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Welcome to your virtual pub.
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johnnyFive
In what feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, trying to become more conscious of my mental limitations makes me ... well, more conscious of them.
It's less about ability and more about endurance - I only have certain times when I can do mentally taxing things (thank you ADHD). So I both need a lot of recharge time and can't really count on being able to do any kind of "work" at a given time.
I'm working on a translation into Spanish of a book at the behest of a small publisher. This is good and bad - I love language and the art of translation, but am only too aware of its limitations. One of the reasons I love learning langauge is so that I don't have to rely on a translation. Plus the book I'm translating is my favorite of all time, and has been hugely influential on me and on my life. I despair of being able to do it justice.
Even if it were something I was less emotionally invested in, really putting myself out there in this way is something that is abjectly terrifying. I can only hope that I can do "well enough," even if I don't actually know what that means.
---
BrightBlue
I've done [NaNoWriMo](https://nanowrimo.org) for twelve straight years now. I've never _published_ any of my novels, but that's not the point.
It _used_ to be the point. I was convinced I was going to write the next great american novel, whatever that means. Now I'm just happy to write, to be involved in an insane little journey with a lot of other people. Having done this for over a decade, NaNoWriMo has become as much a part of my holiday season as the actual holidays.
And I need it more now than I have before. This year has been stressful and it's nice to have some touchstones from 'the before time' that I can still go back to.
I'm giving my long-running work in progress a rest this year (not laying it aside...) to work on something brand new. My previous WIP is fairly dystopian and I'm not in the mood for dystopia just now. So instead I'm writing something lighter and hopefully happier, with a more optimistic tone. I'm looking forward to it!
---
ohyran
Smoking Area
The nurse looked at my dad and said, "He looked nice". I looked down at him replying that yeah he was a good guy, kind down to his core.
But also a drunk.
He had been lying there for about 6 months, skull cracked one night on the rainy cobbles of the Olskroken square seperating his favourite pub and his dingy little apartment filled with technical gizmos, halfmade and, wine bottles, fully emptied.
The other drunks said he had been "kinda wobbly" but didn't want help. They where very dramatic retelling the scene, the blood, his fall. Of course they also had keys to his apartment and emptied it of whatever alcohol or tobacco he had lying around and when the going gets tough the drunks get to drinking and then goes away.
I was told to come. They called me. Told me. I rushed off to the neorological emergency ward of the large brick shaped block of misery that is our central hospital in town that sunday morning not knowing at all what it would be like. What to expect.
My dad was lying there, or some shape of him. The empty suit of him, wires, cables and tubes crisscrossing him. Pumps pumping, machines beeping all to keep his husk alive. To fill his lungs with air, his blood filled with nutrients and diverge the piss and shit off to their little plastic bags. It smelled like detergant and skin.
That first day I had to call my family. My mom, my brother, my dads ex wives. Listening to their voices - from calm and expectant, to surprised and worried. For me mostly.
Six months later he was still there. He hadn't died although the neorologist told us... well "me" the woman he had shacked up at at the end of his life was an alcoholic, married with another man and some drugs where involved too. When the going gets tough, the drunks get to drinking. They can be the best people in the world, the sweetest kindest most wonderful people - but as a drunkards child, nothing gets between them and the drink. You can trust them, but never the drink.
She was gone when the neurologist told us to plan his funeral, that he wasn't dead but dying.
One of my dads ex-wives swung by and did her aura-sensing shit. I didn't say anything. Its hard to find words to say when a woman with rocks mined by slave children in a far away country worn with an air of moral superiority quivers her hands over the thin husk of my dad talking about that his spirit had left to the beyond with a confident tone.
I guess she had her process to deal with this death-not-death, I had mine.
"He looked nice" - it was six months in now, I visited when no one else did. I walked up those disinfectant and skin smelling halls and in to his room and tried to talk to him. He was thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker, and the doctors kept talking about him as if he was just about to go somewhere. The nurses talked of him in past tense.
And god I wished it would be that way. Sitting there on that bed playing his country music for him, reading the political news. I dreamed of it to be over.
The man had drunk since he was a child, and started smoking about the same time. He never ate - you could see his ribs.
At first the doctor didn't believe me. "He should be dead" he told me and secretly I wished he would be right. I told him about his past and the doctor assured me I was wrong. He had the lungs of a twenty year old and his liver was in perfect shape. They had done tests.
"That may be as it is" I told him. "But I've known that man my entire life. He haven't gone a day without a drink and unfiltered handrolled cigarettes".
It took some convincing, and at the end he said "well he was appearently someone who could take a beating".
In my mind I thought about how many beatings he had taken and could only agree.
What I couldn't tell him is that as much as I wished my dad would die instead of wasting away here, alone in his skull, I also wished he had been born decades later.
When words like "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" or "Depression" or "Bipolar" or "Autism" existed and help was available. Instead he learned quickly to self-medicate the shit out of himself.
But he really got in to the habit as a way to just fall asleep when sadness was too much. He had lost his first child, my older sister, to cancer when she was four. A break or two in jail when younger. Some military work - it seem to have added up.
"He looked nice" - the nurse looked down at him lying there with closed eyes taped shut and all the tubes running in and out of him keeping him in this world, alone in his head with all those demons and not even the drink to comfort, soothe and calm.
It would take him years to die. I got a call from the doctor one day. "I don't know what to say, but he's awake sort of".
He was... sort of. He spent the last years in a wheel chair in a home for the elderly. He couldn't really speak and flittered in and out of reality and then back in to his mind with all his little horrors.
He tried to wipe the snot from his nose once. He had started crying when I came in to the room - I didn't know why, or how to comfort him. The things in his head was playing him something sad from his past I suppose.
Since he couldn't wipe his nose, the snot running down, I had to wipe it for him. I could see a flicker of recognition and of shame of this intensely individualistic man, and he cried like a child trying to move his head away from my hand and hide the snot and tears and bubbling saliva from me with his half working arms.
Standing behind me was my husband.
Years before, the weeks before he fell I had planned a dinner with my dad.
I was supposed to come out to him, introduce the man I loved who I just met. Come clean finally.
We where both intensely private and individualistic people but I wanted my dad to know I trusted him, that I loved him. That even though I grew up with the cult of masculinity around me, I knew he was a nice person. He didn't just "look nice", he was. A kind person. To show him my life - after a lot of lows was swinging up. To make him proud and maybe to make him open up to me too.
To get to show him I loved him.
Then he died finally.
I don't know if the shame of the relief, or the relief to be free of shame was what made it good or bad.
I did what was to be expected here.
I went to view and guard his corpse like many do here.
My youngest brother who hadn't seen him was with me and was shocked at the hollow sunken thing rolled in to us on his bed, dressed in comfy clothes.
We sat there in that room. The smell of dead body all around us. My brother stared wide eyed at the thing next to us that used to be our dad.
Every year at All Hollows I do what so many do here - I put candles out for the dead, to let them find their way home again. I put out a cold beer, packet of rolling tobacco, a lighter and rolling paper. And every year I write him something.
I don't believe in a life after death I think, but I hope. I so hope there is one. That he can see the love I felt and feel for him.
So every year I put these things out for him to find after the day when his ghost can walk free is over.
Its this weekend.
Next to his candle I put another candle. For my older sister. The child he had to watch waste away.
My mother said that after that he never really laughed. He smiled, a sad smile. Then he drank and fell asleep.
"He looked nice" the nurse said.
He was.
---
Shiloh
Just wanted to drop in for today. Got a long day. Not too much schoolwork to do, just want to catch up on personal stuff. Just for shits, here's my day:
So far:
- Made some Turkish coffee, adding in MCT oil and 200mg of l-theaninen
- Read some of my political science textbooks
- Attended my English class on zoom
Plans for the rest of the day:
- Get a covid test
- Read some more Louis L'Amour
- Attend my Asian history class on zoom
- Run 8 miles, then do a short workout (100 push-ups, 100 squats, both with 45-pound backpack).
- Meditate, ideally 10 minutes straight
- Work on my presentation for my IR class
I'll be lucky if I get most of this done, so I guess it's time to get after it. Hope you guys all have a good day too.
---
bartender
I can't believe it's already the end of October. It feels like time has accelerated again this month. Hard to believe that not so long ago it was the summer and the Terrace was out. Right now the heavy rain splashes on the window and I'm making sure that said window remains closed because it's very chilly outside. @m15o and myself have been very busy planning on the next version of the Midnight. We're almost done, and I can't wait to start showing how it will be like. I'm also glad because the syrup I've started to make turns out very good. Will work perfectly on an old fashioned!
Heya @zed! Good to see you around. Care for some Beer?
To frame: I'm not some archaic boomer, I'm elbow deep in webshit, feeds, paas, saas, etc, and have been for a long-long time. However I am a complete tin-foil hatter, so no social media, no public profile, no google account, all of that stuff. Even posting on Midnight sometimes gives me a mild sense of concern or embarassment that someone I know might read it.
Haha I think that's one of the best framing I've seen in a while. I'm also concerned people I know come around this place of the internet and start to wonder what's wrong with this virtual bartender. Weird feeling.
I've been mulling over recently how to get a more inspiration in my day to offset a long running habit of chronic workaholism. I started with RSS feeds (shout out to feedbin.com, it's great), but these get heavy fast - following ~40-50 sources is enough to have a wall of longform articles hit you in the face each day with backpressure to get to "inbox zero".
I can't agree more with that. I used to have hundreds of RSS people and blogs I follow, and now I have 5, most of which are people from here. I like to check it on my down time. I've been using https://miniflux.app/ and I like it quite a lot!
Twitter is incredible from an information point of view. It's an almost unlimited source of content on any subject. I hope on it from time to time but never really participate. Hope you enjoy the ride!
The bar was one of those places a drunk dies over cheap beer and no one notices until closing time. 10/25/20
I hope you're not talking about the Midnight here! ;)
We're all alone out here. We're all terrified. No matter how nerdy you are, how often you had the words "faggot" beaten in to you, you are a blessing.
The existence of you is a soft breeze through bedroom curtains letting the summer morning light slip in.
What you think of a tawdry fleshy little affair, is in fact the greatest love story of all. The one we have all spoken, whispered and changed.
I couldn't agree more and thank you enought for the story you shared, @ohyran. You have a gift with words and telling stories. I couldn't stop reading after I started. Thanks!
@nmda, that's a poignant introduction and no mater where your path leads, I'm glad you hopped on this pub to share this with us. Welcome!
@tmo! Pleasure to see you there. Here's your Coffee. Or maybe you're more in the mood for some Root Beer Float? Happy Halloween! It's almost that time of the year...
---
brewed
Hey @bartender! Might I ask for a Coffee this morning? My day is about to start in exactly 10 minutes, but for now I'd rather empty my mind and enjoy a hot beverage by the Bar. I can see from out the window the sun starting to rise. I don't know what today will be made of, but it's going to be a good day.
---
tmo
Smoking Area
full
Had some Half & Half tobacco just now. Feeling very full after "freight-training" a bowl (smoking it quickly), but I was in the mood to do so, so...
Things have slowed at The Midnight, I have noticed, but I still pop in here every day to see what the new updates are, say "hello" to people when I think of it. Nice corner of the Web :)
As for me, I have been getting nginx stuff working on a Linode server, and am now exploring PHP type of stuffs. No clue what I am doing but I am figuring it out as I go along. I notice that computer stuff (or at least anything involving the terminal) is *incredibly* forgettable. In my mind, anyway. I always have to go back, look up what I did, how to do it, implement it, and then look up something again. And again. And again. Nothing "sticks". It has has to be Here in the Live Moment for me to get anything accomplished. LMAO! Seems pointless, almost. Therefore, I am DOING a lot, and LEARNING nothing. I'm better off just reading (non-computer science) books.
That's why I am taking a break from it. I will come back, motivated, with some notes/resources to reference when the time arrives. But for now, I don't care much :/
Anyway, Halloween is around the corner. Looking forward, as I do every year. Hope everyone is well :D
---
nmda
Street
Outside there is mist. Volume scattering. I work too much; an apt and calculated sort, my thoughts pass like a VCR kicked down the stairs. Change the channel. Turn the damn thing off. Rattle rattle tick. Signs point to other signs, arrows to arrows. My head throbs. A brisk walk accelerates to a sprint as I pass vacant storefronts with barred doors; small shops, vacant for God-knows-how-long, adorned with signs that are sunbleached, lined with pigeon spikes and speckled with emerging rust. 50¢ Coca-Cola: the land that time forgot. The alleyway dips left, then right; a shimmering, nauseous, asphalt surfboard. The conic red streetlight boundaries burst into a turbulent eddy in the wake of sudden motion: my motion! I am a creature of weight and substance — capable of displacing air, no less. Whence cometh this headache? I hear a faint ring and the throbbing in my temples, a primal drum; each beat reveals the vasculature in my eyes. I am visited by my dead ancestors, running in synchrony. I do a quick spin through the intersection, devoid of traffic for as long as memory serves. Weeds grow out of old Cadillac windows and I dance across cracked sidewalks. Panting, heart pounding, heavy with sweat — did I make last call?
---
ohyran
Smoking Area
I remember my first time.
I didn't know the dude - and considering my age and the fear I had about... you know... "being gay". The whole thing was as tender and sweet as a butcher shop.
We'd talked briefly online and set a date and a time and a place.
I had picked this place a bit outside of my normal haunts thinking that any of my relatives or friends would never go there. He said "ok".
Look, I was there with nothing more pure than sex in mind, so no judgement.
The bar was one of those places a drunk dies over cheap beer and no one notices until closing time. Where no one gives a shit. You could go in naked with a sign around your neck with the words "little scared gay kid looking to have sex. Help?" and people would worry the sign might flip their beers over.
Romantics? Yeah sure I had some thoughts about that. I was young, not dead inside. But still there was another part of me demanding the blood available, and it was neither brain nor heart. It's a youth thing. You think getting laid is this magical threshold... anyway its not about romantics its about my first hookup.
He had posted a photo. I'm not gonna say he was hot or anything, he wasn't. I was too young to think clearly and too old to feel comfortable about my virginity so at that point he could have looked like Ross Perot and I would have gone home with him.
I was just happy he didn't look worse in person, you know?
He was sitting in a booth, nursing a beer. That expression doesn't make sense unless you actually once see someone do it. Looking at the beer, as if you grasp how relevant it is, but not really understanding the point of it. Like a parent with a baby they got as a way to salvage a collapsed marriage. Thats what he looked like. A mix of attempted tenderness and complete confusion about the glass in front of him.
Trying to look at least somewhat suave I ordered a beer and brought it with my to his table.
"You Roy?" I said. Again "suave", I knew what it looked like but not how it was done.
Roy looked up. His eyes where brown. That deep almost orange nutty brown that you think should shine if someone flicked off the lights.
"Yeah, are you [name]?".
The question got me so off guard that I didn't even have a suave answer but just muttered out a "hello". The conversational skipped record of my bummed attempt at a reply didn't seem to face him at all. He just smiled. The way you smile if you've read about it in a book and taken courses.
I remember sitting down, and remember that I was part in trying to have a conversation. Two people trying hard to lift a social piano but not grasping what it was, how it worked or who was intended to do what when - it was a mess.
Ok so before you judge, remember that I needed this. It's easy to forget if you wasn't a little gay kid who not only grew up in a working class area, but also had the misfortune of being a nerd. I had managed to get past just hating what I was and now I had to find a way to get past the threshold - to KNOW that this was it.
I so wanted him to just go, "hey lets pop in to the bathroom and then we can each go our seperate way".
A low bar is what I'm getting at. I was that low bar.
"Is this how its done, usually?" he asked suddenly between attempts at talking normally.
"Errrrr you mean like dates or hookups or ..." I barfed out verbally.
"Is this what its supposed to be?" he continued.
"I ... I don't know. Look if you feel weird, we can just call it quits. I'm ok with that!" I replied feeling my heart sink. Another rejection I thought. Another proof that no one likes little faggot boys who aren't manly enough, cool enough or interesting enough.
"No no. I want to... you know. I just feel like I'm out of my depth with the things". At that point he looked so sad... there was something there, a fragility. Something I didn't understand. But understood to be relevant.
"Do you live close?" was at that point the bravest thing I had ever said in my life.
His apartment was small, barely an apartment. Framed pictures of things, not people, lined in rows like family photos. The whole place smelled like nothing. Like the smell of disinfectant long since evaporated.
His bed was made, a small 1.5 sized thing, barely enough for two.
No plants. Nothing in the fridge. Unopened bottles of shampoo in the shower and a pack of toilet paper with intact rolls on perfect rows.
Hotel-folded towels.
Had I been older, smarter maybe... or perhaps more cynical, I would have wondered if I would get out alive but I was young. And desperate.
We talked at each other in a pantomine of communication then got about it.
Look, I can lie and make this sexy for you, but it wasn't. I had never even properly kissed someone I wanted to kiss until then - but I remember being breathless.
Thats the thing being the little gay kid who thinks he's all alone. When suicide or accepting what you are are the only options, that kiss - the first real one - might be shit but you will always remember it.
It doesn't matter I was flailing my arms around some random middle aged dude named Roy in a surrealist funeral partment of an apartment. It doesn't matter we bumped teeth so often I wondered if my front ones where still in my mouth. It didn't matter he was absurdly enough worse at this than I.
I can still taste him. Feel his stubble. Sense his hand on my butt, placed there like he followed instructions in a manual.
The rest was, what the rest always is. What it has always been with things like this.
Nervous, stupid but with increasing focus and grasp of what this thing humans have done seens our species first came about.
Over too quickly, probably. Crap as love-making goes, most definetly. But perfect in its absurd and pathetic imperfection. I can close my eyes and remember his hands to this day.
His snoring woke me up. Startled me awake, and reminded me of a full bladder, so I tried to sneak out of bed and to the bathroom - covered and draped in the luxurious fabric of understanding that finally, I, was walking naked through another mans apartment. The steps was a catwalk, a march of pride.
When I returned he was sitting up.
"Did I wake you up? Sorry" I said quickly in the dark of his bedroom stinking of us.
"I never fell asleep. I'm sorry" he said and the brown of his eyes shimmered in the gloomy dawn light trickling in past the bedroom curtains.
"Sorry? For what?". The thing with people is that while we loose so much sense when horny, we gain that and more back when we're done. I was scanning the room for my clothes and thinking of homophobic murders and serialkillers. The tone of his voice was so clean, so crisp, so thoughtful to be terrifying.
"I just had to know what it felt like. For once."
I picked up my clothes when he cried and put on my shoes. I said something about having to get up early and left as he sat on the edge of his bed, in an apartment with nothing in it, nursing a middle aged mans fits of crying.
He said "thank you" after me as I left.
My point is this: you think you're taking advantage on the world, that you are the leech. You're not.
We're all alone out here. We're all terrified. No matter how nerdy you are, how often you had the words "faggot" beaten in to you, you are a blessing.
The existence of you is a soft breeze through bedroom curtains letting the summer morning light slip in.
What you think of a tawdry fleshy little affair, is in fact the greatest love story of all. The one we have all spoken, whispered and changed.
Please remember that you are the prize not the punishment. You are the hero's reward. The flowers in the meadow.
You are the greatest love story. No matter what they try to beat in to you.
---
zed
I'm pleasantly surprised by twitter.
To frame: I'm not some archaic boomer, I'm elbow deep in webshit, feeds, paas, saas, etc, and have been for a long-long time. However I am a complete tin-foil hatter, so no social media, no public profile, no google account, all of that stuff. Even posting on Midnight sometimes gives me a mild sense of concern or embarassment that someone I know might read it.
So like, I know what the landscape looks like, but have no urge to participate in it.
I've been mulling over recently how to get a more inspiration in my day to offset a long running habit of chronic workaholism. I started with RSS feeds (shout out to feedbin.com, it's great), but these get heavy fast - following ~40-50 sources is enough to have a wall of longform articles hit you in the face each day with backpressure to get to "inbox zero".
I started to think of how to get the exposure without the digital equivalent of a stack of unread papers sitting on my desk, digging around I noticed 99.9% of the authors whose RSS I was subbing had active twitter accounts. And they were great! It was a good mix of short ideas, links they were interested in, and serves as a notification system when they publish new materials. Combined with the network effects present on the network its been a refreshing way to discover new concepts, with a human element attached.
I also weirdly appreciate the addictive and short form nature of it. This is usually the kind of thing I warn people off - believe in the theory that it inherently reshapes the way you think and your attention span to be exposed to short bursts of media - however I'm making an exception here. Being able to flick twitter open and cut across 20-30 topics, combined with it being a near-infinite feed, gives it a kind of balance where I enjoy what turns up but have no urge to try and "100%" it. It's almost a palette cleanser after longer form reading too.
Let's see how this goes!