It’s an ungodly hour. Sitting. Lounging in my massage chair as my elite liberal ass is kneaded by Japanese technology. Black cat on my chest purring, apparently not caring as my body undulates and shakes as I tap away on my phone above his little body. He’s a delightfully weird little cat and I’m glad he has decided to share his soothing purr.

So Trump won.

When I left this blog dormant in 2013, almost all my posts were private. Yesterday, I went back to the beginning and was restoring the private posts to public one at a time. I did 2004 yesterday. That was also was an election year. Bush vs Kerry. I was predictably upset at the result, but even then, in my mid-twenties, I had scabbed over political scars.

It was really 2000 Bush Vs Gore that broke my heart. The Florida hanging chads. Remember that fiasco? It was during my second year of university. I fancied myself an environmentalist, favorite class Ecology. Truly hopeful that a president who cared about science and the planet would get us back on track. That election felt like everything. It was the first time I was really shocked by the American people. I still have a hard time processing it. That is the pinpoint in time where I believe we fell into the shitty alternative reality.

It doesn’t feel like it, but I think that’s because of my limited perspective. If I was a Boomer maybe I would say it was when Reagan beat Carter in 1980. Or Nixon winning in 1968.

In this moment though, the 2024 election feels bad. It really does. So much so that I lost total momentum on this post as I slipped into a dark contemplative fog thinking about the future.

Massage is over, yet purring has maintained. I love this cat.

I try to live the credo, move through life with your eyes open. Kind of pretentious right? A whole lot like this blog feels…. I have to stop apologizing for taking up bandwidth in reality. Shake it off, start again.

I’ve held to that credo fairly well. My undergrad was a hilarious seven years. My master degree was another five plus. I fucking loved school. I loved taking humanities I didn’t need to. I loved wallowing in the stress and challenge of all the core STEM classes. Back then I was Miyazaki’s No-Face with knowledge. Illegally downloading and consuming The Teaching Company’s classes on things like Greek mythology and history etc. as I walked to class or my low paying concierge job.

I’m still a voracious consumer of information sources that are based on fact and science. If you have an entertaining podcast that broadens your perspective to the world, I’m in. Radiolab was the GOAT for a while. Nowadays there’s tons of them. The Grey Area, Science Friday, Hidden Brain, Science Vs, etc etc. I’m not a total Poindexter though. I round that out with news, story, comedy, political and finance podcasts. I love documentaries, challenging movies that may be tough hangs, but force different thinking and empathy. Less reading than I would like, but I still fit in books like Stumbling on Happiness, the Freakonomics series, etc.

My career was particularly suited for this (now we’re going to get really pretentious). All science is, is a method to find the truth. That’s it. Make a guess at a truth, design and do an experiment to test it, analyze the results and determine if you better understand something about the world. And I was fortunate enough to work with side by side with world class scientists over the last 15 years of my career. That changed me for the better in profound ways. I had to sit at those lab meeting tables every week, discussing and dissecting results, planning next steps based on analysis and broader research in the field, defend everything I did, question what the others were doing. I was dogshit in the early years, I know it. Incredibly intimidated, big imposter syndrome, nervous as fuck, but I got there. Steel sharpens steel, and I got much better. I’ve presented in front of scientists in the National Academy, Nobel prize winners, went to the conferences. I earned my place and belonged, became a leader in those rooms. With all this chest puffing, what I’m trying to say is, I think I’m pretty good at separating truth from bullshit.

So the US election is tomorrow.

What am I feeling? Some mix of anger, hopelessness, grief, disappointment. I check Nate Silver’s blog daily. The aggregate weighted polls suggest the election is a coin-flip, but If I was to bet, it would be on Trump. I hope I’m wrong.

I’m a dual-citizen now. Marrying an American made that possible. I’ve made a life for myself in a Boston suburb. Politically, when I started this blog I fancied myself a far-left radical. Subscribed to Adbusters, reveled in thoughts of anti-capitalist anarchy. Buy Nothing Day, Occupy Wall Street, fuck the elite overlords poisoning our world and enslaving society! Since then, I’ve moved out of the fringe. I certainly still have a liberal core, but I’ve come to believe it is possible for companies to do good things and provide valuable services while having profit in the system. Sometimes you even need that profit incentive, like STEM industries where risk, competition, and speed drive innovation. So I’ve softened a bit. This doesn’t mean I’m not profoundly sad about the state of the world. Debbie Downer time.

I have significant personal happiness in my life. Despite that, I feel a mix of unhappiness, anger, loss and hopelessness for our species. It feels like we’re circling the drain. It feels like science doesn’t matter. It feels like reality doesn’t matter. The USA has caught the perfect virus, and tomorrow night we will get the titers on the viral load. In my way, I’ve tried to understand the Trump phenomenon. Political podcasts, the “Get Me Roger Stone” Documentary, engaging in the r/Conservative and r/Republican subreddits. Attempts to talk civilly with Trumpy family members.

The phrase of his that echoes in my head is, “I love the poorly educated”. How damning is that? How big is that red flag? This is a conman laughing in the face of his supporters. He’s waged war on government and societal institutions because they are independent checks on the stream of bullshit that flows out of his face. Social media has amplified the human tendency to side more with your community than qualified strangers. This is eroding the guardrails of reality. It feels like the fourth estate is dying. We’ve been split into two sides, one fueled by ignorant, righteous, rage. American entitlement. There’s little understanding or desire to actually solve the existential and societal problems our species is facing. Finger pointing, hate and propaganda meant to confuse us. No one even wants to think about the problems. We walk around in cannabis hazes. We watch trite shit on our phones, upvote or like videos and posts on the toilet or couch for a fleeting moment of pleasure and escape. Declare people not like us as dumb. Not caring to think deeply about anything or the challenges and complexities of life. This leads to a failure to understand what is causing the inequities in our society and realize that Donald Trump is incapable of fixing it.

Deep breath. I try to find comfort in my friends, my wife. Bringing this blog back seems to be helping too. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

It’s two days until the election… No. I don’t want to start there. Instead, let’s review how my life has changed since I last wrote here.

The dating turmoil of my late twenties ended after I met a woman who truly made and still makes me happy. Before that, deep down in my core, I believed marriage was extremely unlikely. That my insecurities and relationship needs wouldn’t align with anyone that would love me back. But I was wrong. I found her. She was, and is beautiful inside and out. We dated for a couple years and then married in our early thirties in a wedding that is still brought up as the best the family has ever had. 10 years married now. No kids by mutual agreement. We’re aging together, still strong and healthy. Own a house, 2 cats and it’s lovely.

I’m re-starting this blog off the right way with her. Telling her about it, letting her know that this is an outlet I miss. Reaching a mutual understanding that she won’t read it or seek it out. Giving me the space to express myself more freely, even if it’s just to an audience of one.

On that stable foundation, I had a successful career in science. So much so that I retired from it early at 44. That was this summer. I’m still calling it a sabbatical, but it feels like retirement. Finances are solid and I’m proud of what I accomplished. My work helped save lives.

So, life was good during my absence from this blog. Society on the other hand….

So….. it’s November 2024 now. Four days before the presidential election. Eleven years since I did any writing to myself in this format. Twenty years since I started this blog on Xanga back in 2004 as an introverted, lonely aspiring University Student. Jesus fuck my life has changed. I’m Forty-five years old now. This post will stand as the first one where I’m clearly not young anymore.

I imported all the old Xanga posts. First thing I did was edits to censor names and identifiers. I got distracted by my old writing. I couldn’t help but get nostalgic for that 25 year old kid. The writing was so self-involved… which was part of the point (but goddamn, sometimes it was so clever and charming too). Why did I start a blog? Why public? Back then, likely some narcissism. Some loneliness and relationship unhappiness. A desperate want to be heard and liked, even if that conflicted with introverted tendencies.

So why turn back to it? Because it feels so much better than a comment on social media. Fuck Reddit. There is upvote/downvote judgment on every comment or thought written there. The partitioning of communities encourages group-think hive minds. My old blog was so much more pure. I want to return to the good parts of what that writing did for me.

If you know me in real life, please don’t read this site. I want to write honest and not fearful that I’ll hurt you. I hope this is just a start.

So looks like Xanga is going to close huh. Too bad. I would have gladly kept posting a random note about my life every so often.

Should I try and archive this stuff? It only has nostalgic value. Whenever I read backwards my posts seem pretty stupid.

Maybe I’ll looking into opening another outlet now.

My favourite video game series is Fallout. It takes place in an alternative reality where there was a major nuclear war in the 50s. A few hundred years pass. Your character emerges out of an underground survival vault to discover the ruin and recovery of the human race. Post Apocalyptic, sad, violent, wonderful.

Xanga kind of gives me the same feeling as Fallout. Except more hopeless. Lol.

The doctor was just here. I’m going to get my third rabies shot in a few minutes. (All is fine, just precautionary). Fucking bat.

I felt demotivated today. Fuck.

The five-step procrastination solution*

1) Setup quickly in a well lighted room and close the door
2) Pull the blinds down on all the windows
3) Put a pen and blank piece of paper on the desk for notes as you work
4) Start up a Tangerine Dream Pandora station (so key)
5) Open your file(s) and begin

*only applies to writing/office projects.

Chris Hardwick has a joke about his old myspace page. He says it’s turned into a bad neighbourhood, kind of like Robocop’s Detroit. Graffiti on his wall. A picture of Tom with a scraggly beard and surrounded by jars of pee. I laughed.

Xanga doesn’t feel so much like Robocop’s Detroit. More like an abandoned playground. The vibe isn’t dangerous or violent. It’s just quiet and eerie. All the people I used to check in on and read are gone, yet the list is still at the left of my page. Each person is frozen at a different moment of time. People that don’t exist anymore because they have gone on to live and change. It’s as if the people I knew here were yanked out of this reality and spun off into some other universe.

Except the one that died. That’s a disquieting page. Just frozen there with a bunch of pictures from 2005.

When I’m alone at home I always find myself back here. I didn’t think I would be the last one.