Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

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*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.