Author: Robert Elessar

by

Why would mice and men plan things together? Small wonder such plans go awry.

It’s Friday, as you know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted.  I’m writing this on my smartphone because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop computer with me when I left the office yesterday, but I’m beginning to regret it slightly.  My thumbs have still not completely recovered from their inflammation.  Perhaps they will never fully recover.  Who knows?  But it’s certainly the case that writing on the computer is much easier and more “natural” for me.

I will be working tomorrow if the office is open, and if so I will probably write a blog post.  For the past two weekends the office has not been open, since we had so few people willing to come in.  But maybe this weekend will be different, though we still have a lot of people out of the office.

As for anything else, well…I haven’t backslid on what to eat so far, in that I am following a path that should be good or at least useful.  I must say, though, there were times yesterday‒there are such times many days‒when I thought that maybe what I ought to do is just lock myself in the house and eat ice cream and cookies in huge quantities until it kills me.

Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to kill oneself that way, I’ll wager.  The body has a very high capacity to store calories before it completely breaks down and falls apart.  Individual mileage will vary, of course, but the mileage is long.  Such a course might be enough to make me stop liking ice cream and/or cookies, but that’s not the specific goal.

Yesterday I was also contemplating, both to myself and with my coworker, what I might be like if I had not had my back injury a little over 20 years ago.  I think I said something like, “You should see what I would be like if I didn’t have chronic pain.  You have no idea.”

I don’t have specific ideas myself either, but I do know that I used to be someone who‒when not suffering from too much chronic depression and apparently autistic burnout‒could do just about anything to which I put my mind.  For instance, I decided to apply to medical school more or less as an afterthought, but I never doubted that I could get in or that I could become a doctor.

It’s not that I was cocky.  Self-confidence of that sort has been something I occasionally pretended to have, but it’s not my natural state.  I just considered medical school an eminently soluble problem and proceeded to solve it.

Medical school does not involve a mentally super-challenging curriculum.  There’s a lot of information to internalize, of course, but none of it involves dealing with any counterintuitive notions.  There are rarely any complex numbers or linear algebra or calculus or differential geometry involved in medicine!  Quantum mechanics essentially never comes into play, except perhaps in describing vaguely how MRIs and PET scans work.

Anyway, things being so stochastic, it’s very difficult to imagine what I or my life would be like if I had never developed my chronic pain and back problem.  I might still be working in Winter Park as a doctor; I might still be married; and I would be much more likely to be with my kids, or at least to be able to see and interact with them.  I would also probably be much less grumpy than I am.  I don’t know how my autism itself would change its presentation.  Maybe I never would have sought out or even considered the diagnosis.

I guess it’s pointless to contemplate these things.  We cannot change the past.  Still, one of the big strengths of the human brain (or a pseudo-human brain) is the ability to contemplate counterfactuals as simulations so one can make decisions based on assessment of potential outcomes, colored by past experience and knowledge, rather than having to do everything trial-and-error, with death weeding out the worst local failures.

Still, all I can see stretching before me if I cannot reduce my pain and try to get better sleep at the least is loneliness (which is what I deserve, I guess) and pain and never-ending fatigue, with intermittent forced distraction.  That’s not worth the risk, especially since, in that scenario, an accidental or medical death would be one of the better outcomes.

Anyway, my resolve hasn’t changed since I discussed it earlier this week.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.  If I work tomorrow, I will probably write another post.  If not, I won’t.

by

It seems to me most strange that men should blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m writing yet another blog post.  I’m also writing this on my miniature laptop computer, though it has seen better days and is getting a little bit laggy.

I don’t have anything in particular about which to write.  Certainly, I have no subject like yesterday’s, though I do wish to make clear that I was not joking in my previous blog post, and I am every bit as resolved today as I was yesterday to carry out my plan.  I’ve already begun, in fact, in the sense that yesterday I was very specific about what I ate.

Of course, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I feel very, very tired, but what else is new?  I’ve been tired for almost as long as I can remember.  This fact gets tiring in its own right, which seems to be, well, not a contradiction, and certainly not ironic, but a positive (yet not positive, if you see what I mean) feedback loop.  Being tired is exhausting of morale, or poisonous to the will, or however you want to put it.

I think you probably worry too much about such things, though.  You should be like me, a catch as catch can, go with the flow, Hippy Dippy Dan sort of guy.

Ha ha, that’s a joke, of course.  I am not a laid-back person, and I don’t know that I ever have been.  I’m wound so tightly that only dogs and bats can hear me vibrating.  There were at least three times yesterday in the office when I literally jumped at sudden noises*.  It’s not such a surprise, I guess, that I get along well with cats—at least as well as most cats do with each other.

As an aside, since I’m writing this on the laptop computer for the first time in a while, might I say that if any of you have any avenues by which to address the movers and shakers of Microsoft, please tell them to do something about that stupid little icon that relates to their “AI”** which is there because, apparently, most people feel the need to have some electronic pseudo-entity hold their hands while they write something on a frikking word processor.

It’s pathetic and irritating.  If you know a way simply to turn that process off voluntarily, please let me know.  I haven’t looked for how to do it, but if it’s anything like how readily one can change from their new, horrible default font, there may be no readily available avenue.

I don’t need an AI to help me write.  I’ve been writing since before the effing TRS-80 came out.  I correct AI editing suggestions more often than they correct me.

I’m all in favor of spelling and grammar checkers, especially the ones that work after the fact, not while one is still writing (which can be quite distracting and annoying).  After all, pretty much everyone makes some errors in a first draft.  But I don’t need a machine to help create my writing for me, any more than I want one to help me come up with a tune or draw a picture from scratch.

My boss once said of me, when a few of us were discussing such things in passing in the office, “Doc is an AI.”  I guess that’s a compliment, and I took it as such, but if he was only thinking of our current generation of such things, it’s a bit insulting (though he didn’t mean it thus, I’m quite sure).

Anyway, that’s all as may be.  I got the payroll done efficiently yesterday, and honestly, I felt relatively upbeat in the office.  I haven’t yet revealed my plan to anyone there, yet; the time wasn’t really right, and I don’t want people to get distracted.  But there was a certain freedom of mind associated with having come to a decision, and having declared it publicly, that if I cannot in fairly short order get thinner and reduce my pain, I will kill myself.

Perhaps it’s just the sense of having an available escape that made me feel a bit less stressed.  As Radiohead sang in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Yeah, I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape.  Escape.”  Hitting the bottom can be freeing sometimes, and the availability of an escape can be soothing.

It’s not ideal, of course.  It would be much better if people didn’t ever need to feel that they needed an escape.  But reality was not made for us, and we were not so much made for it as made by it, and quite by accident, as far as I can see.  In a way, if there were a designer that made us for reality, there would be more about which to complain, because that designer clearly fucked up many times.

I am surely one of those fuckups.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  I hope you all have a good day, or at least as good a day as you can.  I’m going to have a usual, typical day for me, probably, which is nothing about which to write home.  And I don’t think I’ll write about it here.

TTFN

*My recording of a sudden versus not-so-sudden noise.

**That looks like the name Al, doesn’t it?  Can you tell the difference without context?

by

I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

by

What shall I do now?

I wrote the beginning of a first draft of a post for yesterday (which was Monday, since today is Tuesday) before it became obvious as I was getting ready for work that something in my GI tract, something that I had eaten, was taking its vengeance upon me.

I ended up not going to the office yesterday, and I ended up not even posting the draft, which I considered posting as was*.  However, there was really not much substance to it.  I think I realized as I was writing that it was St. Patrick’s Day, so I mentioned that in passing, but it’s never been a holiday that means much to me, at least not now that I cannot eat my mother’s homemade corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, that’s a lot of the gist of yesterday’s post, at least if I recall correctly.  Oh, right, I also mentioned that, starting yesterday morning, I am not taking St. John’s Wort anymore.  I gave it well over the 6 week potential time frame for antidepressants at least to start to make a noticeable difference.  Some enterprising reader can‒if you are so inclined‒try to work out based on mentions in my posts roughly how long I’ve been going, but clearly it’s not been making my depression diminish; I think we can all agree about that.

I was also worried, probably unnecessarily, that it might be contributing to the recent apparent worsening of my chronic pain.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a bit too soon to tell, and the matter is muddied by my recent GI trouble, which still leaves me feeling a bit bloated and sore this morning.

As for anything else, well, I don’t know.  What else do I have about which to write other than depression and illness and pain and insomnia?  I suppose I could write more about autism spectrum disorder, but I feel that would be a bit presumptuous of me.

Of course, I’ve learned a fair amount about autism in the research that eventually led me to seek a diagnosis, and my medical and scientific background gives me other advantages in understanding.  But I have been someone diagnosed with autism (level 2, not just level 1, so apparently I need significant support**) only for a few weeks now, so I don’t know about what even to talk.  What of the people, places, and events of my life are explained or explicated by the autism diagnosis?  Does it, or will it, help me come to terms with any of it?  I don’t know.

I certainly don’t feel that I can just waltz into any discussions of or by people with autism, or communities of such people, and have anything useful to say.  I also don’t feel that I have found “my people”, though I certainly can “get” at least some of the things they discuss better than I can some of the things that other people discuss.  But I still feel very much like an alien, an outsider, a changeling, a replicant, something that doesn’t belong on this planet‒even when I’m interacting with neurodivergent people.

So, I guess we’ll see what happens with the DCing of the Wort.  I doubt it will really affect my pain, though it may pain my affect*** if my depression worsens even from where it is now thanks to stopping it.  In any case, it really doesn’t matter, because I really don’t matter, so Batman knows what will happen.  If I implode completely, or if I crash and burn, or whatever figure of speech you want to use, there will be no significant loss, not even to me.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m not doing anything creative or artistic.  I haven’t played guitar (or any other instrument) in weeks now, and I haven’t written fiction, and I haven’t drawn.  I’ve barely read anything other than rereading my own stuff to try to inspire or at least trigger myself.  That hasn’t worked.

So, who knows what will happen?  I certainly don’t.  But in the meanwhile, I hope you have a good day.

*The past tense of “as is”.

**I don’t really have that support, but just because someone needs something to be able to thrive doesn’t mean that thing is available to them.  Reality is heartless.

***Ha ha.

by

Pi and the sky

It’s Friday and it’s Pi Day (i.e., in the American way of writing dates, it is 3-14, the first 3 digits of pi, the mathematical constant).  There was also a full moon last night, as well as a lunar eclipse.  Incidentally, lunar eclipses only happen during full moons (and solar eclipses only happen during “new” moons).

Okay, that’s probably the only even arguably interesting thing I have to say, so if you want, you can stop reading now.

I’m not really feeling any better today than yesterday.  I’ve had really bad pain, and walking is making things worse rather than better at the moment.  I’m not sure what to do about all of it.  Maybe there’s nothing to do about any of it.  Not all problems are solvable in the short term, with locally available knowledge and resources.

I do know that my general misanthropy, and indeed, my panantipathy, has been strengthened in recent months and weeks and days and even hours.  This is not meant to imply that every bit of incoming information has been confirmatory of my general disgust with humans and with reality in general.  That would be extraordinarily improbable.  If that were to appear to be the case, it would more likely indicate severe biases on my part than that reality is entirely negative.  Still the state of the world is overall pretty rancid, and so many people behave so stupidly.

Now, I would never expect anyone to be free from stupidity‒I’ve said before that intelligence and knowledge are always finite, while ignorance is always infinite.  Batman knows I’m plenty stupid, myself, and indeed, I berate myself more in a single average day (often combined with literal physical abuse) than I’ve probably berated other people in any given week, and possibly months or longer.  Also, I rarely berate other people as viciously or nastily as I do myself.  But that’s because I spend every waking moment with myself, so I have no respite from my own stupidity.

I don’t think I have much to say, otherwise.  The world is shit, overall, or at least that’s my provisional conclusion.  I’m open to countervailing evidence and argument, but I’m not seeking it out or asking for it.  I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for and trying to focus on the good things about reality, trying to find the arguments for optimism and reasons to continue, with far less success than I might have hoped*.  So please don’t try to persuade me unless you have something you think is original to say.

That’s enough for today.  I have nothing new to add at the moment.  I don’t know whether I’ll be working tomorrow‒there aren’t very many people available to come in, so I don’t know what the decision will be‒so I don’t know whether I will even consider writing a blog post.  Even if I do work, I don’t know if I will write a post.  I probably shouldn’t have bothered writing this one.  It’s not very good, and it’s certainly not uplifting or inspiring or edifying in any reasonable sense.

Oh, well, that’s pretty much a good description of reality, and it comes full circle to my point.  Whatever the case, whether it’s meaningless or not, I hope you have a good day and a good weekend.

*One might say that the search for reasons to be optimistic is itself a sign of optimism, and it’s not an entirely meritless point, but it’s not enough.  The desire to desire to live is not the same as the actual desire to live.  The wish to see if there is any worthwhile purpose to anything is not the same as having a worthwhile purpose.

by

I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy for a Shakespeare based title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and though I don’t particularly feel like it, I’m writing a blog post because it’s Thursday.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to write one tomorrow or Saturday (assuming we* are open, which we probably will be, since it’s rare to be closed two weekends in a row).  As far as I know, I will not.

I don’t really have any energy or impetus to write much.  I’m trying.  I’ve been rereading my fiction to try to stimulate myself, but so far it’s obviously not doing the trick.  I reread first The Chasm and the Collision, then Son of Man, then The Vagabond, and just yesterday finished rereading Mark Red.  I’ve also reread a few of my short stories.  But, though I’ve enjoyed rereading my stuff as far as it goes, it’s not really doing anything as far as catalyzing any desire to write, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I think things would be much more positive if I were able to get a good sleep (at least one night) and especially if I weren’t in daily, increasing pain.  I’d be tempted even to try ketamine if I thought it would really help, though there are some cautionary examples in the mainstream media that would give me pause.  Heck, I’d practically be willing to try full-on PCP if I had good reason to think it would provide lasting relief without causing worse problems.

Of course, there’s the rub.  All of these things that can provide even temporary, real relief have a range of side-effects that would make my situation even worse than it is.  Yes, I freely admit that my life could get worse.  It’s almost always true that things could be worse than they actually are.  But that doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’m just so weary, so tired of every day being dominated by both physical and psychological pain.

Actually, I feel that the last adjective there should be “psychical” not “psychological”, since the latter term refers to the study of the psyche, and I don’t have pain or suffering that involves the study of my psyche, just pain in my psyche itself.  Still, the common usage, for what it’s worth, seems to lean toward “psychological”.  Then again, current common parlance refers to psychological problems as “mental health”, as in “Are you suffering from mental health?” which makes little sense.

I wish I could wrap myself in some kind of life-support cocoon and undergo some form of metamorphosis, like Adam Warlock in the comic books.  Hell, just being able to sleep for a while seems like it’s a ridiculous, superstitiously foolish notion, on a par with the expectations of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, who thought a space ship was coming to gather their souls (and was supposedly hiding in, I think, the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet).

I want to rest.  I want to stop being in constant pain.  It’s been going on for more than twenty years, and it’s tainted every aspect my existence.  It has contributed to everything from the breakup of my marriage, to my arrest and incarceration, and to my inability to sustain or create any kind of close relationship of any kind.

The people “closest” to me are hundreds to thousands of miles away, and I have no doubt that if they were physically closer, a kind of Uncertainty Principle-like process would occur, such as what makes the momentum/energy of, say, an electron greater and greater the more tightly you try to pin it down, until more and more of its wave function leaks out and the probability of it being elsewhere‒even on the other side of the universe, so to speak‒dominates over any local presence.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, I’m sorry.  But I don’t even have any will to watch science videos or to read science books or what have you, let alone to go into any rigorous discussions thereof.  I’m just making the point that I’m much better for other people from a distance than from up close, with the function approaching a singularity (of negative infinity) as the distance from me shrinks toward zero, rather like some logarithmic function.  This graph (of log base 2) demonstrates why, from a certain distance, it can start even to be pleasant to interact with me, though with diminishing returns…but woe betide anyone who drops below one unit of distance.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  It’s probably much more than enough.  I’m sorry to be so tedious; believe me, no one gets more tired of me than I do of myself.  At least all of you can just go read something else by someone else, or do something else entirely.  Not I.  I am stuck with being and enduring the miserable git that I am every waking moment.  And waking moments make up far too great a proportion of the times of my life.

Have a good day, if you can.

TT…FN, I guess.

*By we, I mean the office at which I work.  While I have no problem joining with you, my readers, into a collective, first person plural pronoun, I simply have no idea what y’all’s work schedules are.

by

“Look into my eyes…”

I’m not going to write much today.  I don’t really have much to say.  I know, that’s never stopped me before, but today I just don’t have the mental energy to write anything or to make up anything about which to write, other than the fact that I don’t have any such thing.

I’m very, very, very tired‒though I still can’t sleep for shit.  I’ve said pretty much all there is to say, for me.  I don’t really have anything to add.  My tendency, in real life, is to subtract, at least from all the people and things I encounter.  I tend to take away joy from the people with whom I am in contact, and I take away more, it seems, from those I love most and to whom I am closest.  I drain their energy, but I don’t seem to gain any energy for myself thereby.  I no doubt do the same to at least some of the people who politely read this blog.

It’s enough.  I don’t want to do any of it anymore.  Writing fiction, writing nonfiction, drawing, singing, playing guitar, studying science…all of it is shit, and all of it is pointless.

I don’t know if I’m going to write a post tomorrow, or ever again.  Of course, in principle, that’s true every day, but this time it’s a conscious…well, not an intention, but a conscious lack of intention, or wavering thereof.  Anyway, I don’t have the energy.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel great.  I doubt it like the fucking mischief, but it’s a possibility allowed by the laws of nature, as far as I can see.

In case I don’t write anymore ever again, I want to thank you for reading.  There aren’t very many of you, but you are there, and I appreciate you.  I hope I haven’t poisoned your minds too much.

Please have a good day, and a good rest of your lives.  It’s been an honor and a privilege to communicate with you, one that I know I could not deserve.

by

Well, here we go again

It’s Monday morning, again, and I’m starting another week writing a blog post in the morning instead of doing something productive or creative or whatever.  Or, I suppose one could also say I am doing this instead of sleeping, though it’s not as though I really had a choice about that.

Oh, and the reason I didn’t post on Saturday was because the office didn’t open on Saturday, since everyone kind of needed a break.  It wasn’t because I died sometime after my Friday morning post, unfortunately.

Anyone who thinks that dying would be the unfortunate thing clearly hasn’t wrestled with and internalized the fact that everyone is going to die anyway, and that chronic pain makes the process of being alive a form of slow torture.  And as some famous person from the time of the inquisition said, if anyone has not confessed themselves a witch or a heretic, it is merely because they have not been subject to torture.

He was commenting on the fact that, unless there is truly some greater purpose motivating someone, torture works on essentially everyone, eventually.  Now, I don’t know if it’s melodramatic of me or if I exaggerate in calling 20+ years of chronic pain (while still trying to live a gainfully employed, productive life) a form of torture.  Maybe I’m just a wimp.  I do know that I do not have that greater purpose, that goal on which to keep my gaze fixed.

I used to have something or some things like that.  One of the thoughts that helped me get through prison was that I could look forward to seeing my kids again when I got out.  The whole point of accepting a plea bargain, even though I consider myself innocent, was that I didn’t want to take the chance of being in prison any longer than I had to, because I wanted to see my children again as soon as I could.

Of course, that turned out not to happen, because they didn’t actually want to see me.  It turned out that their lives were at least simpler when I wasn’t around, just like their mother’s was, just like pretty much everyone else’s life is simpler when I’m not around.

That was about 10 years ago, and I still haven’t seen either of them since.  I ask you, what’s the point of enduring anything in that situation?

I have a lot of endurance, I think‒mentally, anyway.  I can put up with a surprising amount of stuff just out of general pig-headedness.  But after a while it all gets annoying.

And lest anyone be under the mistaken impression that I am someone who has not sought help or not allowed people to help me when they tried:  I have gone through years of therapy at various times and of various kinds, I have taken various types and brands of antidepressants and related medications, I have called the suicide crisis line more than once and have very briefly been hospitalized because of it.  I have taken various kinds of medications and have tried numerous interventions including surgery to address my chronic pain.  I don’t easily let problems go.  I don’t tend to give up easily, at least not at things that matter to me.

But I am tired and I am in pain and I am alone.  Also, it turns out I am autistic.  That would, of course, be nothing new, just newly discovered, but it does make it very hard to make new friends or new connections with people, especially now that I am no longer in an environment where there are people around who are interested in at least some of the things in which I am truly interested or who have shared backgrounds.

I would like to do good in and for the world in some fashion.  I would at least like to bring original creations into the world that make some people happy, at least for a little while.

I know we’re all just animals, muddling our way from the womb to the tomb, acting in ways shaped by natural selection’s effects on our ancestors.  There need be no deeper point to life than that to keep everything rolling.  But it’s not very interesting after a while.

I don’t know.  Everything is getting boring.  It’s hard to bother keeping oneself alive when everything is either dull or irritating or painful.  There is such a thing as learned helplessness, even for the very stubborn.  All creatures have their limits.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say or do here.  I don’t know what the point is.  Probably there is no point.  I know that I am pointless, at the very least.  So I’ll draw this to a close again, and start yet another pointless, unpleasant, idiotic day.  I’m stupid that way.  But maybe I’ll get smarter someday.