Blog Archive: Early 2025
25 February 2025. I guess I suck at animation. I've had multiple series totally bomb on YouTube. The last two in particular, Dicks Retirement Trailer Park and Lightspeed Drifting, represented quite a bit of work: 130 1-minute episodes of Dicks, and 30 10-minute episodes of Lightspeed (basically the equivalent of several feature-length motion pictures). Between them they garnered a handful of likes, but every single episode of both series got at least one thumbs down, many got several, along with comments like, "You need something better to do with your spare time," and "This really sucks!" Rather disheartening. So the general public has spoken, and I saw no use in continuing to post more stuff that people don't like.
All I can say is, judging from what gets the likes, there's no accounting for taste.
1 February 2025. Mere days away from turning 70, I confess to have wondered long and often what life in my 70s would be like, and now I know. Because I am only a day older when I hit 70, not a decade older. All will be the same. I will still be suffering from a disease that has crept up on me over the course of a decade at least. That nasty surprise comes at any random time when I pause and reflect on times past, on days when I had surprising physical strength and clarity of vision. Although plenty remains the same: still grumpy.
But one startling change has taken place over the last few years that has caught me by surprise. I've always been the loner. Perfectly happy in solitude. As I was building my house, I spent all those years living alone in a camper, then later a cabin of the same size, in the wilderness. I was in my element, both physically and emotionally.
But suddenly I find myself dying, and with that physical change has come an emotional shift as well, for I now know loneliness. For the first time in my life. I'd not known it before. So I am left wondering what is responsible for this change. Is it the illness? Is it my fate? Do I fear dying alone? I confess it is an odd experience, for the change is just as perplexing and disturbing as the feeling itself. I was never lonely before. And now I am. All I see is a parallel: I was not dying before. Now I am. These are strange and unsettling times for me.
12 January 2025. If I'd been asked a year ago if I'd live to see 2025, I'd have merely laughed. How absurd! Well, here I am, although I'm not at all happy about it. I am simply alive. I don't have the money to put an end to this nonsense (ending my life medically is expensive), so I am more or less forced to continue as I am, although, trust me, I am looking at financial options. Because this is not living. This is surviving. Big, ugly difference. If I was a car, I'd be sold for scrap. Maybe, just for fun, park me in the middle of a field, lock the throttle wide open, and wait for a catastrophic engine failure. Oh, incidentally, my computer is mimicking me: still creeping along on half of its chips. A friend took pity on me and had it serviced. And, like me, it sorta functions; every so often it actually works correctly. It makes for a daily mystery: what's it going to do today?