Worked today but got little joy from it. I find this project I’m working on now tedious and lacking in stimulation. I want to be doing more. Something else. But I cannot for the life of me figure out what. My mind seems to be in a constant haze—I hear a high pitched, far off, buzz in my ears, way back in my mind somewhere. I don’t know. I imagine that it’s the medication. Perhaps its simply tinnitus, which can also be caused by medication. Or maybe I was dropped when I was a child. Perhaps I landed on my head, flattened it a bit, rolled the brain around in its juices as it settled lopsided and now I’m forever in need of something, like a mind that can comprehend things.

I sometimes wonder if software user documentation is necessary. If a piece of software, some application, were written well, would there ever be a need for user’s guides? Also, design documentation. Why are there so many kinds of documents to explain the design of some system?

As a hard core user and programmer for many years, I’ve rarely ever bothered reading user guides or even installation documentation. I’ve written my share of these over the years, but then I would hope that they’d been written in such a way that would draw one to continue reading beyond the title and copyright notice.

When learning about a software system when I go to work for some company, I find it sometimes useful to read through documentation, but often times, if there is any, its out of date and in desperate need of rewriting anyway, even if it is current. Looking through the code, which can be overwhelming I admit, often helps a programmer to understand the structure and the logic of the system more so than the documentation, but then I keep wondering, because its still time consuming to read through code, if there isn’t away to come up with some kind of system for documenting the design of a system that, when glanced at, becomes completely clear to the one doing the glancing.

Today I discovered on the back of my right ear a pimple beneath the surface of the skin and it has been growing larger, although still it doesn’t feel like its reached the surface, and its growing more painful, possibly because I keep touching it and squeezing it and pressing it. I also have one like it, but smaller, on the bottom tip of my nose, and that one really hurts when I touch it.

Rob and I used to write a lot about the books we’ve read and the games we’ve been playing, even after his child was born. But lately I’ve done the writing and he only sometimes responds (in brief) and I find that to be a shame, for although we’re not as close as we used to be, I still found our occasional emails to be fulfilling in a way. Stimulating. I don’t get that much anyway, especially now that I’m working from home. My wife isn’t into serious, intellectual discussions. I find this disappointing, but I knew what I was getting into when we began dating. She has many other qualities that draw me to her. There are the weekly discussions with Dr. Stewart Johnson, but we only talk about feelings and my horrible past and the fact that I have few friends and no one with whom I can have any sort of intellectual conversation. So I write here in this journal, but not very intellectually, and I keep thinking I ought to save that sort of thinking for all the novels, the great, great novels that I’m destined to write. How pathetic to think this, but I do sometimes feel that its only a matter of time before the inspiration falls upon me like some brilliant light shining through the heavens. I mean, hell, what am I waiting for? If its inspiration (and yes, I have been inspired a number of times to write or even paint or sketch things) I’m waiting for then I will probably never get anything written.

I used to think that my misery, my depression, before the medication came along, was worth it… that it was fuel for my imagination, dark though it may have been. Now I feel more numb than anything and while I have this voracious appetite to read, and read, and read, I cannot seem to get an appetite to do much else.

One of the things I want to do is come up with an idea for some kind of software solution to some kind of problem. I want to start a software company. But then I don’t know anyone and often these things are best begun by more than one person, preferably friends or at least colleagues of some sort. Maybe some kind of hardware product, like an inexpensive camera attachment for microscopes that can be hooked into a computer. Or maybe a completely computer controlled microscope—just put the slide into the thing and watch the microcosm appear before you’re very eyes in brilliant color.

Sometimes I wish I had become a research scientist of some sort so I could just sit in my lab or wander about the field conducting experiments and making notes in a bounded journal. I often thought about becoming an archaeologist—I’ve had that dream since I was a child just out of grade school and heading into middle school. I remember even making my own clay from flour—it was a kind of dough that would harden. And I sculpted tools and little people and created an entire archaeological dig site with little bones in the earth. I think I used soil from the back yard and I painted the tools and the people with some water based paints. I think I got a good grade on it, but I don’t recall. I do remember not being too happy with it because the dough wasn’t easy to shape—I should really have used modeling clay, but there was a handout given by the teacher with a list of crafty things we could use or make to help us do our projects and instead of going out to buy clay my parents thought (or perhaps it was just me) that making it myself would be better. I vaguely recall my mother helping me make the dough, but then I could be wrong. It was a long time ago, and unlike my wife with her almost infallible memory, I cannot recall a great many things from childhood. Perhaps if I sat down and meditated on it a while things would come back to me as they do when I’m between consciousness and sleep.

I like to sleep, and I think now about that very moment I mentioned, the time between consciousness and sleep, where your mind begins to wander, images flowing easily within your mind, thinking about the past, the future, made up things. I often think about work or people I know or even something about the past. Even I think about the books I’m reading, the stories I’ve been ingesting like a very hungry man who has just discovered, as he walked in from the scorching heat of a summer day, a surprise banquet in his honor. A feast placed before his starving eyes. Where to start? Where to begin the feasting? The berries or the beef?

I ought really to write stories about me. I am pathetic after all. I could call my novel The Idiot, Take II. Or the Pathetic, Boring Fool of a Human. Or why not just The End, a book that contains just one blank page between its covers and no others.

My thoughts are like cockroaches… as soon as I turn on the light to see them they scatter. I literally mean that. I could be out and talking with my family or with sherri and something might be said that pisses me off or really makes me think and damned if I cannot shut off the flow of stuff coming into my head. The very thoughts! Sometimes I think in prose and wish I had a wireless connection from my brain to my pc, or at the very least a pad and a pencil and training in short hand. I suppose I really ought to just take advantage of those times when my mind is open, fresh, oozing with thought and idea and consciousness. But sometimes its all I can do to move as my mind just reels through things. Sometimes I stare for a long time at a wall or the floor or close my eyes and think, think, think! Glorious thought! Why does she play coy with me? Why does she hide only to tease me when I’m not looking?

I sometimes read reviews of novels or short stories or essays or even non-fiction books and I sit in awe at the ideas and the words that I see about these things. I think to myself that I’ve read this story, and I couldn’t even begin to write a review like the one I was reading. All I’d have to say is, hmmm… neat story. I liked it. What the hell is that? Then you have these guys, younger than me, intellects, scholars, writing amazing things about the works that they’ve read, drawing conclusions, connecting dots where I didn’t even know there were dots to connect. Am I that stupid? Maybe. I sometimes think that I ought to be writer simply because I could never review or edit another’s work.

My problem is that I do not press myself, challenge myself, push myself to any kind of limit, physical or mental. I just amble through life, like water through a river, taking the path of least resistance and following my fancy. I read when I want to, stop when it gets difficult, write when I want to, stop when it gets difficult, start exercising when I want to, stop when it gets difficult. I am defined by my own laziness. I am ashamed at times and now I have a child coming into the world, assuming things go well with the pregnancy, and as much as I sit here and think that I will be the model father, imagine myself going to great lengths to educate my child, to make him/her a thinker, smart, a lover of words, of ideas and of truth, I come to realize that I will certainly do no such thing after all. I can see myself sitting on the sofa in front of the television too tired to do much of anything, extremely overweight and the child jumping on me, crawling all around, asking me to come and play in the yard, to toss the ball, to read to him, etc., until one day as my pathetic influence grabs hold of his tiny, precious mind, and he suddenly stops bothering me, crawls up onto the sofa, and just sits and stares at the tube, just like his old man, dipping his hand over and over into a greasy bowl of potato chips and sucking down a coca cola.