Anxiety

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“…the only thing that’s real.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone instead of the laptop computer.  There’s no important rationale for this choice, it’s just the way it turned out.  There are causes for everything that happens, but there aren’t necessarily reasons.

I was terribly stressed out yesterday, though arguably nothing too Earth-shattering happened.  Just quite a few unexpected and frustrating but relatively little things occurred that led me to want to hurt myself, and I wanted just to give away my black Strat at the office as well as a very cool piece of hiking equipment that I have that my boss really admires*.  I just wanted to divest myself of everything and go off and, I don’t know, try to swim to Morocco or something**.

I don’t feel much better this morning, but at least it’s been going reasonably “according to plan”.  I’m still in stupid amounts of pain, since right when I woke up.  Nevertheless, I did my morning exercises and got ready for work, though I feel almost as though my upper body and my lower body are hanging by a thread from each other.  Only nerves seem to connect the two sometimes; otherwise it feels as though my upper half is merely balanced atop my lower half, and as I sit, stand, lie down, walk, and so on, it wants to fall off its perch, and that process hurts.

I haven’t actually played guitar in weeks.  I’ve “wanted” to, intellectually.  I even got the red Strat out at the house, putting away the SG, because the Strat is my second favorite***.  However, that hasn’t led to me playing it, though I came close at least once over the weekend.

I of course also haven’t played piano/keyboards, partly because my keyboard is covered with superfluous clothes and other things that just need a place to be.  It’s shameful, I know, but I have little room for storage.

I also haven’t written any fiction or done any drawing, and I don’t even have any modeling clay, though the discussion of my pain made me think of when I used to play with clay every day (hey hey!).  Occasionally, one would get a single hair mixed in with the clay by accident, and then if you were splitting the clay, the two bits would sometimes be held together only by that hair; that’s how my back feels a lot of the time.

When I shift a little, at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, it feels as though my upper and lower halves want to separate, but they’re held together by the collected nerve fibers that carry all that lovely pain and spasm and electrical sensation back and forth to and from my brain.

I won’t say I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone‒there are quite a few people in the world who merit such pain and much, much more, and yet they live with impunity.  Many of them have been doing their dirty deeds for quite a long time, and even if they were to die violent deaths tomorrow, they would already have gotten away with nearly a lifetime of successful villainy and will suffer no more than most people are near the end of their lives.  Indeed, these people will probably have better, more attentive health care in their final moments than most people who have done no willing harm to anyone.

Lovely universe you’ve got here.  (It wouldn’t) be a shame if something happened to it.

Also, you can’t threaten such people with stupid points like “history will judge you”, because such people don’t tend to give a shit about that kind of thing.  Many of them probably secretly believe themselves to be immortal; they certainly don’t care about what the milling masses think of them after they’re dead.  And any concept they may have of an afterlife is clearly not worrisome to them, or not enough so to deter their foul deeds.

And here I am, feeling like I am slipping very painfully off my lower half even as I write this, despite aspirin and naproxen and Tylenol and heating pads and Icy Hot and Voltaren cream and CBD and Delta-9 gummies and all that.

It’s too much.  If I cannot get this to improve soon, I may move up the deadline of my plan, because I am tired of being not only depressed and anxious and autistic (with all that that entails) but also just in chronic fucking pain every fucking second of every fucking day for more than 20 fucking years!!!  There is no sign of it abating.

Have a good day if you can, and thank you for reading.

*It’s a machete; I don’t know why I’m being coy.  It’s a beautifully designed and made machete, no cheap throw-away crap.  This is the sort of tool one could see being handed down with pride from generation to generation.  I bought it because of the aesthetics; I rarely need a machete for practical purposes.

**I would not succeed.  I am not that good of a swimmer, but even if I were, I don’t think any human or humanoid swimmer ever could swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

***My favorite is my Les Paul (see above), which was also, like my red Strat, made by my former housemate.  That guitar has such a beautiful sound, but it is very heavy.  It’s what I used for all the guitar parts, including the little arpeggios and whatnot, on Like and Share, and also for my cover of Something, with no pedals and only a little delay.  I used the red Strat almost entirely for Schrodinger’s Head and for much of Catechism, including the solos.  I used the black Strat for the solo in the middle of Breaking Me Down.  I have not recorded anything using the SG.  That’s no criticism of it; the timing was just wrong.

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.

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“You gave me no warnin’ of what was to be”

“Monday, Monday…so good to me.”  So sang The Mamas and the Papas, though I’ve always thought those lyrics were strange.  I mean, who thinks that way about Monday?  The singer(s) is/are disabused of their fondness for Mondays already by the end of the first verse, at least if I follow its meaning, but I’ve never met anyone, as far as I can remember, who expressed such initial fondness for Monday, the beginning of the school/work week.

Looking back, I myself am probably the person who came closest to feeling that way of all the people I’ve known, back when I was in grade school and high school.  I’ve never had a great relationship with idle time, honestly, and I liked to learn, so Monday was good.  Also, my friends were at school.

I don’t know what to write about today, to be honest.  I’m working on my “project” of course, and taking steps toward its resolution.  I don’t think very much has changed yet, if anything.  I can certainly tell you that, so far, my pain has not diminished.  But I wouldn’t expect it to have disappeared so quickly with minimal (if any) physical alteration.

I’m getting a bit lost about things with which to fill my mental time.  I’m not really reading much anymore, fiction or nonfiction.  I did start rereading Unanimity:  Book I over the last few days.  I’m liking it, as far as it goes, though I appreciate when we leave Charley Banks’s point of view and get into the heads of the various other characters.  Charley is both the initial protagonist and the definite villain of the book, and boy does he do some truly horrible stuff, and it can be disquieting to be in his POV.

I’ve said to others that while of course the villain and title character of The Vagabond does or means to do more terrible things and more willfully so than Charley, the horror in The Vagabond is mainly supernatural style horror.  Charley, on the other hand, does horrific things that humans could, in principle, do to other humans.  In that sense, it’s a quasi-realistic horror story.  It’s not fully realistic, like Solitaire, but superficially nothing flagrantly supernatural happens.

Mind you, though it may carry the trappings of sci-fi horror, the things that happen in Unanimity are, in my mind at least, really not scientifically plausible, so I consider it supernatural horror.  This is in contrast to The Chasm and the Collision, which seems like a fantasy adventure story but which is, if you look closely, a science fiction story.  It’s wildly speculative science fiction, but so is Stranger in a Strange Land.

Anyway, I obviously don’t have much of consequence to cover.  It’s not as though my discussion is going to give anyone any new insights into my books, because no more than a handful of people have ever read (or ever will read) any of my books.  So I’m mostly just spitting in a high wind and seeing where it lands…which won’t matter, because no matter where it lands, it’s almost immediately going to dry out and be nothing.

Whatever.  I apologize for my constant grumpiness.  I am in pretty significant pain already today, but I’m trying* to work on it.  I’m constantly trying‒trying new shoes, new socks, new spandex joint braces, new medicine combinations, new forms of exercise and ways of doing the exercise I already do, avoiding specific foods, all that stuff and more.  I do not just saunter through life shrugging about my pain and my depression and my horrible social anxiety and giving up and not trying to improve.  I don’t give up on tasks very easily, and I try hard to be as rigorous in my attempts as is feasible in one life without the ability to do controlled (let alone blinded) trials.

I’m not optimistic about good outcomes when it comes to my present goal/strategy/plan of either improving my pain or killing myself.  People who say that, after enough torture, someone will beg for death are not lying.  Everyone has their limits, though some people’s limits are awe-inspiring, and death comes to them before they break.  But to have that strength requires some kind of meaning or purpose or at least a social connection.

We’ve all surely seen human interest reports of people who face terminal (or merely deadly) illnesses or accidents or losses but keep upbeat and positive  and either defeat their illness or come to terms with it or die with dignity in an inspiring manner.  Such stories almost always (in my limited sample, anyway) show people who have strong social supports, of friends or families or groups with solidarity and purpose.

You never see shows about the people who are alone and face a terminal or painful illness without even medical insurance or friends or family or other support nearby.  That’s because those people die like they lived‒alone and unnoticed.  Also, one can’t easily sell advertising with an after-school special about the secluded man who dies of complications of cancer and is only found when his rent is overdue or because the neighbors make a complaint about the smell that turns out to be his rotting corpse.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’m sure you’re all inspired and uplifted by my beautiful words (ha ha).  I hope that you are inspired and uplifted by something, anyway.

It may be a fool’s errand, philosophically, to try even to begin to discern who deserves happiness.  But heck, you might as well try to be happy if you can, as long as you’re not doing it by making other people less happy.  Mutual exchange to mutual benefit is entirely possible, and is responsible for many if not most of the good and pleasant things we have in the world.  The universe may be truly zero sum and zero outcome in the end‒if the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics holds true‒but it can nevertheless have a positive integral, the sum of the area under the curve across time.  It is mathematically possible.

There’s nothing that guarantees it, of course.  It can also have a negative overall integral in principle.  Whether that will be the case or the other will depend, at least locally, on human behavior and choices.

I’m not optimistic.

*Fuck you, Yoda, you’re just wrong about the “trying” thing.  It was your self-important arrogance that contributed more than anyone else’s input, to the decadence of the Jedi that left them vulnerable to the Sith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anyway, here’s my Friday blog post

Well, it’s Friday, the official end to another work week‒though I am scheduled to work tomorrow‒and I am here writing yet another blog post.  Today, I’m writing on my phone, since the few days’ rest seems to have eased my thumbs at least a little.  Also, I feel that my last few posts, which were written on my mini laptop computer, sucked and went on too long*, so using the smartphone might improve things.  I don’t imagine it could readily make things much worse.

I’ve been having a great deal of pain over the last several days, as I think I’ve mentioned.  I mean, I’m in pain every day, pretty much all the time, but it does vary from day to day and even from moment to moment.  When it’s at its baseline, I can almost ignore it for a while.  But when it’s acting up, it’s very hard for me to put in the background.  It dominates whatever else might be happening.  It makes everything harder‒and things are often not easy for me in the first place because of my chronic depression and (apparently) due to my hitherto undiagnosed autism.

Anyway, I’ve felt very stiff and grumpy and above all pretty miserable over the past several days, but apparently, it doesn’t quite show on the outside.  I’ve occasionally quoted the song Brain Damage by Pink Floyd as representing the way I often feel:  “And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear / You shout and no one seems to hear / And if the band you’re in starts playin’ different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

I guess the inability to make others aware of my distress‒and often my own inability to recognize it in myself‒is probably at least partly related to ASD.  I suppose it’s just as well that this aspect of it keeps me from being too irritating to the people around me (at least in this way).  I know that I’m plenty annoying in numerous other ways, though, and I spend a lot of time berating myself for having been an idiot in many situations and interactions.

I also find myself spending a lot of time being severely irritated by people and occurrences in the world around me.  Sometimes the irritation is perfectly well-deserved, and sometimes it is thoroughly irrational and unfair on my part.

I don’t know what to do with any of it.  I don’t know what to do with my life, other than to wad it up and throw it in the figurative dumpster.  I’m already like a plate of leftovers that’s been left in a not-quite-cool-enough refrigerator for many months.  I’m a putrid, fungus-and-bacteria-riddled mass of something that was (maybe) once fit for human consumption.

Now, even the most robust person‒or even a dog or a pig or a flipping billy goat‒would vomit if they thought to bring me into their lives.

If you look closely, you might even be able to make out the shape of what I used to be, but that old outline is obscured by alien clouds of hyphae and fruiting bodies, by oozing purulent liquid, and by the scent of mildew and gangrene.

The things I am and which remain to me are merely reminders and mockeries of what I used to be and what I used to have.  But even back then, in my “heyday”, I was a mess, never worthy of the good that existed in my life.  At least I’m more self-aware of my shortcomings now than I used to be.

But literally every step I take is painful.  Everything I do is uncomfortable.  And though I have never had an inherent belief or thought that I have any right to be comfortable, it all does old.  It’s something that can be endured if there is a compensatory reward of some kind; if one has love, if one has friendship, if one has companionship and purpose, then one can tolerate a great deal.  Otherwise, it’s just a parade of painful, pointless moments.

Of course, I would never say that I have more pain or discomfort than any other person.  I’m quite sure that there are many, many, many people whose lives are more painful and whose existence is less positive, less valuable or beneficial to themselves than mine is to me.  I don’t know why such people bother.  I don’t know why I bother.

I find myself disgusting.  I’m pathetic and weak and unimpressive, and I need to stop deluding myself that some day I might once again become otherwise (if I ever have been).  The return on the daily invested effort of existence is tiny, and it’s shrinking all the time.

That’s enough for today.  Honestly, with as much pain as I’ve been in, and as unpleasant as I find my own company, I would not complain if I don’t live to post tomorrow**.  I doubt anyone else would, either.

In the meantime, please try to have a good day, if you can.  You might as well.

*Reminiscent of my life, in that sense.

**That’s trivially true in a sense, of course.  If I’m not alive, how can I complain?  Nevertheless, I do mean it more deeply here.

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I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might blog thee something.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing another blog post.

I did an update yesterday to my little miniature laptop, and now the MS Word (and presumably Office overall) has also been updated, with—as usual—relatively frustrating consequences.

Microsoft appears to have a real knack for changing things that were perfectly fine and making them not as good as they used to be, adding things that no intelligent person wants—like their frequent, irritating interruptions asking us if we want to let their AI assist us.

And, of course, they still have their stupid Craptos font in place as the baseline, even though it looks terrible and not at all professional.  Honestly, I’d rather submit a scientific paper in Comic Sans than in that stupid new Aptos, largely because they haven’t given us a choice whether or not to have that as our primary font.

They also have that stupid office icon everywhere that looks sort of like a ribbon folded over four times, or whatever that stupid symbol is supposed to seem to be.  It’s distracting and intrusive.  Why do they change things just for the sake of changing something?  It’s just stupid.

This is one of the big failings of some among the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.  They rant on and on about wanting to make “change”.  But change, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing.  I’ve gone over this so many times, but random change is much more likely to be detrimental than beneficial, especially in a system that is functioning relatively well.

Most mutations in germline cells don’t lead to improved survival and reproduction.  Only the rare few that happen to confer some local advantage will make an organism more robust.  That’s natural selection, and it is inherently blind and stupid.  It only produces “progress” because it has unthinkably long time-scales and numbers of organisms with which to work, and is utterly blind to suffering and failure and, yes, even to extinction.

When engineered systems are changed, those changes need to be evaluated, carefully thought through, and ideally tested thoroughly before being put into full implementation.  Otherwise, matters can degenerate rather than be enhanced.

Random mutations almost never produce benefit; even a complex, reasonably stable system is going to suffer if there are arbitrary changes.  Most systems in reality are not streamlined, smoothly functioning, sleek and simple designs.  They are Rube Goldberg machines, and if one bit of random “machinery” goes off, almost always the whole thing will fail completely.

In the body, random genetic changes are likely to lead to cell death or, even worse, to the development of cancer.  Similarly, radical changes in products or governments are almost always catastrophic.  This is one of the reasons even Jefferson noted, in the Declaration of Independence, that prudence recommends that, while imperfections in a current government are tolerable, it’s usually better not to go the way of revolution but to endure, changing the system gradually from within.

Only when there is no other way to do things that does not entail worse suffering should one overthrow or radically change the government.

Of course, for government changes to be overall beneficial, it’s important for the people involved to be knowledgeable and thoughtful, careful, committed to making things as good as possible and willing to correct their own errors (which requires them to admit to being fallible).  This is part of why the current and recent governments, in the USA at least, have been horrible.  They are run by micro-brained monkeys throwing their feces at each other, too stupid to realize that they are ignorant, and too narcissistic (on both sides) to be self-correcting.

Even the people at Microsoft, which is a premier technology company and has made real advances and improvements in its day, seem prone to this moronic “change for the sake of change” thing.

I hate them.  I hate all of them.  I hate everything.  It’s all so, so, so irritating.  People are so stupid they think that they—or some people—run the world, which is utter nonsense.  They seem to imagine that the people and places that exist now are real, while the countless dead people in the past are not.  But we are the same as our dead forebears.  We are all just individual molecules in a vast bath, or as Kansas so eloquently put it, “just a drop of water in an endless sea”.

The fact that all these little AI assistant things are being mindlessly added into products is an example of change that it not well-considered.  It’s just a desperate, hysterical attempt to compete again others who are doing the same stupid thing.  We don’t know yet what good, if any, will come of it, but outcomes will almost certainly be unforeseeable—even by AIs.

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to have any realistic hope at all for the future of civilization, whether human or artificial or some combination.  So far, AIs have only impressed me when they have carefully focused goals, like winning at Go or figuring out protein folding.

I’m angry and frustrated.  At times, I just want to destroy all life in the universe and all potential for future life.  It just so often seems that life is a thoroughly bad idea in and of itself.

But probably it will be more efficient if I just destroy me.  I’m sure most people would prefer that to other options.

In the meantime, try to have a good day if you can, enmeshed as you all are in the poisonous net of reality.

TTFN

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Are you entitled to a headline?

It’s Wednesday, and I’m writing this post using my laptop computer, and here we all are again, though we are not on the Mississippi.

Actually, for all I know, some of you reading actually are on that river.  But I am not, and I don’t think I ever have been “on” it, though I think I have crossed over it at least once, on a bridge somewhere.  I’ve also had at least one dream that I can vaguely remember from long ago about driving in a car up a road that ran alongside some imaginary Mississippi (I think I was on the west side of it) but whatever it was in my dream was almost certainly not much like the real thing.  Similarly, the landscape around was also not at all like what I’m sure the real landscape along the Mississippi really is.  It was almost…compressed, and also simplified, in a way rather reminiscent of the Territories in the Stephen King/Peter Straub book The Talisman.

That was a weird digression, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s not really a big deal, though.  I have no particular agenda for today’s post, so it’s really going to be just a stream-of-my-consciousness thing.  Hopefully that won’t be too unpleasant for you.  If it is, I suppose you can console yourself with the fact that you only have to endure it for the few minutes it takes to read the post—indeed, you don’t actually have to read the whole thing, though if you’re reading these words, you’ve probably already read a substantial amount of it.

Still, least you’re not stuck inside this consciousness like I am, every waking hour.  And I have more waking hours than most people do because of my insomnia.

I had a particularly bad pain day yesterday.  I actually needed to use my bamboo walking staff to get up from my seat.  Well, I didn’t truly need to use it, I guess; I was able to do it without.  But it hurt quite a lot more to stand up without it than with it.

I’m not certain what caused this rather severe exacerbation.  Sometimes I try to do slightly different exercises or stretching or to wear different shoes and whatnot to see if they are better, and sometimes it just turns out they are worse.  On the other hand, sometimes the pain seems just to be random, or at least it’s worsened by some event or series of events that are not clear, and over which I have no apparent control.  It’s frustrating.  I keep trying, believe me; I’m still alive, after all*.  But Batman knows it’s hard to know why I try, because I see few if any potential short-term or long-term rewards.

Of course, I’m also no further along in deciding what, if anything, to do about my autism diagnosis.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe it’s enough just to know.  Supposedly there are supports and communities and so on for people with autism, but I am not good at seeking out communities at the best of times.

At least some people use this sort of situation as inspiration to make “content”, either on Instagram or on YouTube or similar.  I did do my old YouTube video “Asperger’s…or not?”  I guess I could do another one, a sort of sequel to that one, now that I have my formal diagnosis.  Unfortunately, I’m even more hideous to look at now than I was back then, so the prospect of making a video is of mixed potential at best.

In any case, I have been having a lot of trouble, largely because of the pain and my depression.  I’ve been taking the Saint John’s Wort for several weeks now, and I’m far from sure that it’s having any beneficial effects on my mood.  It all makes me want to ask “What is Saint John’s worth?”

Yes, that’s the sort of joke I think of whenever I write those words.  It’s not something I seem able to resist.  I have more of an excuse now, I suppose, but I doubt that makes it any better or more tolerable.

I don’t know what to write.  I don’t know what to do about my pain or my depression.  I don’t know what to do in general.  I’m getting lots of strong urges to hurt myself—partly just for distraction, partly to express my frustration, which I cannot seem to do in other ways, and largely because I just hate myself—and I have succumbed to them more than once recently.  That’s not a good trend.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I’ve already said more than I had to say, so the signal to noise ratio of this post is small.  But what part is the signal and what part is the noise?  I’ll give you a hint:  anything that seems whimsical and humorous and upbeat is almost certainly noise.  It’s my habitual cloak, since I know that people in general don’t want to deal with someone who is in distress.  They want to be able to convince themselves that there is nothing that needs to be done, or that there is simply nothing anyone can do.  It’s nice to be able to give those people an out.

As for the prospect of finding some out for myself, one way or another, well, I guess you can only wait and see, while I try to see if I can find any answers, whether trivial or significant.  And if nothing else changes, tomorrow I will write another blog post.

Please, please, try to have a better day than I have.

*Whether or not that’s a good thing is a question on which I am far from clear.

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When we fight reality, reality always wins.

It’s Tuesday morning now‒which, fortunately, as far as I know, has never been described as “never-ending”.  Alas, the same cannot be said of Tuesday afternoon.  However, since we are not still stuck in the last Tuesday afternoon‒or indeed in the very first Tuesday afternoon‒then we have to conclude that the line “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” from the Beatles song Lady Madonna is a poetic figure of speech.

That’s weirdly frustrating for me.  It reminds me a bit of how I remember reading that Tolkien was frustrated with the play Macbeth because Birnam Wood didn’t actually come to Dunsinane, signaling Macbeth’s imminent defeat*.  Tolkien didn’t see why, in a play that clearly involved the supernatural, the wood could not literally come to Dunsinane.

Of course, in the fullness of time, in his own work, the Forest of Fangorn really did come to Isengard, and to Helm’s Deep.  It’s one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings.

How did I get onto that subject?  Or, as Théoden asked, “How did it come to this?”

Now I’m suddenly thinking about the moment when Théoden, despairing, asks (in the movie) “What can men do against such reckless hate?”  It’s a real moment of doubt and pain, but Aragorn is there to support his spirit.

And that makes me think of doing a “parody” version of Sympathy for the Devil, in which we would have the line, “I was ‘round when Théoden had his moment of doubt and pain / Made damn sure that the uruk hai met our swords and sealed their fate.”  It could be called, perhaps, Sympathy for the Ranger or Sympathy for the Strider or something like that.

We could have lines like “Just as every Noldor is a kinslayer, and all the Nazgul slaves / as East is West just call me…Aragorn, ‘cause Minas Tirith I will save,” or something along those lines.  It’s a bit silly and cheesy, I guess, but that’s okay; it’s a parody.  Anyway, I don’t think I’m actually going to try to produce a whole set of lyrics for it, but who knows?  I’ve done weirder things for more frivolous reasons.

As for what to do about relatively more serious things‒i.e., my diagnosis of ASD level2‒I still don’t know.  I don’t know how I’m going to go about following the recommendations in the report, such as they are.  Knowing at least some of the explanations for many of the difficulties I’ve had in my life, including my relatively intractable troubles with depression and with insomnia and social anxiety, is a good thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily give me any idea how to approach things from here.

In some sense, it is a little discouraging, especially regarding my depression and insomnia, since there is no cure for neurodevelopmental disorders; they are a product of the fundamental structure and function of the brain.  At best, they can be managed.  This also explains why many traditional or typical treatments for such things do not work well in those with ASD; evidently, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t tend to work as well for people with autism as it does for “neurotypical” people.  And I know that antidepressants have more limited efficacy as well.

This makes sense.  We commonly hear of how many of the treatments and scientific understanding of major illness were for a long time only studied in men, and women were treated the same way as males, until slowly, gradually, the medical community realized that many diseases present differently in women, and respond differently to treatment.

Well, autistic and other “neurodivergent” people are a much smaller portion of the population than women are, and we don’t know as much as we would like about psychiatric and related disorders and their treatment even in the neurotypical.  It makes sense that we should be somewhat behind the curve in even understanding, let alone knowing how to treat, psychological and neurological disorders in those with underlying neurodevelopmental conditions.

The universe is complicated.  Any attempt to make it seem or feel less so, as by following the “ideas” of demagogues and demonizing those who might disagree, is just going to leave one vulnerable to underlying, actual reality‒which is not merely a matter of perception.

The universe at large does not care what you believe.  You can definitely be killed by forces and things that you not only don’t understand, but in which you don’t believe, or about which you have not the slightest inkling.  As a particularly gruesome example, it didn’t matter whether JFK ever knew he was being shot at, let alone that he had been hit.  A person can die before they even know that anything is happening; they can be just snuffed out and gone.  Probably most people, and nearly all other animals, die not understanding at all what is killing them or how or why or what death is.

Such is the evenhanded dealing of the world, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge.  The only thing we can do to armor ourselves is to try to understand as much about the universe as we can.  For one never knows what knowledge will be useful or even essential before one has that knowledge.  Greater knowledge is always worthwhile, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things never really are equal, but that’s why it pays to learn how to solve partial differential equations.

That’s enough for now.  Have a good day if you can, please.

*Macbeth’s reaction when he receives the news that, apparently, Birnam Wood really has come to Dunsinane Hill, is to hit the messenger and yell “Liar and slave!”  I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of funny and also is an instance of one of the cardinal failures of literary and dramatic (and real life) villains:  they discourage their own people from giving them information by punishing them for delivering accurate but bad news.

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Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

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The blog of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, which is why I’ve greeted you as I have.

I slept worse than usual even for me last night, and yet I’m wired and tense, not at all sleepy.  I cannot go on this way.

I’m once again writing this on my phone.  I got at least a few days’ rest for my thumbs, and it has seemed to help.  But mostly, I just didn’t want to carry my mini laptop back with me yesterday, because I’ve been having a rather severe exacerbation of my chronic pain, worse than usual, and it’s just a lot of work to deal with it and with extra weight.

I suspect that the various little things I’m trying to do to improve my strength and health are actually backfiring and making my pain worse rather than better.  It’s frustrating.  I really don’t like to give up on things and I am terribly stubborn, but it’s getting to be just too much.  Every day veers between tedium and stress and exhaustion and pain, and there is no evidence of any light or even rest anywhere along this tunnel.  There certainly doesn’t appear to be any exit other than the obvious one.

I’m still waiting for the results of my autism assessment, which is not any surprise; it’s not technically “due” until tomorrow, so I’m just being overanxious in hoping for it sooner.  Still, I’m not sure what difference it’s going to make, one way or another.  It’s not as though I’ll be able to avail myself of any services for adults with ASD or anything.  This is Florida, America’s limp and syphilitic penis, and there are no real such health services of which I’m aware.  Also, I have no insurance; I cannot seem to manage to keep track of and maintain such things.

I really don’t feel any hope for my future.  I’m just tired and sore and tense and adrift, and I don’t fit with anyone or anything else in the world.  You sometimes hear someone talking about trying to find one’s “people” as it were‒the people who share similar interests and characteristics‒but I don’t think I have a “people”.  I’m pretty sure that anywhere I go I will be a weird outsider who never really fits in.

To be fair, when it comes to most groups I don’t particularly want to fit in.  Many things that other people find interesting don’t grab my attention at all.  I don’t begrudge people their interests, of course, as long as they’re not harming anyone else.  The more joy in the world the better, I would say, ceteris paribus.

But I can’t seem to form joy.  I am at best capable of momentary distraction.  Okay, new science knowledge can sometimes make me feel actual joy, albeit transient.  But that’s about it.  Even that is losing its charm, especially since there’s no back and forth with anyone about it.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I feel that I’m barely making it through to the end of each day.

I’m sure this is really getting old for all of you, and I’m very sorry about that.  Believe me, I know I’m a miserable person with whom to interact.  I try not to be.  I’ve been trying to be a positive presence, a useful, productive, and positive force in the world, because at least then I can justify my existence.

But it’s exhausting to try to act upbeat and funny and energetic and clever and enthusiastic when you’re just trying to make yourself stop feeling horrible, even if for only a brief time.  I know there exists the famous saying‒admired by many because it rhymes, as if that were a legitimate measure of intellectual quality‒that one should “fake it ’til you make it”.  But I’ve been “faking” it, or trying to do so, for as long as I can remember, and it has not brought about any significant change.

It’s no more effective than was my long experiment in which I applied autosuggestion to myself, repeating the mantra “I love my life and I love myself” (in my head) any time I was walking anywhere or when I was idle.

I almost always have some such message on repeat, trying to accomplish something.

But as far as I can tell, all I’ve accomplished is maybe slowing my descent and degeneration.  I don’t see any way to turn this around‒and I’m pretty smart, and I have been trying to find answers for almost my entire life so far.  Trust me, the obvious ones that tend to spring to mind have not succeeded.

The good news is that, if I were suddenly to disappear‒say, for instance, if after I post this blog entry, no one ever hears from me again in any way‒no one would really be affected.  It would not change anyone’s day-to-day life (other than perhaps a few of my coworkers).

Not to say that no one will mourn me in principle, much as Adam Smith recognized that a European person of learning would feel a rather abstract sense of mourning if all of China were wiped out by some massive earthquake.  I would certainly not be a loss for which any sensible person would be willing even to risk losing their little finger.

Frankly, I doubt that I’m worth someone stubbing their toe.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I work tomorrow, so I expect I’ll write a post then, but I am off this weekend.

TTFN