The happy place

Had to delete LinkedIn app just now cause it’s such a cringe fest. Some life advice shared between a bunch of wankers, like idiotic things really, like how some people are owls and they bring value because of this, or that you should be able to explain everything to a ten year old, or you share your tips on how to secure the infrastructure to not get hacked (like focus on externally exposed services first (who would’ve guessed that)), and some selfies where they cry to show that sometimes they feel bad inside even though they seem to be happy (deep).

All of this is what I’ve seen today. and people out there put shit like this on LinkedIn cause what? they aspire to become some sort of influencers? I feel stupider every time I Scroll that feed and now enough is enough.

Agree?

Aaah I am alive!!

To breathe the fresh air and well I can’t smell anything really, but I know there are smells of various kinds in my area, to know that and to not have that much pain anywhere is a stroke of luck if you want my opinion.

Making lasagna today. Making some fantastic work at work today. Having a fresh cup of coffee and some snus today like right now. This life; Today I’m up for the challenge!

Have you seen the news? read about the wars? The killing of the innocent? The recession? That unemployment is soaring and that people are getting poorer and that that democracy index thing is back like fourty years in time? And the rich line their pockets, profiteering of people’s misery; Don’t read that shit what can you do about all of that? I mean sure you could do something or everything or nothing, but what?

Put shortly; ambivalence is what I’m feeling about today.

Bought three pairs of jeans. Thing is they change the formulae for jeans over the years so you cannot buy same pair because all bets are off even with same model number and instead you have to go to store and try them on.

That’s a fact of life I have come to accept even though for sure I do not understand it, like the case is with so many other things including why I would want to buy a new pair of jeans which looks already like the pair I’m seeking to replace. Like with frizzles and pale on the knees etc.

This is the case that we try to navigate in a world we do not understand, we are just trying to give it our best shot at least I do that: strive to be decent and honest and kind and stuff.

I’m feeling anger now but that’s cause I’m a little bit hungry and lack the energy to rise from the sofa, what they call a catch 22 and a downward spiral snd a vicious cycle but I will break the cycle now.

There are some people out there with their heads so far up their asses that their heads pop right back out of their mouths again. My best advice is to stay clear of such people as they will make your life miserable even though that may not be their intentions.

So anyhow that’s all about my Monday which now is successfully completed. Even I did go for a run in the snow because it wasn’t -23c for a change.

I remember sitting exactly like this in the very same sofa I do now, and it was Sunday and I wasn’t looking forward to Monday, and now it’s exactly like that again. That’s a déjà vu right there, and another five days to deal with somehow. If I think about it, I did the very same thing, and I felt the very same thing the week before and the one before that.

I make a decent enough salary, I’ll save some money and when the time comes I’ll make my move and break out of this loop, because it’s more like a downward spiral.

Speaking of downward spirals, in my youth I was really into Nine Inch Nails and there were many texts about drug abuse but that flew over my head at the time because I guess it was hard to relate as I spent my time reading comic books or drawing or tinkering with the computer. Even going to parties wasn’t on my radar, and anyhow he (Trent Reznor) sounded angry and/or sad, and that was enough (I did understand the lyrics for Closer though) but anyhow I don’t listen to that no more. I also had green hair at one point and it really accentuated my pimples. Green hair listening to The Downward Spiral in the Walkman but not yet smoking the cigarettes. That was me before I was happy like I am now.

So the objective then, is to stop this downward spiral from reaching down to how I felt inside at the time when I was listening to downward spiral. To somehow point the spiral up.

So about that post, why I did have a traveling job even though I don’t like travelling, and in fact I am pretty similar to Ferdinand the bull, who is pretty happy right where he’s at with what’s right in front of him. I’m thinking like how could I make such obvious mistakes, and why aren’t we (some of us at least) so good at taking advice from others?

It’s like when I was kickboxing, (here comes the point of this post, the thought I have in my head which I’m tryin to convey), they say keep your guard up, right, and you try: You try to keep your guard up, because you know you don’t want a punch in the face, even with gloves on, you know this, but as soon as you get tired, or you are busy trying to land a roundhouse kick or something, boom you get a punch in your face, from out of nowhere, because without knowing it, gravity pulled your guard down and you were to busy or tired or something to pay attention.

Then you learn.

OK that’s all I had on this right now.

I used to really love Sigur Rós, think it sounded mesmerising and soothing and even I could listen to it when falling asleep, but now I think it sounds like a tormented cat with pianos and shit. I can’t enjoy it.

Something has changed inside of me, apparently, and that’s a fun fact and it’s like opening a door inside of you but nothing is there anymore or something else is there that wasn’t there before, or doors which used to be empty inside now contains something new, and suddenly you like pesto but not Sigur Rós.

There are doors you keep shut and doors you couldn’t open if your life depended on it.

I’ve been in a dark mood since these layoffs yesterday, thinking about whether my next move is to move on as well, I guess at least it’s time to power on the radars and long range sensors and all that to seek out the grass elsewhere, cause surely the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? Or rather, surely there must be greener grass on the other side of some fence?

Feeling a bit too old right now frankly I can’t muster no interest in AI and/or machine learning or suchlike, even clicking around in some cloud or worse yet doing the terraform or I guess the OpenTofu apply, is to me something comparable to going to the dentist, and therefore I ain’t sure of how many years I’ve got left in my career, been guessing like five, so that makes me think about that song by Sonata Arctica; The Last Amazing Greys, in which the Wolf in the lyrics passes the torch to the younger generation (a very good song), it’s I think is about being chased by what I think is death, and death is catching up.

Listening to that song while writing this I feel my spirits rising, I will do something clever, a real clever move like I always do, probably there will be clouds in there and I shall embrace it.

You can lead a donkey to the river, but it’s still gonna be a donkey when it gets there.

What the fuck is this shit?; now they laying off my friends at my work and it’s an ugly thing to do in a recession with people having families to care for.

Rich folks can just lay people off and they cash in and the laid off people have to post posts on LinkedIn about how grateful they are because they ain’t wanna bad mouth their former employers so they have to be grateful hoping to get a job to feed their families, it’s absolutely disgusting.

Is this the future we were hoping for? Normal people pay the price for rich folks folly. Many of them directors and VP:s and fine folks are so full of hot air they would’ve left earth long time ago if they weren’t also full of shit.

Do you like Conan? I do too.

I started reading Conan comics when I was a young boy. I remember especially there was one story in which Conan returns to his home village to discover his kin crippled and enslaved by vicious warlords, They’d been hamstrung, unable to escape, and the family sword had been turned into a plowshare which the hobbled family members were forced to use. Conan seeing this, begins plotting his vengeance so off he goes with the plowshare, into a forge where he turns the plowshare back to a sword with which kills each and every one of the vicious warlords and frees his village (I remember it like that, wish I knew which one that was).

Anyhow that made a profound impact on of course. Such a righteous man. He did good to get back at those bastards, the right thing, and I think that hidden in there, is some powerful message.

Anyhow I picked up some Conan Chronicles book when I had a traveling job, a compilation of some of the short stories written for Weird Tales by Robert E Howard. They blew me away and rekindled my interest in Conan the Cimmerian. Howard had a very word-efficient writing style in there which can communicate a lot of information without using many words. Terse.

For example check this out:

There’s this passage in Rogues in the House from 1934

It is simply an arrangement of mirrors. Do you see those mirrors on the walls? They transmit the reflection of the room into these tubes, down which other mirrors carry it to reflect it at last on an enlarged scale in this great mirror.”

Murilo realized that the priest must be centuries ahead of his generation, to perfect such an invention; but Conan put it down to witchcraft and troubled his head no more about it.

This tells a lot about the adversary (some sort of genius), the world in which they live (must be ancient if clever mirror arrangements are centuries away) and Conan, (who at this time was Intelligent and cunning like a wild beast, but not very civilized or educated. (there are other short stories of course where he is a wise King because the stories are from different times of his life)). Also that witchcraft is a feasible explanation for that which they describe.

What I liked most about Conan when I was a young man, and why I held him as sort of a role model, is the fact that Conan will not be wronged without retaliation of equal measure (or more), and he lets no one mess with him.

I used to be like that too, except the other way around.

A lot of the short stories written by Robert E. Howard are now public domain and can be found on Project Gutenberg. My favorite I think is A Witch Shall be Born