I am done with burning myself out trying to blog on a daily basis and seeing absolutely no reward for the effort.
Yesterday was a bad day for me anyway ─ despair and futile rage. My wife is killing me with debt, and my two working stepsons are devoted to being freeloaders or parasites. I had managed to set aside $1,600 of my pension money that were earmarked for eradicating my VISA card's balance, and to also allow me to make a few purchases of some nutritional supplements and another item or two from Amazon; but the three of them stuck me with the full monthly mortgage that was scheduled to be debited from my chequing account yesterday or today.
I had to transfer over $1,200 of the precious $1,600 to be entirely secure that the deficit in my chequing account's balance would be comfortably lifted. And I have since expended $300 toward that VISA balance.
No offer of any financial help from my wife and her sons, despite me pointedly letting her and her oldest son know this past Friday that mortgage day was probably to be yesterday (the debit was delayed until today, however).
My wife only seems to work in order to party and / or spend hours long into the night throwing away money at a casino nearby the Thai restaurant she works at.
There is no out for me ─ not from my empty marriage, nor the crushing debt that has me imprisoned here in my home. I don't drive, so I am basically housebound, with my 70th birthday less than three months into the future.
God doesn't care for weaklings ─ He's only impressed by the powerful and the takers. I deluded myself most of my life thinking and believing otherwise.
I'll have that 70th birthday, but I see no reason to live on to a 71st birthday. Sometime during that intervening year, it may as well end for me.
On this past Sunday, into the latter afternoon I ventured forth on the four-mile round trip hike to the nearest government liquor store so that I could add two dozen cans of strong (8% alcohol) beer to the supply that I do my best to keep in stock. Approximately halfway home, I was approached with conversation by a rather rough-looking chap whom I might estimate to have been in his 40s.
He was fairly lean and sinewy, and seemed reluctant to have our conversational exchange come to an end. And I ended up probably losing a half hour talking with him.
He was seated on a public swath of lawn and under a tree, enjoying the shade. Earl by name he was, and I had the impression that he was resident in a nearby subsidized highrise, but he also seemed to be somehow semi-homeless. A blonde soon joined him whom he identified as his wife ─ possibly Rose by name.
Maybe his common-law wife?
Maybe his common-law wife?
She came from the building, and bore a blanket and a number of items ─ it was almost like they were about to picnic at that spot next to a sidewalk.
She moved with a suspicious degree of energy ─ which is to day, she seemed to me like she might be a drug-taker. Earl had professed to have given up drinking, but he said naught of alternate 'self-medication.'
She moved with a suspicious degree of energy ─ which is to day, she seemed to me like she might be a drug-taker. Earl had professed to have given up drinking, but he said naught of alternate 'self-medication.'
Earl identified himself as a Newfie, but had lived out this way for many, many years.
Rose ─ who was probably around his age ─ seemed initially uncertain of me, but she quickly grew comfortable and talked as much as did Earl. She was attractive in a hard sort of way, and I rather liked how she seemed to be eyeing me in my sleeveless top ─ I do not look my age, and my arms were bulkier with muscle by far than were Earl's.
I even thought that Rose looked most appealing as a cuddle partner.
Please keep in mind that my wife and I have not been physically intimate since March 2013, so I have not enjoyed that sort of closeness with anyone since then. Sometimes, I crave it as surely as if it is a life-sustaining need. And in some ways, it truly is ─ we all need human contact of a physical nature.
Anyway, I soon had my attention drawn by Earl to a knife he was wearing on his belt ─ they assured me that despite what is commonly believed here in Surrey, it is not illegal to carry an unconcealed knife of any length. Earl claimed that with the deserved reputation for violence that Surrey has ─ especially there in the Whalley area ─ his knife is a deterrent to being attacked.
I showed them the tactical pen that I carry, and both were quite impressed.
Nevertheless, if a knife in its sheath is legal, I can see the value of having something like that on one's person. And substantiating the legality of this, I found the following:
Carrying a knife is legal in B.C., as long it is not spring-loaded and not concealed, other than by a sheath.
That is at the very end of a June 25, 2012 CBC.ca article titled 9 Vancouver stabbings raise concerns.
Once I have my 70th birthday in October, my thinking is that I am going to start undertaking the development of my ability to handle long walks once again. I am going to give up spending the hours per day that I have devoted for the past decade or so trying to generate a second income online ─ it is nothing to waste eight hours a day on my six hosted websites and this useless blog (and its now-private predecessor that I started up in September 2008).
The purpose of the walking would be to improve my fitness and health; but ultimately, I will likely ─ as I become adapted to extensive walking again ─ be venturing into locales where I could easily meet with deadly violence.
I do not want to have to ever suicide, so exposing myself to the potential of deadly violence is a promising alternative to taking my life by my own hand.
Before I bring this short post to a close, I want to spotlight an interesting article on organ donation ─ and why NOT to be an organ donor.
Last October I had to get my two pieces of provincial photo identification renewed, for their valid lifespan is five years and that deadline was reached as of my birthday that month.
In renewing the identification, I obligingly signed an organ donation agreement. Only afterward did I read an article on why being such a donor is not always an ideal situation to find oneself in.
This article is of more recent vintage, but is very much along the same theme:
DrMicozzi.com
This quote from that article made an especial amount of sense:
A person can be declared “brain dead” when their heart is still beating—which the brainstem controls.
But that stipulation makes no sense. How can someone be legally “brain dead” when their brain is still telling their heart to beat?
We would never bury a “brain dead” person with a still-beating heart (except in a grisly and macabre tale from Edgar Allen Poe). So, why are we allowing their vital organs to be removed with a still-beating heart…a normal pulse, blood pressure, normal color, normal temperature, and other normal vital signs of life?
Surgeons administer paralyzing drugs to “brain dead” patients to prevent muscular movements during organ harvesting. And when the body is cut open, the heart rate increases and blood pressure skyrockets as a normal physiologic reaction to the pain!
The brain stem controls these normal reactions. But according to a legal definition of “brain death,” no part of the brain should still be functioning…including the brain stem.
I confess that I do regret signing that consent ─ not that I want to live at any and all cost. I have already made it clear that I see no real hope of ever being delivered from my joyless, debt-filled life other than through death. But I have never felt too easy at the image of my body being butchered for its organs.
Ideally, I would prefer to die somewhere in the wilderness where my corpse would remain untampered with by my fellow man ─ who just cannot seem to leave a body unautopsied, no matter how apparent the cause of death.
Enough of that ─ I finish with a few more photos that my wife took in June of last year in Rome when she added to our debt by visiting a sister of hers who has made Italy her second home.
The digital camera's date setting had not been adjusted or updated for that trip, so the metadata embedded within the photos which indicates that they were taken on June 7 (2018) is only a very good estimate of the date.
The first two photos are selfies of my wife:
Some research I have just now done finds that the pizza restaurant shown at the right in this next photo is Trattoria Pizzeria La Caravella di Magistri Luigi (Google map). Since the photos that follow it were all taken withing a span of five minutes of this photo, then all locations were very nearby that location.
By the way, I am still trying to do a daily plank of 6½ minutes, but they are almost excruciating. I barely held out yesterday.
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