More than 23 hours per day on average I spend in this same tiny apartment, feverishly slaving away at this same stupid desk.
A while back, I noted how I gave up quickly on using a razor to shave my face. I haven't done that since year 2004.
Seems fantastic has taken me so long to make another change.
18 years.
18 years.
Only a few weeks ago, I got out of the shower, as I do everyday, just before sitting back down here at this same stupid desk.
That one particular day, earlier this year, 18 years later, I stood at the closet, same as every day, to pull out a clean set of clothes again for another day of sitting here at this same stupid desk.
But no, I thought.
Why put on regular clothes today?
Has taken me 18 years to finally get it.
After 18 years, I finally got it. I don't have to put on clean, regular clothes.
There's no point.
I'm not going outside today. I go for three or four days at a time without even going outside, and even then, for less than 15 minutes. About every week or so, the walk to the grocery-store takes me less than an hour, there and back.
So, it's 18 years later. I can just pull out the same clean set of clothes that I will sleep in later tonight.
Had to take me 18 years to finally get it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/world-news/2022/04/02/TELEMMGLPICT000291498282
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/04/ukraine-crisis_bucha-bodies-05.jpg
by me, Kerry Burgess, posted by me, exccerpts: August 17, 2018 11:36 pm
Being an old man now, the idea of trying to survive in a world where no one else exists doesn't seem so appealing. For one reason, the windows. Walking around outside the empty windows of all the structures hold the promise of civilization.
From 9/3/1916 ( ) To 4/2/2022 ( Today, Saturday ) is 38562 days
38562 = 19281 + 19281
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/17/2018 ( ) is 19281 days
From 12/25/1876 ( ) To 10/24/1989 ( "The Stand" complete edition, by Stephen King ) is 41210 days
41210 = 20605 + 20605
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/2/2022 ( ) is 20605 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_1916
September 1916
From Wikipedia
September 3, 1916
The U.S. government passed the Adamson Act, named after U.S. Representative William C. Adamson, which established the eight-hour workday for rail workers. Although the practice existed earlier with Ford Motors, the legislation popularized the eight-hour day for other industries.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1928/windaus/facts/
The Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1928
Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus
Born: 25 December 1876, Berlin, Germany
Died: 9 June 1959, Göttingen, West Germany (now Germany)
Affiliation at the time of the award: Goettingen University, Göttingen, Germany
Prize motivation: "for the services rendered through his research into the constitution of the sterols and their connection with the vitamins."
Work
Cholesterol is an important component in the body's cells and plays a major role in several biochemical processes. During the 1920s Adolf Windaus researched the composition of cholesterol and closely related substances, sterols. He established the sterols' relationship with bile acids. Adolf Windaus also found that ergosterol, another sterol, had the ability to cure rickets, a disease characterized by skeletal weakness and caused by a deficiency of vitamin D. He was able to show that vitamin D was formed out of ergosterol under the influence of ultraviolet light
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 25
He saw a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn of a house across the street. He went to it, looked at the house it belonged to with its drawn shades (so much like the houses in his confused dreams), then went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although he knocked several times.
He went back to the bike. It was small, but not too small for him to ride, if he didn’t mind his knees whamming the handlebars. He would look ludicrous, of course, but he was not at all sure there was anyone left in Shoyo to see… and if there was, he didn’t think many of them would be in a laughing frame of mind.
He got on the bike and pedaled clumsily up Main Street, past the jail, then east on Route 63, toward where Joe Rackman had seen the soldiers masquerading as a road crew. If they were still there, and if they really were soldiers, Nick would get them to take care of Billy Warner and Mike Childress. If Billy was still alive, that was. If those men had quarantined Shoyo, then surely the sick of Shoyo were their responsibility.
It took him an hour to pedal out to the roadwork, the bike weaving crazily back and forth across the center line, his knees thumping the handlebars with monotonous regularity. But when he got there the soldiers, or road crew, or whatever they had been, were gone. There were a few smudgepots, one of them still flickering. There were two orange sawhorses. And the road had been torn up, although Nick judged it would still be passable, if you weren’t too choosy about the springs of your car.
Black flickering movement caught the tail of his eye, and at the same instant the wind stirred around a little, just a soft summer breath, but enough to bring a ripe and sickening odor of corruption to his nostrils. The black movement was a cloud of flies, constantly forming and re-forming itself. He walked the bike over to the ditch at the far side of the road. In it, next to a shiny new corrugated culvert pipe, were the bodies of four men. Their necks and swollen faces were black. Nick didn’t know if they were soldiers or not, and he didn’t go any closer. He told himself he would walk back to the bike, there was nothing here to be scared about, they were dead, and dead people couldn’t hurt you. He was running by the time he was twenty feet from the ditch, anyway, and he was in a panic as he rode back toward Shoyo. On the outskirts of town he hit a rock and crashed the bike. He went over the handlebars, bumped his head, and scraped his hands. He only hunkered there for a moment in the middle of the road, shivering all over.
For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner’s permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Let’s get them to Camden. We’ll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.
But his knocking and ringing were answered less than a dozen times. The door would open to the length of a latch-chain, a sick but hopeful face would look out, see Nick, and hope would die. The face would move back and forth in negation, and then the door would shut. If Nick could talk, he would have argued if they could still walk, they could drive. That if they took his prisoners to Camden, they could go themselves, and there would be a hospital. They would be made well. But he couldn’t speak.
Some asked if he had seen Dr. Soames. One man, in a delirious rage, threw the door of his small ranch-house wide open, staggered out on the porch dressed only in his underpants, and tried to grab Nick. He said he was going to do “what I should have done to you back in Houston.” He seemed to think Nick was someone named Jenner. He lurched back and forth along the porch after Nick like a zombie in a third-rate horror picture. His crotch had swelled terribly; his underpants looked as if someone had stuffed a honeydew melon into them. At last he crashed to the porch and Nick watched him from the lawn below, his heart thumping rapidly. The man shook his fist weakly, then crawled back inside, not bothering to shut the door.
But most of the houses were only silent and cryptic, and at last he could do no more. That dream-sense of ominousness was creeping up on him and it became impossible to dismiss the idea that he was knocking on the doors of tombs, knocking to wake the dead, and that sooner or later the corpses might begin to answer. It didn’t help much to tell himself that most of the houses were empty, their occupants already fled
- posted by me, Kerry Burgess 5:33 PM Pacific-time USA Saturday 04/02/2022
