Anxiety

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Raveling down the knitted sleeve of care

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading to the office‒way too early, because I still can’t get a good night’s sleep,  Even with recent interventions to try to help my pain and insomnia, it seems the sleep honeymoon phase might already be over.

I felt very much like the lone soldier in the jungle again last night, unable truly to rest and relax, primed at some pervasive level to jump up and react in case some threat developed.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a true external threat.  It might be some break in my routine, sleeping past my alarm*, realizing I had forgotten to set my alarm**, or there might be an intruder, some deliberate, secret assailant, come to attack me in my sleep***, or just a new flare-up of chronic pain developing.

It’s not a great way to start a day or to continue a life.  As I said, I had some temporary improvement not in the quantity of my sleep but in the quality thereof‒I wasn’t sleeping more, but I felt as though I was sleeping better‒for the past week plus a day or so.  This is probably why I’ve had the energy to write some blog posts this week.  But last night felt just like one of my typical, paranoid, restless, angry “sleeps” from before.  I have not stopped my new intervention, but apparently it’s no longer addressing whatever the roots of my sleep issues are.

I suppose I shouldn’t draw too sweeping a conclusion so readily.  One night is not a pattern.  But it’s such a familiar experience, and after such a short semi-respite, that it’s almost worse than never having a respite at all.

For at least 15 years (at least), I’ve spent most of my days and nights alone in the wasteland‒not literally, of course, don’t be stupid.  I just mean that I’ve had the sense of being by myself‒even when in crowded places, such as malls or prison‒and with no real recourse to anyone to help me defend against potential enemies, physical or social or “spiritual”, real or even imagined, external and internal.

To be clear, I don’t feel that the world around me is generally hostile.  In some ways, that would be easier, although considerably less stable.  If I were literally being attacked, I could literally take arms against that sea of troubles and let slip the dogs of war, imitate the action of the tiger, throw my warlike shield before my body and lay on*, fighting against assailants until they were all beaten or until I was dead‒and damned be him that first cried, “Hold, enough!”

Almost certainly, the outcome would be my destruction, but we all have that coming, anyway.  Dying in battle against actual attackers isn’t the worst death I can imagine, if I’m honest (it’s not the best one, either, don’t mistake me…I am not a Klingon or a Sontaran, and I do not embrace the philosophies).

Alas, I will probably be taken down in the end just by the progressive deterioration of my body.  It would be nice to die in a way that is heroic or at least useful, but that’s unlikely to happen.

I’m frustrated and angry about many things this morning, and I’m sick of feeling this way so much of the time.  What is the point of this?  Unlike Camus, I don’t imagine Sisyphus is happy.

It would be one thing if he had people whose company he enjoyed with whom to spend his time while he kept pushing his boulder.  Or, if he really were achieving some result, something beneficial, something that improved the world beyond himself.  But just to keep grinding away at his absurd and pointless task, with no benefit, with no entertainment, with no inherent joy in the process…why bother with that?

At the very least, he could try to plot his escape and enact vengeance against those who sentenced him to this fate!  It might take a long time, but it’s not as though he has anything else to do.  Even though he was made to roll his rock as a punishment, any eternal punishment would always be immoral when brought in response to any finite deed in a finite lifetime.

Of course, no one has put me in my current state.  Well, okay, the government of Florida and of Palm Beach County certainly did their parts in carrying out significant injustice in my case, and those involved are probably worthy of retribution, but it’s all really just so haphazard and so much a part of an unplanned, inefficient, and fundamentally unjust system that it’s not even easy to know where to begin.  Probably, we just need another really big asteroid, or a nearby gamma ray burst, just to wipe the slate entirely clean.

I guess we’ll all see what happens.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend, whether you want to do so or not.  So there.

*Ha ha, I don’t recall whether that has ever happened to me.

 **This has happened, but almost always in the middle of the night, when I awaken, realize with a feeling of severe tension that I forgot to set my alarm, quickly make sure to set it…and then just stay awake until it goes off or until just before it goes off.

***I keep various weapons next to me, within arm’s reach, when I sleep.

****Macduff

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Two-day Tuesday posting streak

I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday.  And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.

As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen.  Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.

It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway.  It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.

I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius.  I could even cite some evidence.  For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay.  Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.

In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist.  I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere.  People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people.  It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.

I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember.  Probably not very much.  I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.

In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona.  I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart.  I remember a particular formative event in this arc:  I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***

Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have.  I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers.  However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me.  I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem.  But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.

So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on.  I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness.  I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world.  If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today.  It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do?  I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration.  So, you know, no big deal.

*Conjecture:  The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information.  Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.

**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.

***His term, not mine.  I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends.  Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.

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Box open

I don’t know if I’m going to post this.

Of course, to a certain degree that’s true of anything I write.  There’s many a slip, as they* say, twixt dress and drawers.  One could begin writing and decide that what one was writing was crap and just delete it (fortunately, crap is my baseline, so if anything, I’m occasionally pleasantly surprised).

One could also lose the file.  This happened to me recently, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably had to do with poor network reception on the phone while in transit, and some flub that led to the post I had started not being saved on the phone.  That was frustrating, if slightly interesting; it’s been at least a few decades (I think) since I previously lost a document due to failure to save.  That used to be the nightmare scenario in college, but for as long as such an option has been available, I save at every full stop (well…nearly so).

Of course, one could even meet with misadventure between the time of beginning a post and when one intended to post it.  An accident, a major life event distraction, or even death could intervene.  Though, I can say with high confidence that, so far, I have not died without posting a particular bit of writing.

But none of these reasons is why I am not sure if I will post this, though some can never be ruled out ahead of time.  I simply have nothing in mind about which to write, so I don’t know if I’ll post whatever comes out.

This is very much stream-of-consciousness, but it is a stream of written consciousness, and the very act of expressing thoughts linguistically crystallizes them, changes their phase, perhaps reducing them in dimensionality–the expressed thought may merely be the circular shadow of the original thought’s sphere–and the degree to which they are smoothly continuous.  Though this writing is very much me and is true to my character and personality, this is not the way my thoughts are when I am not expressing them and/or interacting.

It’s a bit like that philosophy assignment Feynman talked about from his younger days, in which he tried to spend time being aware of his dreams and kept a journal about them.  He experienced various interesting things, but in the end, he correctly noted that he still didn’t know what went on in his dreams when he wasn’t paying attention to them.  And likewise we, even people who engage in deep and advanced mindfulness meditation, still know what our mind is like only when we are mindful of it.  We don’t know (for certain) what our minds are like when no one is looking**.

The point is, I have nothing really about which to write.  Which clearly does not stop me.  There are people who can speak at any time, despite having nothing interesting to force out of their mouths.  It seems that I, at least in some modes, am like this with the written word.

Mind you, I’m not good even at written conversations anymore, such as those in which one engages online.  I was very distressed and frustrated when PBS SpaceTime stopped doing answers to questions in the comments after ongoing videos, presumably because they had expanded their Patreon and got all that stuff done in the associated “Discord”.  I have never used a Discord (if that’s the proper way to say it) but I’ve used chat rooms and stuff in the past, to a limited degree.  I never had very much fun with them, not much more than I have fun having conversations with large groups of random strangers IRL****.  I did make a very good friend on a depression support chat group once, but I don’t think the group otherwise helped my depression.

So I don’t want to get involved in Discords and Patreon extras in order for the Spacetime guy to answer questions people have asked, or whatever, and so I stopped being a Patreon supporter for them, and I also don’t watch as many of their videos, or at least not as early or as eagerly.  I don’t seem to enjoy them nearly as much as I used to enjoy them.  But then again, that’s pretty much the case with everything.

Even interacting through the comments on blogs can be anxious.  I certainly rarely interact on other sites or blogs, fearful of annoying the hosts and other readers.  I’m almost always worried about a response  to a comment I make, bad or good.

And yet, I want to interact with people I like…and with people I think I might like and (even more rarely) people who might like me.  Yet, more and more, the possibility of interaction, even with people I already know, fills me with tension‒with I guess what must be called anxiety‒and I end up avoiding the possibilities.  And when someone replies to one of my comments, my first reaction is to feel a sense of dread, and I have to force myself even to look at the response.  I usually have to make myself wait, first to look at the response, and then, later, to respond to it, if such a response is appropriate.  It’s a bit maddening, and it’s certainly stupid.

So, I guess, today I just felt like communicating out into the world, even if only in one direction, and with nothing of real interest to say.  That’s that, that’s all it is, that’s all it’s about.

I don’t know if I will do this again tomorrow or not.  But in the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Nanny Ogg says it, anyway.

**Please note:  This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, the collapse of the wave function and so on***.

***Except to the extent that, as far as we know, everything has to do with quantum mechanics, of course.

****“In real life” in the speech of SMS acronyms, though it could also mean “I really looked” when one is trying to find something but hasn’t been able to locate it, and some other person is snidely wondering if one made more than a cursory search.

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Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, charm ache with air and agony with blogs.

Hello and good morning.

As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*.  Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office.  Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.

I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.

That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already.  I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin.  I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.

The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances.  Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar.  Go ahead, try.  If you succeed, please get in touch with me.

Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them.  But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great.  I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.

I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar.  I can do injections, obviously, even to myself.  But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian.  That seems very uncool.

Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief.  It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.

Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them.  I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.

I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties.  I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems.  I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.

It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must.  Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction.  But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.

Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general.  But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.

Sometimes that happens literally.

Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive.  I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone.  The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:

On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people.  There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.

However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting.  I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones:  one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them.  I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.

Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory.  I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.

Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again.  This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).

Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.

I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.

One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all.  I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled.  They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.

I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen.  Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.

And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order).  I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel.  On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good.  If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment.  Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.

TTFN

*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.

**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems.  The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.

***Almost certainly untruthfully.

****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”

*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.

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Monday morning, heading down

I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it.  This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now.  So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post.  It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.

I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me.  But I’m not doing well, even for me.  My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks.  My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual.  My overall health is poor.

I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing.  My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.

I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something.  Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing.  But I cannot apply any power.  I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.

Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now.  It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him.  Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.

So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.

Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me.  I’m ashamed of me.

I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know.  I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day.  I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.

I feel sickly and sweaty.  The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.

Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right.  It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly.  You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case.  Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does.  I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.

Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one.  I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though.  My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head.  Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. 

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Doubt is called the beacon of the wise, the blog that searches to th’ bottom of the worst.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post.  It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024.  It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.

I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course.  That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.

I wish I had something interesting to discuss.  I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels.  They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was.  But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is.  Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways.  But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.

I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me.  Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions.  It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact.  Though there are always things one can learn from others, too.  One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.

As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*.  He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.

Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle.  The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.

And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof.  Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.

There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside.  This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called Deep Utopia.  I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be.  Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.

I am reading at least two other books, though.  I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.

I’m also working through Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller.  He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself.  It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be.  Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on.  It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.

I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.

Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”.  Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***.  I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success.  Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.

Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness.  As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care.  I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.

Oh, well.  Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew.  Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.

Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers.  It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero.  Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.

TTFN

rosh-hashanah-merged

*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.

**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.

***So many “dis” words.

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An impromptu post I wrote but did not edit

It’s Tuesday, and I’m on my way in to the office, and since I’m not writing any fiction right now, I figured I’d see if I can write a brief blog post.  This is my only real interaction with the outside world, and apart from my sister, this is the only form of conversation I actually have with anyone in any depth.

As you know‒well, maybe not‒I’ve tried using my YouTube channel to express thoughts and ideas, but I get no real feedback or engagement there.  I even posted a little video recently on my hitherto fallow Instagram account, but though I got about two “hearts” on that, I don’t expect much more.  It’s a peculiar venue, anyway.  I enjoy the videos of the guy reading silly signs in a silly fashion‒he’s surprisingly funny‒and the people doing skits and especially the woman who does skits acting as everything from planets to fonts to the brothers Romulus and Remus deciding what to name the city they’re founding.  I also enjoy seeing some of the cosplayers, though the music they tend to put in the background is often terribly irritating.  I guess a lot of that is influenced by TikTok.

It’s the first of October, of course.  The month of the Autumn People (of which I suppose I am one, certainly by birth date). “We are the hungry ones. Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well.” “You stuff yourselves on other people’s nightmares.” “And butter our plain bread with delicious pain.”

Of course, none of that sadistic nonsense really appeals to me.  I’m not a tormentor by nature; I’m a destroyer.  If something (or someone) irritates me, I want to obliterate it, not “punish it” or “hurt it”.  I don’t want my enemies to suffer, I just want them to die.  So I am more sympathetic to Melkor than to Sauron*.

And, of course, my greatest, most enduring‒possibly my only‒enemy is myself, and so…

I think what triggered me to want to write a post today was the fact that yesterday, on Why Evolution is True, Professor Coyne wrote a post about his previous night’s insomnia and his unpleasant dream and experience.  He has intermittent insomnia, it seems, and it causes him real discomfort.  I was one of the oodles of people who shared our own experiences in the comments, noting how I almost never remember my dreams, but haven’t slept well in almost 30 years, and that when I sleep I feel like a soldier in a battle zone, never willing to sleep deeply and always alert as if potentially under attack.  I don’t know exactly what’s behind it.  Maybe it’s just that I don’t ever feel safe, anywhere, at any time.  Which is an accurate feeling, of course.  Safety is an illusion and a delusion, and it always has been.  It’s not safe in the world, and no one here gets out alive.

Anyway, I guess I was perhaps hoping that maybe the erudite readers of PCC(E)’s website might have some new ideas about things that might help my problem, but alas.  Nothing so far.  I think I’ll quote the whole thing here, though:

“I almost never have any dreams that I can remember, because I almost never seem to sleep deeply enough (though that’s probably an illusion). In any case, I can remember (roughly) the last time I had a good night’s sleep: It was in the mid-1990’s. My sleep has never been great, even when I was a child, and it has gotten worse over time.
Even taking Benadryl (or similar medications, OTC or prescription) only gets me about four hours, and then I am groggy–but not SLEEPY–for the rest of the day. Alcohol only makes my sleep and chronic pain worse. Mostly what happens when I wake up–several times a night, usually starting about 1 am–is that I long for something like a V-fib arrest in the middle of the night. I feel like a soldier trying to sleep in a battlefield, always watchful lest some emergency happen. That was useful when on call during residency. It’s not so useful now.
I don’t remember the last time I woke up to my alarm. But I do remember that it used to make me rapidly hyper-alert, as if someone had just called General Quarters, and I would tend to sit up instantly and shut it off as quickly as possible. Nowadays I usually just give up on sleep by about 3:30 in the morning.
I SINCERELY hope that PCC(E)’s insomnia resolves or at least improves. This is no way to live.”

I received one comment reply suggesting Remeron, but I’ve tried that, along with various other antidepressants and sleep medications, prescription and otherwise.  I’m not sure what the issue is with me, but I really do wish I could get a good night’s sleep even just, say, once a month or something.  If I could get one regularly, I’m not even sure what would happen, but I feel that I would be so much better in every way.  I suppose I have a sort of gift of extra time because of the fact that I don’t sleep as long as normal people, but the time I have is miserable.  It’s a bit reminiscent of one version of the “Repugnant Conclusion” regarding utilitarianism.  One gains for or more hours per day of extra time awake, but that leads to all time awake being only barely tolerable‒and sometimes not truly tolerable except through the hope that perhaps the next day might be better, and the brutal biological drives to stay alive, even when life is miserable**.

It’s not clear to me that this is the proper or best or even a good choice, but there are so many pressures upon one to stay alive, even without purpose, without meaning, and without any real hope.  Of course, hope is insidious; even those who would seek ruthlessly to expunge illusion and delusion, at least from myself, cannot seem to embrace the freedom of despair (so to speak).  Again, I attribute this to “pre-programmed” biological drives, ruthlessly honed into us by natural selection.

Anyway, that’s enough.  Including my quote, I’ve given you all more than enough dreariness to imbibe on a Tuesday afternoon.  It’s bad enough that Tuesday afternoon is never-ending***.

Try to have a good day.

*When I began writing that, it autocorrected to “Sharon”, which seems a bit unfair to whomever Sharon is.

**And the desire not to cause pain to those one loves.

***If that were literally true, of course, then once the first Tuesday afternoon arrived, there would never be another day, and we would all, always be living in Tuesday afternoon.  That is, unless perhaps each Tuesday afternoon bifurcates in time, with the initial Tuesday afternoon going off on a higher-dimensional tangent and continuing in its course without end, while the other branch continues to cycle through “normal” time, but every week shooting off new, eternal branches of Tuesday afternoons.  That’s a weird thought.  Sorry.

by

O madam, my old blog is cracked, it’s cracked!

“Hello and good morning,” he said with a sigh.

Here I am, doing this again, or still doing it, or however you want to characterize it.  Words cannot give an absolutely complete picture of things that happen, not without being as dense in information as the literal reality itself, and if one is going to do that, one is going to have to double the information density of every real thing in order fully to describe it, which cannot be done at scale.  As I’ve said before, the only thing with computing power adequate to completely simulate the universe IS the universe, at least as far as I can tell.

I had meant to be done with all of this, or at least on my way to being done with all of this, or on my way toward something better or at least different starting on Sunday, the first day of Autumn, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Unfortunately, I had rather severe problems with my feet‒my left heel/plantar fascia and my right Achilles tendon‒that made it unworkable to carry things out the way I had intended.

I’ve been doing my best to calm these foot problems down, and they both are improving‒being a trained MD with 15 years of clinical experience is good for something* it seems‒but it may just be necessary to choose some other path to my destination.  There are many from which to choose, and I am prepared for several of them.  This is not a new or frivolous idea of which I speak, and I have put thought and preparation into it for a long time, all while foolishly hoping for some answer, some rescue, some epiphany, but ultimately finding such hopes to be chimeras or will-o-the-wisps**…or maybe even balrogs.

Anyway, as you probably already know, I posted all of Extra Body here last week over the course of four days.  If you read and enjoyed it, please take a look at my books on Amazon and consider buying and reading one or more of them.  Though I should warn you, most of my stories are much darker than Extra Body.

If you’re not good with dark stories, may I suggest The Chasm and the Collision?  My sister has rightly pointed out that it’s my only story with as upbeat an ending as Extra Body.  I would say Son of Man and Mark Red are somewhere in between, and a few of my stories, like If the Spirit Moves You (found in Welcome to Paradox City) and, to a lesser extent, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” have some lightness to them.  The former could even be called a comedy of sorts.  But both stories center around fairly dark concepts or situations.  Many of my other stories are horror stories…though there’s not a single “supernatural” thing in my darkest ever story, Solitaire, which is available solo and also appears in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Anyway, I doubt very many people will ever read any of my stories, which I think is too bad, but I certainly have no right to have my stories read.  I think there might be a lot of people who might get at least some joy out of some of them, though.  I think it would also be very satisfying to know that many people read my stories and some fraction of them enjoyed them.  Even if they read them without knowing who the author was, I might not mind.  But maybe I would.  I’m not quite so egoless as all that.

Despite that aside, I have not started writing anything new since publishing Extra Body.  I did open up and look at Outlaw’s Mind and I remade a version of it with the whole first in media res scene taken out, since the story ended up going in directions that I think were better than that original idea.  But I have no will to work more on it.  Likewise, when I even contemplate working on HELIOS, I feel an almost visceral revulsion or intimidation.  And roughly the same thing applies for DFandD, or any of my other potential stories, like Changeling in a Shadow World and Orion Rising and so on.

The various drawing materials I bought upon being briefly inspired by Facebook “reels” of people drawing have laid fallow since I got them.  I can’t imagine drawing something now.  Nor can I really focus enough to read books or watch lectures on serious treatments of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, though I dabble here and there throughout most days.

I did read a new book:  Annihilation.  I had seen the movie, starring (a thoroughly misused) Natalie Portman, and wasn’t very impressed.  But then I stumbled across a video page by a young woman who is a Star Wars fan and an author and who said she had loved the book but then had seen and hated the movie, so I got the book (for Kindle).  It was hypnotic and disturbing and bizarre, and definitely far better than the movie.

Unfortunately, it’s told in first person, and when I read first person books I tend to lose a bit of my own sense of self and start thinking with the narrator’s thoughts, even about my real life, at least for a time.  It’s the closest I come, in a way, to having a real “theory of mind” in the ordinary sense.  Otherwise, I don’t tend to have a concept in my mind of what other people might be thinking or doing or feeling when I’m not in their presence.  I think reading fiction from a young age helped save me from being utterly confused by humans in general.

People are observable phenomena, and can be fascinating and fun and engaging, and I like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.  But other than through their own words, or through fiction, I don’t really have an “image”*** of other people’s thoughts or minds.  I’ve never even for a moment wanted to be someone else (though pretending to be‒i.e., acting‒can be enjoyable), because I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be someone else‒not from a subjective point of view, anyway.

I have been playing guitar and singing a bit in the mornings at the office some days, when I know I am by myself and can feel relatively uninhibited.  That’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes painful (though in a strangely addictive way), and I occasionally think about making a video like some I’ve made previously, of me playing and singing Nothing Compares 2U, or Fake Plastic Trees, or Lucky, or The Man Who Sold the World, or even Karma Police or Ashes to Ashes or Weird Fishes (though I can’t so far do the “arpeggi” part of that latter song), all of which I can play and sing reasonably well.  But the thought of doing the work is too intimidating, and anyway, I can’t really bear the notion of putting my disgusting face out there for people to see.

Okay, well, that was a meandering bit of nonsense.  Unfortunately, here I am, still here, alive and writing this blog‒if nothing else for the moment.  I hope something will change about all that, and soon.  I cannot continue as I am, but I cannot see any better path other then no path at all.  Still, of all things, writing this blog is probably the most ego-syntonic thing I do, and I greatly appreciate everyone who reads and likes and “likes” it, even if I cannot comprehend why you do.  Just, thank you.  I surely cannot thank you as much as you deserve.

TTFN

*Though, like everything else about me, it turned out not to be good for very much for very long.

**Or should that be “wills-o-the-wisp”?

***Not really the right term.  Perhaps “model” might be better?

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

by

My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.