(no subject)

I posted this on Facebook this morning, but the work of embedding a link into the text seemed like too much work to post it here too. That's where my brain was.

From this morning:

There's this article headlined "Climate Despair Is Making People Give Up on Life."


That's basically where I am these days I think.

I know something needs to be done. In small, tangential part, I was going to address that via being involved in urban public policy, but that did not come to be.

I've been talking with my therapist a lot about how doing any number of forward-looking things requires a certain fundamental optimism about the future. I'm realizing that maybe I just don't have that. It is significantly affecting my mental health, and I don't see a way to resolve the issue because it's completely external to me. Not feeling depressed and to some degree hopeless feels irrational, and I'm not very good at prioritizing my feelings over my rational analysis of a situation in *any* context.

I'm home over this four-day weekend when I already had a fully planned out trip to see a bunch of the kinds of things I've always loved seeing on the kind of road trip I've always loved taking. I can't say exactly why; I just couldn't get excited about it, other than in fits and starts. I just want to hole up with people and animals I care about and be insular.

And I *have* been taking my brain meds. I shudder to think how I'd be without them.

Organized Workshop

It took a while, but I finally did things today. I got my workshop organized and finished building the radio kit that's been languishing on my desk for months. It's late to start on it today, but I put my Marantz 2270 on the desk. Tomorrow I hope to replace the burned out lights and the rest of the vellum behind the front panel. While it's open, I'll hook my scope up to the power bus behind the big filter caps just to see if it looks relatively clean. I don't know how to do much more than that right now.

The Coca-Cola crate is Lisa's and is full of her records. On top of it is another of my vintage receivers, a 60 watt-per-channel Sherwood S8900-A in the factory faux-wood cabinet. That was another thrift store find. It was from a down-market SA tagged at something like $30, and there was a half-off electronics sale so I paid $15. I borrowed my Klipsch speakers from the living room to connect to it and have been playing music from my phone while I work. The unit was made in Chicago, and was Sherwood's last unit made here in the US. Having local history connections to my gear makes me happy. I haven't done any work on it; it's powered up and played just fine since I bought it.

I think working on repairing some stuff might help me not want to just lie around and do nothing. Fixing things makes me feel good about myself.