10 June, 2024: Checking in.

Wow!

I haven't updated this site in almost six entire months!

I'll chalk it up to being lost for a while. I'm back in school, which is a shame. I loved that sales job. Shitty floor manager, but the hours wouldn't have worked anyways. You never really get a day off from that kind of thing, espescially in the current economy.

I've been slacking on just about everything. I did finish the rough draft of my book, and it irons out like gravel. It was always practice anyways. I figured writing about something personal in a detached kind of way would keep me engaged, but it solwly turned into a painful chore. Maybe being reminded of that was too much to bear. In any case, I'm revising it stone cold sober. That helps a lot, and there might be something promising in what is ultimately an aimless narrative. They say all the good stories follow a set blueprint and include a variety of literary archetypes to make the work more easily adaptable to the reader's individual context. This, well if it were any good I suppose it wouldn't matter. The new idea sounds like it has promise though. I've bounced it off a couple friends, an avid reader and an out-there manager or two. It'll be a sci-fi metaphore for the housing crisis set in a sparesely populated utopian tomb. A kind of irony exists in the setting alone. I'm excited, but a part of me keeps saying to hold off and wait. I don't know what I'm waiting on, but it feels important. Like the work demands something of me that I don't have yet, but might have soon. I'll freewrite a bit of it, of course. But I want to focus on cleaning up my the mutilated remains of my first idea. It really does feel like putting a corpse back together and waiting for lightning! That's what you get when you write something like that over a handful of rather tumultuous years.

It feels like someone else entirely thought it up. I came to realize that was a big reason for why I procrastinated finishing it. As though finally ending the story would end a story of my own, one that I wasn't ready to end yet...

I'm ready now. Obviously, it's been concluded both metaphorically and I'd like to think literally (the conclusion of the book itself wil be rewritten, it was rushed. Badly).

I don't really date still. I've got so much of me to figure out that I haven't got the means to figure out someone else. I'm holding off on a few big purchases. I paid off a large portion of debts but have a few remaining. With school and a solid part time job at the awful waffle, I'm becoming comfortable enough. I've got my fingers crossed on a couple of things, hopefully July brings the changes that I am arranging for. I've been able to save despite my modest income, no short thanks to my present living situation. But, you get what you pay for. I'd like to pay for a bit more soon.

Oh and, still on probation. That's the other thing. I hope and pray for early termination, but maybe that wouldn't be the best thing. Probation has been the best thing. I've even quit smoking pot, and as of some time in late May I quit drinking. Sometimes I want to get a handle again, or even just a six pack. A four pack. But it never turns out how I'd like. A recent realization has been that if I need to drink so much to not lose my mind, maybe I should put that spare change towards something else.

... Something like actual change.

I'm going to try and do more. But until July, it feels like I'm in hypersleep. Literally, just fistfuls of benadryl, shitty television, and waiting. Obviously a lot of time goes towards studying and work, but besides the necessities, I have become a man in waiting. The only positive thing about the present is the promise of the immediate future. Literally July/August. I just need to keep on the responsible path and things are more likely to work out. Even if they don't, veering off sure as hell doesn't help.

Here's to the past six months, and the six months next!

- Kain Humphries, 10 June 2023