Anxiety

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They will eat like wolves and blog like devils

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 14th of December in 2023 (AD or CE), and it’s the second to last day of Hanukkah.  Not that such a thing matters to me, really.  I don’t have anyone with whom I’m celebrating this or any other holiday.

I’m not really celebrating anything at all, come to think of it.  That seems appropriate.  What, really, is there in this world for me to celebrate that isn’t drowned out by all the noise and idiocy and spitefulness and pettiness?

I’m waiting for the second train today, not the first.  I was awake well in time for the first train, but there was not really any point in trying to get to that one.  It was at least as crowded as the second train has been, and getting to the office an hour earlier just left me puttering around there.  Also, it may have contributed to me writing quite a long blog post, yesterday.

I’m not sure if anyone actually read yesterday’s post all the way through.  Certainly, no one appears to have left any comments, even on “social” media—although I guess someone might have commented since yesterday afternoon, which was the last time I checked.

I’ve decided to go back to wearing my slightly larger Timberland boots, which—obviously enough—I have neither given away nor discarded.  They are simply more comfortable and feel more protective than most of my other shoes or boots.

I haven’t been doing any long-distance walking for a while, but I’ve walked in total 2 to 3 miles a day each day this week, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem with the boots.  Of course, my back and my legs hurt—a lot—but they almost always hurt, so it’s difficult to attribute that to the boots.  I’ve also not been wearing knee or ankle braces at all this week, because they’re irritating me.  They probably give me some benefits, of course, but sometimes I just don’t care.

I’ve been trying to eat a somewhat healthier diet this week—heavy on legumes and beans and nuts and stuff and light on breads and cheeses and all that.  I haven’t even had any meat at all.  So far, it’s given me terrible gastrointestinal discomfort and has made me feel unwell, but I’m hopeful that this is just because of the shift in diet, and that my system will adjust itself.  If it doesn’t do so soon, I may give up on the notion.

Basically, I’m trying to do something, almost anything, to improve my overall daily mood and energy and motivation.  Because I really don’t feel any interest in or joy regarding much of anything anymore.  I haven’t read more than three or four pages of any book this week (in aggregate), fiction or nonfiction.  That’s weird for me, and it’s not a good sign.  But I cannot seem to conjure any interest.

If you’ve been reading my blog so far this week, you know I said that I would try to find health insurance for which I could sign up and which I could afford, and I have today and tomorrow left to try to meet my deadline.

That’s a good word, “deadline”.  But I guess it may be somewhat ironic when discussing health insurance.

Having that task before me really stresses me out; I don’t like it hanging over me, but I also don’t want to do it, particularly when I don’t even want to take care of myself.  The only possible silver lining might be that, just maybe, I might be able to check myself into some mental health facility that’s slightly better than some Florida county or state level shit-holes.  I doubt it.

I probably ought to be in some mental health place.  I’m almost certainly a “danger to myself”, at least for some portion of most days.  Not that I have imminent plans, mind you; don’t get all excited and call the local police.  I’m cleverer than that.

It’s quite windy and a bit rainy around these parts today, as it was yesterday afternoon.  That probably contributes to my back and legs flaring up above their usual baseline.  I’m still keeping up with my pull-ups and dips, though I need to get back into doing more crunches.  Maybe that would help my GI and back trouble.  It might make it worse.  It might have no effect whatsoever.

That’s the conundrum, and I cannot really do a case/control, double-blind sort of test to find out clearly what the reality is.  It may be that the boots I’m wearing now have never actually caused me any trouble, and that it was merely coincidence that I had flares-up before when wearing them.  Or my assessment may have been accurate.

None of it really matters, anyway.  I should just walk and walk, as much as I can, and to hell with the pain.  It’s not as though resting makes it go away, though pain does make one not want to do much.  That’s a biological, organismal thing, though, and it doesn’t necessarily make for the local best decision.

The train will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll wrap up this waste of your time for today.  If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, please have a good last few days thereof.  Please have a good day and good days in general if you can.  If you feel like commenting, please do so.  If you are able to “like” a post and wish to do so, please do.  If not, it won’t hurt my feelings.  I won’t even know it didn’t happen, not in any specific sense.  Eight billion people fail to “like” my posts every day, and I hardly even notice most of them.

TTFN

red eyed wolf smaller

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“From ev’ry depth of good and ill…”

Does anyone else ever feel guilty about never letting their first alarm of the day sound, about always shutting it off before its allotted time because you’re awake anyway?  It feels almost like an unkindness—as though the alarm wanted to do its job, but was always thwarted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only one who so anthropomorphizes such a function, but what can I say?  I’m a weirdo.

I’m currently waiting for the very first train of the day, since I was awake anyway, and I decided to see how the new, even earlier, 4:20 first train is.  I’m hoping it will at least be less crowded than the 5:20 train.

They haven’t even opened the gates that lead to the stairs or the elevators or the ticket machines at the train station yet, which seems a bit unreasonable, considering they are the ones who set up the new schedule.  Still, according to the tracker site, the train is on its way, and it’s only two minutes (!) behind schedule.

I don’t know why it’s two minutes behind schedule at this hour.  I don’t see how it can be dealing with any kind of traffic or anything.  Oh, well.  This constant inability for people to keep to schedules is only one of the reasons I despise living in this world.

Speaking of things that make me not want to continue living, if anyone out there reads this on WordPress Reader, or by any other, similar means:  are you able to comment and “like” the blog posts I write just as used to be the case?  I know I’m having trouble doing so with, for instance, my favorite website that I follow, and that fact is starting to make me fade away from reading it as consistently as I used to do, because I cannot “like” a post and see the comments (or leave a comment) all in the same place.  I’m wondering if that’s also happened with my blog, because I’m getting many fewer views and stuff than I used to receive.

It may simply be that people have gotten tired of reading my posts or even of dealing with me at all.  I know I’ve gotten tired of myself, more and more all the time.  I can certainly understand if people have just gradually drawn away from what is, after all, a depressing blog.

Even posts like yesterday’s, in which I went into all sorts of minutiae and trivia about temperatures and percentages and the like, are probably just mind-numbingly dull for most people.  Many of the things I enjoy are difficult for other people to appreciate, it seems.  As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of my favorite poems, “…all I loved, I loved alone.”

Anyway, I would appreciate some feedback about the visibility and/or accessibility of this blog for others, because I cannot readily tell from my perspective how others are seeing it.  And please—as always—comment here, not on Facebook or TWFKAT*.

I fear that the “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, as they nauseatingly refer to themselves, have altered things to try to make the platform more exciting and up-to-date and have instead caused it to cease to work properly for oddballs like me who really would prefer things to be consistent, for them not to be constantly fiddled with, especially since that so often makes so many things so much worse.

If I were more paranoid, I might imagine that the world is trying to push me finally to commit suicide, since so many of the things from which I have taken at least some small modicum of distraction, if not necessarily comfort**, are shriveling up and blowing away.  I’m getting increasingly bored of the science and mathematics offerings on YouTube, and the reaction channels I watch have already reacted to stuff I like, and no matter how briefly enjoyable it can be to pretend I’m watching something with a friend, that’s clearly really not what’s happening.

Most of these people would never be my friends even if we lived nearby and had anything else in common but shows to watch.

And the newer science and math and nature videos I’m encountering are sometimes astonishingly idiotic, credulously addressing things like UFOs and whatnot.  Ex-Twitter is even less interesting than it was before, and I was never a huge fan of it.

I try to get involved in Facebook, but it’s also rather sparse and spare, and there’s not as much interaction as might be beneficial, and even the briefly interesting little, short video things very rapidly become astonishingly repetitive and boring.  I think those are all attempts to compete with TikTok or whatever, and if that platform is at all like those things, then I can see that I am not missing much.

Even the podcasts by Sean Carroll any by Sam Harris are too brief and intermittent to provide enough benefit to make a serious difference, though they at least are truly engaging while they last.

[FYI, the train arrived finally, just about here.  I meant to note this when it happened, but I got distracted.  It’s more crowded than I would have predicted, which is quite disappointing and borderline distressing.]

And now I have this external pressure to get health insurance, even though I don’t want to care for my health, because there’s not any compelling urge to keep myself alive and “healthy”***.  However, I did promise****.

I don’t want to take care of myself.  For what purpose, to what end, would I do so?  I mean, I do keep trying little things, attempting to tweak matters, trying to adjust and improve my physical and mental health, but even when I start a day in a relatively playful mood, I still wind up at some point slamming my forehead repeatedly against the metal posts that support cubicle walls in the office, until a coworker has to come and make me stop.

This was because some people who arrive late end up staying and working into lunchtime, bringing me alone for the ride, even if it’s supposed to be my break time.

I think, today, if at the beginning of lunch anyone is still on the phone who arrived at the office later than the official starting time, I’m going to unplug the modem and just forcibly interrupt these worms who have no consideration for other people’s time.  Of course, if there are people who were on time who are still on the phone, I’ll not do that.  People who began work when work is supposed to begin and who just overflow a bit into break time deserve some courtesy.  The others deserve only shadow and flame, but I’ll be merciful; they’ren’t really worth the trouble.

I’m really uncomfortable in my own head and my own skin.  I feel quite desperate, and I am losing most of what few psychological supports I had.  I will do my best to force myself through the process of setting up insurance before the end of the week if I can, but I can’t help but hope that some catastrophe will take the whole thing out of my hands and make it moot before then.

I’m running out of time, though.  I’m so tired and stressed out and frustrated and in pain, and it’s only the stupid, pre-programmed, hard-wired, firmware-like, non-intellectual fear drive that keeps me from doing the sensible thing and just dying.

I’m not afraid of anything specific, really; it’s just that innate, existential, unkind drive to avoid dying, which is about as pleasant to me as the need to urinate and defecate.  I hate being alive.  I hate my life.  And while I definitely don’t want to hurt people who still think I’m the person they used to know, and whom they wouldn’t want to have die “before his time”, it’s simply the case that that person is already dead, anyway.  He has been dead for years.

I’m so tired.  I feel like the last passenger pigeon or the final surviving quagga, whiling its time away in a bleak cage somewhere with no company of its own kind, waiting to die and put the final full stop on the extinction of its species.

I suppose it would still be acceptable if some miracle were to happen and change my life and bring me back to the way I used to be, or better, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  Certainly, no “supernatural” figure seems poised to intervene, and I don’t think any natural ones have the wherewithal or the inclination.  There’s certainly little to no benefit in the admittedly well-meaning cajolery to “just hold on” and all that jazz.  I try, obviously.  I’m still here and writing.  But it feels more like I’m fulfilling a prison sentence than it does like surviving…and I’m familiar with both.

As another poet I admire—and who escaped the prison by his owns hands—wrote:  “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”

*The Website Formerly Known as Twitter.

**WEIT is a comfort and often a joy, and I am very distressed about not being able to see and comment and “like” it, and other comments, as I usually do.

***Physically, of course.  My mental health is a lost cause, anyway.  I received a “how are you doing?” automated email from betterhelp.com last week.  I had briefly used their service, but I quit when my therapist had to go on leave (for legitimate personal reasons).  I didn’t want to have to try to find a new therapist.  I know the checking-in email was automated, and the corporate decision to send it was probably related to the time of year, since many people have troubles in this season.  It felt touching, in a way, even though I know that there were no real people involved in sending anything to me specifically.

****To be fair to me, this was a promise made on the spot, and to someone who had long since broken her own much less spontaneous promise to be with me for the rest of our lives, through better and worse, sickness and health, and all that bullshit, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too pressured.  Promises like the aforementioned, traditional ones, however, are no longer taken very seriously, even in the moment they are pronounced…or so it seems.  That’s yet another charming human innovation:  purely performative vows.

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It’s all a matter of degrees

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m waiting for the second train of the day, the one I caught yesterday.  I slept a bit better last night than Sunday night.  That’s not saying much, but beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes.  It still feels a bit better, at least.  You know you’re in some weirdness when four or five hours of heavily broken-up sleep feels fairly restful, and you don’t even really consider bothering to go and catch the 4:20 train.

It’s relatively cool here in south Florida, by which I mean the current temperature is 57 degrees* according to my weather app.  This is, rather amusingly, lower than the app’s statement of what the low temperature overnight is supposed to have been.  Anyone paying attention might be excused for feeling that the app, in contradicting itself so flagrantly, should not be considered reliable.

Of course, it’s obvious that the app, or service, or whatever it is, simply doesn’t bother to update its “printed” overnight low prediction just for local minutiae.  It’s not meant to be too precise, and in any case, local temperatures can vary quite a bit.  The predicted low was 60, so it’s only off by 3 degrees.

Those who have not been thoroughly enough educated might think this is a five percent error—small, but not negligible.  That is not correct.  Both Fahrenheit and Centigrade are relative temperature scales, based around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a useful, but provincial, set of benchmarks.

No, to get the correct error estimate we must work with the absolute temperature scale, or Kelvin, which begins at “absolute zero” the coldest “possible” temperature and goes up to whatever the maximum possible temperature is**.  So, the error in absolute degrees (which are the same size as degrees in Centigrade, by convention) would be 3 degrees times 5/9, or 15/9 degrees Kelvin.

Now, to get the predicted temperature in Kelvin, we first convert to Centigrade—by taking (60-32) x 5/9, or (28 x 5)/9, or 140/9, or about 15 and a half—then add 273 (which is what zero degrees Centigrade is in Kelvin, ignoring the digits after the decimal point).  So, the predicted temperature, in Kelvin, was about 288 degrees.  15/9 is one and two thirds degrees, so 1.67 degrees (taking 3 significant figures).  As a percentage of 288, that’s pretty tiny.

Here, I’m going to go to the calculator program on my laptop, and it gives me…roughly 0.58%.  That’s just over half a percent error.  Not too bad, when you think about it.  How often are your own estimates that accurate?  If you could pick stocks that well, you could rapidly become a billionaire, I would think.

Here’s a funny little aside:  the southbound train just pulled in across the tracks, and I’ve apparently used the Wi-Fi on that specific train before, because my laptop just prompted me to sign in.  The train is pulling away now, and it’s too late, but it must have a pretty good Wi-Fi signal.

Okay, on to other matters, none of which seem nearly as interesting to me.

I think I’m going to try to use the same person who helped my coworker (the one who had a stroke) get new health insurance at what appears to have been a very good rate to sign up for some for me.  I don’t even want to try to use Medicaid or Obamacare if I can help it.

I don’t trust the human government, anymore—as Radiohead sang, “they don’t…they don’t work for us”.  It’s not that I think the government overall is malicious or evil or whatnot.  It’s just that everyone in it is very small and parochial, working for their own local self-interest under local pressures and incentives.  It’s astonishing that they ever accomplish anything useful at all.

Ants and bees (and termites) do a much more impressive job when they build their hills and hives and mounds, but then again, they are individually less self-serving in many ways.  That’s not to their particular credit—it’s the just way nature has shaped them for their lifestyle and reproductive strategies—but it’s true, nevertheless.

Human governments, meanwhile, are made up of individually motivated creatures whose reproductive processes (and thus their drives and fears) are not much different from any other mammals’, but who try to work in ultrasocial settings as if they were some close relatives of Hymenoptera.  It’s a testament to the incredible power of language (particularly written language) that they accomplish anything at all.

When it has dealt with me specifically, “the” government has done far more harm than good, and most unjustly***.  The less I have to do with any level of their power—I will not grant them the word “authority”—the more comfortable I will feel.  I have a learned aversion and probably some form of complex trauma associated with such things.

I don’t see any reason to overcome that aversion, because I don’t see how it would make my life any better.  It certainly would not make local or state or national governments any less likely to grind me—or anyone else who isn’t massively wealthy and unscrupulous, which probably includes you—into bone meal.

With that, I’ll start to wrap things up for today.  It’s the fifth day of Hanukkah, so enjoy it.  Also, there are only a lucky 13 days left until the annual celebration of Newton’s birthday (they also celebrate some other guy’s birth on that day as well, and though he seems to have been a good sort of guy overall, he really wasn’t born on anything like December 25th).

Christmas was, of course, grafted on to a pre-existing solstice festival, and why not?  Heck, Newton’s birthday was only on December 25th according to the Julian calendar, so it’s at least a week or two out from the Gregorian “date of his birth”.  I could figure out the correct Gregorian date, but I can’t be arsed.  It’s a question with no gravity, no momentum, not even any real significant potential energy.  One might say it is of infinitesimal importance.

Have a nice day.

*Fahrenheit, of course.  If it were 57 degrees Centigrade, global warming would indeed have taken an abrupt turn for the very much worse, and we would all be in the express lane to extinction, unless it were a very transient phenomenon.  And, of course, if it were 57 degrees Kelvin, we would all already be frozen to death quite nicely, since even the nitrogen in the atmosphere freezes below 63 Kelvin, and oxygen is a liquid below 90 K (both of these numbers are at “normal” pressures, which would not prevail in these circumstances).  I don’t know quite what it would mean to be at a 57 degree angle outside—would that simply mean that everything in the universe had been rotated by slightly less than a sixth of a full circle?  Given the rotational symmetry of the laws of physics, from which comes the conservation of angular momentum, I don’t think anyone would even notice.  And, of course, the Earth rotates locally 360 degrees a day, by definition.

**If memory serves, it’s called the Planck temperature.  Anyway, this would be the temperature at which each local point in spacetime would be so hot that the local energy would make a black hole, and in any case, the usual laws of physics would break down.  However, of course, if that energy is uniformly spread out, as presumably it would have been in the very early universe, any local spacetime curvature might be entirely effaced, so there would be no such black holes, as all the universe would be full of such energy.  I think inflationary cosmology would imply that there never really was an era of such intense local energy, unless that would be the “inflaton field” itself, but I may be misremembering this.  Anyway, that’s getting well into speculative physics.

***I am, of course, inescapably biased in this assessment, and I honestly could in principle be convinced by argument and evidence that I am wrong.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I’m incorrect in considering that statement to be accurate and true, with a fairly high credence—certainly well into the mid to high 90 percent range.  In other words, if I considered about a hundred assessments in which I was comparably confident as I am to this one, I would expect to be wrong about only a handful of them.

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Don’t offer any spare change for my sake

It’s Monday morning, December 11th (2023), and they’re starting the new Tri-Rail schedule today.  The first train of the day was moved much earlier—to 4:20—but then the second one was moved back to 5:20, so now I’m waiting for that, since the earlier one is long gone; I didn’t think to leave the house early enough to get here for it.

I thought that the second train was at 4:50, because during peak hours they’ve set them to be every half hour, but apparently this early it isn’t “peak hours”.  I could have made it for the earlier one; it’s not as though I slept more than about half an hour to an hour all of last night.

I know, this is all really boring and pathetic stuff about which to write.  Sorry I can’t be one of those bloggers who writes about would-be helpful subjects, or about travels—those can be interesting—or be like WEIT, the website I like to follow, where PCC(E) writes about all manner of interesting things, because he’s actually an interesting person.

I’ve found myself inadvertently given various obstacles to following that website the way I normally had for years.  If I follow it on Reader, I cannot comment, but I can “like” the post…but I cannot see or like any of the other comments at all.  And if I follow it on the regular site directly, I don’t get updates in the Reader like I prefer to do, and writing comments, while possible, is unwieldy.

I think I’m going to give up.  It’s very sad for me, but I don’t like all these changes.  Websites and apps and everything else are all always changing and updating—usually in utterly useless and barely even cosmetic ways—once a month or more, or so it feels.  I guess they imagine that to remain static is to fall behind, but their changes are not usually improvements.

This is a predictable outcome, since while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.  Even on a one-dimensional setting, things are more likely to worsen or stay the same than to improve (although, admittedly, that’s only a difference of one point on the line).  When things are more complicated, it’s far more likely for things to be worse than to be better if they are changed randomly.

For people like me, all these stupid little changes, even if only cosmetic, are just stress-inducing.  In some ways, it was better when you had to buy new editions of software and the like every now and then in order to get updates and upgrades.  Then, the updates were worthwhile, and were vetted and tweaked and all sorts, because there was some cost to putting them out there and to getting them.  Now, who gives a crap at the various software companies?  If the latest update turns out to be detrimental or irritating to people, they can just “fix” it in next week’s update.

Case in point:  the Uber app has changed its main page for when one is awaiting a driver, but not in any way that improves the substance—they’ve just altered the way the window looks and made the whole thing more unwieldy and childish-looking than it was before.  Why?  I don’t know*.  Possibly some software writer had to justify his or her continuing employment, and doing something substantive would have taken more mental effort.  Better just to take formerly clear data and put it inside a rectangle with rounded corners—wouldn’t want anyone to poke themselves on those purely graphical, sharp right angles—with only part of the data showing and in a big, ugly font.

And humans are so stupid, they’ll think they’re getting something new and be excited about the updates, as they are with the new phones that come out every other day.

The world is so stress-inducing, I really cannot tolerate it much longer.  I’ve said that I would get myself signed up for some form of health insurance, and I don’t want to break my word, but the very prospect—and the fact that I was asked to do it—almost feels as if I’m being set up for something.  I know that’s crazy, but it’s a feeling that exists.  I feel as if I’m being herded into some metaphorical abattoir.

I feel so overwhelmed by the very prospect of doing the insurance, though, that I feel like I want to die this week, before my unofficial deadline for signing up for it.  It’s ridiculous, I know, but the pressure is getting overwhelming, and I have no source of relief, no personal support, no tidings of comfort or joy.

I suspect the train is going to be more crowded than usual, and that’s pretty stress-inducing, too.  There are definitely more people waiting at the track than there usually were for either the former 4:45 or the former 5:15 trains.

I don’t think I can stand all this much longer.  I have a semi-serious of going to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in West Palm Beach and immolating myself, so I can at least become some kind of protest or something.  I have collected enough flammable liquids to make it workable, and I have a backpack big enough to carry them.

But, of course, that’s a somewhat scary way to die—fire and all, I mean.  Even for a former Boy Scout who has a bit of fire bug in him, like so many of us did, it’s an intimidating thought.  Still, I tested out the backpack for its carrying capacity yesterday, just to see, because I was feeling particularly low at that time.  It could do the job.

I don’t know what to do.  I wish I could calm my mind.  I wish I could sleep.  I wish the world were not so stupid, and that I were not so stupid, also.  I don’t think I can do this much longer…maybe not very much longer at all.  I feel like I have a shorter remaining time to figure something out than I had thought I had…a lot shorter.

Just the thought of getting on the newly scheduled, overcrowded train feels like it’s going to be more than I’m prepared to handle.  I really hate this.  I hate my life.  I really, really hate it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I guess, as long as I’m around, I’ll keep doing these blog posts.  Aren’t you all lucky?

Have a good day.

*He’s on third.

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Weird pegs hammered into “normal” holes and spiders living in beehives

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station very early—quite a bit too early for the first train—because I was awake anyway, and there was no point in waiting around at the house.  The train station (like the office) in many ways feels more hospitable than the house does.  That’s not saying much, but there it is.

There seem not to have been very many people reading my blog these last few days.  Evidently, when I’m not focused on my mental illness—and it is mental illness, it is not mental health—people don’t seem very interested.  Or maybe there’s a change to the WordPress Reader algorithm so that people don’t see my blog pop up.  I know something has changed, because I can no longer directly comment (or see the comments of others) on my favorite website through WordPress Reader.  That may be because the person who runs that website finds me annoying.  It’s easy enough for me to imagine that other people find me annoying.  I find myself annoying, so it’s not exactly a new notion.  Still, it’s very disheartening to be ostracized, deliberately or accidentally, from my usual interaction at that blog.

I don’t have much heart from the start.

I was approached—figuratively speaking—by someone yesterday morning asking me to please get health insurance, and making suggestions about how to do so affordably.  I listened, because of who it was and, even more importantly, because of on whose behalf they were probably partly speaking (though I am convinced of the caller’s true personal good intentions as well).  I agreed, fine, I’ll get health insurance of some kind.

It’s not the money, mainly, that’s been in the way of me getting insurance.  It’s my self-loathing that mainly gets in the way.  Why would I want to maintain my health and try to live longer or healthier?  What is the point of such an endeavor?  I’m personally extremely unhappy, and in pain, and sleepless, and alone, for one thing (I guess that’s more than one thing, but you probably know what I mean).

At this stage I’m just a net drain on the world, anyway.  Surely, the whole planet would probably cheer up slightly—but noticeably—if I were gone, like a pond that’s been muddied by heavy rainfall finally clearing after the silt settles out.  Most people wouldn’t know why the world felt a little more positive, a little more hopeful, a little more pleasant, but it would still be the case.

Anyway, I said I would do it, so I will, unless something kills me first.

I was in a weirdly upbeat mood part of yesterday morning before that event, although my blog post was rather angry.  To give you an idea of how weirdly upbeat I was, I had finished writing the draft of my post and was getting ready to lie down on the floor of the office (I do this a few times a day to help my back) and I set my computer to install updates in the meantime.  And as I saw the computer message that informed me that it was “updating”, I thought, “‘Updating’…that needs to be the title of a rom-com.”

Immediately, I thought up and quickly wrote out the plot synopsis for the romantic comedy in question and emailed it via my smartphone to myself.  Later, I told my boss about it, conveying the basic story line, and he said—with some enthusiasm—that it was quite good and he thought people would really like that story, and would read such a book.

I had thought of it more as a screenplay sort of thing, to be honest.  I considered getting on Skillshare or something similar and doing a quick course on screenwriting, to write it up.

Of course, I’m not in such a good mood as yesterday morning—it went away by early afternoon, when I suddenly felt a burst of severe tension, as if someone had injected me with epinephrine while I wasn’t looking.  It’s not a good feeling, but I have it a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve pretty rapidly and persistently gone downhill since then.

So, I guess I’ll sign up for some form of health insurance.  I have some degree of inherent resistance to the idea, of course, a big one being just my honest difficulty dealing with bureaucratic matters, with paperwork and personal records and trying to fit my weird and distorted metaphorical pegs into the square and round holes laid out—quite unthinkingly—by the world.

That latter comment about things being laid out unthinkingly is important.  No one should imagine that the world as it is was ever truly planned or designed by anyone, whether out of beneficence or malice or otherwise.  Individual people and so forth have had plans and goals and ideas, but no one is big enough actually to design a society or a government or an economy or whatever.  It all just falls together, like salt crystallizing out of a strong saline solution, or rock candy forming on a string in a cooling bath of saturated sugar water.

There are tendencies to form certain kinds of patterns, of course, because of the nature of the constituents and their interactions, but if one were to arrange ten million such rock candy baths, no two of the products would be the same.

Rock candy is simple, of course, and its point and purpose are simple.  So, it doesn’t really matter what specific shapes might be formed when making it.  Societies and civilizations, on the other hand, can take all manner of forms, and these can be truly better or worse by any criteria one might choose to use to measure them.  But they are not inherently real, they are not inherently good, they are not inherently stable or ethical or fair or just, and maybe they never will be.

Justice (however one may want to define the term) does not happen on its own.  Even if one tries to achieve it, one must constantly reevaluate, reassess, tweak, and adjust how one approaches it, because it is not a simple problem, and each local solution will engender new problems.  Problems are solvable, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be solved.  Wanting to solve them is not enough, and even trying to solve them is not enough.

To achieve justice, or at least to optimize it, for even a group of a hundred people would probably be computationally impossible even using a physically maximal computer.  Even assuming one had a fully agreed-upon definition of the term, the adjustments needed to get everyone in the best possible place seem fit make the traveling salesman problem trivial by comparison.

As for achieving optimal justice for 8 billion people, well…that’s not even a pipe dream.  It’s not even laughable.  At best it could only really be achieved at individual levels or perhaps in small groups, but then again, there’s not even an agreed-upon definition of the term.  This is one of the reasons to be suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers or a “real solution” or whatever, especially if you think they are sincere.

True believers are dangerous, far more dangerous than psychopaths or the mentally ill, and they have done vastly more harm throughout history than all the most self-centered of sociopathic villains could ever do, even if given absolute power (or so I predict).  This is at least partly because anyone who thinks they absolutely have the answers for civilization or even a society is simply wrong.  They always have been, they always will be.  Finite entities cannot even fully understand themselves, let alone ultimate, complex aspects of the world around them, so they can never be mathematically certain that they have the final word on any question.  It is always necessary, in principle, to be open to criticism and testing, to updating beliefs, even if one is very close to being sure.

Anyway, I have trouble dealing with bureaucracies and forms and paperwork and everything.  It feels utterly unnatural and uncomfortable.  It always has, but when I was younger and had people in my life, I was more able to put in the effort.  But it’s always felt unnatural to me, and deeply so.

It’s a bit like a spider trying to become a member of a beehive—seeking nectar and pollen and tending larvae and warding off invaders to the hive and all.  Some of the spider’s attributes may be useful—silk and venom and potent things—but a spider does not live on honey and pollen, and it will not thrive in a hive (if it even stays alive).  A spider is an alien in a hive; it can no more live like a bee than it can grow wheat and thresh it and grind it and then bake and live on bread.  However long it lives, it will simply be suffering.

That’s how I feel about a lot of this shit.  But I’ll do it.  Maybe I’ll even try to write that rom-com.  I can write pretty easily.  Of course, knowing me, the rom-com would probably devolve into a horror story, but maybe that would be good in a way.  After all, I’ve had romance of one kind or another in all my horror stories, and there’s usually at least a little bit of joking.  Sauce for the romantic comedy goose…

At bottom, though, I really don’t want to be healthy and alive.  I mean, it’d be nice not to feel physically miserable as long as I am alive, but that desire is preprogrammed into the organism, and I cannot rewrite that programming.  I can, however, shut it down, or let it come to a shutdown on its own, since I cannot update it, despite the title of my potential romantic comedy.  Life is shit—and if you’re a cockroach, shit is life, but that doesn’t mean you can make high art with it.

Anyway, here comes my train.  Have a nice weekend.

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I blog you give me leave to go from hence

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in three weeks, I’m writing a Thursday style blog post.  You can all start breathing again.

Yesterday’s blog post was kind of weird, wasn’t it?  I’m not even completely sure what I wrote.  I certainly haven’t reread it since editing it before finally posting it, but I feel I said a lot of strange things, and wrote about things I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about with anyone before.  Maybe I have.  I don’t think there was anything particularly shocking except that it was weird for me to say some of them.  Also, I feel it was more erratic and bizarre even than my usual posts.

It’s now the last day of November in 2023 (AD or CE).  That’s mildly momentous, or at minimum a mediocre milestone.  There shall be no recurrence of the month of November in 2023 (AD or CE) in any of our lives again, unless the ways we “define” the terms are changed.  Even if we had a time machine to come back to this day, we would not experience a new November in 2023 (AD or CE) if we were to return to it; we would be re-experiencing the same one, albeit from some different perspective.

I don’t know if returning to the same month would initiate some new Everettian branch of the universe, as in my short story Penal Colony, or if it would instead be some manner of closed, time-like loop in spacetime, which always happens exactly the same way—since it only actually exists in one instantiation—even if you were to experience it more than once.  It might be like coming to a crossroad, going through the light, looping around a “cloverleaf” in the road, and coming back to the crossroad in the perpendicular direction, then going on forward.  There’s only one route; it just happens to cross itself.

And, of course, if you did a self-Oedipus and somehow killed yourself at the crossroad, its not as though you would be changing your future in any sense;  that would “always” simply have been the way you died.  So, 12 Monkeys would be much more like the nature of such reality than, say, Back to the Future or Time Cop or that newer time travel movie with Bruce Willis that I haven’t seen.

I don’t know quite how I got on that subject.  My mind meanders morosely (and occasionally merrily), and I don’t necessarily know where it’s going.  As I noted above, sometimes I don’t even know where it’s been.

That’s why I never eat off of it, if I can help it.

One thing I’ve tentatively concluded after my thoughts from yesterday, though, is that I really am not capable of managing life in the human world.  I don’t think I ever have been; other people have helped me out in the past, and I have no such other people available now.

I have skills and tenacity and intelligence enough to survive for a time, and to create an illusion of “getting by” that’s convincing enough for people who aren’t really part of my life—which is everyone, these days—but everything is falling apart, and I don’t know how to maintain it, nor do I have the will and the wherewithal to do so.

You might as well ask a moth to maintain a termite mound.  Or even just ask an ant—maybe that’s a better comparison.  An ant could sort of get the idea of a termite mound, and if it’s already been built, the ant could sort of help maintain it to some degree for a bit.  But really, it’s not where the ant belongs, it’s not the lifestyle to which it is adapted.

Ask a human to try to live the life of an ostrich, among ostriches.  The human might put on an interesting show for a bit, and since humans are smarter than ostriches, the human might even succeed at things the ostriches couldn’t from time to time, but if the human is committed to living and behaving like an ostrich—if there are only ostriches anywhere to be found in that human’s environment—that human is inevitably, eventually going to fail catastrophically.  It may be a slow catastrophe.  Maybe it’s nothing anyone would make into and share as a video on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok.  But it would still be a catastrophe.  It would not be pleasant to experience.

Drawing closer to home, it would be hard enough for, say, a chimpanzee to try to live with and as orangutans or vice versa.  Even chimpanzees and bonobos—as closely related as primates get one to another—would probably not be able to thrive if one were placed within the other’s society.  I would guess that a bonobo would probably be abused and die before too long in the company of chimpanzees (who are notorious assholes) but a displaced chimpanzee would probably have just as confusing and frightening a time, if more subtle, trying to blend in with bonobos.  It would have a few slight advantages in strength and size, on average, and it might even be able to learn to try to fit in and make its way.  But it would be living a lifestyle subtly but profoundly different than the one to which it is adapted.

Anyway, that’s all a bit tangential and weird.  I don’t think I’m making myself very clear, and for that I apologize.  I just realize more and more that I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, even if I were to find the motivation and desire to do so.  It’s a slow crash and burn, perhaps, but I think I really am crashing and burning.  And I don’t think that there was ever a chance for anything otherwise to happen, with me trying to live among and adapt to the world of humans—or normal humans, or “neurotypical” humans, if you prefer those metaphors.  So, what should I do?  I don’t know.

In the meantime, though, I hope you all are having and have had and will continue to have or (if that’s the best for which I can hope) that you begin to have a very good day and week and a very good new month starting tomorrow and so on.

TTFN

Hermit or magus

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“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

1427235137816

*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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For the satirical blog says here that old men have grey beards

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, though it doesn’t feel like it should be, because I didn’t write or go to work on Monday.  I also haven’t been doing any significant walking since the end of last week, as I’ve been feeling quite physically low.

Unfortunately, my physical health doesn’t seem to be recovering much, yet.  I still have an irritating, dry cough, and my nose is stuffy, and I feel rather crappy.  But I slept well (for me) last night, getting almost five hours of sleep, and possibly a little bit more.  I didn’t wake up feeling particularly good, but I think that’s just mainly because I’m still sick.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of illness that will be life-threatening, but we can always hope.  After all, it’s possible for a simple viral upper respiratory infection to lead to a secondary bacterial infection that ends up becoming a lethal pneumonia.

Fingers crossed, everyone!

I haven’t shaved this week—I normally just have a sort of goatee (not a fancy one, just a straight, old-fashioned, The Master style goatee, as shown below), but occasionally I let the full beard grow out a bit.  It tends to be irritating because the spacing between whiskers on my cheeks is wider than on my chin and lips, and also the whiskers on my neck get irritating.  Obviously, it’s possible to muscle through that, but another problem I have is that, apparently, when I have a full beard I look quite amiable, and strangers start talking to me out of nowhere, much to my surprise and discomfort.

I never wore a beard at all while I was married.  My (ex-) wife thought my goatees looked “too aristocratic”, which I take to mean that they made me look vaguely villainous.  I was also in the Navy when she and I first met, and of course, I couldn’t wear a beard then.

I don’t know quite what the fetish is in the US armed services about being clean-shaven and having short hair; maybe it’s born from days of fighting lice, though being completely shaved would be better for that.  I’ve been shaved-headed before, and I found it quite pleasant in many ways.  If you roll out of bed late, for instance, no one can tell if you haven’t showered.  Apparently, I also look a bit like a real life version of Doctor Evil when my head is shaved, but less funny, more actually evil.  I’m okay with that.

My ex-wife also had an interesting attitude toward beards in general, which was her explanation for why she didn’t like them:  She always had the feeling that men with beards were trying to hide something.

Think about that.  If you’re a man who actually does grow a beard, that means you are genetically programmed with that secondary sex characteristic.  Without modern technology, once you hit puberty, you will start growing a beard.  Not all human males (or related alien species or replicants or changelings) grow beards, but for those that do, it’s just what happens when one doesn’t take other action, much as getting old is just what happens when one doesn’t die young.

What that means is that, when someone who would otherwise grow one does not have a beard, that is the more unnatural situation.  It requires regular (usually daily) effort to be clean-shaven for a post-pubescent man who grows facial hair.  That seems like a situation where people might be trying to hide something.  Specifically, they seem to want to hide the fact that they are adults, that they grow beards, and whatever comes with that.

Maybe they want to appear boyish and thus less threatening?  That couldn’t explain the military tendency, but that tendency is clearly only a modern affectation.  Traditional warrior classes tended to have beards.  Think of the Vikings, and the hordes of Genghis Khan, and the Spartans, and of course the many middle-eastern warrior peoples, from the Persians to the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Also, of course, it’s pretty clear that every Abrahamic patriarch and/or prophet, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all had beards.  Even King David almost surely had a beard by the time he whacked Goliath (it’s hard to imagine a hunting bandit, leader of a band of outlaws, being preadolescent and/or taking the time to shave every day).  Michelangelo made one heckuva statue of the young King as clean-shaven, but that doesn’t have to be any more true to life than it is literarily accurate to put pointy ears on hobbits and elves in Middle-earth*.  Also, of course, by most accounts, the illustrious (and sculpturious?) Mr. Angelo had quite the beard, himself.

It’s a bit weird, all of it.  Maybe the admiration for being clean-shaven harkens back to some not-so-secret preference of the medieval church higher-ups for prepubescent boys.

It’s probably at least partly just random, or at least stochastic, with the highly nonlinear equations of sociology producing weird eddies and fluctuations in local social mores that aren’t necessarily motivated by anything inherently logical.  But still, it seems rather silly to me for someone to think that men who simply allow their faces to do what those faces naturally do—i.e., grow beards—might be hiding something thereby.  It’s a bit like imagining that an apple tree is being slyly malevolent by growing fruit.

Still, the whole amiable appearance thing is a much better reason for me to avoid beards.  I feel very awkward and tense, engendering urges toward literal physical aggressiveness, when strangers talk to me.  Apparently, my tendency to grow “wizard eyebrows”, as my ex-wife described them (fondly) is not off-putting.  Perhaps when I have a full beard, I look like a kindly wizard too much.  Whereas with a goatee, I look more like a Warlock (which used to be my nickname in high school).

Now, if having a full beard encouraged beautiful, intelligent, interesting women to come up and talk to me out of the blue a lot, I might be less displeased (though I would almost certainly be at least as tense and anxious).  But that seems vanishingly unlikely.

Anyway, that’s enough nonsense for now.  I don’t have any idea what Shakespeare quote I might alter for the title to this post, but you will know by the time you read this.  Of course, yesterday’s title was an actual, full-on quote—from Gloucester, AKA the future Richard III, in the play Henry VI part 3—but that was unusual, and I did put quotation marks around it.

I’m sure I’ll find something adequate.  I have all the works of Shakespeare to use as a source for my material.  That’s a hell of a deep well from which to draw.

TTFN

the master worried about his future

*Think about it.  Tolkien went to great pains to describe how hobbits had curly hair on their heads and on the top of their feet, that they are smaller than the bearded dwarves (and that they themselves do not grow beards) and that they tend to be rosy-cheeked and stout around the middle.  But he never once said anything about their ears.  You would think, if their ears were meant to be pointy or otherwise remarkable, he would have specified this; he was an obsessively meticulous creator of his world, a tendency he self-parodied in his short story, Leaf by Niggle.  There is apparently some obscure reference in his notes that could be taken to be saying that his elves might have had slightly pointy ears, though I’m unconvinced by what I’ve read even of that.  Certainly in the Bakshi version of LotR, the hobbits and the elves all had “normal” ears, and that’s the way I have always pictured them in the dozens upon dozens of times I’ve read the books.  The ears are my only major complaint about Peter Jackson’s original trilogy.  I consider their presence an instance of pandering to the “broader” audience of people who aren’t actual Tolkien fans.

by

“Be resident in men like one another and not in me”

Well, I’m on the laptop (computer) again today.  I specify that it is the computer because I want to make it clear that I’m not on anyone’s actual lap top.  I don’t think there is anyone out there whose lap could tolerate me sitting on it—I suppose Santa Claus could maybe use his magic, but it’s a bit early in the year for him, even given holiday-time mission creep—and probably even fewer laps on which I would be able to tolerate sitting.  And one cannot really be on a lap around a race track or in a swimming pool, unless one is actually going around that track or swimming, either of which activity would make it very difficult to type.  I guess the top of such a lap could be thought of as its beginning, as in “taking it from the top” in music.  But that wouldn’t change the writing difficulty.

That’s a weird opening to a blog post.  Sorry.  I think I’m particularly weird in the morning, or at least I’m a particular kind of weird in the morning.  I know that, as with many people suffering from depression, my mood is often at its worst in the morning, but sometimes I’m at my least weird and my most sane—from my own point of view, anyway—in the morning relative to the middle of the day or the afternoon or the evening.  Often I feel most sane when I’m most depressed.

It’s quite frustrating when, by the end of the day, my energy level lifts a bit, because then I have a hard time relaxing and getting to sleep.  But, of course, it’s not as though I can sleep in, or sleep late to make up for staying up too late.

I will say, though, that last night I got nearly four hours of sleep (pretty uninterrupted once I got to sleep), and it felt surprisingly deep.  I had at least one dream of which I was vaguely aware, because it was interrupted when my alarm sounded.  I don’t remember anything about the dream, other than that it was a dream, and I awakened feeling quite disoriented*, thinking it must be much later than it was.  It wasn’t.  It was just as late as it was, as one might expect.

My work friend who had the stroke is apparently doing pretty well, which is good news.  It feels so ironic to me how often people around me, ones who have a lot for which to live, and who have good reasons to be healthy, and who have families and friends, are stricken with significant health problems.

I’m referring to serious, dangerous health problems here.  I have some health problems—chronic pain, stuff like that—and I certainly have mental health issues.  But I’m the person I know whose life could most easily tolerate significant health setbacks, or at least the one whose ill-health and/or death would have the least impact on those around me and the world at large.  Even so, on I go.

Yet my life, such as it is, is in fact steadily eroding.  It has already become quite a poor, puny, pathetic little remnant of a life.  I don’t do anything other than go from my one room (with attached bathroom/shower) to work and back, and I write this blog.  I don’t play guitar or write fiction or sing or any of that anymore.  I’m getting more and more tired of even non-fiction books.

I don’t watch any ongoing TV shows other than things like Loki, which is quite limited, and Doctor Who.  Unfortunately, even the latter is something that I wish I could watch with someone…and not via a cheesy-ass “watch party” thing online.  I don’t understand how those could be any fun at all.

I have a hard time even visualizing people I know when I’m not around them.  I mean, I know they exist, of course, but I can’t readily imagine what they might be doing, or that they’re doing anything in particular, if I’m not with them.  I know they exist, but I only really feel them existing when I’m in their presence.

Maybe that’s part of the whole ASD thing, I don’t know, but it’s always been very difficult for me to maintain any form of relationship over significant distances.  There have been exceptions, but you could count them on maybe half the fingers of one hand.  And those exceptions always involved nearly-continuous communication.

Still, while of course I know, intellectually, that other people are all still there when I’m not in their presence, I don’t seem intuitively to model them except when they’re nearby—and when they’re nearby, I don’t so much model them as watch them in a kind of analytic way (though I do feel the noise of their emotions).

So, when I’m alone, I often feel*** truly and completely and fundamentally alone in the universe.  I often feel that way even when other people are around, though there are some distractions and intellectual engagement that help make that a bit easier.  But there have been relatively few people in my life with whom I feel really connected, and eventually most of those people have gone far away or cut ties with me or died or whatever.

Who can blame them?

So, anyway, that’s the deal.  It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s payroll day.  And tomorrow will be my traditional Thursday post.  I sometimes entertain the notion of writing blog posts in the afternoon or evening, and seeing if the content is different in character, and if anyone would notice.  But to do that would require serious restructuring of my routines and schedules and things, and I don’t think I’m up for it.  Also, morning is when I have time to do this.

I’m awake anyway, so I might as well use that fact for something productive…if that’s how this can be described.

Please try to have a good day.

*It’s weird how the Brits tend to use “disorientated” even though the root word is disorient, not disorientate (which sounds, perhaps, like the name of Catherine Tate’s sibling or child**).  I guess even in the states we say “disorientation”, but I think that’s just because “disoriention” would not flow very well.  I’m probably biased.  One related thing I find frustrating, and found especially frustrating when I was in medical practice (and training) was how many doctors, even American ones, would refer to the state of having been dilated as “dilatation” instead of just “dilation”.  It feels like they lost control of themselves, and only just barely were able to resist saying “dilatatatatatatation”.  It makes no good sense.

**Of course, Catherine Tate is her stage name, so it would be weird for a sibling or child of hers to have the last name “Tate”, to say nothing of the first name “Disorien”.

***I don’t think I’m alone, of course.  I’ve never been tempted by the philosophical position of solipsism; it doesn’t make any sense, at least in its literal form.  But I definitely feel a sort of intuitive pseudo-solipsism in some senses and at some times.  By that I mean I am the only person I have any actual sense of persistently existing.  On the other hand, I can sometimes “feel” other people’s emotions, in a sense, when they’re around, and one on one that can be good when one is a doctor.  However, when there are a lot of other people around it can quickly be overwhelming, especially if it’s also literally noisy.  Two kinds of cacophony is too much.