Feel so lonely, baby, I could die

It's a funny thing, this crazy instant global connectivity business. Supposed to bring people together and all that. Instant communication, via fiber optic cables, multiple T3s running through the workplace, all that business... I feel more isolated than ever these days. Maybe it's just the winter talking, but it's been a simple winter so far -- a little rain, a little fog, but not the 90 days of constant rain I'd been led to expect from Seattle. No, I think it's something else. I'm here in my office right now. I'm sitting at my desk, bare feet propped up against the window -- I look like a lazy V with bad posture to boot. Beyond my window, blackness outside -- an unlit cul-de-sac, a quiet neighborhood. Just me in a room of light surrounded by the uninterrupted blackness of night. Nobody I know is online right now, as I can see via MSN IM, Yahoo, and ICQ. None of the songs I want are popping up on Kazaa-lite. The message boards are still, no new updates for me. What happens when you're connected to the whole world via a simple DSL line, and you find you're all alone in it? (Answer comes screaming back to me: you weblog, of course. That's not where I wanted to go with this, though.)

Having moved away from my longtime home, I'm separated from most of the friends I had. We might not have done much of interest all the time -- a cafe at night, the odd club, a movie, or something along those lines -- but there was a presence. Removed to the 'Net, I don't have a lot of interest in going out -- for one thing, with whom would I go? And many of my friends are online, so we type at one another for a few hours on some nights, and that's like old times, somewhat. Mostly. Slightly, really. But I've shifted -- I'm online when I'm home. I don't know how to meet new people, and I'm not interested in the awkward "getting to become friends" business anyway. The 'Net's given me a sense of instant gratification, and I suppose maybe I want to be surrounded by people I trust without having to discover whether or not I can really trust them at all.

There was a time when I had friends in a dozen countries, maybe -- England, Sweden, Spain, Japan, China, Norway, France -- well, that's only a half dozen, and I'm leaving out a few -- my universe was pretty big, I think. But since then, I've let a lot of them fall by the wayside. I've just fallen out of touch, really. My universe feels like it's shrinking. I'm in a social blue shift, collapsing in on myself with, it seems, an ever-increasing speed.

I just miss my friends, though. All the ones I have, and all the ones I had and left behind. Nights like this, these dead 'Net nights, make me realize it all the more acutely.

Listening: The Legendary Pink Dots -- The More It Changes (off of The Golden Age). Hotel Noir to follow.
Drinking: I had half a Guinness, but it made me lethargic and headachy, so I stopped.

Focus, Pinky

Focus is exactly what I can't do right now. I'm at work, and I'm taking a little diversion time to do something other than stare at that goddamn Excel sheet for another second longer. My eyes are blurring from cross-referencing game tutorials with dialogue from the in-combat scenarios (I'll tell you what I'm working on later. It's not a secret--I just don't feel like it). The days have been getting really long, and the stretch from 2 to 5 is almost unbearable at this point. I can't focus anymore. Should I give up the caffeine? I get the impression it's the only thing keeping my blood pressure up in the realms you living folks are used to. I feel so impatient, so anxious, so bored lately. I'm looking for ANYTHING new to shock me out of routine. And anytime I find something new, I'm trying too hard to fit it into the routine instead of savoring the newness. Creature of habit.

Listening: Every day is Halloween -- Ministry. It was a bit of a whim, a craving for 80s cheeseindustrial. I was on the Two Towers soundtrack before that, and Ride (Nowhere), Ringo Shina (Syo-So Strip), and a random setting that seemed obsessed with Jesus and Mary Chain, Pogues, and VNV Nation. I need to track the pattern of the randomizer on my iPod to see how it selects its tracks.
Reading: Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. Brilliant, so far, but I've got a mountain of books, and I'm letting myself jump from one to the next with no rhyme or reason, and certainly no completion. I just finished Burroughs's Junky, which I'd not read before. I see in it a template for trainspotting, almost, and I wonder if both those books latched onto a common thread of heroin literature or if the heroin addiction experience has simply been so well described by Burroughs and Welsh independently that I can see and compare the traces of heroin addiction and withdrawal. I don't know if that sentence made sense -- I just shifted to Ministry's The Nature of Love, which actually has aged pretty well, but it caused me to lose my train of thought. That lack-of-focus thing again.
Drinking: Work tea. We used to have Twinnings Earl Grey, but we've shifted to some crap decaf nonsense that makes me sick. Now, we're shuffling into the world of Lipton Gourmet teas, which are passable and probably cheaper, but they're for shit. I'll have to start brownbagging it again, teawise. Teabagging it. *shudder*
Playing: See, I'm not even interested in games right now, either -- I was playing Panzer Dragoon Orta, and it just lacks...SOMETHING that the original Saturn games had. Something indefinable--call it whimsy, call it tone, but it's missing here. It's bloody hard, too. Not a bad thing, but it does make me lose interest more quickly than I ought.

Feck. I'm dancing in my little ergonomic seat. I wonder if that's good on my spine.

twenty-nine

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.