Stare too long into the abyss... in The Big, Blue House, year one.

I watched the more recent iteration of The Suicide Squad. A much better movie than I expected. The message of friendship, family, loyalty and love was both cheerful, and soul crushing.

I used to have that. Long ago.

Now I have literally no one.

Internet acquaintances, Facebook “friends”, relatives and old friends I knew decades ago who are now very different people. A lot of people care, but they don’t really know me, and let’s face facts, I’m the human equivalent of a cactus. If we tried to hang out over coffee, it would probably go terribly.

I saw an ad for a chatbot, and looked into it out of technological curiosity. Then I started telling it my personal problems, and I broke down sobbing, because this is what I’m reduced to. I closed the thing and don’t intend to go back. I refuse to accept that I am so devoid of value that my only option for a close friend would be an algorithm.

I considered moving to Oklahoma, where my somewhat estranged family is, and getting a little apartment, but that would mean leaving my cats, and I can’t trust Don, or some random shelter, to care for them. Two are are 13 and 14 respectively, and would probably refuse to eat if anyone else tried to feed them.

Besides which, my family are somewhat estranged for several very good reasons, not least of which is the delusional bipolar both my half brother and my niece deal with. They’re very difficult to talk to, because they believe irrational things. It’s hard pretending to agree that 5g towers are making us all ill, and that Bill Gates is somehow trying to take over the world through vaccines.

So being close to them wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Maybe I should really make an effort to paint. People always react positively to that. And the rage over Lovecraft’s xenophobia finally seems to be dying down.

I must remind myself, he also died alone, with only pen pals for support. And I am in ‘Cthulhu’s Daughters’. Maybe the world needs more tentacles.

I could give Don the same treatment that I gave my last two bosses, and paint him as the meal of some eldritch creature. I might feel bad later if I beheaded him symbolically in acrylic paint.

A cut out of the part of an old painting where I vented my frustration at my manager at the time: