Well, it’s Friday. Or at least this is the post for Friday. My communication has been pretty sparse this week, I guess. For most of the comic’s run I made a point to have it up by midnight on the east coast. When I started that was the standard and people regularly got called out for not meeting it. When I couldn’t present anything much of quality I figured I could at least meet that bar and it would be something. In recent years, with all the stuff that has happened, I let that slip a lot. I know that most people are just happy that I’ve kept posting at all, but it still makes me unhappy when I’m not prepared to post at 10 PM on Thursday, my time. So if I don’t have much to say I prefer to just post on time and not say anything. Honestly, not having anything much to say is the best state of things. Not having anything going on is the best way to be I find. At this point just being left alone, without stress, is a luxury. When I say that I don’t really mean I have nothing to do. I mean that I don’t have anything to do that depends on anyone else. I can take care of things that are important to me. Not having to adhere to someone else’s schedule is the perfect state of being.
As you’ve often heard me say, one of the things I hate most in life is being told what to do. Having to be someplace at a specific time is pretty close to that on my list of things I don’t like. Not that I think having an appointment is unreasonable. It’s that I fixate on needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. If you tell me a week in advance that I will have to be someplace at a specific time I will slowly become more fixated on that moment until it becomes the background noise to all of my thoughts. By the time I’m actually there I will have worked myself into such a state of agitation that I will nearly always be on the verge of an anxiety attack. Of course I’m pretty good at hiding exactly how agitated I am, so if you can actually notice it chances are on the inside it’s hundreds of times worse.
I’ve always been like that to some degree, but it has gotten worse and worse as I’ve aged. Sort of like how aversion to going places eventually evolved into full on agoraphobia. Things have escalated. I feel like I’m only awake for minutes a day now, so there’s no time to do anything. Anything that cuts into those precious seconds stresses me. I thought that maybe it was just me, but I’ve been seeing people saying similar things online recently, so maybe it’s some kind of cultural malady that we’re all experiencing to one degree or another.
If I were sleeping better that would probably alleviate some of the problem. It takes a long time for me to wind down to sleep, so when I get there I tend not to get up when I wake up. Especially if I fall asleep for two hours and then am wide awake in the middle of my night. I know two hours of sleep isn’t going to carry through the day, so I try to get the remaining four by brute forcing sleep. As you probably know that rarely works very well. But then I end up staying in bed for too long because once I get into sleep mode then I don’t want to come out. I can kind of see why Michael Jackson ended up in his death sleep capsule for years. Money gave him a quick fix and he went for it. Of course now he’s got all the time to sleep he’ll ever need… I don’t think I want to sleep for eternity just yet.
Maybe winter will take the edge off my allergies and I’ll be able to get back into a rhythm that is more conducive to productivity. Time will tell, I suppose. In any case I’m trying to get the comic to you when I say it will be there instead of 20 minutes to an hour later. I guess time will also tell as far as that goes.
Anyway, I hope you have a nice weekend. I’m going to be having a guest on Saturday. I need to sort out the guest area but I’ve been too busy with other things. I guess I’ll have to do it tomorrow. It’s kind of ironic that I’m cleaning up an area just so it can be made messy and the process will restart. That’s basically all life is though, I suppose. Regardless I hope to see you here on Monday. Until then, hide the Death Star plans.

2869 Paws For Alarm.

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