I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.