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WARNING: The following may contain “sacrilege”. Proceed with caution.

Well, I would say “Thank God it’s Friday”, but I am working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, and so it’s not the last day of the work week, which is what people are generally celebrating when they say, “Thank God it’s Friday”.

I suppose that tomorrow I could say, “Thank God it’s Saturday” as a replacement expression.  It’s a bit more cumbersome, but at least it would be sort of appropriate, since in Judaism, Saturday is Shabbat.  Then again, if one is an observant Jew, one does not work on Saturday.  Well, I guess if one is a rabbi or a cantor technically one works on Saturday, but that’s a whole nother* thing.

As for the thanking of any deity for the fact of it being Friday (or any other day), it seems gratuitous, because the days of the week and how we order them and what we do on specific ones seems very much a purely human convention.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that a god would arrange specifically, and certainly not for individual people.  After all, when it’s Friday for me, it’s Friday for everyone else, barring those far enough away for the clock to roll over and such.

Of course, I suppose, if there really were a God, and if that God were, as is generally described in the Abrahamic religions, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then God would be literally responsible for everything, including every action and choice that any and all humans ever make.  So, it wouldn’t be absurd in that case to thank God for the fact of Friday, but it would also be reasonable to say, “Screw God, it’s Monday”.

If God can be given credit for all good things, then God must bear the blame for all bad things.  There is no other logical possibility as far as I can see.

I am open to being convinced otherwise, of course, but please spare me any trite and transparently nonsensical excuses like the whole “free will” thing or blaming Satan (or some other, similar entity) for the bad stuff.  If people have free will‒a fairly nonsensical notion in and of itself, at least as far as the so-called libertarian** free will as imagined by some in the Abrahamic faiths goes‒then God is not omnipotent, and cannot really even be omniscient.

As for the whole “blaming Satan” thing, well, did God not create Satan?  Who is to blame if Satan is faulty?  Likewise, who is to blame if humans are faulty?  If they were made by an omnipotent and omniscient being, along with everything else in the universe, then that being is the only one that can possibly be held ultimately responsible.

Of course, one could claim that Satan (or Ahriman or whoever) was not created by God, but came into existence separately.  That at least is more logically consistent (and somewhat more interesting) than the alternative, but it also inescapably implies that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient (and it raises questions about the omnipresence thing as well, for where was such a God when its antagonist came into being?).

Of course, it’s all pretty much nonsense, though some of it can be entertaining.  We could replace “God” with Eru/Iluvatar and “Satan” with Morgoth and lose nothing from the above discussion.  Actually, the latter two are slightly more honest, for in the very first chapter of The Silmarillion, Iluvatar plainly and openly says that Melkor (aka Morgoth) can do nothing that does not have its uttermost source in Him (Eru/Iluvatar).  Neither can anyone else.  But of course, Tolkien was smarter, or at least better educated, than the men who wrote the Bible and other similar religious works.

An interesting (to me) aside:  the name Lucifer (“light-bearer”) referred initially to the morning star, and is referenced only thus in the “old testament”, though apparently there was some snark involved, since it was a taunt toward the King of Babylon, or so I am led to understand.  But of course, the morning star is the same astronomical body as the evening star (Eärendil in Tolkien’s world), both of which are actually the planet Venus, just at different times in its relative orbit.

Also interesting is the fact that Venus, supposedly representing the Goddess of Love, is the most hellish place in the solar system, with crushing surface pressure, searing heat, suffocating carbon dioxide atmosphere, and even sulfuric acid rain.  Maybe that’s appropriate for the Goddess of Love; love can be corrosive and crushing and searing and even suffocating a lot of the time.

It is funny that the same planet can have come to represent evil (Lucifer) and great good (Eärendil) depending on the story, and also that it can represent love while being the most hellish (though not the deadliest) planet in the solar system.  I don’t think the dichotomy or contradiction or whatever you want to call it has any deep meaning about the nature of the cosmos, or even the solar system, but it does say something about the nature of humans and their myths.

Anyway, if I haven’t irreparably offended you with the preceding, I hope you’ll look forward to my post for tomorrow, which I will be writing, exclusis improvisis.  It’s not as though you can look back to it, at least not today.

*I wonder if “a whole nother” counts as tmesis, the insertion of a word in the middle of another in order to add emphasis, e.g., abso-friggin-lutely.

**Not to be confused with the political ideology of Libertarianism.

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Here is my threatened audio post

You’re gonna love it!  Or not.  One of those things.  That’s logic for you.

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Blog post after being out sick

I’m sorry about yesterday, everyone*.  I had some kind of stomach bug or had eaten something that was a bit off, something like that, and I stayed out of work, so I didn’t write a post.  Anyway, it was the sort of thing associated with nausea and vomiting, not really with much “lower GI” trouble, thankfully, but now it’s mostly worked its way out.  Certainly, I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up any more, at least not imminently.

It would be nice to be able to say confidently that I don’t think I will ever throw up again in my life‒if I could say so with good reasons‒but I don’t think it’s very likely that I’ll be able to say that honestly.

I need to stop “talking” about this, because it’s making me feel queasy again.

Anyway, I’m going to the office today, because I need to do payroll, and there will also be a bunch of crap on which I will need to catch up from yesterday.  That’s part of the reason I hate staying at the house from work even when I don’t feel well.  There’s always so much catch-up work after even one missed day.  And catch-up is too sweet and acidic for someone who has an icky tummy (ha ha).

I’m really not doing well, overall, in case you haven’t been able to tell, or in case you’re just new here, which is not impossible.  In my ongoing quest to try to correct some of this, I recently began encountering videos and some articles about low-dose lithium‒which, in non-low doses is used to treat bipolar disorder among other things**, as you may already know‒being beneficial for things like depression and even for preventing or curtailing certain forms of dementia (and, potentially, slowing aging, though that seems more speculative).

You can’t get the medical form of lithium without a prescription, which is probably good, since in those strong doses it can have significant toxicity, and people using it need to be monitored.  But there are other forms that one can get as supplements, and I ordered some recently (from a supposedly reputable brand).  They arrived yesterday evening, so I took one dose before bed‒thankfully they don’t appear to be irritating to my stomach‒and then one this morning.

It’s no big surprise that lithium is available in many forms.  It is the third most abundant element in the universe, having been created (in comparatively tiny amounts) when hydrogen and helium*** were made, in the aftermath of the Big Bang (technically we are in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and we could even say that we are in the ongoing process of the Big Bang).

But the lithium atom (the ion, really) is the active part in those various available compounds.  It is chemically quite similar to sodium and potassium (having that one electron in its outer shell, like they have) which are ubiquitous and essential electrolytes for numerous bodily processes.  Like them, in elemental form, lithium is a soft, light metal (indeed, the lightest metal), and like them it is highly reactive.

Anyway, enough of the chemistry trivia.  The point here is that I am trying to use it to treat my chronic dysthymia/depression if I can, which has been a difficult and long task at which I have been far from successful.

Probably part of that, or maybe even all of it, is related to my ASD, and so it may not be amenable to the same kinds of treatments that often work for others, and can be quite intractable by ordinary means, since the root problem is very different.  I don’t know how often I’ve had severe depressive episodes in the past in which it’s actually been autistic burnout or shutdown or related stuff.

There is growing data that things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which has relatively good results for neurotypical sufferers of depression, may actually be counterproductive in those with autism.  Autistic people tend already to analyze their thoughts, often too much, and to be disconnected from their feelings, though they have them and they can be overwhelming.  Analyzing it all just seems to increase that disconnect.

So, yeah, I’ve had very limited benefit from therapy, and similarly limited response to various kinds of antidepressants.  But maybe lithium will help.  I guess I will find out.

I would really like to try therapeutic psilocybin therapy, because based on the state of the science as I understand it so far, it works via entirely different mechanisms involving the “default mode network”, a series of brain areas/modules that are associated with self reference and the like.  But there is no legal use of psilocybin in Florida except in clinical studies.  (Thank you, Tricky Dick et al; may you and your ilk rot in Hell for as long a consecutive time as the length of misery to which you’ve contributed in so many others.)

The only places psilocybin therapy is legal in the US include Oregon (a very long way from me) and, ironically, DC.  So I don’t see how I would be able to avail myself of it in the current state of things.  And my brain is not my friend, so I am very leery of using psychedelics without supervision.

But I have to do something, or I’m pretty sure that pretty soon I am going to kill myself.  There is very little that holds me here day to day, and the very kind and good people who remain in my life are people I feel‒indeed, I am all but convinced‒would be at least as well off without me around, and probably better.

Have a good day, though.

*However many that may be.  It’s probably not a huge number.  Then again “everyone” can refer even to one person, so I guess it’s a tolerable pronoun, even if it might be slightly misleading in its usual connotations.

**It’s also pretty good for rechargeable batteries, and when added in the right proportions to deuterium/tritium can enhance the yield of thermonuclear weapons, because neutron capture leads to it decaying into tritium and…something else, another fusion product or some such; I need to review the specifics.  It’s never been my primary field of interest.

***Most helium currently on Earth is not helium from that early “elementogenesis” or whatever the official term is.  Rather, it is the product of radioactive decay of heavy elements, which often produces “alpha particles” which are just helium nuclei‒two protons and two neutrons‒and which can pretty readily grab electrons from the world about them and turn them into atoms.  This is why‒so I understand‒helium gas pockets are often found near concentrations of uranium ore and the like.

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Monday, Thursday, Doomsday, Workday, let’s call the whole thing off

It’s Monday, but for some unclear reason, I felt the strong urge to write that today was Thursday when I was titling this file to be saved.  It took a moment of concentration to correct that urge.

Probably it goes back to the long stretch of time when I did my blog posting only on Thursdays, because I worked on my fiction every other workday.  That paid off, in a sense, because I did write quite a lot of fiction in that time.  Though, to be clear, it did not pay off in any material sense; I’ve spent more by far on copies of my books to give away to coworkers and such than I am likely ever to make back.

It was an awful lot of work for things that, as far as I know, only two other people have actually read at all.  My music has done better, honestly, though not in the sense of bringing in any income.  But at least some people have listened to it, my originals as well as my covers.  I guess songs are quicker and easier to consume than novels or even short stories (especially my short stories).

So, yeah, even though it’s been years since I was following that Thursday blogging practice, the etchings of that habit are still not completely effaced from my brain.  This is the way of habits, as I think I mentioned not too long ago.

Speaking of music, by the way, I want to share a really cool bit of music that came up in my YouTube feed, and which I think deserves a listen (and a like and a share if you can) from all of you.  It’s very good, as is the artist’s other work.

YouTube is basically all I did this weekend.  I did not read nor write, nor did I play any music (either on a stream or from a recording or on guitar or keyboard or cello).  I haven’t done any of those things in several weeks, barring a few one-time exceptions.  I mean, I went for walks on Saturday and Sunday, though I was careful not to go too far, and I used sunscreen this time.  This was because I had a few errands to run; it was too hot and humid to walk for fun.

But, yeah, I watched videos and vegged out rather pathetically pretty much the entire weekend.  I mostly watched various reactors reacting to either Backrooms or Fantastic Four First Steps.  Meaning, I watched multiple different people and groups of people reacting to each movie, more or less at random.

It’s almost like watching a movie with someone, though not quite*.  Movies are a way of socializing for me; they are one of the few ways I can connect with people.  TV shows are similar.  I don’t really like to watch things by myself.  I do it sometimes, of course, and I even went to see a movie by myself once, when I went to the theater to see the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, because I just didn’t want to miss that.

I considered going to see the new Spider-Man movie this weekend, but it just felt…I don’t know, like something that would highlight my solitude even more than does watching oodles of different people reacting to movies that I’ve liked.

Mind you, I did watch a few more worthwhile videos.  The Science Asylum guy put out a couple of new videos about basic circuit theory topics, and I watched Tyler Folse reacting to a Veritasium video.  That tends to be fun.  He (Tyler, I mean) frequently speaks my own thoughts** when he’s watching such videos, which is refreshing.

Anyway, that’s as good as it gets, and I don’t know if it will ever get that good again.  But I am still going to work, though it is often difficult for me clearly to say why I do it, even to myself.  I’m just bringing in income to sustain an existence that is almost without anything to recommend it.

I don’t like it here in Florida, for one thing.  It’s naturally an amazing state, quite unique and with many, many interesting life forms.  Unfortunately, humans are not one of the interesting ones.  They are an infestation that has turned this state into a wellspring of the stupidity that is so rampant in the US.  It’s no coincidence that Taco Piggy took up residence here.

So, I’m working to sustain an existence I hate, in a location that is largely repellent‒but with a few very lovely oases in time, such as my youngest, who is enough to counterbalance many, many negative things, but who would almost certainly be well served by not having me in their life any more than necessary.  That’s certainly the general consensus at which most other people have arrived regarding my presence in their lives.

It gets harder and harder all the time for me to get up and get into the office every day.  It’s not because there’s anything particularly bad about the office; I mean, the noise can be really irritating, and if I don’t watch myself it can get the best of me, but the people are okay.  They’re actually quite nice.  I’m without a doubt the least pleasant person at the office.

That alone is enough to make life subtly and pathetically dreadful.

*I also watched a few more people reacting to the “special look” trailer for Avengers:  Doomsday, but I think I’ve seen most of them by now.  Doom is, as I’ve noted, my favorite villain and one of my favorite characters overall in fiction, so the special look is nice because it focuses more on him.  Here it is, in case you missed it.

**Not literally.  He’s not like Tyler Durden.  I just mean that he seems to have similar thoughts in response to the things he’s watching to the ones I have.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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I haven’t found a good Shakespeare-based headline

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and there is no lapcom involved in writing this post, at least not on my part.

Maybe “involved” is too broad a word.  One could argue that all the posts I’ve written before on my lapcom(s), of which there are many (posts, not lapcoms), set the stage and set the pace and set the precedent for this post.  And so, in a sense, they are involved in this post, and thus so is it.  However, that is reaching a bit.

So, I will clarify.  I am writing this post on my smartphone, not on my lapcom, which is still at the office, which is not where I am writing this.

I feel very groggy this morning, perhaps even more so than I have the previous three mornings, though the residua of my migraine pain appear mostly to have gone.  Between that* and the fact that I am writing on my smartphone, I may not write much today.

I appear to be very tired.  Actually, I say “appear”, but it is my own state to which “very tired” refers, and it is a subjective sensation (though it is also an objective fact), so if I appear tired to myself, then the odds are good that I really am tired.

Speaking of being tired to myself, it feels like I’m being so very tedious here lately.  Perhaps I am no more tedious than I’ve ever been.  I don’t know.  For all I can tell, I have always been tedious, my entire life, starting long before blogs (BB if you prefer).

Certainly, no one has wanted to stick around me for any very long period of time, not my parents, not my (former) spouse, not my children.  I seem to be an unpleasant fact and presence eventually to those around me.  Maybe it’s time I took the hint and got gone.

I still haven’t been able to read.  I think I’ve spent less than twenty minutes reading over the last two weeks or more.  I don’t know if you quite realize what a departure that is for me.  I haven’t even been reading audio books‒which would count for me, since I always read auditorially, meaning that I “hear” the words I am reading.

I also haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than maybe half an hour in that same time.  That happened when I started watching a video of “Groovy Grace” reacting to the Pink Floyd album Animals, which is one of my favorites.

As the album began, with Pigs on the Wing Part 1, I could not resist pausing the video, picking up my own black Strat, and playing and singing that song.  I played the combined song, parts one and two, including my own tortured** version of the guitar solo by Snowy White, which was the version one could hear on the old 8-track tape, or so I’m told.

After that, I played and sang a few more songs, including Wish You Were Here, which starts and ends on the same chord (G) as Pigs on the Wing.  I might have also played the Radiohead song Lucky, and probably The Man Who Sold the World.  That was it.  I didn’t even do Nothing Compares 2U.

Other than that, I’ve just mainly been distracting myself.  But I’m a bit foggy even for that right now.  You can’t tell (probably) because I edit these posts, but I’ve been making a lot of typos again.  That’s more likely to happen when I use the smartphone just at baseline, but today’s rate is still an outlier from the mean (see my post from the other day).

All right, let’s wrap this up.  I don’t have anything more to say (not for the moment, at least), so I will emulate the habit of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and seal my lips.

TTFN

*How groggy am I?  Well, I initially wrote “between that…” (by which I meant, my level of grogginess) “…and how groggy I am, I…”.  So, yeah, pretty groggy.

**I nevertheless actually like my version of the solo better than Snowy’s.  Go figure.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]

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I feel like posting this because I dread the immediate future

Getting the “aura” for one of my “classic” migraines now. It came on FAST (in minutes) and is BIG, obscuring most of the right side of my vision.  I am not looking forward to this.