Musings on life

Musings on Life by Tobias H.C.P.

So, I will start this off I suppose somewhere… I think I’ll just wing it and do stream of consciousness writing for this since my thoughts are so discombobulated. However now that I’ve quit all addictions my mind is focusing to a point of things coming to clarity. It’s been allowing me to kind of put everything into perspective. How my formative years still affect me to this day. Things ingrained into my psyche and mind. Walls I’ve put up to make it through those younger years and which I’ve torn down and put up in the times since. Okay so lets begin with one piece and spiral from there.

So, when I was younger and growing up I was a pretty happy kid for the most part. I loved being outside, barefoot. Running around without a care even though I was the runt in the neighborhood I still stood my ground with the bigger kids on the block most of the time. I played ball with them, hung out. Was teased and such every now and then. It wasn’t until they all started to hit puberty when it got a little more violent. Their heights and strengths grew exponentially and I wouldn’t hit a growth spurt or puberty til much later. It was this shift in power that drove me to despise being around other people. Not right away but at the point my parents were considering divorce and we were planning on moving to another neighborhood. As soon as I lost that link to friends I had in that area I just kind of shut down and played video games, endlessly. I lost all social skills more or less in the sense they were all I could talk about or relate to people on. I eventually began to go through my growth spurt and puberty, girls became a little more into focus. But again I wasn’t the most dashing of lads at the time. I got invited to a party and ended up in a spin the bottle game. Nothing shatters you more when you’re young and hopeful than to be teased as a runt endlessly and then in spin the bottle the girl whom was to kiss me scrunched up her nose and said “Ew I don’t wanna kiss that boy.”

I shut down again and went back to video games, a world I could more or less control and enjoy at my leisure. A world where nothing hurt, many worlds of wonder actually. There were so many times I wanted to off myself over the years and miraculously a video game would be announced that would keep me going to play it. To feel that bliss again. Eventually though, my parents did split and I stayed in my little safe gaming haven as much as I could but I met some friends. Just as broken or worse than I was. I had a lot of fun. Got introduced to many life adventures, drugs, and bad relationships. But having had those experiences I feel I was made stronger. Given some common sense and understanding of the people and places around me. I grew wiser over time and while I feel like I wasted my time with most of my romantic relationships. I did get value, good memories and lessons learned out of each. I enjoyed learning the dynamics of love and other peoples viewpoints as, at the time I had some pretty unshakeable beliefs and ridiculous notions to what was and wasn’t. So it was also a grounding experience. After the last relationship I finally realized I’m just not good for them as I tended to get possessive and jealous easily. I would never keep anyone from their friends or ask to see peoples phones or anything but I certainly showed my discomfort and it’s like gripping jello. There’s no way to keep it from squirting out through your fingers if you squeeze it too hard.

Eventually I just kind of lost all… drive? To bother worrying about the other person in the relationship and still to this day I cannot seem to re start my inner hopeless romantic to the level it was before. This carried it’s own consequences with shorter relationships I’ve had since then. So for now I will just leave it be and maybe I’ll find someone like me. And if not then I’m okay just being a lonely writer, I have a couple books in mind. Some music I want to learn to play and many other hobby goals I’d like to achieve in the long run. If I cannot love another then I will love my crafts and whatever the muse will bring my hands and mind to create. All in all, there’s much more I’d love to write but alas I’m stuck in a glass tower having to adhere to schedules and demands of being an adult. Hopefully one day I can win the lotto or something and focus on my writing. To my parents and those that may be affected by this, I don’t hate you or any of that negative nonsense. I thank you for the journey and I love you all.

Perhaps one day a god will find me and show me the truths of this confusing and scary universe so that I may rest my fears finally. I feel most connected to the cool air of fall or cold winds of winter and norse mythology. Always makes me feel more alert and alive within paganism and what not. Even if I don’t feel overly connected to other practitioners of the religion. I just believe in the things that I can feel, dream and achieve. I don’t necessarily adhere to any rule set or anything.

Hopefully I can raise my head high after I make my last big move and find more smiles and happy adventures in the future. And not have to rely on my little digital happy place as much to keep me sane. Anyways I think my brain is out of gas for the time being. I always have a lot more to say but I think my mind sorts it as I type into more concise points and what not.

To all a good eve, a wonderful future and the best of energies and fortune.

Don't look back at your foot prints

In one of my dreams, every layer of my life disappeared like family, future, past, country, politics, opinions, language, culture and dreams. All that was there was the now. A bunch of beings standing on a rotating rock flying through space. 

Not good, not bad. 

Just completely and absolutely neutral. A mindset i've always had is that everything at its core is neutral. And this dream gave me a new perspective. 

We're problem solvers and we constantly put ones and zeros, plusses and minuses, good bad, love hate etc on things we exist with. But there's something else. Something right in the middle. To some it's hidden. To others it's always there. It's acceptance. 

So when someone sees the naked life, you're pretty much standing on a tightrope.

Fall to the right and you can see life as a depressing meaningless drag that gives you so much good just to take it away.

But fall to the left and you can see life as this amazing wonderfully meaningless rollercoaster ride to enjoy. Even if it ends, it's a great motivating factor to enjoy the little things in life. And find your own meaning. It's not always easy seeing the good things in life. 

For me it can take time to see the good in things. I've been very quick to just jump into the destructive way of thinking. But to stand on that tightrope long enough for you to make a concious decision. You have to remain neutral and it feels so impossible to do with all this worldly noise going on, the news drama, negativity all over social media, racism, murder, bad shit happening in your life like car troubles and medical bills. We let all sorts of things inside of ourselves during all of this. it shapes and defines our ego which becomes our entire self.

or at least what we think we are, much like someone who has amnesia. they could have been a horrible person before but are now as innocent as a child until the world around them shapes them once more or they re acquired their old memories or at least some.

I've made the determination not to let the world around me, shape me. I will shape the world around me to my desires within my own means of ability and power. This doesn't mean I wont respect others or their realities. But I will be more firm in my own beliefs and self. Like anything with life this wont be an instant change.

I'll need to focus and practice to form this new self, to tell that pessimist inner voice to get out but take its cautions when it feels right in my gut. A part of me always craves change and chaos and I've pushed it away after college and I've been feeling nothing but depression and stagnation ever since. It's time to get things done or I'll die with too many regrets.

End of the record

In the past 3-5 years, I've felt like my life has been constantly looping over and over again. Just this part of it though. I don't feel like I've aged even at times and that I'm making the same mistakes.

This past year however I feel like at least one of the tracks looping have broken and went off into another part. But the rest of me didn't follow. Not yet anyways, I've been spending a lot of introspection time on how to change those other things in myself to progress so I don't die with regrets and stay stuck where I'm at.

Depression continuously rears it's head and wears me down enough to just want to sleep, constantly. Sometimes it gets bad enough where I'll either leave or call out of work. Sometimes I'll even blow all my PTO on a week off work to just be a fat caterpillar of misery thinking about how I'm a failure and I can't do this or that or I don't have the focus to do anything worthwhile. It wears me down sometimes to the point that I think about ending my own life. Even though I don't think I have the guts to do such a thing I think it would be nice at times to just make all the constant worrying and BS just stop.

And lately, I've just been learning how to punch that voice in the face and just get up and do things. Even if I suck at them for a time. I at the least want to know that I've even tried at all. I've spent too much time trying to keep up with "the joneses" buying the best new gadgets and computers. Trying to impress people that were never my friends in the first place. And trying to drown in a pool with the rest of the fools. As Henry Rollin's said before.

They're cool until you try to get out of that pool, then they all try to drag you in so you drown with the rest of them.

So I haven't gone out much to hang out with friends or family or anything much for the last 4 years. Save for sparse adventures. Not because I hate anyone. But I'm afraid of things I need not be afraid of. It's been hard to break out of that shell again and I don't know how I got into it in the first place. It just kind of formed around me over the years. I think I've finally found the knife to stab my way out of the shell so to speak. Now I need to find and make the time for people, as well as myself. Knowing how to not burn out my social batteries as well.

Half the time when friends call I don't answer because I work in a call center. And the last thing I want to do is take another call. I've grown afraid of using the phone as a phone anymore. Texting is just about the only way to get ahold of me or messages online anymore. My brain feels over connected with worrying thoughts, wishes, goals and many many other things.

I don't know where I was going with this as usual. Other than getting it out of my head. Putting my train back on the right tracks and praying the bridge isn't out up ahead. I just want to feel happy again and other than a few moments here and there. I haven't felt it in a very long time.

MacOS and bootcamp woes

So, I spent about 12 hours total yesterday on something I could have solved in way less if I'd been a little less tired and observant. I installed MacOS high sierra on an external SSD for the speed since I have a 27in iMac 2017 with an i5, 580 graphics, and a 2tb fusion drive.

However I didn't know that bootcamping with the external drive would be such a nightmare. It only saw the fusion drive and would not partition correctly no matter what I did. I tried boot camp partitioning a couple times. It eventually screwed up the partitions so bad it wouldn't correct back to one volume through bootcamp OR disk utility(even in repair mode) So I had to to CMD-OPT-R to re download the stock macos for the iMac and then while in recovery mode, open up terminal and put in this string of commands to undo all the madness.

Command:
N=Macintosh\ HD; for d in /dev/disk?; do o=`diskutil info $d`; [[ ! "$SSD" ]] && grep -lqw 'APPLE SSD' <<< "$o" && SSD=$d; [[ ! "$HDD" ]] && grep -lqw 'APPLE HDD' <<< "$o" && HDD=$d; [[ "$SSD" && "$HDD" ]] && break; done; diskutil cs create "$N" $SSD $HDD && diskutil cs createLV "$N" jhfs+ "$N" 100%
(the above needs to be put in verbatim)
Site I got this from : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7453778

OKAY so, fusion drive is back in one piece I boot from the SSD again back into MacOS. I boot into my VM and then I followed the below guide for the rest.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/31/how-windows-10-mac-boot-camp-external-drive-video/

However, the windows disk did not show up in the startup disks in my macs settings. BUT it did show up after rebooting and holding OPTION. It shows up as EFI boot under an orange drive icon. Signifying an external drive I think(not sure on that one). All said and done it was 2am and I finally passed out from exhaustion so I'm mostly just posting this to save anyone else the trouble I went through. I'll also have this on my g-drive permanently here.

To whom?

Making it work

This is going to be a discombobulated ramble session like usual. So TL;DR is I don't know what the hell I'm doing with my life or how to do it but I'm picking a quest path and fighting for it.


So lets start this off with I don't get along with very many people at work. My attitude and demeanor either locks me in as a funny prankster with no level of seriousness and no sense of business, or some lazy fat kid with no sense of urgency. I like to calmly handle any situation I'm in and that comes off to most as "fuck it, not my money that's flying out the door!" When that's definitely not my intention in the slightest. I never get pinned as a "good fit" for most companies and I've wasted too much time trying to find that company I fit in with best.

I don't feel people FIT in certain places. I feel like most just put on a front just like some or most would when first dating people but they keep it up for however long they're at the job. I found myself trying to do the same thing. Desperately trying to fit in with people I'd normally never have a more than small talk conversation with. And it stresses me out, breaks me down and all I want to do is blow my brains out or something. Instead of live a lie unhappy and worthless in this corporate world. But I try to remind myself I fought for this, despite my mental troubles and continuous medication shifting because nothing works. Despite my poor health and tattoos and feeling worthless. I made it higher up in the corporate world than I ever thought possible when I first felt that fire in my belly to go back to college and get into IT jobs in the first place.

This was my dream job and now that the dream has died I don't know where to go from here. I feel too old to get into another profession. My physical state is not... crippled but I certainly couldn't do labor type jobs as easily as I used to. Retail is mostly out due to my tattoos. What's left? Hot topic manager? Tattoo shop clerk? Construction or something not people facing? Do I stick with IT and hope I find a nice chilled out office to work in or do I try to stick it out in tall  buildings full of horrible and exclusionary people? (not all are bad of course)

Working in this industry I've met some wonderful and intelligent people. I wouldn't trade the time I've spent for anything. I'm going to try and stick with this until I can afford at least a small house in the northwest, then look for another type of work or even just part time IT or something. Something different, I can't handle calls anymore I can't deal with supporting so many people and clients when any one of them could be pissy and want to use me as a pincushion. Being empathic like I am I feel all that rage and stress and it just overwhelms the hell out of me and I want no part of it anymore. I used to be pretty happy and a social butterfly, but my batteries are dead all the time now. I need new ones or a solar panel or something. I need out and I'm going to get out.

I just have to be patient and not let this make me cynical and tear me apart while I work towards this goal I've set, I don't care if it happens a little later than age 35 Since I've had some set backs and may have more. But I'm going to get there and I'm determined. I'm going to write those young teen adventure books I've had in my head for years. I'm going to finish my music albums and make people laugh and whatever other plans I had in mind. Someone once told me you find your inner fire or spark only a few times in your life and you can ignore it or you can hold it and use that power for something. I intend to use it when it finds me again. I feel it inside just like when I went to college and made my first album and wrote so much a few years back.

I can't let myself fizzle out into nothingness. I can't die a crippled, fat, lethargic and worthless mess of a human being. I will not let my addictions and impatience stop me from building my castle. I will continue brick by brick as long as it takes.


Thanks for reading if you managed to make it all the way through and even if not. I'm appreciative of all of my friends. Sorry for not being there much recently. I just needed to find myself again and I kept breaking shovels trying to dig in the wrong spot. <3

Expiration Date

You're blind to what's in front of you
What do you know about the truth
Devalued as soon as we're cast
We were never made to last
Just bodies made and fabricated
We're fighting towards our life extension
We're living for expiration

Under the surface we're not machines
Under the surface we're living dreams
Death lives just one breath away
Somewhere my heart beats in silence
I made my way through the violence
Nobody lives forever

"It's a shame you won't live. But then again, who does?"

My endless will for resolution
Echoing since my creation
I'm living for my expiration

Under the surface we're not machines
Under the surface we're living dreams
Death lives just one breath away
Somewhere my heart beats in silence
I made my way through the violence
Nobody lives forever
Under the surface we're not machines
Under the surface we're living dreams
Death lives just one breath away

-Fear Factory, Expiration Date