Anxiety

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I haven’t found a good Shakespeare-based headline

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and there is no lapcom involved in writing this post, at least not on my part.

Maybe “involved” is too broad a word.  One could argue that all the posts I’ve written before on my lapcom(s), of which there are many (posts, not lapcoms), set the stage and set the pace and set the precedent for this post.  And so, in a sense, they are involved in this post, and thus so is it.  However, that is reaching a bit.

So, I will clarify.  I am writing this post on my smartphone, not on my lapcom, which is still at the office, which is not where I am writing this.

I feel very groggy this morning, perhaps even more so than I have the previous three mornings, though the residua of my migraine pain appear mostly to have gone.  Between that* and the fact that I am writing on my smartphone, I may not write much today.

I appear to be very tired.  Actually, I say “appear”, but it is my own state to which “very tired” refers, and it is a subjective sensation (though it is also an objective fact), so if I appear tired to myself, then the odds are good that I really am tired.

Speaking of being tired to myself, it feels like I’m being so very tedious here lately.  Perhaps I am no more tedious than I’ve ever been.  I don’t know.  For all I can tell, I have always been tedious, my entire life, starting long before blogs (BB if you prefer).

Certainly, no one has wanted to stick around me for any very long period of time, not my parents, not my (former) spouse, not my children.  I seem to be an unpleasant fact and presence eventually to those around me.  Maybe it’s time I took the hint and got gone.

I still haven’t been able to read.  I think I’ve spent less than twenty minutes reading over the last two weeks or more.  I don’t know if you quite realize what a departure that is for me.  I haven’t even been reading audio books‒which would count for me, since I always read auditorially, meaning that I “hear” the words I am reading.

I also haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than maybe half an hour in that same time.  That happened when I started watching a video of “Groovy Grace” reacting to the Pink Floyd album Animals, which is one of my favorites.

As the album began, with Pigs on the Wing Part 1, I could not resist pausing the video, picking up my own black Strat, and playing and singing that song.  I played the combined song, parts one and two, including my own tortured** version of the guitar solo by Snowy White, which was the version one could hear on the old 8-track tape, or so I’m told.

After that, I played and sang a few more songs, including Wish You Were Here, which starts and ends on the same chord (G) as Pigs on the Wing.  I might have also played the Radiohead song Lucky, and probably The Man Who Sold the World.  That was it.  I didn’t even do Nothing Compares 2U.

Other than that, I’ve just mainly been distracting myself.  But I’m a bit foggy even for that right now.  You can’t tell (probably) because I edit these posts, but I’ve been making a lot of typos again.  That’s more likely to happen when I use the smartphone just at baseline, but today’s rate is still an outlier from the mean (see my post from the other day).

All right, let’s wrap this up.  I don’t have anything more to say (not for the moment, at least), so I will emulate the habit of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and seal my lips.

TTFN

*How groggy am I?  Well, I initially wrote “between that…” (by which I meant, my level of grogginess) “…and how groggy I am, I…”.  So, yeah, pretty groggy.

**I nevertheless actually like my version of the solo better than Snowy’s.  Go figure.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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This is today’s blog post, in case you were wondering

Well, it’s the start of a new work week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was…well, idle, I guess, if nothing else.  Certainly there were no significant activities involved in it, beyond watching various kinds of reaction videos online, because that almost feels like watching something with friends.

I’m sorry to have to say that my one slightly longer than usual night’s sleep (see last week) was indeed a fluke and a rather extreme outlier.  I wonder whether ibuprofen even had anything to do with it after all.  It could have been something I ate for all I can tell.

I’m continuing to use the ibuprofen, but I think it’s just doing its usual thing, because I certainly am not getting the response I got when I took it after ten or so days without NSAIDs.  I did get some similar feelings of fleeting but global relief of some kind since then, which makes me suspect that I really do have some chronic inflammation going on, but that’s really not very surprising.

I would have liked to do more walking this weekend, but it’s been very hot and seriously humid, so the heat index rises to well over a hundred starting quite early in the day.  Also, it was pretty sunny, and that adds to trouble, especially if one doesn’t own any non-black clothes.

I know, of course, that it’s been my decision to buy only black clothes, so one could say that it’s entirely my fault.  And that’s even accurate, if one uses the term fault in the sense of “something wrong or badly designed or badly put together” or even “a crack running through the crust or surface or structure of something”.  I’m definitely a faulty device.  That should be obvious.

But it’s not a fault about which I have the wherewithal to make a difference.  I just can’t stand to wear any colors anymore; they irritate my eyes, or some part of my sensory apparatus.  I can’t change my own bad wiring, so to speak, anymore than a computer can improve its own operating system.

I suppose, in principle, AIs may eventually be able to do so, but though I often feel like a replicant, I am not, as far as I know, actually (or virtually) artificial.  I can alter my programming only the “old fashioned way”, by which I mean, trying to learn new things and master new skills and so on.

And I have tried, and I am trying, and I will probably continue to try, to improve myself, to gain new skills, to get past my mental (and physical) issues.  But though I may have made progress‒who knows how bad I might be, otherwise‒I feel very much like an ant trying to scramble up the side of an ant-lion’s trap.

The shifting sand underneath makes the experience much like trying to go up a fast moving downward escalator.  It’s taking all the effort I’m able to muster to keep myself from going rapidly down to whatever predator or basement or whatever lies at the bottom of the course.  Or, maybe there is no bottom.  Maybe it’s possible to keep sliding down and down, forever, never making any headway at all.

It’s enough to make one want just to stop trying and even to turn around and sit down on the escalator steps and just embrace whatever is waiting below.  I certainly don’t feel any signs that I’m even getting within sight of any next level up the moving stairs, let alone finding a potential exit.

All this is a metaphor, of course, and I suspect it’s a pretty tortured one.  I apologize for that.  I try to be creative, but sometimes it doesn’t work too well, and I come out with some equivalent of purple prose.

I think I try too hard to be clever, just as I try too hard to be funny.  I succeed a little bit, occasionally; it would be truly sad if I kept trying and always failed.  But enough people laugh at things I say that I think I have some intermittent success in the humor area.  I’ve even received compliments about some laughs in a review of my horror novel The Vagabond.

I wonder what I would be like if I were able to break the habit of trying to be funny or clever or whatever you want to call it.  Maybe that would be the equivalent of the aforementioned turning around and sitting down on the descending escalator and just watching as it brings me into whatever depths await.

I’m certainly very tired of trying.  I’m not getting anywhere‒not as far as I can tell‒and it’s just exhausting.  Maybe I need what they call a “grippy sock vacation”*.  Except I think I need more of a “dirt vacation”, which is like the proverbial dirt nap, but more welcome to the person taking it.

Okay, that’s enough out of me.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.

*I’m not liable to be able to take one of those, because I do not have any medical insurance, and I don’t expect (or intend) ever to get any.  One doesn’t build fancy battlements and protective fortifications and set up infra-red and motion-sensing alarms around a poorly maintained outhouse.

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Blog, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blog!

Hello. Also, good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 6th of August in 2026 AD (or CE if you prefer).  As you can see, I am writing (or I will have written) a blog post today.  This is only really noteworthy because last Thursday I didn’t write a post.  I stayed at the house and did not go to work.

I would say that I’m not completely recovered yet.  My respiratory symptoms are improving, but are not entirely back to normal (I guess “normal” for such symptoms means “nonexistent”).  My urinary issues appear mostly resolved, which may be because I have continued not to use any NSAIDs other than aspirin (in modest amounts), making up what difference I can with Tylenol.  It’s not ideal, and my thumbs and back and hips and cetera are having more stiffness and discomfort than usual.  Partly because of that, I have not been walking much this week.

I don’t really have anything interesting or uplifting to discuss today.  I appear usually only to be able to sustain an upbeat impression for about one day’s worth of posting, and then I’m exhausted and unable to maintain a normal or positive attitude.  It takes quite a bit of effort for me to pretend to be normal and human.  I used to be better at it‒I think‒but my endurance for such things has worn away.  Maybe there is some psychic equivalent of repetitive stress injury that grinds down that capacity over time.  Maybe I just never really had such a capacity and I was merely fooling myself.

I do know that I had longer stretches of positive mood in the past‒sometimes too positive, I suspect.  But that’s gone the way of the great white whale, as far as I can tell.  I certainly don’t feel positive.  Maybe I come across occasionally as positive, though.

Who knows?  Not me.  I never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Oh, wait, those are the lyrics to a David Bowie song that was covered brilliantly by Nirvana:

Sorry, I think I’m being a bit incoherent.  Perhaps I should try more to be on guard against madness, or at least to fear it like Lear did (that almost rhymes).  But I don’t, at least not really, because my type of madness is mainly mood related, not a cognitive dysfunction.

***

Sorry for that little discontinuity, there.  I got to the train station in the interim and lost my train of thought…ouch, no pun intended, sorry about that.

As I was approaching the northbound side of the station, I had to stop because the express train was coming through, and the gates were going down.  Actually, the gate just started going down as I approached; I could have rushed across, but it would have been a bit obnoxious, and there was nothing to gain by it.

I like being near the express train as it passes, anyway, because its slipstream creates a really nice breeze.

Does anyone else out there see such express trains go by and wonder what it would feel like if one threw oneself in front of it as it approached?  By which I mean, do you wonder if it would hurt, or if the concussive force would be too great and too fast for pain?  Would there even be time and nervous system input enough for one to register impact, let alone to suffer?

I wouldn’t do that sort of thing, of course (I think).  It would be very rude; it would spoil the commute for thousands of people at least, and it could traumatize the poor people who work on the train.  I suppose if I were to be fully hateful enough as well as self-destructive, I might stop caring about such things.  But that hasn’t happened yet.

It’s that wish to avoid discourtesy which makes things like self-immolation or jumping from high windows/balconies problematic to consider, too.  Similarly for just opening up some arteries in a bathroom (mine or that of a hotel or similar).  I would dislike causing such trauma (and mess) for other people.

This is one reason why the notion of just swimming out into the Atlantic seems appealing.  It’s a big old ocean, it’s right nearby, and if one can find the discipline to swim far enough out, there is unlikely to be much mess for anyone to clean up, other than fish and other marine life, who would get a bit of extra food.

However, the ocean is very frightening.  It is not my natural habitat.  I can swim well enough, and it’s easier to do so in salt water than in fresh water, but that vast, deep darkness is daunting.  Weirdly enough, immolation might be less frightening than swimming out into the sea.

On the other hand, there is the notion of just walking.  It’s summer in south Florida; walking more than a certain amount can and will kill you.  When the heat index is higher than body temperature (as it is most days for a substantial portion of the day at this time of year), it can kill you with surprising speed.

I suppose if one were hoping to be particularly fastidious, one could make sure to walk toward the Everglades‒they are never too far away around here, and there are a goodly number of organisms there that would not complain about disposing of one’s body.  They’re generous that way.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that subject for the moment, at least here in my blog.  It’s never very far from the front of my mind, but that’s my problem, not yours.

I work tomorrow, but not Saturday, so there should be one more post this week, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day in the meantime.

TTFN

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The Emperor of Silence reaps no relief from pain…or something like that

Welcome to August, everyone.  For today is August 1st, 2026 (AD/CE).  How exciting.  Huzzah.  Yippee ki yay motherf…

…or goodness sake, we certainly have a rather Roman day today, don’t we?  The month is named after a Roman emperor (the first “official” one, though I wish he’d just kept the name Octavian, since Augustus has too much of a try-hard vibe), and the day is named after the Roman god, Saturn.  Sailor Saturn is also my favorite sailor soldier*.  Though, that last thing doesn’t have anything to do with Rome.

I’m working today, just to confirm what would probably be your conclusion if you were even thinking about the question.

It’s not an absolute correlation, by any means; it’s possible, and not even unreasonably unlikely, that I might write a blog post but not go to work, or that I might go to work but not write a blog post.  The latter has happened more times than not (by far) throughout my life, but we need not worry about that likelihood, since it is ruled out by the fact that I am indeed writing a blog post.  You can tell, because you’re reading it (albeit not while I’m writing, as far as I know).

I am still quite sore all over, especially in my thumbs, back, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, middle back and right side and flank***.  So, yeah, I don’t feel very great.  I also still have some residua of my apparent middle respiratory inflammation, but I think that’s improving.

Maybe it will be good for me to go through a bit of time with basically no NSAIDs in my system‒they’ve been there a lot, for a long time, and cannot fail to have had unintended effects.  We’ll see how the lack thereof even for a few days impacts my health.

On the other hand, NSAIDs can reduce some kinds of depression, and I think they did at least some of that for me.   Still, I am using Tylenol, and that seems possibly to help not merely with physical pain, but also with psychical pain (a little bit).

Weird, right?  And it doesn’t do that by decreasing inflammation in the brain, as NSAIDs appear to do.  It definitely works differently than NSAIDs, though it is not entirely unrelated.

It’s interesting how modules in the nervous system became repurposed (or added-purposed) for later mental functions in larger brains and especially in social animals.  The mental processes associated with physical revulsion and disgust/avoidance toward potential toxins and infectious materials became tied to our moral emotions of judgement, condemnation, and contempt.

Physical processes of fear became connected with anxiety about social opprobrium‒though, in a species like humans, social ostracism really was a serious danger to one’s life in the ancestral environment, to say nothing of being a rather obvious impediment to reproduction.

Anyway, the point is, it shouldn’t be too very surprising that a substance that attenuates physical pain can also ease psychological torment, at least a bit.  We know that opioids do this as well, and to a much greater degree than acetaminophen.

That’s one issue they have.  If a person has a lot of psychic pain‒and many of us do, which is predictable given that we are creatures adapted to hunting and gathering in the savannahs of Africa but are now living in the nightmare/fever dream/bad acid trip that is the modern world‒and has no better, more available, way to assuage it, they’re going to be tempted to reach for the tools they have, however blunt.

If we can figure out better ways of easing those pains, ones that are available and usable by everyone who needs them and which have acceptably few side-effects, that would be nice.

Okay, well, I don’t know if I’ve written anything coherent here, but I’m going to keep this relatively short, because I am still feeling poorly.  I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the weekend.

*Not counting Sailor Moon, who has the same unfair advantage over the others that the Beatles have over other bands.  Sailor Saturn is my Radiohead**/Pink Floyd sailor soldier.

**Heck, on one of my favorite songs by Radiohead, No Surprises, the chorus is followed by the invocation, “Silent.  Silent.”  And Sailor Saturn is the sailor soldier of silence, wielding the Glaive of Silence, with the power to end the world and bring about…well…silence.

***This makes me nervous considering my urinalysis strangeness, but I haven’t yet checked that today.  It feels like it is improving.

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Work, pain, fear, compassion…let’s call the whole week off

Well, it’s Friday, and this will be the last blog post of this week, exclusis improvisis.  By which I mean, I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, and I will not work tomorrow.  I suspect even if I were threatened with rather severe consequences‒which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen‒I would not work.

After all, I have lost most of what mattered to me already, and though some things (people), important things, have indeed come back, and are cherished, I know that I can either survive whatever might be used to threaten me, or that I am not too frightened of death in such circumstances.

As the line from the famous movie (and book) Damage goes, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.”

Of course, that does depend on the type of damage and the nature of the person in question, but still, it is a valid point.  Indeed, as all of you who read this regularly may know, my biggest question is not “How can I survive?” or “Can I survive?” but rather, “Should I survive, and why?”  I’ll avoid getting into the whole Myth of Sisyphus discussion, since I think I’ve done it nearly to death, but I suspect you get the point.

I don’t mean to imply by the above that I think I am immune to threat and pain and torture and so on.  That would be quite unrealistic.  If nothing else, my experience with a kidney stone made clear the fact that, despite chronic pain for roughly a quarter of a century, it is entirely possible to visit upon me further pain so severe that I literally can think of nothing else but trying to get help and to stop it.

Actually, despite those 25ish years, it’s not as though my chronic pain isn’t gripping and debilitating in and of itself.  There are many days in which a lot of my time in the office is spent trying to do my work while writhing and contorting, trying to stretch, banging on my thighs with my fists to try to loosen their tension, sometimes even deliberately hurting myself (sometimes in ways that would frighten other people, I suspect, and that can involve very sharp things and/or very hot things) to distract from the other pain.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve encountered no convincing counterargument so far, but pain is not evolved for one to be able simply to ignore it.  And while I am admittedly rather weird and atypical, and often have felt that I was not the same species as the people around me, I am by no means a different enough organism not to share such a fundamental characteristic.  Pain‒at least, the capacity for it‒is a necessity for long-term survival.  And fear, as the 12th Doctor pointed out, is a superpower.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish true and useful fear from pathological fear states.  As Gavin deBecker points out in The Gift of Fear, if your fear is of something real, you will be able to discern its cause eventually, and it will be fairly focused and reasonably specific:  a particular person makes you feel uncomfortable, something about a particular car or driver seems erratic or reckless, that sort of thing.  Whereas just general anxiety is often vague and nonspecific.

I know of people who felt afraid to take a bath after they saw Jaws!  Now that doesn’t make much sense.  If your bathtub is big enough and deep enough to have a great white shark in it, then you’re probably ultra-wealthy and the shark is your pet.  Probably you keep it well-fed on captured British Secret Service agents, so it is unlikely to bother you.

Anyway, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, not working and being unsusceptible to most ordinary threats.

Certainly, it would be rather ridiculous for someone to say they would ruin my future prospects, that they would put a black mark on my resume or some such.  How hilarious.  A major point on my current CV would be “Three years, Florida State Prison, West Unit, working as an inmate in the Education Department”.  I’m already not competitive for many positions I would have the skill to fill, just as I would no longer be allowed into many nations I would like to visit.

I am, actually, far more susceptible to cajolery and appeals to kindness, or rather “niceness”, than to threats.  I guess it’s because I want to try to be a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person*, despite my tendency toward darkness of various kinds.

It’s an area of insecurity and conflict on my part, because there’s always part of me saying, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”  And I am not always sure, especially when my pain and my depression and my sense of otherness are at their peaks, that it would not be preferable.

But when I am clearest and calmest, I recognize that compassion and at least attempted kindness are better.  They not only may help other people, but they tend to be better for one’s own sense of well-being.  It’s an almost archetypal win-win scenario.

I guess that’s probably a good and somewhat positive place to end this post and this blog week.  I hope you all have a nice day and a good weekend and a good beginning of next week.  I will probably be back on Monday‒again, exclusis improvisis**.

*These are not three different people.  I’m not trying to be like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

**Yes, I am trying to apply that expression frequently to see if I can get it into (relatively) common use.  So, please, do feel free to use it when it’s appropriate, and tell people what it means.  And, what they heck, tell ‘em where you first encountered it.

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Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.

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Blog thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus the “hello and good morning” opening), and here I am writing yet another blog post.  I don’t really know why.

I’ve been trying to promote my “stuff” the other day, at least in a haphazard way.  I shared several blog posts on various social media the other day.  Then I shared my “My Books” page, and then the entries for each of my books.  This was done over several hours.

Then, yesterday, I shared some of my songs, to X and to Bluesky, just to see if anyone checks them out.  So far, no luck.  As far as I can tell, no one has so much as seen any of those shares.  Certainly no one has “liked” them.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I don’t exactly have a huge number of followers, anywhere.  But that just shows the poor taste and lack of discernment of humans, that they cannot appreciate ineffable and transcendent genius when it’s right there in front of them.

I’m kidding.  I wish I could be so egotistical; even if I were the most glaringly deluded person ever in the world, if I loved myself, at least I wouldn’t hate myself.

I’ve tried at various times through autosuggestion/self-talk to get myself at least to believe that I love myself (and thence, hopefully, actually to love myself), and I have at times been known to act as if I thought very highly of myself, though those acts were almost always patently in jest.  I think everyone who knew me knew that; they certainly acted as if they did.

Now, though, I have a hard time even saying that I love myself as part of a sort of mantra or summat.  That doesn’t just refer to saying it out loud, but even in my head.  It’s a bit like saying over and over to myself that I do not feel any pain; I’m not good enough at making myself believe the flagrantly counterfactual for it to work.

My mind is strange to me.  For instance, I have a very difficult time taking any joy, let alone pride, in accomplishing anything.  I don’t know why.  So, most of the things I’ve accomplished have not been motivated by any sense of expected satisfaction in the outcomes but rather by a sense of tension and anxiety about the possibility of not achieving it, whatever it might be.

It’s sort of, “Oh, you accomplished something?  Well, of course you did, it’s what’s expected of you.  If you didn’t, there would be hell to pay, even if it’s only the hell of your own sense of failure.  Now, it’s time to get on to the next thing, because you don’t have a right to rest.”

“Run, rabbit, run

Dig that hole, forget the sun.

When at last the work is done

Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one.”

Anyway, that driving fear becomes less and less motivational over time, especially after one has failed so much and so often, and one’s life is a tattered mockery of what one thought it might be and what it used to be.

At least if I believed that Lord Foul were doing this to me‒he’s prone to try to hurt people by ruining something they love and then returning it to the person*, it seems‒then I could admire his handiwork (or denigrate it, since he could have made things quite a bit worse than they are).

But of course, I don’t believe in any supernatural entities of any kind.  I don’t rule them out a priori, except by definition (since anything that actually exists is natural, not supernatural), but I find none of them remotely convincing.  I’ve tried to see if they can be, but no, really, all of them bear the flagrant hallmarks of ignorance and would-be wish-fulfillment and fear of death and so on.  They are just instances of humans’ desire to be, literally or figuratively, at the center of the universe.

This applies even to modern discussions about whether consciousness can be “merely” matter** or must be some other, extra, “special” kind of thing, because, after all…it’s humans, innit?  It surely must be something fancy and magical.

I’m being sarcastic, which I hope is obvious.  Things like panpsychism, and even the slightly more sensible notions that consciousness requires quantum events of some kind in the brain and cannot be a product of “ordinary” computation, are merely attempts to make anything we don’t yet fully understand into something woo-filled and magical.  They bear all the hallmarks of an egotistical, willful delusion that tries to make mere humans**** unique, in a unique way.

It’s rather sad.  But more, it’s rather pathetic and contemptible.  At least, I hold it in contempt.  People think they want to imagine magical and “supernatural” things, and while those things can at times be entertained as hypotheses, they generally don’t hold up even to minor to scrutiny.  Reality has tremendous wonders on offer, but because they are “ordinary”, they cannot be good enough for some people.  Unfortunately, as Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty.”

Of course, I cannot seem to take joy in the real or the imaginary, and I certainly have a hard time finding joy in myself.  I find me thoroughly irritating, a lot of the time.  And unfortunately, “No matter where you go, there you are.”  I cannot get away from myself, even by sleeping (see yesterday’s post).

Enough.  The more I write today, the more I seem to want to burn everything down.  I guess I’ll stop, at least for the moment.  I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*Thomas Covenant said, about Foul’s tendencies, “How do you hurt a man who’s lost everything?  Give him back something, broken.”

**As if there were anything “mere” about matter***.

***Except matter that is part of a mere (which is a term for a shallow lake).

****Humans merit the adjective “mere” much more than matter does.

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“When I wake up early in the morning…”

It’s Wednesday morning, it’s not even really close to five o’clock (like in the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home…get it?), and yet I am heading to work, waaay earlier than necessary.  That may seem odd enough, but actually, I’ve been “awake” for hours already.

This is nothing new.  Something along these lines happens nearly every night, unless I have doped myself up with antihistamines (which produces its own rather significant problems).  I just don’t talk about it very often, because people just don’t seem to get it or to appreciate the scope and scale and the chronicity of the problem.  They seem to imagine that, since they have had some nights with less than ideal sleep from time to time, they know what I experience, and think it’s not that big a deal.

I am 56 years old (plus about ¾), but I have been “awake” long enough to have been alive, well…let’s see.  To do the figuring, I need to work out my typical or average number of waking hours, divide it by the more normal or healthy number of waking hours, then multiply it by my current age.

Ikimashou:  19 or 20 waking hours a day is usual for me.  I’ll round it to 20 for ease of math, since this is not a precise calculation anyway.  So 20/16* or 5/4 or 1.25 times 56.  Since 56 is evenly divisible by 4 we can just add that quartered amount, which is 14.  So, I’ve been awake long enough for someone 14 years older than I am, or someone who is 70.

To be fair, most days I feel older than that.

On the other hand, I haven’t really been fully awake all these years.  As the narrator in Fight Club pointed out, with insomnia you’re never really asleep, but you’re also never really awake.  So, my brain has not been fully awake as much as a healthy 70 year old’s (or a healthy 56 year old’s) would have been.

I have spoken here more than once about the last good, full night’s sleep I had; it was in the mid-nineties, and waking up the following day was like seeing the first morning of the world before Arda was marred.  It was amazing.

The fact that it was so memorable or noticeable, even at the time, should make it clear that I had already started having trouble with chronic insomnia, though I don’t think I recognized it as such yet.  I think I had been not-too-secretly pleased by the fact that I didn’t “need” as much sleep as most of the people I knew, and I wished I did not have to sleep at all.

I had probably been accumulating the detrimental effects of suboptimal sleep for years already by that time.  And the author of Why We Sleep, who is a serious and prominent sleep scientist, points out that one can never really “make up” for lost sleep, just as one cannot build up a sleep surplus to use later.  Sleep isn’t a substance, it’s a process.

Anyway, the fact that I felt so great after that one night of really good sleep should have warned me that the rest of the time I was being affected detrimentally by less sleep.  But, hey, I was in my mid-twenties.  I didn’t exactly think of myself as immortal‒open heart surgery at age 18 does a good job of splashing ice water in the face of anyone who thinks he’s indestructible‒but I had enough baseline youth and strength to make up for the developing detriments, at least for a while.

However, I did know that I was not that happy with feeling unrested all the time.  I recall saying to the therapist I was seeing in the latter nineties for my ongoing dysthymia/depression, that I thought probably the reason vampires live forever was because they perforce got a full day’s sleep every day.

It was a joke, of course, and it came to me because I had been reading Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles around that time.  But I had at least come to some realization that my chronic sleep deficit was having negative effects on me.  I thought it was mainly due to or related to my chronic depression issues, since early waking is a common sign of developing depression.

It was probably related to my depression, and it certainly affected it, but looking back now, with the benefit of more recent knowledge, I think my ASD (not the heart one, the other one, which went undiagnosed about three times longer than the heart one) was probably a big part of it, with the associated feeling of being always in a potentially hostile, alien environment no matter where I was.

I don’t know why I’m going into all this.  Then again, it is my blog, so I guess I can write about whatever I choose.  If I do ever have any therapists in the future, I can at least refer them to my blog if they want to know more about what goes on in my head.  It’s of course a biased and incomplete picture, but so are all pictures.

Biologist and historians and psychologists and anthropologists** have had to deal with various forms of “observer effects” long before quantum mechanics developed its ideas about uncertainty principles and wave function collapses.  The trick is to try to develop an objective model of a subject in part by recognizing the biases in and limits to one’s various kinds of data and trying to correct for them.

Sorry, I’m rambling.

I’ll close by saying that I seemed to be holding my own up through the end of the nineties, but after coming to Florida, my health gradually (and not so gradually) began to deteriorate.  Then my life went, chunk by chunk, into the shitter.  Of course, my spatial location was probably coincidental, and no matter where I was, roughly the same things would have happened.

Still, it’s hard not to associate Florida with my problems, especially now when the effing heat and humidity makes me think that Homer Simpson got it right:  Florida is America’s dong.  And right now it feels like America is long overdue for a change of underwear, preferably after a very good shower.

On that pleasant note, I’ll draw to a close for now, and if we’re all lucky (which seems unlikely), for good.  I wish you all a nice day.

*If one sleeps 8 hours a night, as is the roughly healthy amount, one is awake 16 hours, since 24 minus 8 is 16.

**This sounds like a term for a person who tries to defend humans against critics.  I suppose, in a way, that’s probably accurate.

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Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.