time, looking like that. Snot blood dripping from the nostril with only one tampon.

There are three significant things worth mentioning about this experience:

First was was when installing IV drip into my arm, the nurse was really struggling with the syringe and she stabbed me many times before finally finding the vein. That is of course OK with me; someone has to always be someone’s first time doing something, and for sure I prefer that to mine being someone’s first surgery.

Second one was that I shared a room with an old man with a wheezy cough and a wheezy breath and he appeared to be on the brink of death but he got hospitalised just in time and after overhearing him on the phone, it turned out that he had caught a cold spending time with his grandchildren. Even so his voice really shone up when he talked about the experience and I am without any doubt that he thought it was worth spending that time with those children even though it nearly liked him. That was very significant experience for me to bear witness to.

Thirdly on brink of panic being put to sleep some medic put her hand on my chest just above the heart I think, and it felt like she was shooting warmth out of her hand and it was very soothing for some reason. That was significant.

And yeah lastly my wife visited me on the hospital the evening before the surgery and she looked so worried that it broke my heart to see.

One more thing: when pulling the tampons out, one of them was stuffed real deep and I felt it in the other side of the forehead so I didn’t really have the stomach to pull it out: my wife had to help me over a bucket. I remember to this day the feeling of having it scraping the insides and when it came out with a gush of blood it was a big relief.

hello hello well met !

I saw a fox just now, scurrying across the fields into the forest. Like a quick brown fox (except this one was red).

That’s a fine sight, foxes are graceful creatures. Fine sight at least as far away from our chicken as we are now, because the foxes spell doom for them: Our neighbours one day forgot to close the hatch and a fox got into their pen. It must’ve been a sorry sight when going there the morning after to discover all of them chickens dead in pools of feathers and blood, unseeing eyes looking back at them and so forth.

That’s the type of mistake you make only once I think.

Anyhow nature’s beauty with foxes and roe deers and lynxes prowling and the like is a miracle in its own right, and we should be lucky to share the earth with such magnificent creatures I think.

But of course the lesson is that they are all ruthless in their struggle to survive and feed their families (don’t know if I would count the deers among the ruthlessest animals or not, but you’ve bound to have some thick skin to survive the harsh and dangerous winters)

Hey did you know that animals with exoskeletons, such as lobsters, they too can gain weight and become obese, just like everyone else, whereupon the skeleton segments will adjust to the new size, but that obese lobsters might still suffer from mobility issues and trouble breathing, so if your lobster turns fat, then you are well advised to put him or her on a diet.

One strategy which I employ in life is to be very strange.

Or rather, not try to be not strange: trying to be normal and to fit in has taken me nowhere.

When I was a young man, before I was a handsome one, I tried my very best to fit in because I had a yearning to be loved. I went to great lengths to please my classmates to try to gain their acceptance and to make friends of them, and I paid a high price with my dignity and so forth, but it gained me less than nothing.

Such a state of being as I was then is sort of a shapeless state of failure. (Someone who to this day seem to me to be a cringe inducing nightmare.)

Then one day enough was enough: I concluded that they (my “peers”) were never going to accept me (I was a joke) and I couldn’t successfully be normal: That that was an unachievable goal to me.

By that time I had long since let go of my oars and was just aimlessly drifting ever which way because I had no goal or anything: it was enough of a struggle to keep afloat.

Anyhow so I gave up on being normal and decided to become instead very strange: invent my own clothing style with Hawaii shirts and t-shirts with hearts printed on them and sunglasses and whatever ugly shit I could find, and when people would point out I was looking like a fag I would show them that I also had on nail polish.

That strangeness made them lose their leverage on me, because no longer did I care to please them: The contempt they had for me I felt it now against them in equal measure.

So that’s how I was able to grab once again the oars of my metaphorical boat and to start rowing. It wasn’t no easy journey, but with the years I became handsomer and handsomer, and I found some friends who didn’t care if I was strange or not: even they liked it.

Like that song with Shakira and Dizzee Rascal: “I’m crazy but you like it, loca, loca, loca”.

In fact no hurdle has come my way since then which has created an equally big existential crisis and also I have been happy (more or less) ever since.

Cause I came out a Diamond.

I’m learning stuff from the TV right now. Apparently Crime and Punishment is a most profound book. Thought provoking is not enough to describe, it’s life altering.

That’s pretty significant.

Might even read it myself, although honestly I’ve had a hard time enjoying the Dostojevskij books I’ve tried so far. Frankly speaking the people in those books have seemed irratic and have acted strange: overreacted to things and so forth.

And I’ve had a hard time keeping track of who is who and it could be a cold fact that I do not possess a formidable enough brain to appreciate such treasures, but I’ll give it a shot one fine day. (I enjoyed the Gambler a lot but it was a short and straight forward novel, but the others are dense and thick or so it seems to me.)

Maybe one fine day when I have a lot of time and am not re reading the First Law triology. Then I might give it a shot. By then my brain might’ve ripened with age and experience.

The fact is that I’m equipped with this somewhat (some might say) unsophisticated brain I have got and for that I am very thankful.

Indeed.

I couldn’t picture a life without my brain.

However: I wrote this post not to flaunt my ignorance, but because of that which I saw on the TV just now: that certain books can have such a massive impact for some people. That is something I myself can testify to be true from my own experience.

But it was a movie in my case, six days seven nights. I’ve written about this one before because as I’ve written before I’m much like an album (or even a single song) on repeat. That film made me stop and think what I wanted from life, what type of career would make me happy (not climbing no corporate ladder, that’s for sure)

Same is true for songs like I’ve written before: keep em on the toes.

Somewhere inside there is a small voice which is your own: listen to that one and pay no heed to what plans others might have for you.

That’s my sage advice.

Feeling really exhausted. It feels like I’ve been painting planks for ten hours straight or something.

When kubernetes was new 2016 it had PetSets but it has been replaced by StatefulSets since then but anyhow I like the pet name better but I would NEVER deploy my dog in kubernetes.

Fact is I’ve had it up to here (really high) with kubernetes and deployments and yaml files nested in yaml files so indented that I need to horizontally scroll even though I’ve got a big screen.

Like a real big curved one.

The manifests are like many of them and it’s enough that one of them has a blank space too much or a template.spec in the wrong place and it won’t compute. Or worse yet: you’ve put the special annotation on the wrong block, or there’s a type-o, so whichever controller won’t pick it up, the magical spell didn’t work and nothing happens, you don’t get your SSL cert or whatever (you wait in vain).

Don’t get me started on kustomize: I get very triggered when thinking on that one.

I feeling the cognitive load too much. So much so that were I a k8s deployment, I would’ve been shot dead long time ago by the OOM killer and then deployed anew. Think that’s my fate if I go to hell when I die.

To exit 137 in a crash loop forever.

Good evening ! This type of week with a day off in the middle is exemplary. A red day; the labour day: the very reddest of red days, suits me just fine.

Blood red.

I am feeling confidence now. I will dance to my own tune. I do not need to seek validation for my feelings from outside sources. I am not fazed so easily.

Feeling like a colossus both physically and mentally bodes well for the future.

I hope these feelings aren’t just from the bubble wine I had for dinner.

Anyhow I shall relish it now. Some days are good and others are bad.

It’s the yin yang.

I have started to re read that Joe Abercrombie triology “The First Law”, because it’s a good one and I like to be having something to look forward to at the end of each day so I’m doing that even though my life is rather too short to re read stuff as I am quite a slow reader and there are many books out there.

I also made a scientific discovery the other day about my allergies: I use to get headaches, sneezes and a cough a couple of times each month, and that would last for hours even if I medicate, basically more or less ruining that day, but if I go out for a jog, like a 5km run, like I did the other day, then that somehow triggers a hard reset of the sinuses and I get back to normal.

Some would say normal is an overstatement; I’ve never successfully been quite normal.

That makes me think about that song by “The Last Knife Fighter”,, “Ring Tailed Roarer Blues”:

So, don′t get me sane when I need change

Don't tell the reaper I′m in his range

Don't call me crazy when all I is is strange

Think TLKF has really some of the best lyrics I’ve ever seen about being a beat down cowboy.

Or in general too. It’s just really good. I think so.

Okay let’s now face this Tuesday with bravery !!