I shouldn't be up this late. The thoughts wandering through my mind now are not particularly pleasant ones. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to just shut up, close this window, and go to bed. Maybe. But for some reason, some part of me feels like I won't be complete unless I do this first.

Readers who don't like the parts where I sound like I've been taking downer pills (even if I haven't) might want to skip this one. For everybody else who decides to stay on board, for best results, crank up NIN's Into the Void as loud as your ears can stand it. Or whatever takes your fancy.

Stay with this, even if it hurts.

Try not to get hypnotized by the blur scope. Close your eyes. There, that's better. Typing blind. Quite the sensation.

Let's see if I can finish this one without opening my eyes. That could be an interesting mess, depending on how coordinated my typing and vi skills are without seeing the output. Wait. Let me queue up some more music first.

There. That should set me for a while. Closing eyes again. Going to type this without looking...

I am neither drunk nor druged, despite possible appearances.

This is stupid. Eyes closed. Monitor off so it's not so bright. Music in my headphones blaring so loude I almost wonder if I shouldn't turn it down in case it might be disturbing somebody. Honestly doubt it though.

No backspacing either.

Whatever gets typed, stays. Have I become overly dependent on the ability to continuously go back and re-edit myself? This will solve that, even though I only started it because my eyes were overloading from the brightness of the monitor. Much more comfortable in the dark. Complete sentences?

Where is this exercise in unmitigated idiocy going?

Coming next on Bitscape's Lounge: Really random line noise! Phrases out of nowhere. Anyway...

It's my webpage , and sometimes I write utter crap. That's the way it is. Tonight, wer're taking it to a whole new level.

Right now, I'm just hoping I didn't accidentally hit escape and throw things into command mode. Cause that would suck. But I know I haven't because I am the God of vi. And I shall be humbled when the output of this gets posted... lol.

That's better. At least now I'm smiling, if only at my own foolishness. Who says this medium doesn't have some kind of theraputic power?

For those just joining us, Bitscape is in the middle of one of those late night episodes of melancholy depression, where he realizes he is 26, living out his parent(s) apartments, making slightly more than minimum wage, and worst of all, finds that he has little in the way of hope or plans for the future. Suckville.

Before I started this, I was thinking about how mmuch I wish I could be doing this from the apartment I used to have, in my own comfy bedroom, instead of sitting cramped in the corner of my dad's hot living room. I was reading the updates on the Onyx webpage, and thinking, "Shit, I haven't been there in over 6 months now", and... Where did I ever go wrong?

Depressed with the (lack of) direction my life seems to have taken, I guess. (Score: -1: Redundant)

And the only response I seem to be capable of formulating in the immediate present is to is to crank up the music in my ears until I go numb, stare of f into space until I'm too tired to care anymore, and finally saunter off to bed to sleep until I start another repetative shift. Or fill the waking spaces in between with a good book or two, a video game, or... you know.

Maybe, if I am honest with myself, I might find myself thankful fthat I have such a mindless jo. At least it takes me away from this utterly unhealthy sulking that I have a tendancy to fall into when I get depressed.

Alright. Enough of this. Eyes open. Monitor on. I want to be able to see what I'm doing. Good.

Inevitably, I once again find myself going into a trance as I watch the blur scope.

I just want to have something that I can feel good about in my life. Maybe hope that things will get better. That I will get better. I want assurance that this isn't the end of my road. It's no fun feeling like the only better days are to be seen out the rear window of the past.

The more time passes, the more I doubt. Doubt my ability to find "professional" work again. Doubt whether anyone would ever want to hire a fucked up idiot like me, even if the economy did pick up again. Doubt whether I'm really as good as I thought I was.

A dumb hack is what I am. Always was. I rode the dot com tide while it was up, and now that the ride is over, me and all the other overvalued idiots are back where we ought to be... serving up burgers, or whatever.

Shit, I gotta stop this. True or not, it does me no good to think like this.

When you work corporate, they really fuck with your ego. Tell all the ppogrammers how "great" and "talented" and "special" you are. You buy into it, and you might even get enthused, work overtime, and really enjoy it. Like we did.

Six months later, all these supposably great, talented, wonderful people are all perusing the want ads and finding nothing. That fucks with you. No way around it.

Maybe that's why I haven't truly been putting in the doubleplus extra effort to find another programming job since a couple months ago. Do I really want to go through all that bullshit again?

Well, the apartment of my own was nice. While it lasted. *sigh*

Truthfully, I'm not sure which freaks me out more. The thought that it's all downhill from here. No more prosperity ever again. A life of barely eking out a survival in this megacorp capitalist hell for the rest of mylife.

Or, that things get better, a good job again, a nice comfortable living, and with it, all all the inner emptyness that that entails. (Though I may have a tendancy to see the greener grass on the other side of the fence, my memory works well enough to know that it wasn't all paradise. Far from it, in many ways. Otherwise, I wouldn't have taken such an active roll in ejecting myself from the office life.) And if things go well, underneath it all, there will be the fear that it all might be lost all over again. Do I want to go there again?

Meanwhile, only during the course of writing this rambling, my mailbox has received not one, but TWO spams about "Finding Jobs Online." This is what posting one's resume on job sites gets. Not offers, but SPAM. (They say they won't spam you, but when you give permission to let potential employers contact you through their system, somehow the definition of "potential employers" gets twisted to mean anyone who wants to send out loads garbage to practically every resume in the system, even when the sender obviously hasn't read anything on the resume. Such is life.)

So anyway, tonight I'm bummed. I'm sure I'll get over it eventually. I just hate feeling so worthless. Like I'm such a nobody. Hell, I'm full of shit.

This seems like the sort of problem whose solution might involve more than the ever-elusive job offers. One word: Therapy. Given my state, finding a shrink seems like it might almost be a decent idea. Hah, like I can afford that right now.

Tomorrow, I gotta do my taxes. That should be interesting. I don't expect it to be complicated, but as of now, I have to admit I'm fairly clueless as to how much I'll have to pay / get refunded. Bad Bitscape for not doing it earlier.

Damn. It's after 4:00.

As much as I hate to do so, I guess I'll have to bring this disaster of a rambling to an end now. And let the mess be posted to the web for all the world to see. I have no pride anymore.

Or I could just cancel the whole thing. Hit :q! and go to bed. Nobody would know the difference, and the world would be no poorer for having missed this epic pile of nihilistic nonsense.

But I've put in so many keystrokes, it feels like it would be a waste to just make it all disappear. Either way, the time has been wasted. So, to the web it goes!

And for me? Sleep. Blissful sleep.