You are worried sick about someone you love, and for whom you are doing all you can, including in some cases putting your own life on indefinite hold; on the other side, you inevitably find coldness.

To be clear, I am acutely aware that It couldn’t be any other way, because you’re literally one of thousands and at some point doctors and nurses have to protect themselves from becoming too emotionally invested. I’ve seen that with vets as well: younger vets will play with pets, older vets tend to go straight to business. Having had pets for a long time, I’ve witnessed once fresh vets become progressively hardened. They were always great, and never disrespectful; but exhaustion is real.

So seeing that with human doctors doesn’t surprise me, rationally. When my cousin passed away, a doctor friend who happened to care for him during his last few days, together with his doctor wife, called me to give me his condolences. I could definitely sense the moment he switched from old friend to professional doctor, going from being genuinely sorry to providing detailed and heartbreaking details in a somewhat detached tone.

On a larger scale, this detachment becomes disconnection. Doctors refer you to one another, but don’t really talk to one another; they only communicate through reports you carry around. I’m typing a draft of this at the hospital, waiting in the comletion of an exam whose resultis terrifying me to no end, and everyone in this waiting room has sheets of papers, envelopes, or even full cases. At least, on a small scale, these things are getting digitized: as long as you’re within the same hospital, doctors can access your data from past appointments, though it’s often quicker just to bring them printed paperwork.

So when it happens that sometimes a doctor remembers something minor, such as my joke about doing PET scans with bananas because they’re minimally radioactive, it frankly warms your heart. At the same time, expressing dread for an exam’s results, is generally met with a shrug: what can they do, after all? They can’t reassure you. They have to wait, just like you do. The difference is that you carry the weight of worry, and the devastating results of a bad result.

This ties in with the loneliness that one feels when these diagnoses arrive, and all the treatments and followups, and especially the ups and downs, that they entail. People whom you know and who love you are genuinely sorry, but ultimately it’s your problem. The worst happens at funerals: people come to the service, they may cry, but then they go back to their usual life, maybe just a little sadder. You don’t; you have to deal with the cataclysmic change that death brings. And what they say about the second year being the worst is true: the first anniversary may still be memorable for some, but after that it’s a terrible day only for you and those who were in the blast radious; the others may not even remember.

Again, this is not a complaint. It’s just taking stock of how it is. I have been on both sides of the barricades, the one who had to deal with death directly (more than once) and the one who learned about it about others; the one who provides care for an ailing parent, and the one who saw that happens to others.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this. I suppose I just wanted to take it off my chest, after all that’s the whole point of writing. Maybe, if I had to ask something of others, is to be patient when someone they know is dealing with something terrible. It’s exhausting, for there is no break and no victory.

I was at Piliggi’s house, there was some party going on; I can’t recall if it was his birthday or what else, maybe it was something about his first communion. A few classmates and I were downstairs, in the internal courtyard of the apartment complex where he lived, possibly passing a football or possibly planning to take over the world, as ten-year-old kids do.

I remember that Piliggi called us from his balcony:
– Hey! Senna died!
– What are you talking about, Pier!
– No, really!
– Yeah sure, we believe you
– Just come upstairs

And Senna had indeed just died. We weren’t that much into car racing, nor we really understood much about it; after all we were just kids. But it was that moment in history where you’d always hear about Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, and a certain Michael Schumacher guy who was starting to make the news.

I remember I was deeply shaken by the news. It felt impossible: how can someone like Ayrton Senna die? In a sense, I think that that was the first time I had to deal with the transition between life and death of someone whom I knew, albeit indirectly.

I forgot pretty much everything else about that afternoon: I only recall that conversation between the balcony and the courtyard, the feeling of dismay at the watershed between before and after, and the Game Gear that someone had given Piliggi: I always wanted one myself, but I knew that from that point forward in my mind I’d have always linked the TV Tuner attachment to Senna.

I do wonder if anyone ever reads this, or even remembers that this blog exists, and by “anyone” I mean humans; of course bots crawl around here, especially with all the AI scraping going on.

So, as I face and come to terms with my own mortality, if anything because I have seen death touch and take so many people whom I loved, I figured I would post again.

As always, I am not going to be posting regularly. I honestly don’t have the luxury of being able to commit to a schedule, even if I wanted to; and that’s not counting the fact that, and I cannot stress this enough, I do simply not want to commit to a schedule. It would make this yet another chore, and I have enough of those to deal with on a daily basis.

That said, I do hope to find the time to post every now and then, if anything just to have a place to keep track of and offload the things that go through my mind. With all that has happened and is happening around me, I have caught myself thinking about how sad it is that, once you’re gone, everything that you thought about, or knew, or had an opinion on, just disappears into nowhere. In a way, the reason I want to start writing again and posting things is not necessarily to have an outlet, and for sure I have no reason to believe that anything that goes on in my mind is interesting to anyone else; but I suppose that it is a relief to know that my thoughts are not just in my head anymore, and that should anything happen to me, these ideas remain out there. An attempt at a legacy, I suppose.

Obviously, there is no concept of permanence on the Internet, and as soon as my credit card lapses this server will also disappear. Yet this is certainly better than nothing, and that alone is enough to bring me a grain of peace.

I don’t know if posting here is going to placate the looming feeling of impending personal doom, nor do I know whether anyone is ever going to peek at this every now and then, just to see if anything new has showed up. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter: I always wrote because I enjoyed the process, not necessarily for acquiring an audience.

Yet, if you are reading this, and you used to know me from whatever there was before, feel free to reach out to me and let us reconnect. I don’t have much time to dabble in social media or things of the sort, or whatever is left of that anymore now that there’s AI slop everywhere, but I do enjoy and nice chat, and I miss a lot of people.

So, I suppose, this is my way of saying “hello” again.

There is a joke that says: adulthood is thinking “next week will be less busy” until you die. It’s funny because it’s true — but it’s also quite sad. And it’s not only about work, because life gets in the way in many other ways.

I’m not going to go into details, but the last few months have been a rollercoaster as a close family member has been dealing with a medical situation. It involved a lot of driving, seeing multiple doctors, a one-week stay away from home while a complicated surgery was performed; and amidst all that, all the practicalities of day-to-day life with the constant background of the pain and issues that comes from them. I even stopped posting on social media, something that (perhaps not surprisingly, but that’s another story) most people didn’t even notice.

At every step along the way, I kept telling myself: I’ll start writing again when this next milestone is reached and I can breathe. Yet no milestone ever coincided with being done, quite the opposite. Suffice it to say that the surgery solved one problem, but opened up a whole new Pandora’s box. We’re now looking at weeks, or likely months, of more appointments with doctors, therapies, and whatnot. And of course, other things in life don’t stop. I still have to work, buy groceries, walk the dog, and handle everything else as it comes along.

As I bookmarked the millionth webpage I will never have time to properly read through, I realized one thing that should have been obvious all along: the perfect conditions may just never come together. Let’s be realistic: all these family issues aside, it’s extremely unlikely that every single piece of the puzzle of life will fall into place at the same time. And even if it did, it probably wouldn’t last long enough for me to be able to write all I have in my mind, or take all the photos I have planned, or whatever it is that I eventually want to do.

It seems clear in hindsight, even trivial. But it’s one of those things that’s easy to lose track of. Chalk it up to my being a perfectionist, maybe, or to an innate (and pointless) sense of guilt whenever I do something I enjoy. Even then, though, I know that I’m not ignoring what ought to be done for others, nor am I putting pleasure before duty. So if I do enjoy myself in a rare moment of downtime, where’s the harm? Besides, who knows how things will be in the future? We tell ourselves that next week will be less busy, but it never is. By extension, I may only have a little time for myself now, but at least I do have that little time. Why postpone enjoyable things indefinitely, if it doesn’t harm anyone and doesn’t distract me from what I’m supposed to be doing?

Furthermore, and I’m perfectly aware that this is a little morbid and fatalistic but bear with me here, who knows what the future will bring. These last few months have really gotten me thinking about how little time we have in general. It’s another cliché, of course it is. But the thing about clichés is that they are true, and sometimes you need to figure them out for yourself.

I’ve always been one who saves up, be it money in the bank, ammo in a video game, or projects to work on. Saving up, at every turn, because it’s better to have it for later if you don’t need it now. It’s a good approach and it’s served me well in times of emergency. But I’ve also denied myself many things and experiences in the name of “this is not the right time”. Yet, how do I know when the right time is? There’s no discrete amount of rightness, rather an infinite spectrum. And you get used to it, so it’s harder and harder to let go and loosen up.

I sometimes joke that “at any rate I have to die” when I do something somewhat hedonistic, whether that’s eating another chocolate croissant or buying a drone. It’s a joke, but lately I’ve been giving it some serious thought. I don’t mean this to be creepy, but then again it’s my stream of consciousness, so who cares? The point is: it’s exactly like that, at any rate I have to die. Again, it’s a cliché, but it’s a whole different experience when you reach that conclusion independently, instead of just reading it on a motivational poster.

I do have a finite number of days left in my life. I did start dying the moment I was born. Those are facts, and they apply to everyone, like it or not. Now I do not dwell in the delusion that I’ll accomplish something great that will change the course of humanity, nor that my own life is special to others in any way. But it is true that I only have so many moments to do something I enjoy, or something good, ideally both. It’s not even a matter of “I just wanna live while I’m alive” (Bon Jovi), because “there [are] worse things than dying” (Eric Bogle).

I’ve wasted many useful moments so far, and have no doubt, I will be wasting many more. Dealing for many years with certain things I don’t want to talk about is part of the reason, and I’m working on that. But my congenital sense of guilt? Well, I’m working on getting rid of it entirely. I may not be popular with others, and that’s fine. I just need to be popular with myself. I’m the one who’s always with myself (Max Pezzali), and I’m the one who needs to take care of myself. That means also taking the time to do something for myself, whether it’s writing, or taking photos, or recording a podcast. Even if time is limited, even if I can’t do it as well as I wish. A little is a slightly better than nothing, better than waiting for the perfect time, and much better than regretting the wait.

I look back at the things I was doing a few years ago, and I feel like I slowly lost track of those creative endeavors. Life got in the way, that’s for sure, but I also progressively distanced myself from them, as if growing up — or perhaps growing old — meant sacrificing myself in the name of some greater good. “I’ll do them when things get better” is a honest-to-god approach, but it also ultimately leads to nothing. And I can’t afford to lose myself even more.

I want to write, take pictures, record podcasts, try painting, make a movie, hack machines, create things. Not to be popular or famous, or god forbid rich; rather, just because I enjoy doing those things. And that’s all the reason I need, really, especially as I become more and more aware that time may be infinite in the universe, but is extremely scarce for a person.

So here’s the plan. I’m making no commitments, because life can and will get in the way. I’m not even giving myself a tentative schedule. But I’ll try to at least start writing more often, and hopefully post whatever I write on here. They may my thoughts and streams of consciousness, rather than “articles” or something useful. They may be rants. They may be politically incorrect and extremely biased. I don’t know and, to be completely honest, I don’t even care. Nor do I care whether one or a million people will read them, or even nobody. That’s not the reason I’m doing it. I also want to start picking up my photography again and doing a million other things I’ve put on hold until now, but that’s a whole different story.

And if the end result is not perfect, then who cares? I’ll try again and fail better: “I know the streets are cruel, but I’ll enjoy the ride today.” (Dream Theater)