I should note this day for posterity on my calendars from now on.  It’s been the bitterest day of my life, for a reason I won’t go into here.  I mean…I’d actually Love to go into it…the blog has been a kind of therapy for me ever since I started it, since I live alone here in Baltimore and don’t have a companion I can actually…you know…talk to.  But there are certain someones out there I just don’t want to let see that particular small corner of my heart anymore.  I feel abused.  So I can’t really talk about what happened today, even here.  Much as I’d like to really get it out.  I’ve been wandering around in an all too familiar daze all day since it happened. 

It’s almost exactly like it was back in the late 1980s, when I fled every creative outlet I had because I just didn’t want to look to closely into my heart anymore, and I started plinking around with computers because I could be creative writing code and I discovered that code could be beautiful and elegant and crafting these beautiful and elegant algorithms didn’t involve my heart but only my brain.  All afternoon I was just completely zoned out and yet I was coding like mad.  Like the only existence I had was in the code.  The code was a safe place.  I didn’t have to have a life there, didn’t need a heart, just a brain capable of parsing structured syntax and thinking logically, and some problems to solve.

No I didn’t get laid off…although I’m always expecting that will happen eventually.  With the coming post-Bush budget woes NASA certainly will be facing heavy cutbacks, probably of the sort it felt in the 1970s and 80s after Apollo ended.  I have no idea what I might do with myself after Space Telescope, when and if that ever happens.  But for now I’ll be slightly amazed if I even survive the coming winter.

If only I had companionship…