Four days into my Ohio visit, four left. Morale is really low. Between listening to my stepdad cough his lungs out every 10 minutes and bracing myself to visit my cancer-stricken stepbrother on Monday—for his birthday, forcrissake—the sense of poignance and doom, as my family dwindles away from me, is really getting to me.

Got way delayed on work this day because the wifi is terrible and it's impossible to find a place to sit and focus. Worked three hours already and have another 6-7 hours left before I can quit for the week.

Not sure exactly what I'm returning to. When I went back to Seattle from a long trip, back in the day, it felt like there was something social and uplifting and weird waiting for me. I love Peg a lot, but I feel like all I've got coming besides her is more loneliness and more of our usual domestic routine. It's cozy, but that's not gonna be enough to get me through these years.

Haven't gotten to work on Parallax in the slightest.

Don't even know what I'm fighting for anymore. State of the world, well, any barrier against it I had built up just got washed away somewhere between Barry, the flu, and Ohio.

I just wish there were an honorable way to give up, and stop having to fight more and more for less and less. The "shiny things" that I used to build my life around—or the illusion that they'd come around someday instead of just being empty, promised bait—feel so far away, just gone forever.

If I really, truly had any say in how I would spend the rest of my life... *sigh* I want donuts. I want a sack of 200—300 gourmet donuts and nobody who's gonna be hurt by the consequences of me eating them all in one sitting.

That's about it, really. Everything else I dream about is the sort of self-indulgent quick-fix justice that's morally repugnant to most of you, over in a day along with any chance of a normal life, and would only leave some pundit clicking their tongue about how violence is all Those Evil Leftists have got.