Randoms – Cannibalism Might Be Tasty

Today is going to be rough

I thought that today was going to be okay. I have to do the last wish of my father today which is to plant the tulips on my mother’s grave. I couldn’t do it when I wanted to do it because I had hand surgery. Technically, I am still not supposed to do it but its starting to get too late to plant so I have to do it today before the ground gets way too hard. I thought I was going to be somewhat indifferent but now I am bawling. I need to bring my dads ashes with me just so he knows I did it. I was going to put a little in the ground but I don’t have a urn… he’s just in a baggie and if I open it, it will make a mess and I have nothing to dump it in. It’s bad enough that the bags are sitting in a plastic storage box.

For fuck sake. I need some fucking help. I NEED SOME HELP.

I’m so lonely.

Small Things.

So let’s see if this works.

This is the first time that I have tried typing since I had surgery on my hand on Thrusday. I don’t know if it was successful or not. Right now its sore and bugging but at least the swelling is down enough for me to type it seems, albeit much more slowly and with more errors than usual. I still have a soft dressing on it and the first knuckle of my thumb is still MIA due to swelling but hopefully this was all worth it in the end. I just won’t know probably until December. I can’t lift anything heavier than 10lbs with that hand until then. But if I can, if it’s fixed? I can lift weights again and that will bring a small joy back into my life. Well we’ll see. Next Friday I go get my ankle looked at. My thought is probably its going to be a call for physical therapy then when that doesn’t work (It won’t, the ligaments are fully torn) then it will be surgery there too.

But small wins, eh?

I don’t really have much to say. I do but nobody cares. Nobody listens to me. People only want you in their life if you will fuck them, give them money, do something for them or are fake happy 24/7. Being an old, fat, ugly single woman past menopause means that I have no value to society anymore. ((shrugs)). But I didn’t have value before except for the reasons above so in actually, I never had value to anyone. Nobody ever cared for me. Nobody ever will and finally, FINALLY, I have accepted that. That’s why I quit social media, emailing people, texting people… they never spoke back to me or reached out to me so I knew where I stood. I just never accepted it. Now I do.

It sucks, I was totally alone in the hospital which was more embarrassing than anything else. You know you are pathetic when nobody cares enough about you to be there when you get out of surgery. It was embaressings more than it hurt.

Such is my life. But at least I can type again. Small things, I guess.

The things they don’t explain.

There are so many things nobody tells you about when it comes to death, especially when you’re single, older and have zero family and very limited friends. Like, they don’t tell you what you’re supposed to do with all the photos of yourself as a child that your parents took but then you expand that, and think about when YOU die, who’s going to take the photos of your life and dispose of them when you have nobody to help you exit this world? I mean maybe I knew because as and adult there are VERY FEW printed photos of me. Everything is digital. (Which is something I need to think about- I need to create a “Doomsday” counter of some sort… if I don’t access something within two years, all digital proof of my existence is deleted. I mean, I am kind of reducing my footprint now because I don’t matter to anyone anymore so there really needs to be no trace of me anymore. I am starting the Twilight of my life now. It only gets worse from here on out and I WILL die eventually. There is no one to take me out of this world so I need to start figuring out how I will take myself out when my time comes. Leave no trace… Well that’s not exactly true. I have something in mind if at the last moment, I can make a shit-ton of money. I have an idea, a plan… but it requires my luck changing… but I don’t have any luck but the bad kind.

They don’t explain to you what you are supposed to do when you’ve got no money and your dad dies. Thank god for Catholic Charities but they don’t explain what you do when you don’t have the money for an Urn or to bury your dad because remember, you couldn’t even prevent him from going to the county morgue (don’t think about that, don’t think about that, you made it right in the end. you made it right, mostly, in the end). But you go to pick up your father’s remains, find out that he didn’t even fit into one remains box, so you get a reusable tote with the crematorium’s name on it (yeah, I’ll take that to go buy my groceries in it… If it wasn’t the bag for my dad, my morbid sense of humour WOULD do just that, but I can’t… because this bag held my dad, and it’s okay if its your dad, but it’s not okay if it’s my dad… see how that works?). So you bring your dad home and you just stare at the two boxes wondering what to do, then realize well, you’ll just but him in an Ikea storage bin in your closet until you get evicted or you become a millionare and can deal with it. And it’s surreal as fuck. And you feel just.. weird…

Then the dreams come that night, and they’re just sad, sad, sad… full of sad. Your father is in them, its a stylized version of Chicago that you keep in my mind. You note for a moment that you keep cities in your dream brain like short hand. You have Chicago, New York and London in some strange reoccurring shorthand when you dream of them… but here you are with your father in your dream and you watch his struggles And you see, you see… and your heart breaks all over again. You wake up, unrested, staring at the ceiling, feeling drained, feeling just a sadness… but the day is here and as I say over and over over, the world keeps turning even if you feel like it isn’t. So you get up. And you decide that today you’ll write on your blog that nobody reads because you feel the need to write.

I dropped off social media recently because I realized that people (well stop, I have always KNOWN that people ) don’t care. But it’s different now. I really am happier just detached from people. Don’t get me wrong, I have like two people I kinda of talk to right now and they lovely fucking people and have been there for me and oh my god, I think this would have been harder than it already has been if they wouldn’t let me just cry on their couch when I need to. I think they “see” me. They know I don’t need their fucking advice, I just need a place to break down where it’s okay to break and I’m not judged for it. If I figure out how to get income in, I need to get them the biggest Christmas present. But yeah, I just said “fuck it”. I’ve slowly been writing in my hand journals more to get it out, but they’re more “to do” lists though they have been evolving to contain more of my thoughts and emotions. They’re helpful because when I have moments of malaise, they keep me on track on the whats that need to be done… and I may be on my way out in this world but there is still a lot I need to do before my time comes.

There’s always a lot to do and never enough time.

It bothers me that my father is in my closet. I don’t mean that I don’t love him but he doesn’t belong in my closet but that’s where we are right now. And this, this I will also deal with and manage.

I don’t feel right yet. I need to go diving. I need to do something, one thing that I recognize as “me”. I discussed this in a previous post, there needs to be a “new normal” for me, and I’m not there yet. That doesn’t mean that I completely throw out the things that I loved to do. I need a little bit of soul soothing but unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to do it. I was told I could find someone to dive with if I could make it to Mexico and ironically, I’m cash poor, but airmiles rich, HOWEVER after my experience in France, I finally have decide that I don’t want to dive with people I’m not teaching or don’t know well personally. That’s it. I’ve had to many bad experiences now with assholes. I said something to myself the other day that really struck home when I was putting on a pair of shoes that were a little too tight. I mean I can wear them but they’re a little uncomfortable . I blurted out loud to myself “No, I’m not doing stuff that hurts me.” It made me stop, like litterly stop what I was doing and like look at myself. I said it again out loud: “I’m not doing things that hurt me, anymore.” It was profound. The things I’ve done that have hurt me just to do what people expect to be done. My relationships, my works, my loves (the very few that there have been). And just like that, I said “no more”.

Cool shoes, hope someone at the thrift store is enjoying them. I could have made it work with a little discomfort but life is too shore and my life has been a series of discomfort and that stops. Because I said so.

I’m surely speeding my trip to my underpass homeless encampment retirement. But maybe, maybe, an angel might finally show me a kindness and show me a little bit of compassion and hope before my lights go out forever.

This Dystopian Hellscape

You WILL KNEEL to BEZOS or MUSK. You’ll suck them off while getting rammed up the ass sideways by the Federal government, while the state governments does titty twisters on you. You will do all all this and accept all this and LIKE IT… because you never bother to care or stop it to begin with.

“Oh Tek, what the actual fuck are you on about NOW?”

See, I decided to treat myself today. If you know what’s going on, I have no income and I just lost BOTH of my parents in tragic ways. And I can’t find a job. And I have no close friends. I have zero family now. I have literally nothing to look forward to and am in so much fucking trouble, that somedays, though I have no desire to kill myself, I wonder what the point is in waking up. Then I remember: “It’s to spite all those motherfuckers who wish me dead, who wished me buried. ” They may gloat now at my massive misfortune, and that’s fine. So long as I am not dead, I still have a chance of grinding their faces with my heel into the pig shit. But I digress, I digress… (can you tell I am a little bit bitter, sensitive and angry, oh so ANGRY.) I took a tiny bit of the cash I had to buy some apple cider at Whole Paycheck (foods) because they have the one I really like and I just wanted something today to feel kind of normal again (we’ll get to this in a moment). As I am checking out (and I was way to agast to take a photo of it), I saw “Check out with your palm, register now.”

Look, I fucking LOVE technology. I LOVE IT. And I want to be down with all this shit, but when I look at the fuckers in charge (MUSK is the worst, but then we have Bezos and Zuck- though I think Zuck is going to lose it all, to be honest), I really do NOT want to be part of their data mining and commodification of humanity. I do not. I fucking would love to pay for shit with just my thumbprint, but I’m also smart enough to know two things:

Those fuckers are evil because they have not idea, clue or care about how the 99% live.
They will catch ALL Of us eventually because the governments of the world see use in the biometric technology to catch the pocketbooks of EVERYONE, even those who are trying to stay OFF the grid.

It’s becoming harder and harder to actually USE cash in some areas. You need a card… but now we’re upping the ante- use biometrics. Let’s talk about what that actually means for a moment.

If need to pay for things via biometrics, that’s another way of tracking money… how much money you have, if you are saying that you have this amount yet are able to spend that amount. I’m really sensitive to this right now because for the first time in my life, I need to use the social safety net that is provided to me (meagerly) by my state and federal government. But that is tied to my income. So if someone has felt sorry for me and given me $20 buck so I can go buy some cider at Whole Foods and if I paid for said cider with my fingerprint, but my fingerprint is also tied to my LINK benefits, then with the magic of algorithms, it could come back to say “yo, I thought you had no income, but I see you bough a $5 half gallon of NON-ALCOHOLIC apple cider at Whole Foods. Cleary you had that $20 of income so we’re going to reduce your benefits by $20 because you are abusing the system.”

Wut?

No, this hasn’t happened but I am presenting a scenario that could due the technology we have available and which way we’re heading. If I believed in the good of man and the government, I’d be the first to use my palm. I’m all about Cyberpunk and AI and technology.. But that technology is NOT being used for good at all (though it has the potential) because the assholes among us just see it as a way to lower wages, reduce jobs, reduce benefits and line their already fat wallets (I mean who buys a social media company because it hurt your masculinity then runs it into the ground for millions of dollar and it’s no big deal… Not naming names, I don’t need to.) Yet, said person is still getting your federal tax dollars to run his companies which for some reason on the backs of other people’s minds and again, your tax dollars have given him cache and clout.

Yeah, fuck that. He should have been on that sub. ‘Nuff said.

But yeah, let me circle back to “feeling normal”.

It’s so fucked up. I don’t feel normal. I want to feel normal. But I will NEVER get my normal back. It’s kinda like the world post Covid. The world before Covid is never coming back, you can try to make people go back to the office all you want but eventually you have to come to a new normal, and that’s bloody hard. But let’s take that Covid example and put is on a person who lost both their parents in a very shit ways in less than year, have ZERO support network and are just now…

alone.

So you live in a nightmare that your head is trying to get around the concept that you are just 100% alone now. You don’t even have people who fight with you and make your life difficult yet you know love you and if worse comes to worst, will do their best to take you in . You don’t have it. It’s gone. You have nobody to take you in. You have also found that your “friends” are very selfish people who use this time to make it about themselves, or just don’t have the emotional capacity and intelligence to support you (this I can forgive a little bit, and I have distances myself from them and they have from me and that’s okay. Disappointed, but I don’t hate because when I think about it, I remember that when I was younger, they were emotionally out of touch back then and I should have figured they wouldn’t be able to deal. ). I mean, I am 100% okay of letting go of the people I’ve let go of in the past month and I don’t miss them or want them back as I see they were not good for me. Still, I don’t have my mother to cry to or my father to make me feel bad for crying to him and lecturing me and making me feel like shit yet still my father who loves me. Don’t have him anymore either. I have nobody and again I realize that I am…

alone.

And it doesn’t feel normal because its a new state of being and its really fucking stressful because I know I have no safety net. It’s really fucking stressful because when I am upset, I can’t pick up the phone and call anyone (no, that is NOT why you need a therapist. We over drug and over subscribe therapy because we don’t know how to manage feelings and and develop real relationships with people anymore. Everything has become monetized in some aspects… even relationships..”I will be this for you, if you do this for me”.) So I walk around kind of in daze. I don’t feel like a real person anymore because I know that I don’t matter to anyone anymore. The two people in this world I mattered to are gone, so what does that make me? Who does that make me? I feel like a living ghost. So I am trying to go through the motions, trying to live but I have to live for myself. And I mean we all have to live for ourselves in the end but, it feels better when you know in the background, somewhere, someone cares about your wellbeing and loves you. When that’s absent, you feel like you’re not apart of society anymore- not that society is all that great to being with but still.

So I know, that I need to find that new “normal” and that new baseline because that comfort of who I was and how I perceived the world is never, ever, EVER coming back. I literally am connected to no one. I am a ghost (except for whatever money I make for the government and the 1%, suck my taint and die you fucks). This isn’t something that I can figure out in a day, a week or even a month. I’m trying to be kind to myself. Still…

I also know this is a time of massive change and it’s time to let go of A LOT of things that made Tek, Tek… so I am dying too, I guess. This is hard. This is a process, however, I also see painful, slow fucking growth in me as a person through all of this, sad and tragic as it is. I hate it. I’d rather have my parents back but they are never coming back. Just like I probably am not an IT person anymore and am never going back to corporate America. I’m trying to sort this all out at what has to be the worst time of my life. No savings, no job, no close friends, no parents…

But I do have one, one fucking thing. Just one:

me.

As horrible as things have been, I have never let myself down in the end. And that’s the cruel fucking thing- some of my “friends” are like “well, I know you will sort it out in the end.”. You know what? Fuck you. You could help me but you don’t because “You’ll sort it out in the end”. Yeah, probably, but think how much faster that would be with a helping hand. Think of how much better I would feel if you would stop, give me a hug, offer to help me find work, offer to help me clean my apartment or take me out for a drink or just fucking REACH OUT TO ME so I stop feeling like I don’t exist anymore.

But you won’t. I have nothing to give you at the moment besides entertainment or annoyance at my situation. And truth, it was like this before I fell so low, the only difference was that I could call my mom or my dad. They couldn’t help me but they were for me. I even have that anymore. It’s just…

me.

So its going to take time for me to navigate a new “normal” for myself. At least I caught on today what the problem was when I said to myself “I just want to feel normal”. I’m self aware enough to say back to myself “But Tek, that ‘normal’ is gone. What you want to feel is never going to feel like that again. It’s impossible. You need to find what the new normal is. Its going to feel bad until you figure out what your new baseline is.” And that sucks, because I know its going to take time and I need to just be that ghost but I also know that I am a fighter and maybe if I need to stand against the world, I won’t go down without taking a few of you with me.

RANDOMS 07132023

I REALLY want a sailboat.

I’ve thought about this for YEARS.

And usually when I think about something for years… it manifests.

Now, I want a boat that I can refurbish and make modern- replace all the lighting with LED, update the interiors, and make the boat “smart” because I’m really good at tech.

I’m also really handy- I enjoy making things.

Getting a boat really isn’t that hard- a lot of people give them away because they’re a pain in the ass. The problem comes with storing the boat and the fees to get the boat out of the water to work on the hull… That stuff I don’t know how to do… hull work. I can do interior wiring and if I have directions, I can do plumbing, etc… I have never been trained in carpentry but I know I could do it if you show me how to do something once (I dunno, I’m good at stuff like that).

I want to single-hand the boat- (because as you know, I am a loner with no friends or lovers) but I don’t want a tiny boat because just like in the apartments I live in (which if I don’t find a job soon, I’m gonna be literally homeless- one of the benefits of having zero family or relatives), I need a place to sleep but I need a place in the boat to set up as a workstation- I am talking about the big monitor and gaming PC, etc. Some people use the navigation table as a workstation but it’s not quite big enough for my needs. I could give up one side of the boat to set this up since I wouldn’t need berths on both sides- I wouldn’t take on crew as I don’t trust strangers at all. So the boat would probably have to be 34 but no bigger than 40 because 40 is pretty big to single hand- it can be done but that’s something to work up to.

I also want it just for a project to work on. I love designing things and making them modern and beautiful. I like the satisfaction of working with my hands and seeing the things I create.

It has occurred to me to start with something small as well. If we didn’t have to winter store boats in Chicago, I’d probably have looked into that years ago.

Which brings me to Chicago…

My father is dying. He probably will be gone in a month or so. We’ve never been close, he’s not been terribly nice to me. Loves me but doesn’t like who I am. Total Trumper… long story. Anyway, after my mother died, its understandable that he would kick it within the year. I have even less reason to stay in Chicago.. HOWEVER-

If I take a look at the bigger picture of what is going on in the US and I can’t make it work to move outside of the US, from a safety standpoint, both personal and environmental, Chicago is one of the safest places I can be in the US. It would be better for me to move somewhere along the oceanic coast due to my personal interests but 1. I can’t afford it, 2. Those states that I can afford are not safe for single, biracial women with the current way the USA is heading. Taking in factors of climate change, ease of personal movement, having a multicultural environment (Chicago is segregated but still, I don’t have to worry about a confederate flag or someone popping off racial shit in the middle of a Starbucks because some drag queen at the very least will pop them in the mouth as they deserve).

Chicago is boring for me because I don’t have kids or a family. NYC has a much more interesting vibe for someone my age who is single and not dying or “getting old” in spirit. Chicago just isn’t the place from that perspective for people like me. But I don’t have NYC money, and I am starting to see age discrimination when it comes to finding a job and I really don’t want to live in a roach and bedbug studio apartment.

I LOVE my apartment and location in Chicago. I am less than 35 mins from a major international airport. The neighborhood is quiet. My apartment is vintage and just the right size (though I would like an additional bedroom for a REAL office and turn my sunroom actually into a sunroom/reading area). I like some of my neighbors at the moment. The neighborhood sucks in that there aren’t a bunch of cute little restaurants or shops to walk to but it ticks all the right boxes in other ways. I just don’t want to move. Even if I moved out of the country, if I were to still keep a presence here in the US, I’d want to keep my apartment because I really like my apartment. I’ve been here for almost 20 years.

If I could have what I wanted though:

Vintage apartment/house/loft… it doesn’t matter, just so long as it isn’t a modern, boxy, boring space. Enclosed garage with room for car, motorcycle, and storage. Near water, I could actually go diving in and see stuff. Access to fast internet. Walking distance to good grocery stores with fresh food that isn’t full of chemicals like in the US. LESS THAN 45 MINS FROM A MAJOR AIRPORT. Nice neighbors that wouldn’t mind watching my cat/dog when I need to go on one of my adventures. The ability to work from home or have clients come to a home office. Also, privacy so as I get older and my tits hang lower to my ankles, I can still be naked in my backyard/courtyard, whatever, and tend to my tomato and hot pepper plants and flowers which I like to do…

I think I want a lot but I don’t really. I don’t want a fancy car or yacht. I don’t want a mansion. I don’t want expensive clothes or stuff like that. I just want quiet and peace. My “things” are diving, technology, travel, and fitness (no really- if my joints weren’t so bad, I’d be lifting every day and doing martial arts again.. I actually am going to try lifting a little bit again starting next week though my wrist sadly is acting up again.) I spend money on scuba, travel, and technology- that’s it. I cook a little bit but not to the point that I need fancy stuff… I have all the fancy stuff already that I would ever want in my kitchen.

In general, besides the fact that I want a boat, a rebreather (yes, I don’t care if you don’t approve- I want one), my motorcycle repaired from the accident (yeah, that’s still a thing.. the lawsuit was only NOW filed.. I doubt I’ll ever see a dime from that) and the technical (computing ) equipment upgrades that just come from wear and tear, I realized that I don’t “want” anything. I am really happy with the things I currently have… which is kind of interesting to me. The only things I want besides what I listed above is maybe a few good friends that I can trust, my health, and time… just more time. And I want to do work that is meaningful and appreciated… and I want to work for myself. I don’t mind corporate America so long as it’s on contract and I am not an _EMPLOYEE_ because that’s when you get caught in that nasty rat race that I never was good at and honestly, never should have been a part of. I’m good at the WORK but not at politics.

My biggest failings are that I never suffered fools, I never could be phony, and deep down, I have great compassion and empathy. I care. A lot. Too much. I love. A lot. Too much. I give. A lot. Too much. That’s hurt me more than I could ever express. If I don’t think you are nice to people, are a liar, are arrogant, or like to gaslight, diminish or be disrespectful to people, I absolutely cannot hide my opinion of you. I can’t pretend to like you. I will keep my mouth shut because I really want to put you in your place and I have a vicious mouth if I let fly, but _I_NEVER_LET_FLY because I know.. I know me.. so I just keep silent but you can read what I think on my face, in my eyes… I’ve never been able to hide it- which is also why I rarely lie because you can tell if I am lying.

I know this seems rambling but with my father dying, me worried about finding a job, and really reassessing what is important to me as my life starts to go on the downside of life, these things all are related, factor, and are important. The challenge is that unless you have connections (which I don’t), or money (which I don’t) it’s really hard to get where you want to be. Lord knows I have fought so hard all my life for my various businesses to take off, doing what I was supposed to do in corporate America, the advanced degrees (I have a Master’s degree in computer science… most people don’t know this). I put myself out there, I did the extra training, the extra classes… but you know what “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” doesn’t work for everyone and the truth is that it doesn’t even work for most people. So if you were able to do it, good for you! But that doesn’t mean that the person next to you who is struggling hasn’t tried to do what you have done, or is lazy or whatever. That’s a false narrative of America and honestly, even I didn’t figure that out until I was like 40!!! I used to believe that too.

Anyway, yeah… I want to go out and spend my last years on earth peacefully and with little stress. I watched how my mother died. I am seeing how my father is dying. I see how my life is and I don’t want to go out like that. I want to die in my own home, with no stress, not worried about being evicted or how I am going to eat or if I can go see a doctor. I want peace on my way out because honestly, all I’ve known my whole life is a moment here or there of bliss and joy, but mostly just struggling, struggling, struggling. Yeah, I travel and yeah, I have some nice things, but in the background, you don’t even know a quarter of what is going on orrrr what I did to make those things happen. If I didn’t do these things, I’d have jumped off a bridge by now… That’s no lie. It’s those moments that keep me from just saying “fuck it, I’m out., jump!”

Except I can swim. Really well.

“God” has fucked up sense of humor. Constantly throws shit at me to kill me, yet has made me in a way unkillable.

But what fun is being a wet rat all the time, ya know?

And this is just a pent-up vent.

Good day!