Anxiety

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For the blog sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, of course, and so I began with my customary Thursday greeting, which takes some form of “Hello and good morning”.  I have occasionally varied the specifics of that a bit—at least once going so far as to write “Goodo and hell morning”—but it tends to stay the same.  Likewise, on Thursdays, I end my blog post with a farewell that I took from Tigger (not from the A. A. Milne stories but from the Disney adaptations):  TTFN, which stands for “Ta-ta for now”.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while probably knows all this already.  Still, since I can at least have a little hope that maybe some new people will come to read my blog, it’s nice occasionally to let them know about some of the relatively consistent things I tend to do.

Speaking thereof, on Thursdays I also tend to title my blog with some quote from Shakespeare, altered to replace one of the words in the quote with some form of the word “blog”.  Sometimes I have to squeeze the word in pretty brutally, but other times it works really well.  Fortunately, Shakespeare had more quotable lines than pretty much anyone else or even any other relatively circumscribed collection of people, at least in English.

Now that we’re past that introduction of sorts, I should try to write about something more interesting.  I don’t know what that might be or whether I will succeed, but I will try.

I’m still not feeling very well, though I think I may be on an upward swing; I still have a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a cough and all that.  Also, my hearing is persistently hosed in the left ear as it has long been in the right*, with associated tinnitus.  I fear that may be permanent.  There’s not much to do about that.

Because of those issues, I’ve recently been avoiding using my earphones, so I haven’t listened to any podcasts, let alone audio books.  It’s possible I’ll avoid them for good, but I may return to them, or I may elect to go for headphones rather than insertable ear phones.  I prefer the wired kind to any possible wireless ear phones, partly because they tend to stay in place much better than free-floating little ear inserts, but more because they don’t have to be charged all the time.  It’s bad enough to have to keep recharging the stupid phone.

I really wish I could be less tense than I normally am without regressing into depression or having to rely on some manner of pharmaceutical.  I mean to try to get back into regular, daily (or more frequent) meditation.  I know that I’ve said—truthfully—that it often tends to make my depression flare when I start to meditate again, even as it truly helps my anxiety and the erratic, chaotic nature of my thoughts and emotions.  But perhaps I should just accept that and go with it.  I rarely find depression completely debilitating, though it is often life-threatening.  But that’s as may be.  Life is life-threatening.

But I do want to clarify my concentration back to earlier, better levels.  I’m full of ideas for things to do in my immediate future, such as meditating and working on my stories and adjusting my diet and walking more and learning more about all things, all that stuff.  They are good ideas.  But I almost always get distracted by some new thing from even a good preceding thing, much as I used to do when writing stories.

It’s been said that wisdom is the ability to follow the advice you would give yourself if you were someone else.  It’s not nearly as easy as it seems it ought to be.  That’s because humans—and humanoids—are still very much biological organisms with billions of years of potent evolutionary heritage that shapes the moment-to-moment states of the nervous system, rough hew them how we may.

But there are ways to have more control.  I used to do self-hypnotism/meditation every day, a couple of times a day, starting from when I was in junior high.  It was also starting at around that time that I began to do very well in school (to be fair, I was never a bad student, but my performance improved significantly after that).

Once I left that practice behind, becoming distracted by things like college and my soon-to-be-wife, I think my mental discipline and my ability to bring my mind to task as desired deteriorated.  I suppose it’s analogous to an athlete who stops exercising and gets out of shape.

But it’s possible to get back into shape, and the brain is more amenable to improvements—more “plastic” to use the biological/medical term—than are the muscles and connective tissues of the body; you’re never really too old to improve your mind until you’re dead.

So, I mean at least to try to get back into some habits that have been useful to me in the past.  And it cannot hurt to explore the reaches of my mind—though as I make clear in Outlaw’s Mind, this is not always guaranteed not to come with dangers.  Of course, that’s a fantasy/horror story, so there are occurrences in it that, as far as we know, cannot be encountered in real life.  But that doesn’t mean there are no dangers.  For instance, as I just pointed out, mediation sometimes triggers worsening depression for me, and that depression is dangerous (to me).

It’s not as though I’m doing great otherwise, however.  And though it is true to say “all improvement is change, but most possible change is not improvement”, there are situations in which one is in the negative so far that there may be a greater chance of improvement that deterioration.  If one does a “drunkard’s walk” with a barrier preventing motion in one direction, like a figurative large brick wall one cannot get through or around or over or under, and one is already near that wall, random motion is unlikely to get one much closer to it, but can readily take one farther away.

That’s a ham-handed metaphor, I guess, but I suspect you know what I mean.  I’ll try to keep you all posted on whatever I do and what effects those actions have.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*That sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

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Not much to report, but that never stops me

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom today, because I brought it back to the house with me over the weekend.  The idea was to have it with me so I can work on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I have that file open—I had originally saved it with the Word app on my phone, I think, so I had to download the latest version of it and adjust the settings, which had a ridiculously large indentation.  Still, I haven’t started rereading and/or editing what I have yet, nor have I yet written anything new on it.

It’s funny that I think of it as a little bit of a story so far when it’s over 100 Microsoft pages (in Calibri, font size 11, no spaces between paragraphs) and over 70,000 words long.  I know of some complete “novels” that are not much longer than that.  I think it might already be longer than Extra Body, which I consider a novella.  Let me look…

Okay, it’s not longer, since Extra Body is almost 77,000 words long, but it’s getting close.  I had intended to publish the latter as a novella, in Kindle and paperback versions, but I got burned out by other things and didn’t have the energy to edit it.  It is posted on this blog (see the link above) in case you want to read it.  I think it appears in reverse order thanks to the way my blog lists things newest first then going backward.  There may be a way to reverse that—I would suspect there should be—but I don’t have the mental energy to look into how to do it.  I don’t have the mental energy for very much lately.

Actually, my physical energy is lagging a bit as well, at the moment.  I am still fighting that cold I had a few days ago, and I have partly lost my voice.  But I don’t think I have a fever nor other hallmarks of systemic infection, and though I’m coughing up some goo, there’s no evidence of any life-threatening pneumonia, unfortunately.  I’m going to work, nevertheless.  I will be masking* today, and I don’t think I’ll be talking on the phone at all, but I can still do all my clerical and computer and office management stuff.

I don’t really do any sales myself, but that’s not because I wasn’t able to do it.  That’s how I started here.  I just am better at other aspects of the office work, so I do those.  Also, I have a very hard time hearing things on some of the phones, and I doubt that’s gotten better with the tinnitus now in both ears (yes, of course, it persists, like the horrors do and like I do).

During the latest part of last week, I meant to try to look at and work on DFandD in the office, but though I did get it set up and corrected the tabs, I didn’t so much as look at it afterwards, though there were moments when I could have done so.  I’m going to need to work on that, or else do my writing on it in the morning and perhaps put aside this blog most days.  I’d rather not do that; this blog is nearly my only connection with the outside world.

I don’t know what is going to happen, of course.  I really ought to publish Extra Body formally—though that would require removing it from this blog—before I even do more work on DFandD.  Heck, if I’m doing things in order, I really should finish Outlaw’s Mind first, which started out as a short story but has become a novel, one that ties into other parts of my already-written and not-yet-written universes.

But almost all of the wind has been taken from my sails over the years.  I have no real support of any kind, not anywhere near me, anyway.  And I have been diagnosed with level 2 ASD, which entails “moderate support needs”.  But just because you have “needs” doesn’t mean they’re going to be met.  That’s just the way things are, unfortunately.

I don’t know.  I’m even starting to feel like my boss wishes I would go, but that he’s too nice to be too open about it.  There are some things that have recently led me to wonder, though I’m probably being paranoid.  Anyway, we’ve been making some adjustments relating to the consolidation of things and people in our two offices, and I think those changes are positive and productive.  But I fear that I am just in the way of such things, since change makes me grumpy and stressed out.

The office, after a momentary bit of confusion, would probably be better off if I were gone and/or dead.  But that’s not unique to the office.  Everything in the world would probably be (at least slightly) better off if I were gone and/or dead.  If I were being sensible, that’s probably what I would be focused on making happen rather than trying to write more fiction again.

I thought about doing it last week, on New Year’s Eve or Day, but I decided that the thing I was thinking of doing would be too expensive if I didn’t have the nerve to go through with it.  I’m glad I didn’t spend that money—assuming there is any long-term need for it—because I haven’t been paid my latest pay yet.  I don’t know why.  It may be because I’m not worth the money or effort; that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, that’s it for this morning.  If I suddenly develop full-blown, life-threatening pneumonia or similar, this’ll be it.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, at least not from my point of view.  And it’s not like anyone else’s life would change in any noticeable way.  They certainly wouldn’t change in any significant way.  There might be a few ripples on the surface of a few ponds, but those would fade almost before it would be possible to notice them.

Enjoy your day.

*Physically, literally, I mean.  I probably do at least some metaphorical masking every day.  It’s hard for me to tell.  I don’t know if I’ve ever not been masking my whole life.

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“Is there anybody out there?”

Here we are again, I guess.  I told you it wasn’t likely that yesterday was my final bellyache, didn’t I?  Anyway, I wrote words to that effect.  And I was right, though many might think that’s a pity and a shame.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, a silly designation involving iterated “Eves” which would become unworkable pretty quickly.  You’ll notice that I didn’t call yesterday “Christmas Eve Eve Eve”, even (ha) though that would have worked and been accurate.  Still, if one keeps up that process, then “Boxing Day” (aka the day after Christmas in the US) would be “Christmas (Eve364)” or some such notation.

I suppose if one wanted, one could keep track of the days of the year in that fashion, but it seems quite clunky.  Also, if one were inclined just to count the days of the year, or to count them down, it would make more sense to use counting numbers and to start with New Year’s Day.  So the first day would be just Day 1, or Day 365 (or 366) if one were counting down.

Sorry, I know I’m being pretty bizarre.  Maybe that’s just some kind of hallmark of genius or something (though I doubt it).

It’s been a strange several days, including some atypical days at work.  Everyone else in the office has various things happening with their (sometimes growing) families, not all of it joyous and positive, but much of it disruptive.  And sales are always a bit slower at this time of year; people are busy buying presents for loved ones and the like in the latter part of December, even when the political and economic situation isn’t a category 5 shit storm.  But, of course, they are, collectively, just such a shit storm now, so things are more erratic than usual.

I was going to say “chaotic”, but at this stage in the universe’s evolution, chaos is almost always in play‒the mathematical kind, I mean.

Wow, I’ve written about 320 words so far, and I don’t think I’ve actually said anything.  Or, at least, I haven’t said much.  As a method of conveying useful information, this post (and perhaps this whole blog) has been highly inefficient, hasn’t it?  Of course, if I had specific information I was trying to convey, I might do better.

Though, honestly, I have a truly hard time being honest and clear when I’m trying to convey certain kinds of information.  I will often attempt to express what I think are highly urgent messages‒in person sometimes, but much more often in this blog‒yet it seems I am too esoteric or awkward in my attempts to express myself.  Certainly, those attempts have yet to achieve anything like my desired aims.

Yesterday was no exception.  I thought I was being rather ham-handed, to be honest, but clearly I was not.  I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reader(s).  If a pitcher throws a wild enough pitch, the catcher cannot reasonably be expected to catch it, though that’s the catcher’s expertise.  How much more unreasonable would it be to blame other people for not getting points my unconscious or awkward or habit-driven and “neurodivergent” mind is forcing me to make in very awkward ways?

I am far from a professional pitcher in this metaphor, and no one has ever volunteered to be my catcher.  Most people who end up trying to do it, out of chance or kindness or whatever, get sick of the work after a very short while.

I cannot justly blame them; that’s one villain trope I find intolerable, blaming other people and taking out one’s frustration on them instead of assessing how one’s own choices can be improved.  It’s small wonder these bad guys, who have secured all the advantages through diligent villainy, fail in the end.  It’s not just because of plot armor.

Another bad villain habit is gloating over a still-living arch-enemy.  In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had caught Yoda off-guard with force lightning.  Yoda was down!  And Palpatine allowed him to get up because he had “been waiting for this for a long time”.

Moron!  If he had pressed his advantage with more force lightning or even just rushed up and cut the little bugger in half with his lightsaber, he would have had time to head to Mustafar (remember, he sensed that Lord Vader was in danger).  Even if Obi wan got away, he wouldn’t have Yoda’s backup or anything.  Palpatine could have won much more thoroughly, and Vader might never have needed his breathing armor and could have achieved his full potential, and he might even have had Luke and Leia with him.

That was a hell of a nerdy tangent, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It’s a pet peeve of mine.  But I guess tripping over one’s ego is a natural hazard for the sorts of people who become arch villains.

Maybe I dwell on such things too much.  Perhaps that’s what started me down the road to being habitually hyper self-critical, which evolved into self-hatred and a desire for self-destruction.  It’s a bit of a conundrum, but I would still rather not become cocky and arrogant in anything but a comedic way.  I don’t like seeing it; I really don’t want to do it.

Well, this has been another sort of bipolar-pattern post, hasn’t it?  It really does seem to me that I often produce a vaguely sinusoidal pattern of posts veering from very gloomy and morose and thoroughly nihilistic and moribund to weirdly hyperactive, almost hypomanic posts.  Yet even such latter type posts, of which this is one, really feel pressured to me most of the time, in the psychiatric/psychological usage of the term as applied to speech.

There’s nothing really that I can do with these sorts of insights, though, and certainly no one else is using them for any benevolent purpose toward me.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.  As Gendo Ikari pointed out, everyone is ultimately alone, and we certainly die alone.

On that cheery note:  Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Is this my final fit, my final bellyache? I doubt it.

I don’t think I’m going to write very much today.  It’s Monday morning, Hanukkah is basically over, Christmas is coming in three days, and the world‒as always‒is just a dried out, crusty piece of crap.  Perhaps that’s good if you’re a dung beetle.  But I am not one of those.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s a good way to regard the people who want to claim as much of the world for themselves as they can without care for whether they deserve it from any point of view, and who don’t care what condition it’s in, since everything is shit anyway, and they are fond of shit.

Yeah, let’s call those people dung beetles.

This is not intended as a slight against actual dung beetles, though, which are honorable creatures which play an important part in the general ecosystem.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter.  Of course, whether or not something matters is very dependent upon one’s point of view.  What matters to an architect who specializes in skyscrapers might be of very little even trivial interest to a beet farmer.

That’s just a pair of examples‒or an example of a pair.  This is not to be confused with the worries of a pear farmer (Ha ha); they might yet have a third set of priorities, mightn’t they?  Though I suspect the concerns of the pear farmer would probably have more in common with those of the beet farmer than those of the architect.  And, of course, assuming they are all human, their overall concerns share much more in common than those any of them might share with sea anemone…or just ordinary anemones.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going on about right now.  I was thinking of just embedding some YouTube “videos” of some music that I’ve done‒some original, some covers‒that sort of convey the way I feel today, since none of my blogging seems to work.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, anyway.  I don’t know that there’s any point in it, but then, I don’t know that there’s any point in anything, do I?  I have my suspicions, but I don’t know, and I have no interest in believing in much of anything, at least in certain senses of the word.  Indeed, I have real contempt for people who think believing is a good enough way to approach reality.

Sorry, I suspect I’m not making much sense here.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Here, take a look at a few pieces of music, some original, some covers.  Then I’ll shut up and spare you lot the nonsense.

Actually, I don’t know if I’m even going to do that.  I guess you will know, if you’re reading this.  But I hate what I’ve written so far here today.  Though, perhaps it’s a work of unparalleled genius.  The odds are far from great, but they are not zero.

Ugh.  I don’t know what I’m doing.  This season of the year has really exacerbated my already not insignificant neuropsychiatric issues.

I’ve learned that there’s a nice high-rise Hyatt hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale with surprisingly reasonable room rates, and I was thinking of maybe getting a balcony room there either on Christmas Eve or on New Year’s Eve or something.  It sounds like it might be a good place from which to watch fireworks.

I’ll keep you posted about that.  Or maybe I won’t, I don’t know.  I know I have a cover of No Surprises as one of my favorite songs‒in a way, my theme song‒but that doesn’t mean I’m dogmatic about it.  Anyway, something could be a surprise to all of you (though goodness knows it shouldn’t be) and not so much of one to me.

I’m not a big fan of surprises, because most of the surprises in my life have been unpleasant to horrible.  And almost all of them occurred slowly, almost creepily.  They aren’t the sorts of surprises to make you jump, though they sometimes can leave you with your jaw hanging open and your breath bated.

Enough.  This blog is done for today.

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A shorter and slightly less negative post

Okay, well, I’m back writing this on the smartphone again today.  I decided not to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, because it was annoying to deal with even the minor extra weight, and also because I fear that writing using the lapcom leads me to get a bit too wordy and carried away.  I’ve mentioned this before more than once, though I cannot immediately give you links to the earliest or the most recent mention of the issue.

Anyway, the point is that I can type on a regular keyboard almost as fast as I can talk*, so I kind of run off at the mouth…so to speak.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing‒though given that we’re discussing me, it probably is‒but I think it can cause a bit of an aversion in some people when they see that a blog post is longer than usual.  I don’t know how many of my readers actually do read to the end of the average post, but surely it’s less likely to happen if the post is 1400 words long than if it is merely 900 words long.

Of course, I set my target nowadays at 700 words, but that just means I am less likely to go over 1000.  I almost never stop at or before 700 words.

I tend not to write as much, as fast, on the smartphone. This is partly because it’s just not a good way to write things; it’s clunky and prone to induce errors, and the lack of real keys makes it so there is less sensory feedback about what one is typing.  Also, my thumbs get sore from writing on the phone.

Now, though, I’ve had a few days off, so my thumbs are less painful.  I’ve also been taking strong doses of NSAIDs over the past few days, and that may be helping them.  It’s not helping my stomach, though.  I already feel nauseated right now, and it’s not even 5 am as I write this.

My life is so glamorous, isn’t it?  And I share most of the best aspects of it here, with you readers.  There are many things about which I feel too dreary even to bring them up.  I don’t want even people who are quite nonjudgmental and positive about me to see the squalor in which I live.  I am not very good at taking care of myself.

Sorry, I’m sure this is all very boring.

Sometimes I must admit that I envy people with unreasonably high self-esteem.  I mean, past a certain point, overinflated self-esteem makes one prone to do harm to other people.  But at least such people spend their time, day in and day out, with someone they love, right?  They tend to disgust me (and many other people too) but the kicker is:  they don’t care!

This is not to confuse such people with the pathologically narcissistic, who seem clearly to be motivated by some deep insecurities that they chase like a heroin addict needing a fix.  They are pathetic and do not seem comfortable with themselves, though they can come across as shameless.  I wish I could think of a good, well-known public example of such a person, but for the life of me, no one comes to mind.

Ha.

Ha.

Anyway, my problems lie in the other direction.  I have a pathological self-hatred.  When I’m calm and objective, I know that there are at least some aspects of myself that are not horrible, and some that are even arguably good.  I’m reasonably smart and rather creative, for instance.  But I just annoy the hell out of myself, and it’s very hard to get a break.

I know it’s possible to love someone without really liking them (in the sense of just enjoying spending time with them), but after a while, if you’re forced to spend every moment, waking or otherwise, with this person you had loved but whose personality you found annoying, you can become prone to hate them, or at least to hate their presence.

I’ve never felt this way about another person, but it’s how I tend to feel about myself.  I’m like a chronic, itchy, burning rash somewhere between the lower edges of my shoulder blades, just where it’s hardest to reach.  And though I can briefly mitigate the problem, it doesn’t go away.  There’s only one cure, and unfortunately it involves killing the patient.

Oh, well, whatever.  I need just to get over myself, so to speak.  I think I take life too seriously.  I would be able to do better if not for my chronic, really annoying pain.  I might even be able to enjoy life with or without loving myself.  But, as I often say, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit.

I don’t know if I’m working tomorrow, but if I do, I’ll probably write a blog post, and you’ll see it here.  If not, you won’t.  Either way, I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*And not the sort of hesitant speech that happens when I don’t really know the people with whom I’m conversing, but rather my speech when I’m talking to someone about something in which I’m interested.  That probably only happens regularly with my sister, once every week or two, nowadays.

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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“As it is lasting, so be deep!”

Well, it’s Monday again.  It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, which technically started at sundown last night‒which means it started not only at different times for different time zones, but also in different latitudes, since in the winter the sun sets earlier farther north than closer to the equator*.  It also rises later.  This is all due to the curvature of the Earth.

Of course, in summertime, the sun sets later the farther north one goes (or south if one is in the southern hemisphere).  If you’ve ever been in northern Europe in the summertime, you’ll know what I mean.  It can feel very strange for it not to be dark out yet at nearly eleven at night (for instance) if one is from the US, where things aren’t quite so disparate.

Anyway, I’m not really celebrating Hanukkah this year, any more than I celebrated Thanksgiving or any more than I will celebrate Christmas or New Years or any other such holidays.  I have a little stylized menorah graphic that I used to put up on “the board”, with an increasing number of candles with the days and everything, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this year.  It’s actually more depressing to do little superficial things to mark a holiday when one has no one with whom to celebrate.

Speaking of all this, by the way, I’m very sorry if some people are put off when I talk about my depressed and stressed and self-destructive thoughts.  I know they bother some people, though that in itself is a bit curious.  After all, they’re not your depressive and anxious and self-destructive thoughts.  Or maybe they are in a sense.  I don’t know.

I do know, though, that it seems that my dark, morose, and pro-mortalist posts seem to garner higher readership than my ones where I discuss some kind of mathematical or scientific or philosophical or political point. They are certainly more popular than my fiction.

The number of people who reliably read this blog, or at least click on it daily, is greater than the number of people who have ever bought a single one of my books or even my short stories**.  I don’t know why more people click on or “like” the dark posts, but I don’t mind it.  At least I can feel that there are people who hear it, even if there may be little “listening” involved.

Of course I’m heading in to work today.  Things have been slow at the office, and some of the people who work there are going through various events‒some positive, some negative‒that mean that some of them are unable to work as regularly as usual or to work at all in the short term, and it makes things slower and a bit dreary.  Of course, unless I’m sick, I go to the office.  I have nothing better to do (nor, really, anything worse, since that might be tempting also).

I do keep being tempted to go back on antidepressants, but they never seem to quite work out as I would hope, in the sense of actually correcting my depression for any significant length of time.  I’ve tried at least one member of nearly every class of antidepressant, and more than one of some.  They just tend to make me more disconnected and dissociated, honestly.  Maybe ECT would help more, but that’s hard to get nowadays, and the potential memory issues associated are worrisome.

SSRIs do tend to help my anxiety/social discomfort somewhat, but they affect my judgment, with negative outcomes.  For instance, I did not see the fact that I could end up a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years when I was only trying to help others who also had chronic pain, like I have.  And therapy has never given me many durable results‒this is, I’m led to understand, not uncommon in people with ASD‒though it was often nice to have someone with whom I could speak freely and who would at least give me sympathy.  Still, it was pricey.

I certainly don’t want to disrespect my various therapists‒I do very much respect them, and they did their best for me, I’ve no doubt about that‒but I might have done as well having weekly visits to a sex worker.  I don’t think I would have wanted to partake in their regular “services” though; I think the prospect of having sex with someone you don’t know, let alone to whom you have any deep attachment, is very strange and seems uncomfortable.

It might sound like it could be good, but I think it would be unworkable if I tried it.  I don’t even like being patted on the shoulder by people with whom I am not close, and sometimes, depending on my mood, even by people with whom I am close.  But still, one hears stories of men who go to sex workers largely to have someone with whom they can freely just talk.

That would probably cost more, though, and possibly lead to legal problems, not to mention the facts of exploitation and so on, in which I have no desire to participate.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  But it doesn’t matter.  I’m just tired of all this.  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I just want to sleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day.  And Happy Hanukkah, if you celebrate it.

*The mirror image of all this occurs in the southern hemisphere.

**Though people who actually read my stories do seem to enjoy them.  I’m just really not good at promoting myself.  This is probably tied to my whole self-hatred, self-destructive attribute cluster.

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“And, to SLEEP, you must slumber in just such a bed.”

Well, it’s f*cking Saturday, and I’m going in the to f*cking office to f*cking work, because it’s not challenging enough for me to recover my limited mental equilibrium when I have two days off, so I should try to do it with one as often as possible.  Oh, and the one day I supposedly still have to take off is the day I have to do all my laundry, which means I have to go into the other part of the house and, more often than not, deal with their overly energetic and poorly trained dog‒and it’s a big dog.

I’m not afraid of dogs.  I like dogs, even very large ones.  But I have little sympathy for dogs that have not been trained, and who act like they’re still teething or something.  If it were my dog, I could rapidly train it out of the habit of putting its moronic jaws around peoples’ forearms, and it and I and others would be happier overall.

Maybe next time I’ll go out with suntan lotion or even pepper spray all over my arms, so it gets an unpleasant mouthful if it tries.

Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted just to slip it a few chunks of the rat bait/poison that I have.  It’s not the neurotoxin one, which is supposedly less harmful to people and pets than to rats.  It’s the super-coumadin, blood “thinning”, anticoagulant one.  To be honest, though, I would probably not be willing under nearly any circumstance to poison a dog, since the agency of such a creature is limited and its poor behavior is largely due to the humans in its life.

And yes, of course I have a big, multi-pound bag of rat poison.  Who knows, I might get peckish at some point and want it as a snack.  The holidays are upon us, after all, and it can be so hard to stay on a diet at this time of year.

Anyway, that’s just one possible nosh that I have for potential last meals.  I even have a couple of emptied out fiber capsules that I’ve refilled with broken glass pieces.  They would actually go nicely with the previously mentioned snack, wouldn’t they?  Like salted caramel, the two components could really enhance each other.  You might even call it synergy.

Enough about such tempting treats.  The point is, I’m going to the office today.  Then I’m heading back to the house.  Then I’ll be trying to rest if I can for the remainder of the weekend, though when I think of my own mind, I am inescapably reminded of Boromir describing Mordor:

That works pretty well to describe my very annoying brain/body.  I cannot seem to sleep very long, and I never feel like I sleep “all the way” if you will.  I am always somehow on yellow alert; I don’t know why.  It’s exhausting.  There are plain few upsides or effective distractions, and almost never any relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about right now, really.  I just feel a general, free-floating hostility and even hatred for most things in existence.  Sometimes I just want to wipe out the whole universe.  It can be done rather easily, at least from a certain perspective.

Incidentally, creating a new local source of the hypothetical inflaton field would probably not do the trick, assuming that inflationary cosmology is correct.  Most of the mathematical solutions to that possible situation indicate that, such a field would initiate a new, rapid, inflationarily expanding “universe”, but from the perspective of our universe the created bubble would just plop through and out of spacetime.  I haven’t done the math myself‒I am not adequately trained to do it at this time‒but I have this from more than one fairly reputable and reliable source, including people who actually do have the necessary expertise.

I’ve previously discussed vacuum collapse; if one could figure out how to trigger that‒assuming it is possible‒one could literally wipe out everything in the current universe.  Though, of course, it would take a long time, since it could only happen at the speed of light, so really, you’d only be wiping out everything in your future light cone.  There may be no way to destroy the universe that doesn’t effectively take a limitless time to accomplish.

On the other hand, when I spin around, it’s possible to view that action as the universe spinning around me while I’m stationary.  There are legitimate reasons why we don’t tend to think of it this way, but it’s a perspective that can be taken.

From that sort of perspective, when one dies (from one’s own point of view at least) the entire universe ceases to exist.  It’s very simple and thorough!  Of course, if there is an afterlife, that plan would fail, and one would be forced to go back to the drawing board.  But I’ve never encountered even borderline intriguing evidence or argument that might indicate an afterlife exists, unless you count things like a Poincare recurrence*.

So there is at least one reasonably reliable and plausibly achievable way to destroy the universe, from my point of view.  And the good thing about that is, from other points of view, the universe would still exist, and this would be no more contradictory than the fact that someone falling through the event horizon of a large enough black hole wouldn’t even notice it happening, but those far away would see the faller as never even quite reaching the event horizon.

Anyway, that theoretical stuff isn’t really very interesting for present purposes.  What matters is, at the very least, I can destroy the universe in a sense, if I so desire.  And every day it seems to become more and more tempting to do so.  This world is just so disgusting so often, and it’s not just humans that meet that description.

Ah, well.  Try to have a good day if you can for as long as the universe does exist.  After that, you’re on your own.

*Or the possibility of quantum immortality in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics.  But the various other possible alternate versions of me in such a theoretical quantum multiverse are not “me” even now, from my point of view‒not exactly, anyway, not in any sense that I can experience.  So future possible subsets of the wave function of the universe that contain randomly immortal versions of me are not worth taking into account, and they are vanishingly rare**.

**Though I suppose, as time goes by and all mortal things die, the quantum wavefunction of the universe might come to be dominated by such versions of…well, everyone.  None, however, would be able to interact with each other as far as I can see.

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I never may believe these antique fables nor these fairy blogs.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as the savvy/experienced can tell from the fact that I said “Hello and good morning” or similar words at the beginning of the post.

I’m not at all sure what to write now.  There’s nothing coming into my thoughts that seems interesting.  There are many annoying things, things that make me want to swat or poison or burn them like a swarm of mosquitoes and other bloodsucking, disease carrying pestilentia.  I don’t know if that last word is “really” a word, as in one that’s used and recognized by many people.  But it’s a word that feels right, and does at least some job of conveying the formication* that so many things in life induce for me.

Everything in my life is either dominated or highlighted by pain and/or tension-anxiety and/or depression, and all of that tends to make me feel angry or at least grumpy a lot.  It’s not pleasant, as I’m sure you’d agree.

Ugh, this is all so tedious and pointless.  I’m spitting in the ocean as if there’s any real chance that my loogie could change the course of the Gulf Stream even at a small scale.  But its impact is entirely washed out by thermal and other noise.

I’m having a hard time getting interested in anything positive‒I haven’t watched any science videos or read any science books or philosophy or whatever for a while.  I have plenty, and there are many things I would wish to understand better than I do.  But I have no available energy for such things.  It takes all the energy I have to get up and go to work and try to pretend to be human and productive, and then to get back to the house at the end of the day.

Time’s been my way when I would have thought it would be a shame if humanity dies out without ever leaving this solar system, without ever expanding and maybe, potentially, becoming cosmically significant, as described in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity.

Now, at least some of the time, I think it’s probably appropriate.  Why inflict the naked house apes and their progeny (literal or figurative) upon the greater, future cosmos?  Let there be disharmony.  Let there be dissonance.  Let there be cacophony.  Let there be chaos.  And finally, let there be silence.

I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here.

I need to clear my head, or at least I wish to clear my head.  My brain always seems to be cranking away at about a mile a second, in a random, drunken walk through the phase space of my possible thoughts.  I think it’s been like that pretty much all my life, but in the past, when the machine was newer, it ran more smoothly, and all the pipes and tubes and wires and hoses and fans and transistors and every other metaphorical part were functioning more efficiently.

What’s the point of all this nonsense?  I’m sorry.  I’m sure this is very unpleasant.  I’m sure that I am very unpleasant; I’ve been told so before, and the cases made were not unconvincing.

I used to be able to hide that part of me a lot of the time.  I used to be able to pretend to be positive and upbeat and to help the people around me to feel good sometimes.  I’ve even done some good at times in the past.  It’s been a long time since that’s been the case.  But that’s not too consequential, since I am now alone, and probably will be for the rest of my life, which feels pretty appropriate to me.

Anyway, whatever.  Try to have a good day.

TTN

*That one is a “real” word**, and no, it has pretty much no common ground with the word “fornication” beyond similar sound and shape.

**And I looked up and confirmed that “pestilentia” is a recognized word also and means roughly what I used it to mean when I “reinvented” it.  I guess that shows that it’s a well-crafted word.