Author: Robert Elessar

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A brief reminder of my “audio stories”

Well, I’m working today—as I will also be doing Monday—so, obviously, I’m writing a blog post.  Aren’t you excited?

When I arrived at the train station this morning, I thought the whole system was shut down somehow, because the “garage-door” style barriers were closed, blocking the stairs, the elevators, and the payment machines, like they do when there’s a hurricane coming (there isn’t…I check frequently).  However, it turns out that the guy who opens them just hadn’t arrived yet.  He only arrived after I had gone all the way down to the end of the station to the road to cross the tracks and had come all the way back up on the side on which I need to be.

Ah, well, it’s a little bit of extra exercise, and that can’t be too bad, can it?

I planned yesterday to mention the subject of some of my reading-aloud “videos” of my fiction, but the post got to be too long, and it would have been a very abrupt change of topic, considering I was writing about my difficulties seeking and finding and begging for help when one is circling the drain, as I am.  I haven’t gotten any useful answers, other than a commiserating one to the effect, “Whataya gonna do?  You just gotta keep on moving.”  I can respect that attitude.  It’s far better than someone pretending to have answers when they don’t.  But it doesn’t help me figure out why one should bother to keep moving.  I can’t see any reason, honestly, and the effort has long outweighed the reward for me.  I’m frankly skeptical that there is any reward at all, or that there has been one for some time.

Anyway.

Quite a while ago, I did some recordings of me reading some of my stories, and I turned them into videos, though the “video” portion is nothing but the cover of the story in question.  I think they came out reasonably well; I’ve always been decent at reading stories out loud.  But they didn’t and don’t get much play, even though they are a free way to listen to my (already cheap) short stories, which is why I stopped doing them.

I also recorded and uploaded onto YouTube the first nine chapters of my book The Chasm and the Collision.  This is my most family friendly story, since I wrote it with my kids—who were in fifth and fourth grades when I started it, I think—in mind.  It a story about three middle-school students who become caught up in a trans-universal “fantasy”* adventure.

Thanks to the very wise advice of my father, there’s not even a single curse word in the whole book, though there are scary bits, since there is real danger in the story.  Real danger to the characters, I mean.  I don’t mean to say that reading the story is dangerous.  It’s not.  My sister has read the book several times, now, and she says it’s her favorite of my stories.  As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the fact that she fell and hit her head earlier this week.

I recorded the first nine chapters, but I finally stopped doing it, because, as I said, no one seemed to be listening.  I thought it was a shame, but it was a lot of work to do the reading and then the editing of the audio (though it helped me learn Audacity, which was definitely worthwhile).  Since then, at various times, I’ve thought that maybe I would like to pick up on reading the chapters and uploading them, and then maybe even start to record and upload my other books, a bit at a time**.  I’ve also got a few more short stories and novellas that I haven’t recorded and uploaded, and they could be stand-alone “videos”.  But, again, it’s a lot of work, and it would be doubly frustrating if no one ever listens.

I’m embedding here, below, the YouTube video of the first chapter of The Chasm and the Collision, so that people can get a sample of it.  I’m also going to see if it’s possible to embed the YouTube playlist that is all the “videos” that I’ve done so far from that book, and maybe even the playlist that has the “short” stories that I’ve read aloud and posted.  Again, it’s a good way for people to get exposed to the stories*** for free.

If you listen and like them, I obviously would be delighted if you’d decide to buy them.  All my stories are available for Kindle, and my novels and collections are available in paperback as well.  My last collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities is even available in hardback.  Here’s a link to my Amazon author’s page, so you can peruse them:  The Link.

If there’s more than one person out there who would be interested in hearing more of me reading my stories, please let me know in the comments below.  You can also leave story-related comments on YouTube.

Nowadays one can self-publish for Audible, which is kind of neat, but I think I’m going to stick with the YouTube format, because it’s more informal, and it’s free for listeners so they can introduce themselves to the stories, as read by the author.  I’m very self-hating in general, and that hasn’t changed, but I think my stories are pretty good, and I’m especially proud of The Chasm and the Collision, because I wrote it with my kids in mind—though I don’t think either of them has ever read it, and they probably never will.

That’s about all I have for today.  Nothing has really changed since yesterday, so there’s no other real news to give.  Have a good holiday weekend, for those of you in the United States.  And everyone else, I hope you just have a good weekend.

Here’s the embedding of those videos and playlists, if I can successfully do the latter:

*I put that in “scare quotes” because if you pay attention when you read it, you’ll notice it’s actually a science fiction story.  But the character of the tale is definitely more like fantasy than sci-fi.

**Boy howdy, wouldn’t Unanimity end up taking up a looooooong time?

***That makes them sound radioactive, somehow.  As far as I know, they are not.

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Can a day be both fried and scrambled?

First of all, let me apologize for yesterday’s bogus title and picture.  I had very little mental energy, which no doubt was obvious, and I just felt that I was wasting what little effort I could bring to bear by choosing a quote from Shakespeare to adjust with some form of the word “blog”, and then to find and modify a picture of some kind so that it matched (at least roughly) the subject or the title of the post.  If anyone was looking forward to seeing what “clever” thing I’d done this week, I’m legitimately sorry to have disappointed you.

I think all my posts this week have been dreary, even for me.  I’m gradually approaching the point of just giving up completely.  People usually say that they give up well before they really have.  I know that’s the case for me.  I’ve felt like I want to give up for some time now.  I have also asked, even practically begged, for help—though I’m not sure what form such help might take—on numerous occasions through this blog (and elsewhere), hoping that someone out there might have some ideas, or some resource suggestions, or even some words that I hadn’t read or heard or thought of already, but I’ve found nothing that’s really useful.

I’ve even gotten suggestions to read one of the psalms.  I’ve read all the psalms before, but I went and read it again.  Though they’re nice poetry, it didn’t inspire me in any way.  Sorry, person who suggested it, but I’ve read through the entire Bible at various times, and—though I appreciate your intentions, I really do—it’s not a source of consolation for someone like me.

I’ve thought over and over again about calling the “crisis hotline”, especially now that they added the 988 number to it, but then you read all about those warnings that, yes, they do track your location when you call.  I myself have previously, through a call to the hotline, had a run-in with the effing Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department in which I got nerve damage in my left hand because I was handcuffed—because, of course, a suicidal person is dangerous to two armed PBSO deputies.  Then I got brought to a facility so bleak that I would almost have preferred the mass holding cells in Gun Club Road jail.

I suppose that story does highlight something that’s been in the news:  the fact that police are not trained or equipped to help people going through psychological crises; to be fair to them, it really isn’t part of their job description.  And if you can’t trust that you won’t be kidnapped by “the man” against your will, how are you supposed to be able to trust the crisis hotline?

Not that I don’t think the people who work on it are sincere—I’m quite sure they are and that they really want to do good.  But as I’ve said many times, good intentions are not enough.  Good intentions are just the beginning, and they are only barely that.  It’s not enough to mean to do good.  If you want actually to do good, you’re going to have to figure out how to make that happen, and adjust your approaches and improve them over time as you learn.

I wonder if one of the VPNs your keep hearing about might be useful enough that I could at least use the crisis line “chat” function without being tracked and hunted down by police officers (who are also, I’m quite confident, desirous of doing good, but are not equipped or trained to do so in a psychological or psychiatric emergency situation).  Would just “going incognito” on Google Chrome be enough?  Does anyone out there know?

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Sorry about the interruption just now, though I know you didn’t actually experience it.  I suddenly started getting some esophageal spasm, and I had to rush to get a drink from the fountain at the train station to help relax my esophagus.  It’s quite painful, and it’s disconcerting, and the first time you have it, you feel like you must be having a heart attack or maybe an aortic dissection, but it responds to warm water (at least in my case) which is basically like stretching and warming a charley horse, and heart attacks don’t do that, and neither do aortic dissections.

So, where was I?

Oh, right, I was wondering about ways possibly to get in contact with the crisis hotline without being in danger of getting abducted and taken to an involuntary mental health facility—getting “Baker Acted”, in other words.  If anyone out there knows if just “going incognito” is enough, please let me know in the comments below, NOT on Facebook or Twitter.

I think I’m quite a bit past those first, heady days of thinking that I want to give up, and am really near the point of actually doing it, of actually not caring at all about trying to continue.  I guess I do care about not wanting to be incarcerated, even if it’s in a mental health facility.  The public ones I’ve seen around these parts are just dreary and, well, depressing.

It would be nice to have someone to talk to about these kinds of things, someone I felt comfortable with, someone for whom I don’t have to try to put on a happy (or in my case, probably just a blank) face.  Apparently my face is not very expressive at the best of times.  Certainly nobody seems to pick up on the fact that I’m horribly depressed a lot of the time, most every day.  I think I’ve been trained too much—partly by myself—to pretend.  They call it masking.  Also, it turns out, I’m just not able to express my emotions well, and often not able even to realize what they are from moment to moment.

It’s interesting that people will sometimes send you things like “hugs” on Facebook or through text messages and things, like the hug emojis, you know what I mean?  Now, being apparently an Aspie, as I guess they say, I’m not great with even real hugs from most people, but e-hugs feel peculiar (albeit in quite a different way).  I guess they’re a way of showing that the person cares and “wishes” they could hug you for real.  That’s legitimately nice, and I wouldn’t want to discourage it.

But, like I said, I feel reticent about even real hugs, though from certain people, at certain times, hugs have been great.  Apparently, I’m a bit like a cat in that.  I really don’t even like it when people I don’t know well come up and, while talking to me, put a hand on my shoulder or something.  Though, in the right circumstances, a shoulder and neck massage can be great, preferably when it’s something I’ve sought out.

I don’t even like going to the barber shop, because having strangers touch me even to that degree is just uncomfortable, and that’s gotten worse over time.  You can imagine how much fun it is to be handcuffed and chained and all that.  I’ve had more than enough of that crap for the rest of my life, I can promise you; I would be tempted just to force police officers to shoot me rather than let myself be handcuffed again if the situation arose.

I may just be out of luck here.  There may not be resources to help someone in south Florida who is an “ex-con”, a disgraced doctor, divorced, alone, with chronic pain and, apparently, autism spectrum disorder, as well as dysthymia/depression, who is a long way away from most of his family (certainly those who would want to have anything to do with him), and who doesn’t want to cause any of them trouble, anyway.  It’s frustrating, sometimes, to know that there are resources for people with drug and alcohol problems, there’s public and private support, and people are even celebrated (justly so) for their struggles to defeat them, but if your problems are not with substances but with a fucked up nervous system, then it’s hard to find resources, and humiliating to seek them out.  The world just kind of blames you for the problem.  You’re weak.  You’re defective.  You’re inadequate.  You’re just faulty.

To be fair, though, I don’t like myself enough to be proactive about my mental or physical health much anymore.  I’ve used many different antidepressants and related meds and therapy of various kinds; I’ve tried to see if there’s any religion or philosophy or technique that gives me comfort*.  I just keep coming back to as bad or worse states.

It’s been said by some (usually quite successful) people that being happy is a choice, but that strikes me just as a way for people who happen to be happy to pat themselves on the back while they blame the unhappiness of the unhappy on the unhappy themselves.  They can feel that they deserve their own happiness, and wash their hands of the problem.  “If you’re unhappy, it’s your choice.  Choose not to be.  Get over it.”

What utter bullshit.  You didn’t build your brain or your body or your background, and you can’t “freely” choose what its set-points are.  The workings of the brain and mind are not understood well enough for us to know what “buttons” to push or “dials” to adjust to achieve, reliably, a desired state.  Believe me, no depressed person, if suddenly fully cured of depression and all its causes and sequelae, would choose to feel horrible and wishing to die again.  If they “choose” to be depressed, that’s part of what depression is.

Anyway, I’m not getting anywhere with this…probably because I’m not going anywhere with this.  It’s also getting too long.  But I am despondent, and washed-out, and just getting apathetic about it all, mostly.  I really think I’m near the stage of just letting go.  I want to stop trying to “cry for help”.  It doesn’t do any good, and I don’t see any signs that anyone out there knows any answers that are better than the ones I already know, which I know don’t work.

No one has mastered the merger of quantum mechanics and general relativity; if they had, it would probably soon become self-evident.  And no one has mastered the art of repairing the dysfunctional mind.  It would be too obvious if they had.

If I’m wrong, please tell me.  I could use the knowledge.

*Nope.  Nothing I’ve encountered so far has done the trick, and I am a widely and eclectically read and educated individual.  Most of what I’ve found is puerile.  Let’s be honest, if there was some method or insight or spiritual factor that reliably worked to make life better for people who tried it, it would rapidly become glaringly obvious, and would stand out among all the various treatments and philosophies and religions and pills and machines and other substances.  It would be clear that the people who applied it were better-adjusted and healthier than most others, and they would probably happily share the insights.  True insights, like addition and subtraction, are usually logically demonstrable.  If someone has to sell you something, to give you a pitch and try to convince you with rhetoric rather than with reason and evidence that it’s good—if they sell it with pictures of models and shots of beautiful homes and flowers and all that—it is unlikely to be all that it’s cracked up to be.  You don’t have to “sell” people on antibiotics if they have a bacterial infection; if anything, you’ve got to prevent them from overusing them.

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Some Shakespeare quote with the word “blog” forcibly inserted into it

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so it’s time for my usual, longstanding, weekly blog post, though of course I’ve been posting every weekday for the last several weeks.  I’m not sure exactly how many weeks it is; if anyone has been paying attention, please let me know.

It is also September 1, 2022 A.D., the beginning of a new month, which, to paraphrase The Who, will probably be the same as the old month.  This coming Monday is Labor Day in the United States, but that won’t mean much to me; as I think I mentioned earlier this week, we almost always work at least part of the day on holidays like Labor Day or Memorial Day and other similar minor holidays at my office.

I’m on the earlier train again today, but that’s at least partly because it was running a bit late.  It’s also on the other side of the tracks from its usual place.  I guess either there’s some problem on the regular side, or they’re doing some maintenance or whatever.  It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me, though it does make things a bit confusing for people getting on the train.

Remember I mentioned that my sister had a bit of a fall the day before yesterday?  Well, she’s doing just fine, which is very good news.  However, yesterday, apparently, the other person in my office with whom I share responsibilities injured his back in some rather severe way, and he’s in the hospital.  As someone with a chronic back injury, myself, I sympathize.  He’s got a new baby daughter, too, and picking her up a lot is likely contributory to how his back got hurt.  I don’t look forward to the fact that now I’m going to be doing more work than usual at the office, however.  Also, one of the other people who does a lot is going on a vacation for about two weeks, apparently.

I’m pretty sure the last time I took time off work was when my mother died.  That’s mainly because I don’t have anything that I would think of to do during a vacation.  I can’t see myself traveling anywhere; I don’t think I could really face the prospect of getting on a plane or train or Greyhound bus or anything.  I can’t see anyone enjoying having me visit them, either.  There are probably people who think they would like me to come visit, but I can guarantee, I’m not pleasant to be around.  I ought to know.  Anyway, I’m not good at not working, really.

I didn’t play guitar yesterday, by the way.  I looked at it out of the corner of my eye several times—it sits there right next to my desk in the office.  But I didn’t even so much as touch it, which is a shame.  It’s a nice guitar.  Well, someday soon my ex-housemate can have it back, and either keep and play it (and my other guitars) or sell them and use the money to get something for his daughter or whatever.  Then he’ll have been able to sell them twice, which is a pretty good deal for him.  Hopefully he’ll put it all to good use.

I also haven’t written anything lately, other than this blog.  In other words, I haven’t written any fiction; regrettably, this blog is not fictional.  I don’t really miss writing fiction, honestly, or at least I don’t admit to missing it.  Maybe that’s a defense mechanism, I don’t know.  But I definitely don’t have the will or drive to write any.

I thought about, once again, seeing if writing with pen on paper would stimulate me to do some fiction, especially after having seen a mention of an author who does that on a British comedy panel show I was watching on YouTube, but as longtime readers will know, I’ve tried that.  I don’t think it would make me feel any more prone to write any new fiction than anything else would, and obviously, I’m comfortable and natural writing on my little laptop computer, as I am now.

That’s about it, really.  Nothing else to see here.  Keep moving, keep moving, don’t stop and gape.  There’s nothing anyone can do, so it’s best just to let the poor critter be and let it pass on in peace.  You can say a few words in remembrance or whatever after that.  Someone will no doubt come and clean it up and dispose of the remains when the time comes.  Don’t want to leave them around; they can be vectors for diseases.

I hope all of you have a very good remainder of your week and a lovely Labor Day weekend, if you’re here in the United States.  If you’re not, well, why not still have a very nice weekend?  Heck, take off Monday anyway, I won’t hold it against you.  Spend as much time with your friends and family as you can, please.  That’s about the most rewarding thing you can hope to do in this world, after all, and I understand that it’s pretty darn good.

“Run fast.  Laugh hard.  Be kind.”

TTFN

semi random pseudo picture

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Thus ends what used to be the sixth month

Well, it must follow as the knight the questing beast that Wednesday follows Tuesday, and since yesterday was Tuesday, today is Wednesday.  It’s the last day of August in 2022.  I’m taking an early train today, even for me—I think it’s literally the first train of the day.  I was awake anyway, and have been awake for some time, and finally just figured, oh well, might as well just get up and go.

It’s not that I’m not tired.  I am tired.  I’m deathly tired.  But I can’t rest.  I’m able to get to sleep at night with only minimal difficulty, usually no later than eleven, and sometimes earlier.  But even if I take Benadryl or similar, I wake up starting by around one or two at the latest, and just keep doing it, until by a bit after three I’m not able even to doze anymore.

I watched a few videos with music last night, thinking to soothe myself, and I thought that, this morning, I’m going to try to play some guitar.  But now, on my way in to the office a bit earlier than usual, I don’t think that’s going to happen.  The thought of picking it up and playing just feels…I don’t know exactly how to describe it.  I feel as if just the prospect of doing it is anathema somehow.  Ditto for writing any fiction.  Even just the thought of doing it fills me with something that’s not exactly ennui, but more like anticipatory dysphoria.  It’s not quite like the prospect of considering going to get blood drawn at a doctor’s office for tests that aren’t really necessary, but it’s something in that same type of feeling, just not to that degree.

I don’t quite understand it.

Here’s a weird fact.  The thing I most look forward to now is the fact that, on Wednesdays, because I have to do the payroll, I take slightly supratherapeutic doses of Tylenol/Aspirin/Aleve so that I won’t be in too much pain.  I can’t do that every day—I’d get sick to my stomach, for one thing, but there are other potential toxicities involved with which I flirt already—but I let myself do it on Wednesdays.  So I look forward to it being at least a less painful day.  That’s the highlight of the week.  I don’t mean just that it’s the highlight of the workweek, I mean it’s the highlight of the week overall.  It’s the very best part of my week.

Speaking of pain, my sister had a bit of a fall yesterday morning, just after I’d finished writing my blog post—well, it probably didn’t happen after, but she called me after; her daughter was on her way to take her to the hospital, but she wanted to check with me if there was anything else she should do in the meantime, since I am a trained medical doctor.  She’s fine, thank goodness—some stitches and possibly a bit sore, but no bones broken, and no concussion either, which I was a bit nervous about.  I’m glad she lives close to my niece, and that they get along well, though as I told her, if she ever just had to call an ambulance, I’d be happy to pay for that myself.  It’s not like I’m made of money or anything—quite the contrary—but I don’t have anything else of value to spend it on, so why not?

If I fell*, I would pretty much be stuck using 911.  I guess that’s why it’s there, so people can get help in emergencies.  Anyway, I probably wouldn’t even call anyone at all.  Why would I want to call for help** yet again?  What would be the point?  Though if I panicked, and the deeper, older biology overrode the frontal lobes, I might feel compelled to seek assistance.  It’s hard to resist.  Hopefully, if such a thing happens, I’ll just be rendered unconscious, and it won’t be an issue for anyone unless and until I start to smell.

Speaking of such irritation of neighbors, there are new people moving into the house in which I live, either today or tomorrow.  I don’t know them, though I think I met the lady when she came by to check things out over the weekend—one of the interruptions I mentioned yesterday or Monday.  She basically just speaks Spanish, so I don’t have to worry about anyone trying to strike up conversations, thankfully, but I do speak reasonably good Spanish—it used to be quite good—so we’ll be able to communicate the basics.

In some ways, weirdly, it’s easier to interact with people when there is some relative barrier to communication, because then I don’t have to worry about awkwardness, or seeming too odd, or not quite knowing what to say.  After all, the whole interaction is awkward and incomplete anyway, so any personal awkwardness from me is just part of the overall picture.  It’s curiously relaxing, though of course, it takes some work to recall my Spanish, and understanding other people is harder than speaking it.

Anyway, I hope there won’t be too many disruptions, but I’m probably not going to feel comfortable using the kitchen and stuff most of the time now; I’m still going to need to do my laundry on Sundays, though.  Hopefully there won’t be any issues with that.  It’s the only day of the week I can really do it, at least on any regular schedule, so I really hope there won’t be any issue with mess in there or other people’s clothes left just sitting around in the washer or dryer.

I’m so tired of having to deal with things.  There’s no percentage in it; there’s nothing to be gained.  It’s just annoying.  I wish I had an off switch, or at least a “sleep mode” that worked reliably, or even a restart button that could clear whatever background apps are running and open things afresh.  I guess that’s one of the things sleep sort of analogously is “supposed” to do for us, come to think of it.

I’m not speaking from recent personal experience, though.

*Not the Beatles song.

**Again, not the Beatles song.

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I don’t have much to say, today, but…

…wow.  I’m really tired.  I mean, both mentally and physically, I am very, unusually tired for the morning.  Part of that is due to a particularly fragmented sleep last night, but as regular readers will know, that’s not too unusual for me.  Part of it is no doubt also due to the lingering effects of the respiratory virus I’ve been dealing with for the past week plus, and for which I really haven’t had any rest to speak of, except Sunday.  Part of it is just the general cacophony of people and sound and light that happens at the office and which leaves me feeling, at the end of each day, that I wish I could just spin a cocoon around myself and…I don’t know, metamorphose into the next stage of my life cycle or something.

A lot of it, though, is just that my mental energy, or drive, or enthusiasm, or whatever you want to call it, is just petering away steadily, and some days that lowering level interacts with other factors that make it more noticeable than others.  I guess it’s a bit like a particularly cold day during a gradually oncoming ice age, or a marked dip in the stock market during a more gradual steady decline.

I know, those aren’t really very good similes, nor are they even really apposite.  Is that the right word to use?  Apposite?  Would “pertinent” be a better choice?  In any case, they are both rather contrafactual examples, because the general climate trend for the nonce is toward higher temperatures, not lower ones, and the various forces of the market are more or less engineered such that the stock market will, overall, tend to go up, as it has done now for decades.  Maybe it would have been more relatable to mention a brief upturn in the market, one that is then corrected when things return to their more general trajectory.  But that would hardly carry the message of the fact that I feel unusually tired, would it?

I guess I felt a bit of this tiredness yesterday, now that I think about it; certainly I felt a bit breathless, in general, to the point even where I got out the little portable pulse oximeter that I bought for the office—mainly because it’s cool that we can have such things so cheaply nowadays—and checked my oxygen percentage and my pulse.  They were both well within the range of normal.  In fact, my pulse was better than it usually is.  So I was being a bit of a hypochondriac at that time.

But I do feel tired.  I just want to be able to rest, not to have all sorts of interruptions in my environment, so many intrusions in my personal physical and mental space all the time.  I wonder how much a sensory deprivation tank would cost.  Probably a lot more than I can afford.  Anyway, I don’t know where I would put it.

I’m not sure what else to write today.  I’m just mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually exhausted.  I wish I could just rest.  I probably won’t even have Labor Day off; we’re almost always open at least part of the day during such holidays, since they tend to be good days for sales, as all the appliance stores and whatnot have all seemed to know for as long as I can remember.  But I don’t seem to be able to relax, anyway, no matter what.  I can only “relax” by crashing and burning.  I wish I would just do that, now.  It’s got to happen sometime, but I keep hoping for it and it doesn’t come.

Oh, well.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  But this is probably boring and tiresome for all you reading.  Sorry.  It’s not as though I can lessen my fatigue by spreading it around, and if I could I probably wouldn’t.  That wouldn’t be very nice.  I’ll leave you here, then.

Have a good day.

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Paper bags get wet on rainy Mondays

Well, this wouldn’t be a good day for Karen Carpenter—at least if the lyrics of one of her songs accurately described her feelings—because it’s a Monday, and it’s raining.  Since both of those things, according to the song, always got her down, then the combination of the two seems likely to have done so doubly.

Unless, that is, the combination follows the rules of multiplication rather than addition.  Adding two negatives produces a more negative outcome, but multiplying them together turns the product positive.  Maybe then the combination of a rainy day that’s also a Monday would have boosted her spirits.  I think she could have used a boost.

As for me, well, rainy days don’t tend to get me down particularly.  They don’t necessarily cheer me up, either, though sometimes I enjoy them.  Right now, the rain is here either as a consequence of or as part of the cause of a slight drop in temperature, which is nice, because it’s been quite hot and muggy with little to no respite for quite some time.

You’d almost think I lived in south Florida.

And as for Mondays, well, even when growing up I never had a big dislike of Mondays, and that’s not my only divergence from Bob Geldoff.  I certainly didn’t dread school; I was always a pretty good student, and school was where I had my friends.

Also, I have usually preferred to have a purpose of some kind, so whether it was school or work, I never particularly disliked getting up and going in to either one.  I like having a schedule, with things to do and a place to be at a particular time.  If anything, weekends sometimes make me feel a bit lost, at least when I don’t have any family structure or any reason to do anything in particular.  I just loaf around feeling rudderless.

Of course, this weekend, I definitely welcomed the rest.  As I think I mentioned, all last week I was fighting a virus, and didn’t get a chance to take a day off, so I needed the break.  As it turns out, I had to go briefly into the office on Saturday morning, because the other person with whom I alternate Saturdays had lost his keys, and our boss was already well on his way to Key West*, so he was much farther away that I was.  It happens; I wasn’t too upset about it, but I really didn’t feel very well.

Honestly, I’m still not really feeling very well, physically, though I certainly feel better than I did on Saturday, when I was tired and grumpy and a bit out of breath.  Now I’m just a bit out of breath, and a bit tired; but I don’t feel particularly grumpy.

Give it time, it’s early in the day.

I even brought my book of all Radiohead song chords to the house over the weekend, just in case I got the urge, during that time in which I was supposed to be undisturbed, to play guitar.  I did not, of course—I could have told myself I wouldn’t—but then again, I wasn’t actually undisturbed, but rather got no fewer than four surprise impositions on my time and space.  But I don’t want to dwell too much on those, or I will get grumpy.

I’m really just physically, mentally, and emotionally fatigued, I think, and it’s not something I enjoy.  I certainly don’t get any kind of secondary gain from it, unless it’s the secondary “gain” of fulfillment of my self-hatred, since I can’t really socialize very well anymore, I don’t have the sort of personality that makes people want to spend time with me—I also don’t enjoy doing things such as most people seem to enjoy—and I frankly don’t even want to take the chance of trying to get involved with other people, since I have an almost 100% track record of alienating those closest to me, the people I love, and on whom I rely, the most.

Maybe Tennyson was an idiot, or at least simple-minded, when he said that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  Or maybe he was thinking more along the lines of someone like Voldemort, who was incapable of love and lived a life of misery, making other people suffer, before dooming himself to an eternity of pain.  That really doesn’t sound so good.

Shakespeare was a bit more on the money with Hamlet’s inclusion of the “pangs of despis’d love” as one of the things a person wouldn’t willingly bear if they could avoid it.  And then there’s Fiona Apple, who in her song, Paper Bag notes that “Hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs too much to love.”

Not that poetry (or song) automatically has any access to truth, even if it’s beautiful.  Just because someone can put words together nicely, in ways that catch people’s attention and appeal to their cognitive biases doesn’t mean that those words actually bear any deep wisdom.  As witness:  “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

That’s the problem with rhetoric, as opposed to dispassionate argument.  Often it “persuades” people because of the clever manipulation of the foibles of the human psyche, forged as it was in the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa over the course of a million to a hundred thousand years, depending on when you start your cutoff.  People can embrace non-sequiturs and internal contradictions without giving them much notice, if they trigger the right emotion or have a catchy beat or sound or structure.

This is why, unlike Mulder from The X-files, I don’t want to believe.  I want to be convinced by evidence and argument…preferably the dispassionate kind.  Passion is nice to feel, but when considering someone’s attempt to persuade you, it should be a warning sign, in them or in you or in both.  Being passionate doesn’t guarantee that you’re not right, but even if you are, it may mean you’re right for bad reasons, and it doesn’t help your chances of getting things right.  Passion is a decent servant but an unreliable master.

no belief

Maybe I worry about such things too much.  Though even the words “too much” carry assumptions that, for the most part, people don’t notice or try to pick apart.  Too much for what purpose, by what standards, according to whom, for what reason?  If this much is too much, how does one determine how much would be just right?  How much would be too little?  What would be the good and bad consequences of any of these states, and would they be different depending on external conditions?

Probably I’m overthinking it.  But what do you want from me on a rainy Monday?

*How ironic.  Well, not, not really ironic.  But it is an amusing coincidence of words.

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Is this an untitled blog post?

It’s Friday, and this time it really is the end of the workweek for me.  I’m pleased by that fact.  Indeed, I came very close to abstaining from work even today.  I’m just beat from this week, and I’m still not over whatever this virus is that I have.  But I figured I might as well go into the office for the week’s last hurrah.  It’s a slightly shorter workday than usual, anyway, and that helps me find to will to proceed.

I’m not sure what to write, today.  I expect I’ll try to make this brief, since my energy level is rather low.  There have been fewer “likes” for my blog posts this week than usual, and I’m not too surprised.  I’ve been even grumpier and more negative than is my norm, because I’ve been ill, and people seem to prefer blogs with “uplifting” messages…whether they have anything to do with reality or not.

Also, the medicine I take to treat my symptoms—especially the decongestants—tends to make me more tense than usual (and that’s saying something!), and that doesn’t help make me more pleasant, I’m sure.

I guess the positive of this is, if I feel better by Monday, I’ll probably write at least a little more enjoyable a post, so that’s something for regular, loyal readers to anticipate optimistically.  I don’t know what topic or topics I’ll address, but then again, I still don’t even know what topic I’ll address here today—as you can probably tell.

I’ve gotten on the train, now, and honestly, I’m already beginning to regret having decided to go in.  I’m just so physically tired.  But as I think I’ve mentioned before, being at the house is not really much more relaxing than being at the office, and at least at the office I can sometimes, occasionally, feel that I’m doing something useful.  Also, at the office I have interpersonal interactions, which are at least a bit interesting, and there are even people there that I like.

It’s an interesting fact that I’ve gradually realized about myself that I’ve never had friends that I made just for the sake of having friends.  I had friends, of course, good ones, but they were people I met at school, people I saw every day, and so I got to know them during the course of doing our other, mutual, purpose-oriented stuff.

If I hadn’t had school to attend—if I’d been home-schooled, for instance, or if my family had moved frequently from place to place—I don’t know if I would have made any real friends at all.  As it was, though, my family stayed in the house in which I grew up right up until after I’d left for college, and of course, I was the youngest of three, so my home and school environments were pretty consistent, and I ended up making very good friends indeed, particularly through junior high and high school.

Then in college it was comparatively easy to make friends, because I lived in the dorms, and had a roommate.  In fact, my roommate and I were able to get along with each other pretty well, so we stayed roommates throughout my time in college.  And we made some other good friends along the way, and eventually, by senior year, five of us shared an apartment.

I feel bad that, for instance, my daughter’s university experience up to now has been basically done from home due to the pandemic.  I would not have wanted to miss out on my own college experiences, though there were also many heartbreaking and difficult things that happened in college as well.  But, of course, I met my kids’ mother in college, in the orchestra; we both played cello.  I can’t regret that.

Now, unfortunately, the people at work are too different from me, and are in different situations, and I have trouble finding anyone that I could expect to spend much time with outside of work.  And I’m not very good at doing social interactions that aren’t embedded in some other, more purpose-based endeavor.  I think I’ve always been like that, but it didn’t present that many obstacles, because I’d always been pretty successful, and the purpose-based endeavors I was involved in were populated by people with whom I had at least some things in common.  Then, of course, for a while I was married, and my ex-wife tends to be a much more social person than I am.  And once we had kids, I had my family, and that was all the social life I needed or desired, and more than I probably would have ever thought I would have.

Unfortunately, now I don’t have my family around me, and my former career is thoroughly wrecked, and I don’t have the skill or even the comprehension of how to gather supportive friends or people with shared interests, so I’m pretty much adrift on my own.  Of course, from a certain point of view, everyone is always adrift and alone anyway, no matter how many people are around one, but humans in general do seem to receive actual, measurable benefits from being in a community, which makes sense in a highly social primate species.

Whereas “Nexus-13, alien, changelings” like me are, well…come to think of it, I just don’t know any “Nexus-13, alien, changelings” like me.  So I don’t even know whether I’d be able to make friends with one if I met one.  Possibly not.

But, at least, I have the (I expect) uninterrupted weekend before me, and no pressing responsibilities, so hopefully I’ll be able to rest, if not to sleep.  I hope all of you have a good weekend, too.

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The fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle blog

Hello and good morning, all.  It’s Thursday again, the traditional day on which I’ve written my formerly-weekly blog for a few years now—I’m not sure precisely how long—and so, obviously, it’s time for my weekly, bog standard blog post.  Welcome.

I’m not sure that this will be much different from just the posts I’ve been doing semi-daily.  I suspect it will be less grumpy and irritable than the ones I’ve done the last few days, though I still am somewhat ill, and that fact influenced the tone of my previous two posts.

I don’t have any particular topic in mind, which is a bit of a shame.  My post about Blowin’ In The Wind has continued to be quite popular (relatively), even though it was rather long.  Probably that’s because it had a definite subject, but I can’t be sure what really makes it appealing.  There are no comments on the post for me to be able to discern readers’ reactions other than their “likes”.

I understand readers’ reluctance to comment.  At least, I have such a reluctance, myself.  Whenever I comment on almost anything*, whether it’s a YouTube video or a Facebook post or, more commonly, a post on WEIT, I almost always feel stupid almost immediately, all but certain that I’m just annoying everyone, including the poster of the video or the writer of the website (e.g. PCC(E)).  I almost always feel that my comments add absolutely nothing to the discussion and are just stupid, free-association, weird verbal tics that other people are just going to be confused by, at best, or will otherwise sneer about.

Then, if someone else replies to my comment and I see a notification of that fact, I start to feel tense and even nearly panicked.  I worry that I’ve landed myself in what’s going to be some drawn-out, stressful, potentially acrimonious discussion, and I can barely even talk comfortably to people I’ve known my whole life anymore, let alone relative strangers.  But I don’t want to be rude and not at least look at what’s been written.

So, I don’t take it personally that people don’t comment—except to the extent that I take everything personally.  But when I do, I almost always blame myself, so don’t worry about that.  It would be nice if I could have interesting and engaging conversations in the comments of my blogs, but I guess the blog itself doesn’t engender such things.  There’s not much to do about that except encourage people to comment if they feel like it.

So, by all means, comment if you feel like it.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much going on in my life other than this blog, work, and being ill at the moment.  I haven’t written any new fiction, nor played any musical instruments of any kind since the last time I mentioned not having written any fiction or played any music.

I did make a mildly amusing but very niche meme from that new, beautiful photo of the moon that those astrophotographers made.  It’s a very nice picture, I must say, perhaps the nicest image of the moon I’ve seen, but being who I am, I was reminded of a character in Stephen King’s The Stand, and so I added my two cents to it.  I’ll use that as my picture for this Thursday, so you all can either enjoy it or not, depending on how you react to such things.

It would be fun if the picture “went viral”, but I suspect my tastes are a little too weird for that to be likely regarding anything I find amusing.  Anyway, if anyone doesn’t understand it and needs clarification, feel free to let me know—but use the comments here to do that, please, not the comments of Facebook or the reply function on Twitter.  I come to WordPress every weekday, usually several times during the day, and obviously I note comments that are made on my blog.

I don’t even like to check my notifications on Facebook unless I’m feeling particularly mellow, because I feel thoroughly stressed out that someone is going to be chastising me for being depressed or something similar, which will only make me feel angry and more depressed, or saying something that I’ll find irritating, or whatever.  Facebook seems to bring such things out in people.  I don’t know the specifics of why, but the broad explanation is that it monetizes outrage, so of course people will be “rewarded” for acting in such ways, and this will tend to engender that overall attitude on the site.  For many people, outrage seems to be pleasant, or at least “ego-syntonic”, but I hate it, and feeling it makes me hate myself ever more with each new occasion.

So, to repeat, if you want to ask me a question or to comment about something I write, please do so here, and don’t bother doing it on Facebook, and probably not on Twitter.  Though, one-liner type jokes are decidedly welcome on Twitter!

That’s about all I’ve got—or “all I have”, to be more grammatical.  I’m really tired and near the bottom of the tank in general.  I really wish I could just go to sleep and stay asleep until I feel rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  The world in general feels to me like I’m being rubbed all over by sandpaper soaked in lemon juice that’s squealing with a mosquito-near-your-ear noise and giving off a smell of mildew.  Acid-covered sandpaper will tend to wear you down before very long.

I hope all of you, however, are feeling as well as you can.  I hope you’re getting at least some enjoyment out of the summer and getting to spend time with your families.  Labor Day (in the US) is coming up in less than two weeks, and I hope you’ll have family get-togethers, cookouts, and loud, happy conversations while the younger generation play outside and get dirty.  Have some burgers and hot dogs and potato salad for me, would you please?  But above all, please be good to those you love and to those who love you.

TTFN

that spells tom cullen

*Frankly, it’s true whenever I say much of anything at all to anyone, verbally or in writing.

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Excuse me, Miss Anthrope? The doctor will see you now.

It’s Wednesday now—hello, Wednesday, you’re my second favorite member of the Addams family—and at least I think I’ve figured out why Monday night/Tuesday morning was particularly bad for sleep for me:  I’ve been coming down with the respiratory virus that’s now going around the office.

It’s not COVID—we’ve been tested and all that—it’s just an annoying cold-type virus, but one that nevertheless made two other people in the office who had it stay home.  Unfortunately, I could not stay home (or leave early) yesterday or today, despite feeling crappy, because one of the people who was out yesterday is the only other person who shares a crucial function in the office with me.  And today I am even less able to stay home from the office, because in addition to the other work—and the fact that, for all I know, my coworker will be out again today—I have to process the payroll today.

Of course, I wear my mask on the train anyway, just as a general precaution, so I’m doing that today, even though by court order the CDC (or TSA, maybe) had to revoke its mandate about wearing masks on public transport.  Because, you know, masks are a cruel and unusual imposition on the delicate faces of the great American pubic…I mean public.

I can’t believe what a bunch of panty-waisted whiners so many people are about wearing effing masks, if only just to at least decrease a little bit the odds of them spreading stuff to other people in the world (and with the added bonus of sparing their neighbors from having to look at their unimpeded faces).  And a lot of these wimps are gun-toting Republicans, people who imagine themselves to be rugged, independent, frontier types.  But they’re afraid of needles and afraid of masks, and afraid they can’t defend their homes and their Wal-marts and their ways of life without dozens of firearms each*.

I hope—I wish—that the next time any person who complained about mask wearing needs serious medical interventions, such as surgery, the whole surgical and medical team decides that masks are an unreasonable imposition from the Nanny State, and that avoiding increasing the risk to these patients’ lives is not worth their minor inconvenience and discomfort…and then proceed to cough and sneeze into the open abdominal cavity or chest or whatever part of the body that is getting treated.

And hand washing—that’s got to be an unconstitutional imposition as well, isn’t it?  George Washington fought the Nazis at Gettysburg not just to throw off the yolk of the Roman Empire, but also to give all Americans the freedom not to have to wash their hands at the behest of dictatorial scientists who use their imprimatur of authority to seize and maintain their control of the top corporate and government positions all throughout America and the rest of the world.  Just look how many top scientists are running nations and major corporations, making billions upon trillions of dollars each, every year…money that’s taken from hard working Americans on farm subsidies and disability, money that’s taken from their houses in the middle of the night at gunpoint, while they sleep, by Islamic terrorists who are part of the International, global Zionist conspiracy.

Okay, sorry, enough of that pretend rant.  I just have no respect for wimps who can’t stand to take a little personal responsibility for tiny bits of inconvenience to help protect themselves and their fellow citizens.  They’ll make all sorts of excuses—not very clever ones, usually—but ultimately their protests and complaints come down to tantrums about not getting everything their way.  Most of the pundits in the media have all the character of spoiled toddlers who don’t want to brush their teeth and go to bed.

When I think about ways to kill myself, which happens rather often, I frequently rule out a lot of them right away just because they would inconvenience too many other people**, and I wouldn’t want to do that.  But maybe I shouldn’t bother to take that into consideration.  Humans in general don’t seem to worry too much about other humans being inconvenienced; why should I worry about inconveniencing them?  Let them (hypothetically) deal with my messy corpse in the middle of their workday.

On the other hand, maybe the rude and irritating people, the people who are whiny and inconsiderate—not wanting to be inconvenienced themselves, but entirely willing to cause trouble for others—are simply noisier, more noticeable than all the other, finer people out there.  After all, one doesn’t tend to notice the countless members of the public who go through their days quietly, politely, doing their part and yielding the right-of-way as it were.  That’s precisely because they try not to cause unnecessary inconvenience to other people, but it makes them lower profile.

And the small fraction of people who are disgusting, whiny brats get noticed precisely because they are disgusting, whiny brats.  And they make the rest of the human race look bad, and also they do far more than their share of damage to the world and to others.

If only we could find a way to isolate these people and prevent them from breeding.  Oh, well.  We’ll send at least some of them off to hold political office in the meantime, which at least gets them away from trying to do anything productive, where they’ll only make things worse.

Huh, that’s weird.  I seem to have talked myself around to at least considering that the majority of the human race might be less reprehensible than I sometimes feel they are.  I really must be sick.  Anyway, try not to be too put off if I occasionally indulge my instinct for misanthrope; believe me, the one person in the world I hate most of all is myself.

*I am not a dogmatic anti-gun person.  I’ve owned a few guns when I could, and I enjoyed target shooting; I shot competitively, in fact, and successfully.  But there’s a difference between shooting recreationally or owning a weapon for potential personal protection (and training appropriately for that purpose, since otherwise it’s more likely to do harm than good) and fetishizing guns, the bigger the better.

**To be honest, though, it’s also often at least partly because I can’t see myself quite being able to work up the nerve to do them, at least not without getting supremely drunk or similarly impaired.  For instance, I wouldn’t want to throw myself in front of a train partly because it would inconvenience a great many commuters…but it’s also just too intimidating a prospect, viscerally, when I consider it.  Setting myself on fire with gasoline would probably be easier.

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“I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.”

It’s Tuesday morning, in case you somehow didn’t know—or, I guess, in case you’re reading this at some time in the future, six sevenths of which will not be on a Tuesday.  Actually, in the long future, presumably, the concept of Tuesday will cease to be relevant; indeed, it will cease to exist, and certainly once the Earth has been incinerated by the sun when it goes red giant, such things won’t matter.  But then again, presumably no one will be reading this blog at that point.  It’s hard to consider seriously the possibility that my blog might outlive the very Earth itself.  It’s not impossible in the sense of being against the laws of physics, but it seems vanishingly unlikely.

Of course, if the Many Worlds (or as I like to say, the Everettian) interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then in some branches of the future my blog will probably still be read even beyond the days after the Earth in incinerated.  Perhaps this will be because, in that branch (or, rather, that particular subset of the branches of the Everettian Multiverse) I am considered the savior of the human race, or the prophet of some new religion or something.

Now that’s a dystopian future!

As for the here and now, in case it’s not evident, I had a worse sleep last night even than I normally do.  I feel vaguely as if I’m living in more than one of the many worlds of quantum mechanics at once as it is; certainly everything seems quite surreal and slightly distorted.  I’m reminded of the line from Fight Club (the movie) in which the narrator says that, with insomnia, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy of itself.  It’s not quite exactly the way I feel, but it captures some of the spirit of it.  Anyway, I’m very foggy and ever-so-slightly delirious—more so than usual, I mean.  So please excuse me if I seem even more absurd than usual.

If I seem less absurd than usual, then, well, I don’t know what that might indicate.  I doubt that it would imply in any way that insomnia is good for me.  More likely it would just highlight the chaotic nature of its effects on my nervous system and the rest of my body, giving superficial outcomes that might, on initial inspection, seem to be an improvement.

Believe me, though, they are not.

It would be one thing if I were going to eventually get the ability to see all the colors and auras and everything in the world, like in the Stephen King book Insomnia, including getting the ability to suck excess, unused energy from people and get healthier and “younger”.  But, of course, I suppose then I’d probably be caught up in events that threatened the fate of all realities or something, and that would just be annoying.

Not that the real world is mundane or anything, except perhaps in the literal definition of the word*.  The laws of physics, mathematics, the facts of chemistry and biology, astronomy, cosmology…these things are all quite amazing.  It’s too bad so much of human history, and the human race in general, doesn’t quite live up to the universe.

Okay, well, I guess that’s a bit unfair.  Humanity is whatever it is in the universe, and it could not be otherwise than it is, by the laws of physics.  Everettian Many Worlds might seem to make things a bit questionable here, but General Relativity (which has a much more confirmed status) certainly seems to show that the past, the present, and the future** all already exist, or still exist, or “always” exist, whatever that even means when you’re talking about the totality of space and time itself.

And, yes, this implies that free will, in the purest sense, does not exist.  But then again, how could it?  It’s not even coherent from a philosophical or psychological point of view, let alone from that of physics.  If you think you have free will that somehow rises above the laws of physics, then try drinking three martinis within the course of an hour on an empty stomach and choose not to be drunk.  Your brain is a physical organ, and your personality, your alertness, your willpower, your self-control are all dependent on the state of that brain—indeed, they are part of the state of that brain.

For that matter, try having long-term insomnia and a neurodevelopmental disorder and chronic mood disorder and and see if it doesn’t affect your outlook and your ability to tolerate and deal with the slings and arrows of day to day life.  Try not to be grumpy and impatient and diffident and anxious and stressed-out.  Maybe the insomnia will be part of the cause of a chronic mood disorder for you; or maybe the chronic mood disorder causes it.  Or, more likely, the things feed back on each other in the ridiculously complex system that is the brain, like a hurricane that becomes self-sustaining in the right conditions.  Anyway, it’ll make you think and feel stupid things that will make you hate yourself even more than you already do, believe me.

At least, that’s the way it’ll work if you’re identical to me.  Which you’re not, of course.  Unless you are me, from the future, looking back and rereading this former blog post at some later time.  But then, of course, you still won’t be identical to the me that’s writing this, will you?  You’ll be a future version of me, later in my timeline, in the one future that exists, if there is only one, or in some subset of the many worlds of quantum mechanics, if that is the correct description of quantum mechanics.  But whatever that future is or is not, whether there are many versions of it or just one, it will be whatever it will be, and the nature of it is and will be whatever it is and will be, and I do not have any choice in that matter.

Neither do you.

*From the Latin mundus for “the world”.

**Which, by the way, are not universal concepts but are applicable only with reference to any given world line, and any point, arbitrarily chosen, in spacetime.  What’s past to some might be future to others, yet they all might be thought to be simultaneous to yet a third observer.