Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 571)

Hello Everyone!

A peculiar dream, Some thoughts on writing, A little algorithmic assistance goes a long way & Ugh the pests!

It is not all that long after sunrise and I am sipping my espresso while listening to the birds chirp outside whilst heavily pondering the dream that I was having before waking. I have actually been up for a while now and that last bit is pretty much all I have done aside from letting the dogs out and of course setting the espresso brewing.

There is no way to effectively detail what I was dreaming without launching into some novel sized explanation of it all so I am not even going to attempt to do so. That said, suffice it to say that some of the dream was kind of absurd, some of it was incredibly intense and portions of it were a good bit more lucid than what most of my dreams have been lately.

I am sure that I will be mulling it over for most of the day trying to fathom every nuance of it but for now I kind of just want to preserve the memories as they are and not let my waking mind influence said memories too much. Of course that is always a tricky affair but I do prefer doing it instead of projecting a bunch of interpretations onto it all and potentially skewing its content in the process.

On a different note. I cannot shake the feeling that my last few entries have been a bit lackluster and that my little break and subsequent 'getting back into the habit of writing each day' has played a part in that. Mainly I keep telling myself 'they cannot all be winners' but I am questioning just how much my heart is in it at this point.

What I am getting at is that now some one thousand nine hundred and seventy-four days later (including today) I have gone through all sorts of fluctuations in my writing habits, tried all kinds of schedules for doing it and generally given it my best and so forth and so on. In doing so I have come to the reluctant realization that yeah some entries are just bound to be better (or just more insightful) than others and that perhaps my own view of it is largely irrelevant.

It is definitely a side note but another thing that I have gradually realized is that writing and thinking are critically linked together for me and a big part of how I process things is via writing. Which sounds pretty awesome at first glance but it is not like I want to pour every private thought that I have into these public entries and will hedge around all sorts of stuff to insure that I do not do just that!

At times I long for the old 'paper and pen' method just for the above reasons but hey they would assuredly defeat the purpose of sharing. I say that mainly because I know that once written in longhand there is a zero percent chance that I will type it up later either in part or in its entirety regardless of the content.

In all sincerity I have no idea how I have side-stepped my own caginess for so long (with the sharing in general) but hey all these days later here I am. Although I could blame it on sheer desperation (which in the beginning played a larger role than it does now) I also felt incredibly compelled to share my life with a few friends and just never stopped doing it.

At no point did I ever picture myself diving so far down the rabbit warren of writing as I have and while I do have a massive amount of mixed feelings about the actual wisdom of doing so... I do not mind (nor regret) doing so to the extent that I have. My best strategy with it all so far is to write in such a way that I am not asking many questions or leaving much in the way of openings for other folks commentary.

Honestly, it is difficult enough for me to get out of my comfort zone and share stuff to start with and the very idea of engaging in conversations over it all tends to make me feel like perhaps it is all a bad idea to start with and that I should promptly stop doing it. In short if writing is a river of thought in motion then conversations are potential logjams that will invariably see said 'river' stop flowing in its well-defined channels and flood its banks.

Perhaps the most important thing in all of that is to understand that at this point in things I have a really difficult time with writing anything that is under around a thousand words and even that is what I would consider to be shorter than what I prefer. I do occasionally go through phases where I will make truly short replies or make comments but by and large I would rather type nothing than too little to fully explain things from my perspective.

Having vast fluctuations in my ability (or desire) to communicate with others sure plays its part in things but primarily I am already doing the one part of all of this that I am 'good' at which is to put it simply: Making these entries semi-consistently. Everything else (including the editing, posting, picture taking, account management and promotion) is something that I have had to wing it with.

My biggest point of failure in it all is definitely the promotion aspect because at some point I really quit giving a damn if folks tuned into my little side-show of a life or not let alone what all I have to say about it. That sounds kind of awful but in reality 'popularity, fame, fortune' and all that horseshit is just some dark alley of myopic circle-jerking that I personally have better sense than pursuing.

In other words, if my words cannot stand on their own merit then what the hell are they worth to begin with. The last thing that I truly need in my life is feeling pressured to live up to some unattainable standard full of 'shallow selfies and worthless likes' from folks I not only do not know but probably do not want to be associated with in the first place.

I have always felt that doing so would be an incredible disservice to both myself and for the folks that actually read these entries but it is also probably why it all gets so little attention in the first place. Which if you have not noticed the last thing that I really want is superficial 'attention' because it is one hell of a poor substitute for genuine interest and/or equally genuine connection.

So in short yes I would rather bring my little 'sharing experiment' to an utter halt than turn myself into some kind of 'cardboard cutout' of a person who is always schilling themselves and their content to others. I am also well aware that making long entries eliminates the majority of folks right from the start which as I have clearly stated before is a big reason why I settled into that style to begin with.

Not to sound too punchy here but really if folks have a hard time digesting anything longer than two-hundred and fifty characters at a time... I not only cannot reach them but lack any will to do so whatsoever. Sorry (not-sorry) on that one because at this point in my life I refuse to participate in the dumbing down of things in an effort to accommodate folks laziness, impatience or desire for instant gratification.

To be clear here there is a massive amount of content (and content creators) that cater to those things and if that is what folks are into it... it assuredly is not all that difficult to find especially with all the 'algorithmic assistance' both herding and funneling folks towards it. Believe me when I say that: I lose absolutely nothing by not contributing to it all!

Anyway, per usual I have gotten way outside the bounds this morning of the 'homesteading' lane in which I try to (sometimes loosely) keep these entries which I am fine with as long as I do not get off on too many wild tangents or rants. I definitely wax and wane on that front but by and large I have still yet to muster any desire to produce sterilized content devoid of my personal goings-on.

I think that the biggest factor in that 'waxing and waning' is how much physical work I do (or do not do) at any given time or even more definitively just how much time I spend outdoors instead of being cooped up with my own thoughts infinitely mulling things over from every angle that I can. As much as I enjoy all that thinking... too much of it (just like too much physical work) can be rather detrimental.

Maintaining that balance between my two main modes of operation (thinking and working) is of course a delicate affair to start with but it is made much easier by the lack of distractions that my life has. I am aware that I should have a third mode called 'relaxation' but aside from my bouts of binge gaming I rarely engage in much on that front.

That being the case you would think that I would be perpetually high-strung and stressed out (which yeah sometimes I am) but overall that is simply not the case. Most of the time I wonder if I even 'have a pulse' because for the most part there just is not much that excites me or that I am even all that interested in.

Alright, it is a bit after sunset now and although I kind of want to delete most of this entry and start over... I think that I am just going to leave it as it is and not think too much more about it. I do wish that I had something better to write about than my own internal landscape but I once again napped most of the day away and stayed indoors.

Early in the day (after doing my routine chores) I considered going on a hike to get more blackberries but the last few hikes that I went on I spent more time swatting at the horse and deer flies biting me than enjoying the scenery let alone the hikes themselves. It is nice to walk around of the pests but ugh they are way worse this year than they were last year!

The winter being a rather mild one probably played its part in the larger pest population (especially with the ticks) but as far as the biting flies go it may well be a sign that there is more wildlife around than there previously was for them to feed on. Of course there could also be any number of other normal/natural reasons for the population explosions and I am just unaware of what they are.

As far as around the homestead proper itself goes the pests are not too horrible thanks to the chickens but I really need to get a new fly bag trap before the summer arrives. Between the compost mounds and the chicken waste the house flies are always going to be problematic but that one trap that I used last year did a pretty stellar job at keeping the population down.

Well, it is now growing late and I better call this entry good enough and get on with editing and posting aspect of things. I have been trying to squeeze in a little gaming in the early evening and do less of it in the morning (to accommodate my writing routine) but apparently I am at the tail end of my gaming inclination and will probably stop doing it altogether soon.

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night or something like that!

The sun setting through the trees.

Thanks for reading!

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Cheers! & Hive On!