After my night time cat adventure, I slept for several more hours this morning.

When I told mom about the kitten, she surprised me by suggesting that I might see about keeping it at dad's place for a while. Of course, there was no guarantee of seeing it again. I had set it loose outside.

On the way to get an oil change, I went and parked outside the Neighborly Abode, and looked around to see if Patches might still be hanging around. I walked all around several of the buildings, and saw no sign of him.

Just as my oil change was beginning, I got a call from scott saying that one of the client's servers was having trouble, and he might need me to go to inflow soon. Though not thrilled with the idea (especially in the case of this particular client's annoying server), I said, "Ok." He would check a few more things, and call me back if the trouble persisted.

While I waited for them to change my oil, an intense wave of depression hit me, which would linger through the afternoon. When a feeling like that comes, I've had it enough times before to know that it is never fully explainable through rational means. It's just there. Suffering.

Nothing can take it away. There is nowhere I can do, nothing I can do, nothing I can buy, no one I can see to fix it. So when it happens I am resigned to suffer. Through my eyes, everything in the world looks bleak and hopeless.

Though I could not stop it, I did attempt to understand a little of it, and work through whatever feelings I could find that might be behind it. As I did so, I began to feel the sickly emotions coalesce into the physical form of a knot deep in my stomach. Nausea.

It is very easy and very tempting at such times to attempt to simplify the situation by saying, "I don't care about anything, or anyone, or even myself. Nothing matters to me at all. It is all pointless. The world is null, and I don't care." Many times in the past, this is exactly what I have told myself. But today, I realized that even at my lowest moment, it is a lie.

The truth is that I do care. I care about so much, to such a degree, that it weighs down on me. My suffering comes from a feeling of utter powerlessness on a profound level. It consumes my being, paralyzes me, and sucks every thought into its void.

Why? Was it the cat? The dumb client? Some undefined aspect of my life that I hadn't consciously been aware of?

Maybe it's a little of each of these things, or maybe none at all. The parts do not add up to the sum.

Am I just a malfunctioning machine, or is it the suffering that makes me alive?

While I was pumping gas, I got another call from scott. He needed me to go to inflow to look at the server.

I went there and puttered around on the wayward server. In my ideal world, we would not be taking responsibility for servers that clients setup themselves with software that none of us have any familiarity with. They configure it with their own screwed up settings, and then call us when things break? Welcome to bizarro world.

(Not that I can really blame scott for taking the contract, since we did need the money, and I have benefited financially from it as well.)

Eventually, things did get fixed, but I couldn't take credit for it. Somebody who was actually familiar with the peculiar intricacies of this oddball server was called, and figured it out in short order.

I also met another potential inductee for this ongoing insanity, but I didn't feel like writing it right now.

On the way back, I stopped by again to see if I could spot Patches anywhere, but I didn't even get out of the car. I looked out the window, and knew he would not be back. No use in dragging out my own agony. Why did I let him go so soon?

I know why I did. I saw it as inevitable that I would have to give him up sooner or later. The longer I kept him around, the harder that would become. He left a hole in my heart plenty big already. How can that happen in the span of only one night?

I'm going to lie down now. There is nothing more to write.