Well I got an answer to why this summer's been so bad for me. Which is to say it's been a good summer, with lots of activities and good late night conversations with dear friends I'd like to know better. I've accomplished a lot, and my projects are on the cusp of bearing fruit.

But that gnawing depression and my increasing physical injuries kept putting a damper on things, waking me up wondering why I felt so bad about being alive.

So let's talk about routines. Do you have a routine? Of course you do, everyone does, even the most chaotic, attention deficit humanoid has a few. We're bound to our cycles and sometimes we let it drift into the background.

Sometimes it feels like our routines aren't even a part of our lives, but I assure you, even the tiniest most unnoticeable thing is bound to the rest of your existence as much as those novel moments in time.

My morning routine is pretty set in stone. I wake up a few minutes before my alarm goes off, usually right at 7am. I cuddle Snyper for a few minutes and then get a quick bit of alone time. Yeah that's a euphemism.

I sit on the can, then I do a small muscle workout that usually leaves me a bit sweaty a little worn. Wash up in the bathroom, take my vitamins, practice guitar for a little while, toss a ball up the stairs for Snyper and bid her a good day. Get to my car, drive to the office and get there about 10 minutes late.

I plug in my laptop, while it's loading up I take my water bottle and step out to fill it up at the dispenser. Then I sit down, and check my personal email and fb before seeing if there's any work to be done. Then I go to tvtropes.

Pretty innocuous. I'm sure you all have something similar going on. But the routine runs deeper than just these basic actions. Where my eyes look, where my attention goes, that's all part of my routine too.

This week at my job has been a shitshow. Corporate decided to force everyone in the entire 20,000 employee company to change their passwords at the same time, but their infrastructure is such garbage that a combination of security policies shut down somewhere between a third and half of its computer accounts.

What happens when nobody can get any work done? Enter the humble IT guy. Since I'm the only person in my IT group with access to the account setup toolkit, it's fallen largely on me to do the work to get people back online in my section of the company, and because of my special access there are folks outside my group relying on me also. I've been helping folks out from San Diego to fucking Florida.

So when I'm filling up my water bottle yesterday, someone comes up to me because they have been having "such a hard time" the last couple days and need me to drop whatever it is I'm doing to help them. I have a long docket of people and my patience is actually running a little thin so I tell them to fuck off in the most polite corporate-friendly way possible.

But this does alter where I am looking for a moment. I catch the inside lid of my water bottle out of the corner of my eye and see something odd.

Now, I clean my water bottle regularly; roughly once a week. But I guess I didn't pay attention to the lid, so imagine my horror when I discovered that not only were the deep recesses of the lid where it screws in covered in mold, but it was spreading to the inside of the water bottle also.

I went to look up the symptoms of mold toxicity and discovered I am experiencing almost every single one. I've had a persistent cough that won't go away, I've had brain fog, I've had sudden sporadic depression and anxiety, I've had an increasing number of joint pains.

Jeezus fucking christ I've been poisoning myself for who knows how long.

One might say I could have been more thorough in my cleaning of the water bottle, but I'd need a specialized tool to clean deep into those recesses reliably. Regardless of where I am at fault in this process, it's likely I would have continued to make myself sicker if I hadn't been momentarily distracted away from my routine and noticed something out of the ordinary.

Years ago, back in undergrad, me and my queer friends from the bi club would hit the town, we'd head down to this shopping area called the Short North which used to be an arts district before enshittification transformed it into a yet another plain shopping area. Back before this transformation had completed, we used to hit the art galleries that still were there, and one of my favorites was a little place called RoyGBiv.

Roy was a really weird gallery. It only ever showed two exhibits at a time, and they were always big, taking up a whole room each. They were always some kind of avant-garde thing and always made me wonder.

One night we wandered in and one of the rooms was entirely covered in white china while two lesbians sat in a table at the center sipping milk out of saucers.

Another time there was this giant mudhut that reminded me of Yoda that glowed from within and played a soothing ambient tone that sounded like safety.

One night, there were a bunch of balloons, some labeled "everything disappears" and others labeled "nothing's wasted" while a strange masked creature meandered about staring at us.

I still say nothing's wasted to my dear friends in moments of darkness.

The person who would become one of my besties and I got to know the curator of the gallery, a guy named Ken. Really nice guy, he went to work at OSU's library and Roy went seriously downhill. It's now just a normal gallery that plays at being a little quirky.

Anyway, one night me and my friends are walking down the street and stopping every few steps to do squats on the sidewalk. I dunno why I started doing that or why everyone started doing them with me.

Ken noted that it is good to be weird like that, because it wakes people up, gets people to perk up from the sleepwalking that is their routine for a moment or two to see something out of the ordinary.

My Dad (and a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks rom com) used to say "Everyone you meet is asleep, and only a few people are awake, and those people live in a state of constant total amazement."

I try to live that way. To be awake, to dedicate myself to curiosity and to never be dominated by the routines this civilization forces us into.

Well unfortunately I found myself nearly doomed by a routine I depend on to maintain the rest of my life.

Then again, it's sort of a relief, isn't it?

I've spent a good deal of the last weeks feeling like a cosmic plaything, just cursed to slowly degrade the moment I hit age 40. I'd find myself despairing, not sure why I was disintegrating, coughing and aching and caught in the draining whirlpool that was my erratic mood.

Between being a cosmic plaything and just an idiot, it's better to be the one you can just stop.

I wonder if there's other things I can just fix in my life to save myself. My lungs already feel a little better today after not drinking mold water yesterday. I hope the brain fog passes soon.

Maybe I have been somnambulistic lately. Before the brain fog that is. After all, my mornings are very stable. It's funny but things like working out and practicing guitar were originally things that did shake up my routines, but now it seems they're just sorta part of my life now.

Well, I should think about a couple small changes here and there. Never hurts to shift something around. And who knows what it might uncover.