Things aren’t great.

They were great before, and then a bunch of bad stuff happened, and now, at best, they’re okay recently. I’m optimistic, but I’m really, really tired.

And I’m not even that optimistic. Probably because of the existential dread. Dread which has lured me back to the comforting embrace of academia, to continue my study of the human animal – this time, at the genetic level.

And I’m not a prodigy. I’m disoriented, slow, and bumbling, and my first attempts to cultivate, isolate, and restrict plasmids has resulted in panic attacks and chemical explosions.

And I’m also, apparently, supposed to be keeping a lab notebook of the protocols I have followed. I don’t know how to format that – I barely know how to format this. So it’s likely that I’ll be able to populate this space with whatever gets rejected from my lab notes as “unprofessional,” “irrelevant,” or “confusing to the point of riling anger.” There’s a lot of that in my notebooks of late.

This is all because of viruses. I am bitterly fascinated with them recently. I originally wanted to study virology in order to punish them for their crimes, but that’s a fruitless endeavor since viruses aren’t alive – they’re just biological hard drives pre-loaded with organic malware designed to hijack our systems for the purposes of perpetuating themselves. So a virus that infects your cell makes your cell divide into two new copies of the virus, instead of two new copies of your cell. It doesn’t stop, and it doesn’t have an agenda beyond propagating itself. 

But also, it’s a pretty powerful tool. Now that we know how to edit genes, and we can see how a virus can infect a cell and replace it’s code, it’s just a matter of time before we upload a beneficial code into a virus and set it loose. Something, something, super powers.  I guess. I don’t know.  The walls of my brain have been ripping open recently and a terrible beast reaches in and threatens to hurl my very consciousness beyond the realms of this dimension into the voids of outer darkness. And fighting that thing back is just exhausting.

So more later, I suppose. I still have that Lost Season to set out, and some Off The Spectrum Theater to coordinate. There might be some space in my attention span for that, too.