BB Grey–musings

ramblings in a day in the life…from journals (if you’re into that sorta thing)

February 24–26

It’s Tuesday, or Taco Tuesday in Sierra Madre, but I’m fasting so that may not happen today.

Lent is the season where Jesus went into the desert and fasted for forty days. No eating. Dang, that’s a while — and then to top it off, the devil tempts him with a roast beef sandwich. Rough.

So I thought about it and decided to fast. I know that’s not exactly how it’s done. You’re not supposed to jump on the bathroom scale in the morning and say, well… that’s it, I’m fasting for Lent starting today. You’re supposed to enter a fast with prayer, with something on your heart that you’re seeking guidance or reprieve from. I don’t know all the particulars, but it works something like that. I just started yesterday morning and did okay until four or five in the evening.

Come five o’clock, I’m usually ready to eat. Up to that point the entire day is relatively easy, especially if I’m busy. But if I find myself behind a computer with a refrigerator a few feet away, that becomes more difficult. The weather hasn’t been great either — otherwise a walk or a run helps, and then any idea of eating vanishes as my body considers the more immediate needs of life, primarily air. So I pushed past six, knowing I only had two more hours until bed. I don’t eat in bed, so that’s an easy one. I packed up for the night and made it.

Now it’s 5:44 AM and I’m working on my second cup of coffee, so eating doesn’t really bother me.

I know, I know — the faster-haters will say that kind of defeats the whole purpose. And they’re right: when you fast, you’re not just trying to make it to the next minute. You’re supposed to give up something — food — for something else. Time with God. Meditation. Prayer. Each time a hunger pang hits, as Luther put it, another soul springs from purgatory to heaven, or something like that.

But hey — since Sunday night I’m going on 36 hours without eating. By five or six today that’ll be 48, and then I’ll decide: add another 12 easy hours and go for a three-dayer, or eat.

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Yesterday started slow. Mom was scheduled for a tooth extraction in the middle of the day — which meant the day was essentially gone. Prepping in the morning, then the appointment, then winding down after. I was looking for things to do, trying to generate some cash flow. Without anything glaring at me except doing taxes — which I’d rather pull my own teeth than deal with — there was very little busy work. And I wasn’t going to start any job that required physical labor or what I call “in the field” work.

Then I wrote a contract and got some bites. (‘Fast’-talk.) Put out two little fires, things started gelling. A decent day. There was the promise of potential work that petered out by the end of the day, but there’s always today.

I’m thinking of working this morning from about nine to noon, then heading down the hill to thaw out a bit, pick up a saw, and do a walk with Pepper. That puts me back around six — only two more hours to bedtime. Who knows, maybe day three is on the horizon after all.

I wrote a little yesterday. Nothing profound, but decent enough to post — password protected. Something up, just not good enough to share.

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Today the writing muses aren’t particularly encouraging me. It’s almost six, and the market took another hit yesterday. I think there should be a small rebound today. The whole tariff situation and Trump being slapped on the wrist by SCOTUS was working through the system, and then there’s the ongoing AI scare.

We were all gung-ho about AI — how great it was, how we were spending money calling it the next internet, all that hype around chips, data centers, energy, construction, on and on. Then last month it hit us: wait — what? This AI thing is so capable that maybe we aren’t going to have jobs? White collar jobs, entry-level positions — gone. Coders, especially — that was the real scare when Claude could write code at a level that made people nervous.

Which is kind of a weird moment to be sitting here, because I’m going to hand this very piece off to the LLMs to proof and polish. Let the machines do the finish work. I’m just the framer.

Anyway, the market tanked because people started asking: what work is going to be left?

Well, hurray for me — I’m a blue collar worker. My job is safe, at least for now. Until Musk makes super robots that plunge toilets and repair drywall (because Bill got mad at Susie and put his fist through it), my work comes with enough regularity, enough steps, enough variables around location and resources, that I’m pretty much secure for another ten years. By then I’ll be dead or retired, so hey — I made one right decision in my life going from white collar, working-for-the-man to self-employed blue collar stiff.

And the silver lining doesn’t end there. During COVID, when everyone else was lounging inside collecting government checks, my work was considered essential. No break for me. And the free check? Never got it — but when tax time came around I was docked as if I had. Too poor to argue, too tired to care. I chalked it up as experience.

But I was getting to the point: Musk is rolling out this new cost-of-living thing via Bitcoin for all the people about to be laid off. Great. It’ll be like COVID all over again — I’ll be working while everyone else collects the free-bees.

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So here we are. A thousand words in, fasting, fast-talking, and handing it off to the hyperscalers to finish the job — the ones that make jobs, then take them away. Like this writing. Like writers.