STOP! THIEF!

And make no mistake, this world is villainous. Absolutely villainous. It takes and takes and takes. The only gifts we get, it takes back.

If you're lucky—I know we don't like that word, but it's lyrical— your life will follow a typical order.

First, it takes your innocence. Then it takes your youth. Over time, it takes your optimism and hope. You can fight to keep these, but it's hard. In place of these, you'll get frustration and anger.

As time goes by, it slowly steals your freedom. This happens usually very slowly, like getting bricked into a cell in real time.

The years will role by and you will laugh and cry and make memories. You have already given up so much, these gifts will mean THE WORLD to you.

Then this world will take someone you care about. Usually much older than you, and you get a little grief (or maybe a lot) along with it.

And you'll lose a little more freedom. And more of your youth and vigor. Oh, this life is a big ole fat thief. It just won't stop taking from you. Even after you think you don't have anything else to give, it'll find more to steal.

You'll lose your temper and patience over and over and over and over.

If you have children, first you'll lose them to their friends. Then you'll lose them to their own lives. You can convince yourself they are still yours, but they're gone. Maybe you'll see them a few times a year. Or maybe, like one friend of mine, years will go by before you get to see them again. Or, if life is really really cruel, you'll lose them ultimately. Because with enough time in this world, You lose big.

You lose your mom and your dad. You lose your closest friends. A brother or a sister. Both or all.

Eventually, our eyesight, hearing, our very countenance is gone. At some point, this life gets really insidious and starts to steal your memories. This is particularly devastating right when we need them most.

And then it gets more personal and you lose The one person who is closest to you in the whole world. And that person... its like losing part of yourself. Your heart will break and this life doesn’t laugh with glee. It simply doesn’t care. All the handiwork of the villain that is life in this world.

With enough time, this life tries to play the ultimate steal and in doing so, gives us a gift. It takes you.

In a moment, all that we were begins to fade away in memory. We'll linger for a while on the lips and in the rememberance of those who loved us, But time will do what it does and eventually those who keep us in their thoughts will be taken too. And we are gone entirely.

---

and there she was in all her glory. I went to church here when I was younger. one of my teachers and favorite people Doug Messick invited me to go. I found God or he found me, I played softball, met girls had a life. in these walls we were safe. we sang together, prayed together and shook each other's hands. now she's gone, burned to the ground.

Fleeting Ghosts

The night was still, save for the whispering of the wind through the tall grass. A single oak tree stood nearby, its ancient branches swaying gently, offering shelter beneath its lush green canopy. Beyond the hill, fields stretched far into the distance, dotted with the faint glows of small towns. It was a quiet place, a place where time seemed to slow.

The boy sat on the soft earth, legs stretched outward, his arms propped behind him for support. The weight in his chest hadn’t lessened—not with time, not with distance. If anything, it had grown heavier. The questions in his mind crawled like insects, relentless and unyielding.

A girl knelt beside him, her presence ethereal, her form slightly blurred at the edges. The moonlight passed through her in places, illuminating the sadness in her translucent eyes.

“Something feels different tonight,” she murmured, her voice carrying a distant echo, as if spoken from another world.

The boy exhaled sharply, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

“Different? No. It's the same. The same weight crushing my chest. The same questions clawing at my mind.” He turned his head slightly, his expression darkening. “Hell, you're the same ghost of a girl I used to know.”

The girl lowered her gaze, her fingers hesitating before reaching towards his hand. She hovered just above it, never quite touching.

“I never stopped caring, you do know that?” she said softly.

The boy’s jaw tightened. He met her eyes, searching them for the truth he feared he would never find.

“Do I?” His voice was sharp, but beneath it lay something fragile. “The girl I would've died for...” He paused, biting his lip, his fingers digging into the earth. “She wouldn’t have left me like this. She wouldn't have burned me alive just to feel the coldness of someone else.”

The girl winced. Shadows of regret played across her face.

“I never meant to hurt you... that...” She inhaled deeply, as if trying to steady herself, though no air filled her lungs. “That wasn't me. I'm the version of her that loved you, remember?” She tried to smile, but it wavered, crumbling before it could fully form.

The boy’s expression darkened. His fingers curled into a fist, shaking with restrained fury.

“Never meant to?” He scoffed. “Yeah, sure. You definitely didn’t mean to leave.”

His fist came down hard against the earth, sending dirt scattering.

“You let another man touch you. Use you.” His voice cracked, the weight of his own words suffocating him. He looked down, his face contorted in pain. “I guess I never really knew you... Did I?”

The girl flinched, as though his words had the power to wound her even in death.

The boy’s voice grew quieter now, but no less sharp.

“That night, another man looked into the same eyes I once loved so deeply. The same eyes I swore were my home... And he dug you out. He took what was mine.”

He let the words hang in the night air, thick with grief.

“And you enjoyed it.”

A long silence followed. The wind carried the scent of grass and distant rain, but the boy felt nothing.

“You enjoyed it so much, you ignored every call I made. Every desperate attempt from the man who would've loved you until his last breath.”

His shoulders trembled as he dropped his face into his hands.

“You ignored me. And for what? For a man who doesn't truly care? For a man who loves what you are now and not what you'll become because he's obsessed with you being young? A man who saw you as nothing more than a fleeting moment of pleasure?”

The girl opened her mouth to speak but found no words.

“You took what we shared—the gift of intimacy, the bond God gave to two people who truly love each other—and you gave it away like it meant nothing.”

His voice had lost its anger now. It was only sorrow, only the weight of betrayal sinking deeper into his bones.

“You lied to me. Made me believe I was safe in your embrace... until the end of time.”

The girl’s form flickered, as though the weight of his grief was unraveling whatever tether kept her there.

The boy let out a shuddering breath, his hands gripping his knees.

“Now, every day, the same question runs through my head: Did she ever love me to begin with? And if she did, even just for a moment... why do this to me?”

The girl closed her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

And just like that, she was gone.

The wind blew through the empty space she had occupied, but the boy remained still. The night stretched on, unchanged, indifferent to the storm within him. The oak tree swayed gently, its leaves whispering secrets to the night.

And he was alone.

Yet, in his solitude, something shifted. It wasn’t relief, nor was it closure. But there was a fleeting moment of peace, however fragile it may be.

He exhaled deeply, stretching his arms outward, lifting his head to the sky. The stars shimmered above, watching over the world in silent indifference.

Then, in the corner of his vision, something stirred.

A thin strand of dust—soft and shimmering, like pixie dust—floated upward from where she had been. It twisted and danced on the wind, drifting higher and higher toward the heavens.

His breath caught in his throat as he followed its ascent. It climbed, weightless and free, until it became one with the stars.

For a brief moment, the sky twinkled—a single flicker of light, small yet unmistakable.

A final goodbye.

The boy closed his eyes, letting the night hold him in its quiet embrace. And for the first time in a long while, he let go.

After spending some family time, the House is now relatively quiet because 50% of the Family members are sleeping. Which is a good time, to do some side-project work.

For some time, I'm working on a pellet analyze site. I collect the data, when and how many pellet bags I refill in our tank. Which will give me then an overview of how many pellets we used in the past. With this data, I can see at which time we turned on the heating in the house or have a before and after view after we did the house insulation. It's not much and I keep adding some smaller features. Currently, it will give me a number, on which I can roughly estimate how we need for the year. Because the storage is nearly empty, and I need to get more.

For the app, I've created a small script which will fetch the current price of 1t of pellets. It is running inside a cron job. And by occasionally checking the app, I can see when the price is good and should order new pellets.

Lately, I've found a bug, where the fetched price is not the same as I can see on the page of the supplier. So I've done some investigation and found out, that I missed a combination of query parameters. While I was on it, I removed some I didn't need anymore. I'm happy that the page of the supplier is stable without changing the API a lot.

That's it for today. This was my contribution to #TheMonthProject. I've done a minimal introduction of my pellet analyze side-project and fixed a long-overdue bug. 😃

---

02 of #100DaysToOffload
#TheMonthProject #pelletyze
Thoughts?

1: Диптих в БКИ – до 7.2

До 7 февруари можете все още да видите изложбата на Кристина Попова и Яне Гаджев в пространството на културния институт в Прага на улица Klimentská 6.

2: Танцов семинар посветен на Трифон Зарезан – 8.2

Организацията Заедно организира танцoв семинар на 8.2 в дома на малцинствата. Aко желаете да участвате, трябва да се запишете до 3.2 като изпратите мейл на zaedno -at- zaedno.org.

3: Poetics of Encryption – Поетика на Шифроването – от 12.2

Галерия Рудолфиниум ни кани на безплатна изложба, която предизвиква със заглавието и със съдържанието си.

“Разчитаме на цифрови инструменти за много неща, но рядко разбираме как работят. Първо, поради патентования характер на голяма част от корпоративните технологии. Второ, защото разбирането как усъвършенстван AI е успял да генерира конкретен резултат може да бъде невъзможно. Нашето невежество и липса на разбиране по отношение на шифрованите системи е трудно да посрещне. Как тази ситуация се пренася в изкуството?”

4: Орхан Памук в Прага – 17.2

Турският писател и носител на Нобелова награда за литература Орхан Памук ще е в Прага на 17 февруари.

Срещата ще е дискусия на английски с превод на чешки. Все още има билети.

5: Среща в Прага на хора на изкуството: 20.2

Първата среща на хора, интересуващи се и практикуващи в сферата на изкуството, ще се проведе на 20.2 в Kavárna Mlýnská. Заповядайте!

---

Ще добавяме и още

Après avoir lu Le Père Goriot, j’ai voulu poursuivre ma découverte de La Comédie humaine d’Honoré Balzac avec un autre roman parmi les plus connus de l’auteur : Illusions perdues, dans cette belle édition de Patrick Berthier chez Le Livre de Poche. Il faut le dire, l’appareil critique est de grande qualité et j’ai lu avec beaucoup d’intérêt la préface et les notes de bas de page de Patrick Berthier.

À Angoulême, David Séchard, un jeune poète idéaliste, embauche dans son imprimerie un ami de collège, Lucien Chardon, qui prendra bientôt le nom de sa mère, Rubempré. Poète lui aussi, il bénéficie d'une sorte de gloire locale et fréquente le salon de Louise de Bargeton à qui le lie bientôt une intrigue sentimentale qui fait tant jaser que tous les deux partent pour Paris.

Voilà bientôt Lucien lancé dans le monde des lettres aussi bien que de la haute société, mais si Paris est la ville des “gens supérieurs”, ce sera également pour lui celle des désillusions. C'est bien la figure de Lucien, en effet, qui donne surtout son unité aux Illusions perdues qui ont d'abord été, de 1837 à 1843, une suite de trois romans devenus plus tard les trois parties de celui que nous lisons, quand Balzac eut conçu le projet de La Comédie humaine et décidé de faire de sa trilogie l'une des Scènes de la vie de province.

Car si Paris reste bien au cœur du triptyque, c'est à Angoulême, néanmoins, que se noue le destin des héros, à Angoulême encore qu'il s'assombrit. Revenu dans sa ville natale, Lucien n'est pas loin d'y sombrer – avant une véritable ascension dont Balzac fera le récit dans un autre grand livre : Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.

Si Le Père Goriot était relativement court et se lisait facilement, celui-ci est un pavé, parfois à la limite de l’indigeste. Le coeur du récit est passionnant, l’arc narratif autour de Lucien est bien mené, mais Balzac a trop souvent tendance à faire des digressions et à alourdir son texte de détails et de détours tout à fait dispensables, surtout que le lecteur contemporain que je suis.

Le parcours de Lucien est tragique, dans le sens où sa destinée, faite d’ascension et de chute, semble écrite d’avance. Son départ pour Paris, par amour autant que par ambition, pourrait être le début d’une grande carrière, mais aussi le début des tentations et des désillusions. De caractère trop faible, plus attiré par les mondanités faciles que par le travail souterrain, Lucien plonge dans le monde corrompu du journalisme au détriment de sa carrière d’auteur, et il finit par en payer le prix. Tel Icare, Lucien s’approche trop du soleil et chute quand il croit avoir atteint son but. Son retour à Angoulême marque autant la fin de ses illusions que de celles de sa famille sur lui-même.

Malgré les trop nombreuses digressions et longueurs, que l’on peut en partie expliquer par la publication du texte sous forme de feuilleton, je comprends pourquoi ce roman est considéré comme un classique et un chef d’oeuvre de la littérature française. J’ai parfois souffert en lisant certains chapitres rébarbatifs et répétitifs, mais le roman offre également de très beaux moments. Le portrait de la société mondaine parisienne et du milieu du journalisme et des éditeurs est aussi cruel que passionnant.

Je ne sais pas si j’aurai le courage de plonger dans d’autres romans de La Comédie humaine, mais je suis déjà heureux d’avoir pris le temps d’en lire deux oeuvres parmi les plus connues. Cela valait le coup, assurément.

I uninstalled tiktok a bit ago, and now I find myself falling victim to the Instagram reels doomscrolling. Looking back at it now, I realize how much of my time I waste just scrolling mindlessly, doing things I don’t even really want to do. I want to try fully stopping this scrolling pattern, as I’ve mostly replaced it with Reddit now. I’ve somewhat reverted to my prior patterns, but let me try setting a screen time limiter or something of the sort later. I also want to get bigger, or heavier. I’d like to be bigger. And stronger I guess, it feels like a shortcut to strength and that’s what I’d like I think.

In 2023 I migrated my personal website from Squarespace to Blot. Blot is a static site generator that publishes as a website a folder stored on Google Drive, Dropbox, or a Git repository.

Back then I set up Blot to publish a Google Drive folder but I recently switched the synchronization to a Git repository. It was necessary as Blot has been unable to access Google Drive since Google eventually imposed onerous and expensive auditing processes to use their API. This forced Blot and other small developers to drop support for Google Drive.

Blot's developer is implementing a workaround that will allow to continue using Google Drive. But I decided to go with Git anyway as it's a better fit for my current tools and workflows.

Switching to Git instantaneously and seamlessly created a repository I can clone and update to change the site.

#blogging #Google

You came into my dream the other night  We were at a dessert buffet  You got yourself creamy custard  You were so happy  I got a slice of tres leches with coconut flakes all over it You wanted us to enjoy the treats together  It was so sweet  And peaceful

You come and visit me in my dreams from time to time Telling me what’s going on in your waking life What’s on your mind  How you are feeling

I once said to you ”I can always feel your energy” That never changed  It still is true  You never left my heart.

Decades ago, when I was young and green and had aspirations of a career in theatre, I went to an advertised networking lunch of women dramatists.

When I got to the restaurant and found the table, I was slightly disappointed to find only two other women had come. One was a large woman whose white femme brush-cut and other features put me in mind of Ursula from “Little Mermaid.”

The other was an agreeable, quiet woman of middle years.

I can't remember if they had known each other prior to the lunch; it's possible that never came up. There was already a certain dynamic clear, where the white-haired woman held forth and the other mostly nodded along with a pleasant smile.

We chatted. The service was on the slow side.

At least one of us had likely vocalized the observation that it's a bit slow here, isn't it. No big deal, but it'd be nice to order soon, that sort of mild remark.

Without warning, the white haired woman, red faced, smashed her hand on the table and roared,

“WE NEED SERVICE HERE!!!”

My memory goes vague here, but I expect it wasn't long after that the server came over, and our orders were taken.

The woman's energy dropped back abruptly from 60 to 0. She settled back and said, smugly,

“That's how you get them to pay attention.”

The other two went back to pleasant chit chat. I was probably a bit dazed at this point, and may or may not have contributed to it. What I remember most clearly about this part was being especially perturbed that the other woman hadn't reacted to the big woman's outburst as though anything were out of the ordinary in the slightest.

At any rate, I knew I didn't want to be there anymore. I dithered over it for a while, and finally ventured:

“You know, I think I need to put money in the meter.”

I probably said it nervously. It felt like an excuse; it WAS an excuse. As I remember the shouty woman's response, it may have felt like she was suspicious, but of course they said oh by all means, take care of it.

I hurried out to my car.

Now, here's why I remember this little vignette as well as I do, thirty-plus years later:

I went back to the restaurant.

Why? I can't remember, now, exactly. Possibly there was some guilt because I'd already ordered, some idea that I was sticking others with a bill for unpaid-for food? Did I think I might somehow regret cutting off a possible networking connection later? Maybe.

But I don't think that was all of it.

Even if it had been, I doubt very much the restaurant would have charged the others for a third meal if I'd never returned, and what on earth was there to gain professionally from...that?

In hindsight it's clear to me in a way that it wasn't then: there was no sufficiently good reason to return to what had become an absolutely miserable experience. Yet, I did anyway.

So why did I go back?

I'd call it a vague but insistent fear.

Fear of violating a social code, i.e. don't just ghost people in the middle of a meal (with or without the bill aspect), don't lie. (Despite that the woman herself, the reason i wanted to leave, had grossly violated that code).

Most of all, bizarrely, irrationally, but I believe this is so: fear of the woman herself.

Even though she had absolutely no power to do anything to me if I'd left.

Even though, if anything, I was making myself more likely to be vulnerable by spending more time with her.

I went back, I ate something like a dryish chicken sandwich, we made more small talk and shop talk. Eventually, it ended, I went home, and we never contacted each other or saw each other again. And that was that.

So why am I telling this now?

Because, I'm thinking now that despite how irrational and unnecessarily fearful for all the wrong reasons my former self's actions seem to me today. actually: that kind of dynamic happens all the time.

I can judge my former self (harshly, if truly) for being awkward, shy, young, naive, unnecessarily anxious.

But consider the other woman at the table.

She didn't act as though anything was abnormal at all.

In fact, as I'm remembering, she nodded and smiled at the other woman when she announced that this is how you HAVE to act in order to get what you want in life. Like she was agreeing with an assertion about the weather.

And: at least for the moment, the shouty woman was right.

She DID get what she wanted, at least in the short term: attention. Service. Yes, ma'am, so sorry to keep you waiting.

Now, how that served her in the rest of her life is another question. As I'm remembering it, she'd been complaining a lot about how hard it was to find work (imagine).

But in that moment, she'd gotten her way.

By jump-scaring the shit out of people.

And we'd proven her point as well:

Being loud and angry and domineering, even when you have no obvious power behind it, can get you quite a long way before someone protests or stops you.

Mileage varies, of course. In the same situation, some other restaurant might have had a manager who had no time for that nonsense and would have chillingly is-there-a-problem-ma'amed her into submission or getting the hell out of the restaurant, for example.

If the other person at the table had looked at her incredulously and said, “are you okay?? What was THAT?” then excused her own self, I'd have been likelier to follow suit, perhaps.

My point is this:

It's harder—for most of us, anyway—to stand up to this kind of blatant social contract violation than you'd hope.

Because, by and large, we're not trained for how to respond in such situations.

In hindsight and from far away, it's easy to say “my god, stand up for yourself! Have you no pride? What can this lunatic do to you, anyway?”

If you ARE actually in that situation, that last question ceases to be rhetorical. What can they, what will they do if you push back?

In this case, the two of us other customers were free to get up and leave, almost certainly without real repercussion. The server, on the other hand, no doubt wanted to keep her job, and chances are, she wasn't confident the management would have had her back if she'd given attitude back, for good reason.

But this is about more than the kind of calculation you make with your logical, thinking brain over how to respond.

A sudden shout and a slam on the table, say, are designed to, and usually succeed in, startle the other person. It sends you out of rational thinking mode, at least for an instant. It triggers what's called the “fight, flight, or freeze” (or “fawn,” among other “f's”) response.

If that woman made a habit of gestures like that irrespective of context—say, she decided to go to a biker bar at 3 in the morning and got equally cranky at the lack of service—she could be unpleasantly surprised by a very different response. Those bikers, if indeed startled, might well default to “fight,” say.

But you know, I'm betting she knew better than that.

She'd come to this strategy of getting what she wants via experience, after all. If she regularly or even ever had the experience of severe retribution for that kind of behavior, she a) wouldn't do it at all or at least b) probably had at least some sense of who she could try that behavior with safely, and who she couldn't.

A couple of other polite women at a restaurant table, one young and nervous seeming, and a (female) server paid to wait on her: safe enough, as it turned out. It worked. We did not respond with “fight.”

What I -started- to do, technically, was “flight,” and frankly imo a perfectly reasonable response, executed within the niceties I was so hesitant to break. Oh, this has been lovely, but I forgot, I just need to go iron my dog, excuse me, won't you?

The server reacted with what I suppose you could call “fawn,” if you figure that that's basically what a U.S. customer service job is, most of the time.

And the other woman at the table?

Well, she was, and remained, pleasant.

Whatever was going on inside of her, somewhere along the line, she'd developed a strategy in the face of irrational, scary behavior: smile and act like everything's normal.

Everyone has strategies for getting through life, including in the face of a potential threat. Mostly, they run on autoplay; we don't tend to articulate them as such or even know we're doing them. It may not even occur to most of us that there IS any other way to deal with such situations. Or, our experience has taught us that other ways don't work, when we tried.

That shouty woman was an exception, as she did actually articulate her strategy, after having deployed it. “That's how you get what you want from people.”

That she knew what she was doing, and particularly that she was able to return to calm immediately afterward, to me suggests a certain level of control. Which is another advantage that she has over most people she unleashes her aggression on.

It's a strategy used, I would say, less frequently by women, because of how (most) women are socialized, and also how the culture, particularly men, are socialized to respond to angry woman. Other social factors play their role; I expect that her being white counted for a good deal (the “Karen” stereotype doesn't come out of thin air).

I would also imagine that her imposing physicality and well-trained, deep, loud voice made her particular style of acting out (more dominating, less “help me”) more natural or successful than it would have for her smaller, quieter companion; or for me, who was much younger.

Now, imagine another person with a similar life-strategy, also large and loud; and who, further, has the experience of being a white man with a lot of money.

Imagine that, like this woman, this person has training in the art of performance. Knows how to command a spotlight and keep it.

You may have guessed where I'm going with this.

This is has been, among other things, a roundabout way of attempting to answer the question asked by so many of us:

What IS it about Trump, for god's sake? Why do even powerful people just fall in line? Is it greed, is it pay for play? Does he have some blackmail material on them?

Sure, all of that may be true. Obviously there is a scope and complexity to the political landscape that my little slice of life anecdote doesn't encompass (I suppose you could argue that the fleeting thought that this woman might somehow be a “connnection” is a sort of ambition)

And now, of course, the man's accrued a depth and hardening of real power that there are calculations of real, serious potential consequences to standing up to him now. Financial or career ruin were already long on the table; now, perhaps, even physical safety.

But how'd we get here? Why do and did so many people do what Timothy Snyder says is the first rule of things NOT to do in the face of tyranny, “comply in advance?”

I'm now wondering whether some of it is the same thing, in a way, as what happened to me/us in that restaurant long ago.

It's instinct. It's trained. It's even biological. What, after all, is the impact on the average nervous system, confronted with screaming, hurled ketchup bottles, perhaps even hands or fists?

My point is this:

It's probably not all or even mostly all that rational.

For the clearest example of this I would point to the people who still sign up to work for the man personally. Look at the revolving door. Listen to their testimony once they leave. Look at the strained, exhausted faces.

Yet, people still sign up for the ride. Some report initial personal charm and consideration (“he's really different when you get to know him up close.”) But eventually, even many of those people acquire the same taut, exhausted look.

During the campaign, I read an article about his internal pollster: evidently the man was expected to work something like 19 hours a day, sometimes more, depending on what time Trump decided to rouse him out of bed to demand what the hell THESE numbers were supposed to mean??

Long story short: this is how abuse works.

You can see it at the micro level, you can see it ripple out to the people who are not in his personal orbit but are subject to pressure behind the scene. You see it broadcast to the nation, the world from his platform, and how people, how systems respond.

Fascism is abuse writ large.

Authoritarianism, generally, is abuse writ large. There are stylistic differences and complications at scale; the end result is much the same. Shouting, capitulation, fear, gaslighting, shame, impotent rage, intermittently reinforced punishment keeping one forever hypervigilant, at lowered capacity to think clearly.

So, knowing this, as people far from the locus of political power, we come back to the eternal question.

What do we do?

I suppose what I'm suggesting here is: start at home.

Meaning: not just doing what activism you can locally to make concrete difference in others' lives, though that too.

But also, try to sit with the experience of what this general ambiance of, frankly, abuse, is stirring up in you.

What's been your strategy?

There are, again, variables depending on how you're situated sociopolitically/privilege-wise, now more than ever, of course.

The threat is very real and immediate, for some of us far more than others. And our experience up til now, and the strategies we've developed in response, depend on many factors, very much including such axes as: being trans, being poor, having disability/medical vulnerability, being BIPOC.

And even within those axes, there's our own individual experience.

How do you respond, what do you do, in the face of the threatening, the irrational, the impervious to please for empathy or mercy or calm logic?

I don't actually think there's any one “right” answer. Context is everything.

I do think that becoming aware of how we act and why is a start.

Beyond that, I'm starting to study and work with trauma more these days.

The question of how to deal with past trauma compounded by fresh and ongoing trauma is one I'm still looking for answers on.

I will close here by noting that the Project 2025 authors specifically say at one point that their object is to “traumatize” career bureaucrats.

At the time of this publication, that operation, or at least the attempt seems well under way.

Prayers, etc.: * 06:00 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, followed by praying The Angelus, followed by praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, followed by the Memorare. * 10:30 – Readings from today's Mass include – Epistle: Rom 8:35-39 and Gospel: John 12:24-26. * 10:45 – making an Act of Contrition then making an Act of Spiritual Communion, followed by praying Archbishop Vigano’s prayer for USA & President Trump. * 11:00 – Thought for today from Archbishop Lefebvre: Since God is charity, all that He does can only be charity. And mercy is the summit of charity. A person can give no better expression to his charity than by being merciful. The summit of charity toward our neighbor is to forgive him the wrong he may have done us, to love him in spite of his miseries, in spite of his sins. Obviously, our Lord always lays down the condition of repentance. When He takes away sin, when He gives life back to a soul, it is because that soul opened itself by repentance to receiving that forgiveness. But He is constantly forgiving. * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 13:40 – prayerfully reading The Athanasian Creed, followed by today's Daily Meditation found in Benedictus Magazine. * 18:00 – The Angelus * 19:10 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger's Prayer of Command to protect my family, my sons, my daughter and her family, my granddaughters and their families, my great grandchildren, and everyone for whom I have responsibility from any demonic activity. – And that followed by the Saturday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: * bw= 221.90 lbs. * bp= 120/78 (73)

Diet: * 08:15 – 1 grapefruit, ½ pb&j sandwich * 11:30 – cooked vegetables w. cheese sauce, breaded fish steaks * 14:05 – 1 banana * 17:10 – snack on cheese slices

Chores, etc.: * 07:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 09:10 – watchingThe Thing From Another World (1951) * 11:00 – listening to men's college basketball, Washington Huskies vs Minnesota Golden Gophers * 13:30 – now tuned into the Iowa St. vs Kansas St. game * 15:40 – listening to relaxing music and quietly reading

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Saturday, 2025-02-01 ~20:50 #DLFEB2025

A satisfying Saturday, this 1st of February. Handled a couple of chores that needed doing: one related to household budget and planning, and another that had to do with organizing paperwork back here in the home office.

posted Saturday, Feb 1, 2025 at ~8:44 PM #QNFEB2025

The Unhealing Wound of a Broken Heart

Heartbreak isn’t just pain—it’s an abyss. A void that swallows you whole, leaving behind nothing but a husk of who you once were. Some wounds close with time, while others remain open, festering, consuming. These are the ones you don’t recover from. You learn to survive them, to coexist with the emptiness, but you never truly live again.

I know this because I am living it.

The moment I realized my heart was truly broken was the moment I let the truth in. I stopped running, stopped pretending, and faced the unbearable reality. And in that moment, my world crumbled. My dreams dissolved. Time stopped. There was no moving forward, no picking up the pieces—only existing in the wreckage.

I have loved since then. Or at least, I have tried. But love, real love, the kind that fills your soul and makes life worth living, that was taken from me. And because my heart still belongs to the one who shattered it, I can never fully give it to another. It’s unfair, I know. But it’s the truth.

If I could ask them anything, it wouldn’t be about moving on or healing. It wouldn’t be about finding closure. It would be the same questions that echo in my mind every night: Why? Why did they lie? Why did they leave? Why wasn’t I enough? Why did they have to break me—not once, but twice? And despite all of it, why do I still love them?

I live in the past. I float through the present. I ignore the future. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—it only deepens the void. Drugs help dull the pain, but they don’t erase it. Nothing does. Because happiness like that, love like that, doesn’t come twice in a lifetime. And when it’s gone, you’re left chasing ghosts.

I’ve learned one thing from all of this: life isn’t worth living, and death isn’t worth fearing.

So I exist. I smoke. I survive. But I don’t live. Not really.

And maybe, just maybe, some hearts were never meant to heal.