January 25th, 2026. Big Snew.

We stayed up till the snow came down this morning. And / or to watch Top Secret! You choose the narrative.

Taking the morning to shovel and then transfer a batch of Journal entries. 148 or so out of 2988. If I had a progress bar it'd be at 4%....

Flanneled up and armoured.

Stepping out on to the porch - that delicious first soft CRUNCH into the snow. I Live for that sound. We watch videos of people walking in the snow so I can listen to it. Here in the Lair I'm surrounded by the ice tink trickle of more ice coming down from the skies and part of me wants to go out but most of me is done for right now. We'd count as dug out if there was any place to dig out to, but the plows probably won't hit our neighbourhood for days yet.

Shame. Though there wasn't a space for me last night, NOW there's a space RIGHT in front of the house.

Meanwhile, in between shoveling and reading and practicing I still find time to think too much.

Time to go on a snalk. Alone tonight. It's actually the hardest walking in rob memory as the snow's heavily crusted... walking in the SNOW means collapsing through with every step and then pulling your foot almost vertically back up - no robbish foot dragging here. And then trying to walk in the tire tracks, apparently I don't walk in a straight line anymore and my feet are constantly glancing off the edges of the icy trenches. I walk around the block and am DONE.

Specifically, I've been thinking there’s simply no purpose in raging against something that doesn’t know it’s being raged against. Raging against the machine makes sense as a metaphor, but until there’s a feeling AI inside my computer there’s no mileage in being angry at it. Anger, sadness, rage – it should be purposeful. Directed.

You can function without these biological fight / flight chemical responses, and as the world gets worse around us, we NEED to. A cousin of mine recently told me how he “doesn’t need numbers to know some things are bad” – and yet without numbers, statistics, and facts, we simply can’t tell the difference between something that feels bad and something that IS bad. And so you don’t know if rage is going to help.

Listening to the news, ingesting the horrors and indignities being rained down upon Minnesota, I’m almost MORE worried about a tiny item that crossed my desk – Nick Shirley, the YouTube influencer that seems to have inspired the assault on Minnesota by making claims that daycare centers are misusing federal funds, was kicked out of a Baltimore Narcotics Anonymous meeting a couple of days ago. I’m sure he’s working on a Special Expose of OUR city and we could be under the same assault soon.

And the biggest horror of it all? It sure makes it feel, that with the end of America as we know it, nothing I’ve ever done really mattered.

Growing up, my dad was dead set against putting up Christmas lights. It was too much effort for something that was only going to be there for a month and no-one else on the block did it and etc etc. It took FOREVER but early in December I froze my ass and hands off sitting on the porch, untangling tangled lights and weaving them around our porch railings. And yes, it was too much effort for something that was only going to be there for a month, which is why they're staying there FOREVER. Dad would've agreed. Eventually.