Very frustrated.

When I have a do nothing day, a day that involves walking across the face of the earth, I seem able to perform without problem all day. The lungs work, the legs work, I notice that I must be more careful of traffic towards the end of the day as I am not as alert as I was at the beginning and I will take more chances. Read the last sentence to be saying “towards the end of a long day of walking, as my ability to perform computational mechanics in my head declines, and as my innate ability to calculate the speed of advance of an onrushing vehicle worsens, I become less capable and more of a threat to myself.” But I can function. I can get there and back. I have the satisfaction of a minor accomplishment.

Then there is today. Today stands in contrast to yesterday for it is a completely different world.

Yesterday was a day of fresh air, oxygen, CPP, and legwork, the fundamental elements of human existence for the past 100,000 years, or more. Today is a day of litigation, of evidence, of submission preparation, of struggle and failure, of making sure all the little dots are in the right places.

On the 11th of January, when I was trying to maintain a schedule and leave the house according to timetable, I paused in the middle of my inept confusion to write out a blog post. On the walk, I kept asking myself – “why did I do that?” I had a list of tasks, a timetable, became enmeshed in unexpected error, and confusion, and I simply aborted what I was doing and sat down to tap out a blog post? What a strange response.

Tonight, I woke before midnight with a resumption of the cold and headache and I think I now understand why. On the morning of the 11th, my tidy, pre-planned world was in a state of collapse. The reason I paused to hammer out a quick blog post is that the blog has become my means of imposing a degree of order on an unruly world. When I become caught up in a disintegrating world of error, when physical reality begins to escape from me, when it begins to leave me in no doubt that my cognitive activity is no longer providing me with a true image of my surroundings, when I feel I am becoming increasing lost (discombobulated is the word I use. Another equally apt expression would be to describe all that is solid melting into the air), I attempt to resuscitate reality, or my perception of it, with a time out. I sit down and write. I collect my perceptions and hammer out the electrons, nail them down good, fix the world within the confines of a blog post. This post. That post. Some other post in the endless series.

That is the chief virtue of the blog. It is not a recording mechanism. It is a method of imposition, of forcing a congruence between reality and perception, of taking the time to bring order back into my world, a means to dispel the growing tsunami of doubt and confusion that threatens to overwhelm me.

23:54:04

The prior text was drafted at 17:19:02. In the interim I had a meal, and went to bed early, and forgot what I was attempting to write. Or perhaps I did not know what I was attempting to write until this moment when I am up from sleep with a headache, and sneezing, and an unstoppable river of mucous. It comes to me now that I use the blog to impose order on an unruly and disintegrating world, the reality that erupts in that wild place outside of human narrative. When I experience a sudden rent in my world of perception, when reality floods in, I attempt to plug the gap with these words. And surprisingly enough it seems to work.