Motus Mentis

I’ve been letting things go to hell around here the past few weeks — there’s been little more than the odd news item or random piece of Internet flotsam — and I do hope things will be getting back to normal soon.

Unfortunately, not being a man of independent means, I depend for my solvency upon gainful employment, which in my case (having extricated myself a few years ago from the smoking wreckage of the recording industry) involves writing and maintaining software for an international corporation of medium size. Software of the sort that I work on is generally released according to an elaborate and detailed schedule, and its release involves carefully planned cycles of development and testing. Scores of people are involved, and the whole thing is managed by the vast and cumbrous apparatus of corporate administration. If any part of this interlocking mechanism fails to perform as expected, the entire machine begins to creak and shudder — so one likes to avoid being the malfunctioning component. This means that one sometimes has to make enormous efforts to deliver one’s piece of the work on time, and that’s what has occupied me, for nearly every waking hour, over the past fortnight or so; I’ve been working each day until the wee hours, and through the weekends as well.

Sitting in a fluorescently lit cubicle writing program code for fourteen hours a day is a particularly unnatural occupation. While the body rots motionless in a chair, with the eyes locked on a glowing screen at a fixed distance, the mind, constantly parsing patterns and devising algorithms, becomes after a while rather like a clenched fist. Add to that a steady diet of caffeine and take-out food, and the increasing stress of an impending and unmeetable deadline, and one can feel oneself aging, and one’s vigor ebbing away. I have always been good at this sort of thing — mixing records can be very much like this also, and I have always had plenty of what is known in the chess world as “sitzfleisch” — but what one can manage easily enough in one’s twenties and thirties becomes, I am finding to my dismay, much harder to sustain when one is getting into the middle of one’s fifties. It is hard enough to keep at it when things are going well, and the work is proceeding productively — but writing solid C++ code is a tricky business, and one often finds oneself confronted with baffling failures, the analysis and remediation of which can take a long time, and which can be extraordinarily dispiriting when one is already deeply exhausted.

One effect of all this is that there is almost no brainpower left for anything else — for reading, answering mail, following and analyzing the news, keeping up with interesting threads at other websites, and so on — and the creative effort required for daily blogging (even at the mediocre level you are accustomed to finding in these pages) simply becomes more than one can manage.

I do realize, of course, that it hardly deprives anyone of oxygen when waka waka waka goes all feeble now and then, but I know also that there are those who drop by regularly, for whatever reason, and I just want to apologize for the shoddy service.