It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.

Well…I could sleep.  That would be a better use of my time.  Except I can’t sleep.  Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down.  But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested.  Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.

The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process.  I had never experienced that before, nor have I since.  But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.

Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been.  That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria.  And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat.  It’s delayed.  If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great.  I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.

I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better.  Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people.  I appear to be one of these people.

I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat.  I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.

If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful.  I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable.  I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate.  Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.

It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange.  I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could.  It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick.  That’s the whole point of this line of thought.  I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac.  I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like.  It might be worth a try.  I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.

The train just arrived.  I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments.  I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can.  The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans:  the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.

If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time.  Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic.  I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids.  I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it.  Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.

Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.

Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually.  First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point.  And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light.  So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them.  But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.

Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.

Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered.  There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.

Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”.  If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light.  But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so.  That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.

Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least.  Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World.  Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose.  That would be humorously ironic.  Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.

I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…

Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.

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*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me.  This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.

**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.