No, I don't want to try your updated interface

The headlong pell-mell rush that they call progress but is so often proved not better but worse by time. Can't you fuckers just relax for a while and quit working on all your so-called "improvements"? Rarely are they.

The phrase that comes to mind is "left well enough alone".

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Oh hell yeah, I intend me some change, but it's about the timing folks. If it's not genuinely better, then it doesn't count as an Improvement. iMprovement.

Rot in peace, S.J.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Von Moltke

Life forces us to give up so many of our preconceived notions, our cherished values, our hopes and dreams, all in the name of raw survival. "Adapt to what I offer, or die," is Life's ubiquitous mantra. Like a rock subjected to tide and time, you will be changed or you will be broken. Often both.
There are no other options.

So me make our peace with what life makes us and we go on.

I Faced The Land Across Cold Waters and Yet Turned Away

A long six weeks of dealing with a unmedicated snap of the mind, the fallout and consequences in that haunted City By The Sea, and a naked revelation of clinical depression that had been hidden by imprisonment in a dark empty land, now lit in stark abjection.

There were two choices. To mindlessly pursue a misstep of timing against confounding odds, or to withdraw to a terrible place to regroup and recoup.
BUT. Our hero insisted upon a caveat. His time of retrial in the land of empty despair was limited to six months. A deal with the soulless cosmos: a reforging of the self, in return for another opportunity.
The universe is well known to renege on agreements made by its silent consent with it but our hero called upon the Great Balance, that Law of Cycles, to avenge his oath. Now, that Arbiter of All Vows, Time, shall decide redress.

Actually there was a third choice. I pondered it long and deep. It was the Final Choice from which no others can follow. In then end, I decided against it. Life may be short, nasty and brutish but it is the single flicker allowed us in the immense eternity of darkness. I thought I'd play the hand as there's always plenty of time to fold later, and often the choice is taken from you anyway.

So. Six months. I intend to rebuild my body from the ground up--I'm in a good place to start. I'm rail thin from the last six months of running and a month of near starved endless walking the hills of San Francisco.
I'm just a collection of wire hangers to frame lean muscle on. I quit drinking. I don't even need my little crossed-off-days calendar I used when I quit in March. I simply am stopping. I had my last drink with a good friend in a bar in San Francisco Sept 26 and I swore than I would not drink again until it was another one shared with again with some good friend.
No swilling by myself in the darkness of winter in a lonely place.

I came so close to a one-way ticket to Bangkok to drink myself to death. I'd be there now, guzzling Changs and taking pills. Kind of miss that parallel universe: it would have been something to behold. But frankly, I'm looking forward to running in the cold of winter under overcast skies.
I almost fear spring as I will not want to reexperience the terrible heat of this summer; I may go to the southern hemisphere to dodge summer altogether. Funny, I always thought I would do the opposite if given the chance.
Lot of things changing like that. Things that I thought I would always desire, always enjoy, always seek out, all my pole stars shifting in their orbits to be replaced by inexplicable stars I never imagined would guide my course.
It is a strange and unsettling wind that turns the ship of destiny in a new direction.

London Bridge is burning down, burning down...

Safe, sane, civilized London, revealed over a minor incident to be a powderkeg of unrest and violence just waiting to go off. If staid, quiet London can erupt without warning, what does that say about the rest of the unstable world that teeters on the brink?
Lord Curzon, visiting Qom on his tour of Persia in 1889, describing its fanatical inhabitants, said "[it] is one of those places where an accidental spark may be fanned into a disagreeable flame." How surprised he would be that the same could have been said of his great London little more than a century later.

While normally I align myself with those oppressed by the wealthy elite plutocrats, not in this case. These aren't the downtrodden rising against their capitalist masters, these were "feral youth" as I heard one commentator describe them. These aren't intellectuals and poets pushed to desperation by tyranny and responding with violence--these are uneducated, illiterate louts of society, the rabble of the digital age, using modern technology as their torches and pitchforks, flashmob of peasants. The looting is always the giveaway.
Those truly battling authoritarian rulers don't smash into stores to steal videogame consoles and overpriced sneakers. They burn the icons of the power structure, not their own bars and grocery stores. They plunder the wealthy, not their own shopkeepers.
A revolutionary sets fire to the mansion of his persecutor; a fool burns down his own house.

I loved it when David Cameron said that "social media" had to be controlled to prevent this kind of thing. Ha! Weren't the West just recently patting their own backs with smug self-congratulation when this same "social media" aided the people in the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt?
I'll bet Mubarak wholeheartedly shares your sentiment, Mr. Prime Minister.

You don't get to praise the sword when it cuts your way and complain when it cuts the other: hypocrisy.
I love the way technology invariably comes back to bite the ass of its ardent supporters.

The British police responded with such astonishing flaccidity, totally caught off guard. Had I been in command, an unceasing torrent of live rounds would have poured into the rioting crowds. Death toll in the thousands, probably. Fuck water cannons and "plastic bullets" if you have to wait for them, use the guns you've got, now.
There is a big difference between protecting innocent citizens and the legitimate social structure from rampaging criminals versus brutal suppression of freedom-seeking masses by a corrupt regime keeping itself in power; the West has something to learn from the despots, in that shooting into a violent crowd isn't necessarily always a bad thing.
The cops appeared to have no resources at all, not even tear gas. So much for the scary vision of Britannia under the heel of fascist stormtroopers.

Outlying suburbs of Desolation City

Still out of sorts. The vile boggy heat, the ennui. A month to go in purgatory. From the dread of certainty to the dread of uncertainty which in this case is ever so preferable. 

When I was a kid, I read a lot of comics, all kinds. There was something about the goofy innocence of the Archie comics that had a strange appeal for me, a kid more usually obsessed with gory hard-core science fiction.

I recall especially Little Archie's nemesis Dr. Doom and his idiot assistant Chester; after every failure of Dr. Doom's nefarious plans, he would be seen sailing away onboard a ship named The Pride of Walvis Bay.

When I lived in Amsterdam, I dated a South African girl and learned that if you spoke Dutch, then you came as close as possible to speaking Afrikaans, the descendant of the language of the Dutch Boer settlers. On a map of southern Africa she was once showing me, I saw city named Windhoek, which I knew meant "Windy Corner", in Namibia, and there, nearby, that haunting name of so long ago: Walvis Bay.

I think I'm going to go there. I've crossed the equator twice, but never been as far south as the Tropic of Capricorn. Walvis Bay is a windy desert city cooled by cold currents of the Atlantic shore. My imagination is captivated.

It looks like the end of the world, calling out to me with a siren song. The place where I will die. 

All because of a peculiarly exotic place mentioned obliquely in a comic book decades ago that I never forgot. 

Funk, but not the good kind

Have not been able to escape a nagging sense of despair for the last few days. It doesn't help that death is all encompassing, both personally and in the wider world all over the news. It has been weighing heavily on me. Probably just the heat, the slipping arc of the sun, circumstances, the vagaries of biochemical disorders of the mind--still, plenty of bad news on all fronts. I can't recall any good thing that anyone has been able to relate in the last couple of weeks.

"I hear a very gentle sound: very near yet very far; very soft yet very clear. . ." Indeed, the shadows of the evening fall across the years. It seems there is no good thing I can achieve that the world cannot taint and ruin. All my hallowed grounds are soured. I obtain wealth and then idiots cause it to be devalued.
I am beginning to wonder if effort is worth it at all when all accomplishment is so easily made futile by the wicked simpletons who have been given power in our time.
Tiresome, very tiresome.