Good stuff:

8 AM, Saturday morning, I hear someone anxiously yelling outside. I go out and find the little old lady next door yelling "Help! Help me!! Somebody!". She'd somehow locked herself out of her house with no phone when she took her dogs out to pee. I go and get my Gorilla ladder, which neatly straddled the fence, and rescue her. It felt great to concretely help someone, or see another person besides my wife, even though I was aching and quasi-feverish from the booster shot at the time. Been in quarantine #3 for a couple of months while Omicron peaked locally, slowly losing my mind.

Bad effects of the booster wore off after about 48 hours, as expected, and I went to a Super Bowl party. I couldn't wait two weeks. I miss my friends.

Hung out with one of my besties. We were gonna write lyrics, but instead I ended up watching him play GTAV. This has happened before, and usually it pisses me right on off, but he managed to find a hilarious quasi-glitch; The police, in hot pursuit of his character, jump a small barrier out onto a narrow ledge, but are forced by the game's programming to take several small stutter steps after landing, propelling them forward just enough to then plummet to their deaths off the ledge. I must've watched 300 cops suicide themselves. Saw a couple synchronized suicides, even. There's a variation in exactly how this plays out such that it doesn't get old for a loooooong time, and you can kinda pick apart the game's probabilities for things like the using the audio file libraries of male screams and bones crunching, the tumbling mechanics, etc.

Update: It's this position along the ledge of the Southeast side of the Kurtz Center.

Bad Stuff:

Bestie has been "about to get a guitar and learn how to play it" for like two fucking years, now. We're a band of three ex-highschool drumline guys (third guy is bestie and I's other bestie). We've written a lot of lyrics, and we've even worldbuilt for an album, which centers on aliens abducting inbred Creoles from the bayou for the purpose of interstellar travel "outbreeding". I learned bass, which means that I am now an entire rhythm section, and both bestie #2 and I are producers. We plan to do live shows. I so badly want to finally get this project off the ground, but bestie 2 has these things called children, bestie 1 is hella busy accruing hours to pilot 737s in the near future, and I need to finish my PhD anyway.

The PhD is taking forever because my mind doesn't work as well as it once did, I think primarily because of a growing existential dread about the world unraveling. The gas tanks in the garage that I didn't have to use two weeks ago (thank god the electric grid held) will stay full, in case Russia or whoever decides to nuke the nearby military base, and I've spent some time gaming that scenario out. Eye-rolling is absolutely permitted, here, because I know how vanishingly small of a likelihood that is, in actuality, but I'm fucking sick and tired of how quickly shit is degenerating across the board. I think we all grew up with the expectation that society could only improve over time, and now we're all realizing that this expectation is simply false.