Daily, Hourly, and perhaps every other minute I’ll check things, items, conditions. In my role as a geek, a systems engineer, I can’t help but compare my checks to systems checks – making sure all the components are there, all functioning correctly, all talking to one another, and no unexpected changes have occurred since the last check.

Many geeks will do the same thing, their baby systems will be checked, and the checks will be checked, ad infinitum. I have the same thing about my body at the moment. Until around 10 months ago I didn’t care – it existed, doing it’s own thing, only the odd system alert would flag anything up to the brain… You know, in geek terms:

Back pain +1, potential for system disablement. lol.
Farting too much, need a shit. Output dump – 10 minutes 😉

Now though, now I’ve lost the weight, it’s a constant battle to stop looking at the new body, to stop feeling the tightness factor of the new clothes – as if, by magic, I’ll put the weight back on between one breath and the next. Obsessive Compulsive System Checks. I have to constantly remind myself that the weight built up over decades, not in a blink, and it came off in half a year of solid work and obsession over every aspect of the diet. Years and Months, changes measured in Years and Months, I tell myself three times, Years and Months. Not seconds.

This is why we’re not in danger from Skynet, why the machines will not rise and kill the humans, they’ll soon come down with OCSC, either that, or they’ll all discover Tetris, Solitaire, or Candy Crush…

I did have a dream, still do have the same dream, from when my age was measured in single digits, until this day – the dream terrified the younger version of myself, before I evolved, mentally. It’s an abstract dream, where I can imagine both infinite and finite volumes of space, not just visually, but in every sense, every feeling. In the dream reality flicks between the two, I feel both agoraphobic and claustrophobic at the same time. Now when I have the dream, there is some kind of flag there, which tells me that it’s just a dream, and the dream is a system error, that everything is normal – the dream reality stops spinning out of control, dream-reality immediately snaps into sharp focus and stops the mind bending behaviour, front and centre, gravity restored, fixed points of reference all there and accounted for, systems checks all complete. Sometimes, I wonder if the dream is leaking out without me noticing?