I had a truly horrible night, pain-wise, starting more on my right side, where it had been all day, then moving to the left, which is rather annoying.  It’s a bit like when you’ve got a slight cold and one nostril is stuffed up, then you lay with the other side down, and gradually, the upper side clears…but then the lower side gets stuffed up.  I suppose it’s better than both sides hurting equally, at least in some ways, but in other ways, it feels like being turned over so that both of your sides can be pan seared from the inside out.

I’ve said it before, but in any truly civilized world, one would not need to go to work in such a state.  However, yesterday, my coworker did not come in because he had trouble with his own, relatively recent onset back trouble, and I can’t be sure he won’t also be out today.  He has a lot less distance to travel than I do, and he has a car, but he also has an infant daughter.  Anyway, it would be hypocritical of me just to tell him to suck it up and come to work.  But man, it makes a day really feel bad from the start, and I was already pretty glum.

I did at least use the bus(es) to get back to the house from the train last night, and I ended up walking a total of slightly over three miles yesterday without even trying.  I guess that’s good.

This morning, I entertained the notion of taking the buses all the way in to the office, instead of taking the bus to the train and so on.  It’s not an unpleasant trip, though it’s a bit long, but unfortunately, buses don’t have restrooms, while the trains do, and even in the humid heat of summer, I have a hard time going very long without using the restroom.

I’ve always been like that.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I started off the morning thinking of just going to the bus and thence to the train, as “usual”, but my back and hips and legs hurt so much‒and I’m so tired from having had so much pain all night‒that I may in fact take an Uber again, to the train or perhaps all the way to the office.  I just hate this all so much.

It just now occurred to me that I want to give a bit of unsolicited advice:  If someone is in pain (or having some similarly unpleasant state) and they tell you about it, don’t tell them you know how they feel, even if you’re just trying to empathize.  Most particularly, don’t tell them about your own relatively recent onset of back pain when they’ve been living with back pain for more than 20 years, and it’s been a large part of causing them to lose everything they ever had.  I say this to you because that coworker does that to me sometimes, and it kind of pisses me off.

I want to say to him, “Look, if your pain is as bad as mine and you think it has a good chance of lasting as long as mine has (so far) then you need to get yourself a life insurance policy, wait until its requisite time period has passed*, and then kill yourself as soon as you can arrange to do it without causing your wife and daughter too much distress.  Because this is no way to live.”

Of course, that’s terrible advice, and much of it is a sort of projection on my part.  I still often wish I had died when I played Russian Roulette, way back before I was ever arrested or anything.  But, of course, that would have been more traumatic for my kids, I think, so it’s probably good that I didn’t win that round.  Now, though, if I die, it will have almost no effect on my kids whatsoever.

That is, except for the fact that I know that my ex-wife has very shrewdly maintained the old life insurance policy she had on me, so if I die before I’m 65, the kids will get a significant payout.  It’s definitely a George Bailey kind of situation, but I don’t think there will be any Clarence the angel-in-training to come save me.  Besides, with the exception of my kids, if I were shown the way the world would have been if I had never existed, I don’t imagine it would be any worse, and probably it would be better.

Of course, as I often say, I would never want to change anything that would make my children not have existed, no matter what.  But once they were alive and well and doing fine‒say, if I had died in 2012, but perhaps by natural causes, instead of, say, blowing my brains out‒it might have been a better world and a better life, certainly from my point of view.

It’s too late to change the past, of course.  That’s more or less true by definition.  But I can try to work my way to following my own advice about the future.  I absolutely don’t want twenty more years of my life as it is now.  I don’t want even one more year of my life as it is now.

I don’t really want one more day of my life as it is now.  But it’s very hard to fight biological programming that has hardwired in a fear of death (or of the pain thereof, anyway) and a drive to stay alive even when there is no prospect for self or offspring benefiting from it.  It’s just a fact that creatures without a drive to survive don’t tend to leave behind as many offspring as those with a strong one, and we are all descended from the latter organisms.

Fuck you, Biology!

All right, that’s enough for now.  Maybe I will just get an Uber in to work, and to hell with dealing with the train.  At least that way I won’t be standing and sweating on the train platform.  And, though I don’t want to wish ill luck on an Uber driver who is trying to make a living, one is far more likely to get in a fatal accident on a car trip than on a train or even a bus.  I honestly consider that a silver lining; that’s how much my life hurts.  Even if I got in a non-fatal crash, even if I were severely injured, at least then I would get some degree of medical help and pain help and I wouldn’t need to work while in the hospital.

It’s pathetic, isn’t it, to think that way?  Sorry.  I’m no fucking good, and I haven’t been for a long time.

Try to have a better day, readers.  Try to make the most of things, and try to help out the people in your life who are suffering, and try to show compassion and to be worthy of compassion and respect.  Try not to get in a position where you have chronic pain and/or depression and are a burden to other people.  Try to be a support.

And try the spinach and artichoke dip while you’re at it.  It’s delicious.

*Most of them won’t pay off for suicide in too short a time frame, for what are probably obvious reasons.  Yes, I have looked into this.