It’s Monday morning‒the first Monday in November.  It’s also my mother’s birthday, though since she’s no longer with us here, I doubt that she celebrates it any more.  Nevertheless, it’s still worth celebrating.  The world is a better place, I think, for having had my mother in it.  True, she did give birth to me, but you can’t hold that against her too much; nobody’s perfect, and the positive things she did (including my brother and sister) outweigh the negatives, both literally and figuratively.

I felt really horrible last week, physically and mentally (and not just because of my ongoing acute viral illness).  That’s part of why I just did my little sarcastic, blah-heavy blog post.  I had no interest in doing anything more.  What, indeed, would have been the point?  I doubt that I have anything useful or entertaining to say, even today.

Of course, the big election is tomorrow, but honestly, that whole shit show is thoroughly contemptible at nearly every level, and it’s hard to feel good about it in any way.  Of course, one of the presidential candidates is clearly the ethically superior person, but neither is particularly impressive.  I look back with real nostalgia on the Romney-Obama election.

Oh, well.  It’s probably appropriate that it’s Guy Fawkes Day tomorrow.  Penny for the Guy?  Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot.  Let’s set this thing alight.

I have been rereading (and even editing) Outlaw’s Mind after removing the opening scene, thus making it into a story without that constraining ending.  I think it’s a good story; better and more involved than I would have expected when I started it, with a tone that reminds me, oddly, of Stephen King’s Revival, though I’m not at all sure why.

It seems very unlikely that I will finish it, though.  I would need to find some new lease on life, somehow, and right now my life credit score is abysmal, and the only existence I seem able to afford is metaphorically even more dreary and gross than the room in which I spend my evenings and weekends.  I live alone in a single, cluttered, old place, but my mental and “spiritual” existence makes the physical location seem like an all-inclusive paradise vacation with one’s closest and dearest friends and family.

It’s all I deserve, really.  I don’t want you to think I pity myself.  I mean, I guess in a way I do, but it’s a contemptuous sort of self-pity, a kind of “look at that pathetic, pitiful, putrid excuse for a person” feeling.

I really could use some help‒some serious help, some professional help, probably some emergency help.  But I know that I don’t deserve any help, I’m not worthy of help, I don’t merit any help.  It would almost certainly be a waste of resources.

I’ve also had a huge back and leg pain flare-up this weekend, of the cause of which I’m far from certain.  It has, however, made this last weekend almost anti-restful, even though I had Saturday off.

I did nothing to celebrate Halloween this year, despite the fact that it’s generally my favorite holiday.  Then again, I did nothing to celebrate my birthday, either.  As I said in a post on Facebook, I have no interest in anything.  Everything is uninteresting.  I would just like to stop being in pain, to stop feeling like I have to keep pushing forward, to keep moving and doing, just because that’s what one is “supposed” to do.

I can see, more and more, that the current shape of my life is the shape of the rest of my life.  This is the landscape of my continued existence:  doing an okay job that doesn’t involve my medical or scientific skills, working with people with whom I can’t really have conversations about anything that interests me, leaving work to commute to a dreary old room where I try (and fail) to get a decent night’s sleep, then spend the weekend basically doing nothing because there’s nothing interesting to do, and if there were, I would be too tired and in too much pain to do it.

This is all some of why I didn’t really write a post last Thursday.  I don’t know if I will write one this week.  But no matter what, one of these days (and it probably won’t be very long) there will just stop being any blog posts from me, and none of you will ever hear from me again.  And your lives will probably be somewhat happier because of that.

Most people seem to be happier when I’m not around.  Most things tend to go better.

Meanwhile, I can only try to distract myself from my chronic pain by inflicting other, more immediate pain upon myself.  Nothing else does an adequate job, but even so, it’s not really enough.

That’s it for today, I guess