Anxiety

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When the train comes, should I run or hide my head?

Here I go again, wasting your time and mine with another daily blog post that accomplishes nothing for anyone.  I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived at the train station just now, literally seconds before the train prior to the one I planned to take arrived.  This is because I got up even earlier than I usually do, so I figured, “What the heck”, and decided just to get going.  I had some old trash and knickknacks I wanted to make sure to get out in today’s garbage pickup, anyway, and since I was awake anyway, I got up very early to take care of some of it.  I’m clearing out as much clutter as I can, throwing out unnecessary clothes, old Halloween costume stuff, beat up old books I’ll never read, magazines, tools…all sorts of stuff, things that just take up space and make a mess.  I gave my folding massage chair at work to my coworker who has a bad back‒it doesn’t really do very much for me, anyway.  And I’m going to give my colored pencils and such to one of my coworkers who has a young son who has used them when he was here with his father.

Oh, right, I was talking about the train.  Sorry.  As I was saying, I arrived at the station just in time to see the first northbound train pulling in, and my strong impulse was to rush to try to catch it.  I probably could have done so.  It would have required just breaking into a jog for a bit, and hoping the conductor saw me and wasn’t in too much of a hurry‒the train was, technically, slightly early.

However, I decided to fight that impulse, partly because I already get so sweaty, and partly because I didn’t want to have to stress myself out with that somewhat irrational impulse to catch the earliest train.  So, I strolled up along the northbound side of the station, figuratively gritting my teeth, watching the train come to a halt and then depart.

That turned out to be very stressful in and of itself, and I’m still stressed out about it now, especially as more people arrive at the track to wait for the next train, which is sure to be more crowded than the first.  I also can’t seem to help thinking about the possibility that this next train might run late, and that would mean it would probably be more crowded still, and also, just, well…that it would be more of a loss of time than I will already experience from not getting on the initial train.  Not that I have any urgent need to get anywhere very soon.  Work doesn’t actually start for five more hours.  But once I’ve decided to get up and get there, being delayed is just extremely stressful.

I get the impression that my stress doesn’t really show on my face or in my demeanor, any more than my depression does, because nobody seems to notice either thing, though I feel as if they must be glaring and blaring like a fire truck with lights and sirens going at maximum level.  Evidently this is not so.  I think I could probably douse myself in lighter fluid and rubbing alcohol and set myself on fire in the middle of the office, and people would just say, “Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’?”*  Or I could go to the roof of the highest nearby building or parking structure and step out onto the ledge, and anyone passing would just say to me something like, “Isn’t that a great view?”

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, really.

I am possibly going to push some of my “plans” back by about two weeks, unfortunately.  I have this weekend off, but the following weekend, when I am scheduled to work, my coworker and his wife are taking their daughter to Orlando, and if I weren’t available, he might feel that he ought to cancel that vacation to cover for me.  I don’t want that.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

[Okay, my train arrived almost on time just now.  I’m still torn about having skipped the earlier one, but I can’t change that now.]

Anyway, the weekend after that is, more or less, on or around my Dad’s birthday.  I guess that’s both more and less momentous than Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and certainly it is more directly personal to me.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, sorry.  I’m kind of all over the place.  And yet, I’m still going nowhere‒figuratively speaking, anyway.  I mean, okay, literally, I’m on a commuter train heading north at quite a decent speed.

Of course it could be that this is also, as Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, a train bound for nowhere.  I’ve always thought there was some pretty good poetry in that song:  “We were both too tired to sleep”, “We took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness, but boredom overtook us”, “If you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces”, “Because every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”, “And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even”.

Not Shakespeare level stuff, maybe, but still, there were some nice turns of phrase in it.  The chorus, ironically, has some of the weakest lyrics in the song, in my opinion.  They aren’t bad, but the verses are better.

Jeez, Louise, why am I writing about the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song?  It’s not a bad song, of course, but how have I come to be writing about it in a blog I originally started as a promotional venue for my fiction?  It’s bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.

Of course, there’s nothing truly mysterious about the whole thing; it’s just the product of stochastic, drunkard’s walk events.  It has no directionality, no purpose, no meaning.  But it’s still just quietly mind-boggling.  What a catastrophically banal, monumentally tiny, outrageously boring shit-show my life has become.  It’s enough to make you laugh until you choke…or maybe to yawn until you choke.

Anyway, that’ll do for today, I think.  I hope you have a nice day.  Try not to let my words and thoughts infect you with my way of looking at things.  It’s not anything I recommend, and I certainly don’t think I have any particularly wise insights; I can’t even manage my own mind.

tri rail train dramatic

*”Doc” is what people at the office call me.

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Remember what the dormouse said: Decongest your head

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m waiting at the train station for the first train of the day on this first day of the Jewish year.

I took a long-acting decongestant last night, and though it did make me notice more alertness when I had my frequent nocturnal awakening, I don’t think I actually woke up more often than usual.  If anything, as I’ve long suspected, nighttime decongestants improve my breathing (duh), and thus the quality of such sleep as I get.

I have a family history of some degree of sleep apnea, and I suspect that using decongestants‒as long as the side-effects aren’t prohibitive‒provide protection from, and possibly prevention of, that process (This, I suspect, is especially true if, as needed, inhaled corticosteroids are also part of the treatment).

I’ve long suspected that sleep apnea can be a long-term secondary consequence of chronic allergic (and/or vasomotor) rhinitis, with narrowing of the nasopharynx due to inflammation/swelling of the mucosa leading to snoring and worsening sleep, then the weight gain often associated with certain kinds of inefficient sleep and high carb intake secondary to the nocturnal relative hypercapnia (high CO2) and the elevated cortisol that often accompanies chronic insomnia.  That high carb intake, with consequent elevated insulin, may lead to worsening of the inflammation and further narrowing of the airways and the gradual reduction in the quality of sleep, leading to a vicious cycle.

This is hypothetical, of course, and there are many variables that would need to be controlled to test it; I’ve only ever “experimented” on myself, starting when I first had a cat and realized that I was allergic, and that I was sleeping horribly and developing many signs and symptoms consistent with early sleep apnea.  It worked.

I’ve tried (with incomplete success) to avoid having cats since my first one was no longer in the picture.  That helped some and I have intermittently cut back on decongestants, but in south Florida‒and when living indoors in general, I suspect‒it’s hard to avoid all potential airway allergens and irritants.  Over time, the decreased quality of sleep (especially in someone like me who has a deceased tendency to sleep at all) has its effect on my cognitive function, and on my general energy level and appetite.

I have noticed that, when I am treating myself assertively for congestion, I tend overall to be cognitively sharper than when I am not, and I do not think this is simply due to the stimulating side-effects of the decongestants.  Studies have demonstrated that even true stimulants such as amphetamines do not actually bolster measures of intellectual function, though in the short term, they can improve alertness.

The biggest problem with my use of such things is that they tend to increase my level of internal stress and anxiety, particularly social anxiety.  All chains break at their weakest link (at least when under uniform tension), and social interaction is evidently my weakest link.

I’m not terribly afraid of physical danger, though it could never be said that I am fearless nor even particularly courageous, and I’m relatively used to physical pain.  I also don’t worry much about people being “mean” to me or not particularly liking me, or whatever‒for the most part, I don’t really have a clear notion of what other people are thinking of me at any given time, or indeed, what they’re thinking of anything.  When I’m not in someone’s presence, their presence in my brain seems abstract and ephemeral at best.  There are rare exceptions to this rule, but they are countable on the fingers of one hand.

But I do get stressed out about knowing what to say or how to interact, especially with new people, and I worry very much about being a bother or an annoyance to others.  Phone conversations are particularly stressful, except with people I know very well.

So this is definitely a trade-off situation, as are almost all things in life.  The body is an extraordinarily complex Rube Goldberg machine, and to push down on the system in one place almost always causes something to pop upward somewhere else.  I know, that’s not quite a consistent metaphor, but I think it works to convey my point.

Right now, at least, I want to try to improve my sleep quality‒increasing its quantity seems an unachievable goal without using things that make me feel worse overall‒so I can have the energy to do more walking and the like, including quite long-distance walking.  And I want to try to optimize my thinking as best I can, to decrease the risk that major decisions and changes I hope to make are based on poor thinking.

As for social anxiety, well, my social life is nonexistent anyway, apart from work.  I don’t expect ever to make* any new friends or have any new relationships, romantic or otherwise.  That aspect of life just doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me‒certainly nearly all such things have been disastrous hitherto for me.  Maybe if I could find some other member of whatever species I am, it might be different, but I don’t consider the odds of success, or the probable payoff, to be worth the likely cost and the probable rate of failure.

Plus, let’s face it:  I’m no one’s idea of a good prospect for a long term friend or partner of any kind.  I can be quite useful; I tend to be hard working and disciplined, and I’m reasonably bright, but my skills in romantic interactions, for instance, have always been horrible, and if anything they have atrophied over time.

I used to be tolerably good at friendship, but I seem to have no skill at keeping friendships going from a distance.  I don’t naturally think to try to reach out to people‒those times when I do think of it, I always feel awkward and anxious and am sure I’m just going to be an annoyance to anyone with whom I interact and to find the interaction stressful and even heart-breaking.  I’ve said before, even leaving comments on blogs or videos or what have you often leads me to feel real stress afterwards, and to regret doing it.

I just don’t think I’m well designed for this world, though there are attributes I possess that are useful and effective.  Overall, I’m just not a good fit, and the places where that fit is bad chafe and grate and grind away quite painfully at me.  Every day is painful, and not just physically.

If I could find some other world to try, I might do that, depending on what I judged my chances to be.  But I don’t think that’s going to be an option, probably not ever in my potential lifetime.  So, it seems better to consider and prepare for a relatively straightforward exit from this world.

I could say, “Prove me wrong”, like those stupid Internet memes, and I guess if anyone thinks they can do it, they’re welcome to try.  But I don’t expect any fresh arguments or evidence that I haven’t already seen or considered.  I’ve been dealing with this question since I was a teenager.

Anyway, have a good day and a good weekend.  Thanks for reading.

the doctor in the desert

*Google’s auto-correct tried to make me change this phrase, making it “to ever make”.  Yes, it actually recommended that I split an infinitive where I had not done so, though there would be no improvement in the clarity of my expression thereby.  It’s exasperating.  To quote a very sarcastic young Scrooge, “This is the evenhanded dealing of the world!”

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Would there be fewer late trains if we were less willing to accept sloppy language?

I did not walk back to the house from the train yesterday‒it was late and I felt quite low on energy and enthusiasm‒but I did walk to the train station this morning.  It’s muggy and hot still, but it’s cooler than it is when the sun is shining (especially if you just wear black clothes like I do, since, like Wednesday Addams, I’ve developed an allergy to colors).

The biggest drawback to walking in the morning is that, down where I currently live, at this time of year, at this time of day, the air is abysmally still and lifeless.  Now, at the train station, it seems there is at least some breeze, which I suspect is at least partly due to traffic on I-95, just behind me, not more than twenty or so meters away.

Of course, the station is also quite a bit closer to the ocean than is the house in which I currently dwell.  This can make floods more likely here, as I have witnessed first-hand, but the temperature differentials above the ocean and above the land seems to generate a more or less constant wind at or near the beach.

I’ve long suspected that such a breeze should be coming into shore during the day‒because land is heated more rapidly by the sun than the sea is, and the air above it heats and rises, and cooler air from the ocean flows in to replace it‒and then heading out to sea at night, because the water temperature doesn’t change as readily it stays warmer at night and so the process would reverse.  I am by no means sure that this describes the actual dynamics of the situation, and I suspect matters are more complicated than this, but this is how I hypothesize about it.

Aaaaaand, guess what.  They’ve just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed 15 to 20 minutes.  They then say “stand by for more information”, but no more information is ever shared over the speakers.

It’s infuriating just how often the trains are delayed.  If I had an employee who came in late this frequently, I would have to consider firing that person.  It’s unprofessional and disruptive; people make plans based on the expected, published schedules.  And while, of course, there are occasional, unforeseen things that happen anywhere and everywhere, the frequency at which it happens on the Tri-Rail ought to be embarrassing to those who work in the system.

I’ll give it some time, but I really hate riding trains that are late, because they’re usually more crowded than they would be if they were on time.  It’s rather infuriating that I deliberately dragged my feet to miss the previous train‒which was on time‒by just a minute or so, so that I would have time to cool down a bit before the next one arrived.

The next next train, which is almost on time, will be expected to arrive only 8 minutes after the train for which I was waiting.  I think I may sit out the first train and wait for the second one, which should be less crowded.  Right now it feels as though there are a few hundred people waiting for the next train.  I already wish I could just send them away, and this is while they’re just spread out on the platform.

I think I will wait.  The difference in arrival time will be negligible.

It will be a somewhat busy office day today, because I’m going to be doing payroll early, like I did last week.  But that’s not something for which I need to be in the office particularly early; it’s dependent upon two different weekly reports that will arrive today, during the day, so I can’t do it too early.

Yeah, the train platform is packed.  The train is coming now, but I’m not getting on it.  My days are stressful enough without having to squeeze into an over-crowded train car.  It’s not that I’m not capable of tolerating it; I’ve been through worse things, of course.  But it’s just so unpleasant, and too many things in my life are unpleasant, and I don’t have more than a brace or so of pleasant things with which to counteract them, so they wear me out much more than they might have in the past.

I’m not sure I properly used the term “brace” there‒I know it can mean two things, as in “a brace of coneys”, but I’m not sure it really applies to the concept to which I was applying it.

I guess I should cut myself a little slack, considering that even professional news organizations and publications seem to have‒for instance‒lost the conceptual difference between “fewer” and “less”.  Sloppiness of language may seem trivial, and of course, language does evolve, but these irritations are not changes due to legitimate adaptations and pressures that produce a more effective tool of communication.  This is a case in which language, which I see as a kind of crystallized thought, is mushy because the thoughts involved in using it are mushy, as is much of the “information” being conveyed.

Sloppiness of language is a symptom of sloppy thought, and I think it also engenders further sloppiness of thought.  The process feeds upon itself, and people understand each other, and the world, less and less and less over time, until finally, darkness and decay and the Red Death hold absolute dominion and sway over all (to paraphrase Poe).

Okay, well, I am now on the next train, which was indeed only about 8 minutes later than the previous, overcrowded one.  I’ll get about another mile of walking in between the station and the office, so by the time I get there, I will already have walked nearly twice as far already today as I walked the entire day yesterday (according to my pedometer).  The train car is over-air-conditioned, particularly since I’m still a bit sweaty despite a second shirt and my cool-down at the station.  Ah, well, it’s not a terribly big deal.  I’ve had worse, as the Black Knight said after getting his arm chopped off by King Arthur.

I guess I’ll call this good for today.  I hope you have a nice day, and especially that you have a nice day tomorrow.

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A mad moon and a mopey Monday morning

Well, here I am at the train station, waiting to get on the train to go to the office to start another week of work.  Yippee.  Yippee, I say.

I’m writing this on my phone, but the base of my thumbs are feeling sore, so I’m going to try to keep it brief*.

There appears to be some issue with the Tri-Rail this morning; the first train of the day is apparently delayed, which is going to mean that the second one is as well.  I may just Uber to the office and blow yet more money.  At least part of that money will go to someone who’s trying to earn a living by driving.  And late trains are always crowded.

I think I’ll do that.  I should’ve walked to the train, anyway, but I didn’t feel like starting the day sweatier than I already am.  Hopefully I’ll have the willpower to walk in the evening.

***

I’m in the Uber now**.  There’s been no sign of any of the trains approaching, and even the Tri-Rail tracker and the main Tri-Rail websites are not responding.  One might be inclined to guess there had been some kind of cyber-sabotage, but the automated (but specific) overhead announcements were working fine.  Probably it’s all something (or things) far more prosaic.  But the 1st train of the day was announced to be arriving 35 to 45 minutes late, which is already later than the second train of the day, so that one’s likely also to be late.

It’s a bit of a challenge to type on the cell phone while in a car going up I-95, and I wonder whether it would be easier or harder on the laptop (computer).  I’m not planning to write the whole remainder of the post here in the car.  I like to keep track of an Uber trip both on the app and outside, sort of watching how fast (or slowly) it updates.  It’s not important, but it’s oddly engaging, and I can’t do that and write at the same time.

I can see the rising crescent moon outside the right window as I’m heading north (obviously).  I saw it first thing when I stepped out this morning, and thought it looked like some kind of insane (lunatic, if you will) exaggerated grin.

Of course, when the crescent moon is bright and near the horizon, it will always be a grin, not a frown.  The crescent always faces the sun, so if it’s “frowning” it will be following the sun in the morning or leading it down in the evening.  Thus, a frowny moon is going to be a daytime moon, and so less visible than a grinning one.

I think I’m right about this, based on positions and optics and stuff.  I’ve never read about it specifically, but it seems that this is the way it has to be.  Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

My Uber driver is driving a Tesla, which means I’m sitting in a Tesla.  I must say, the front end of Teslas look disquieting to me, because there is no grill (there doesn’t need to be air intake for an electric motor, other than perhaps for cooling, since it doesn’t use combustion).  Though it makes sense, it always reminds me of the scene in The Matrix, when the Agents made Neo’s mouth disappear, or the fate of the formerly shouty sister of Anthony in the Twilight Zone movie version of It’s a Good Life.  A human face with nose and eyes and no mouth is disquieting to see.  Still, they seem to be good cars, and the lack of a grill probably improves the aerodynamics.

***

Now, here I am at the office.  Though I could finish this on the desktop (the computer, that is‒I am sort of leaning on the desktop at the moment), I’m continuing it on the phone because it feels better to finish where I started.  I’ll do the editing on the desktop (computer), though.

There is a crosswalk on the way to the office****, and the walk signals there have been hosed for months, and nothing seems to have been done about it.  When one is on the west side of Military, waiting to cross Hillsboro, the walk signal never activates.  This is despite the fact that I push walk signals buttons in ascending primes.  In other words, I first push twice, then I pause, push three times, pause, push five times, pause, seven, pause, eleven, pause, thirteen, pause, seventeen, pause…and so on.  It rarely gets that far.  Usually, during the main part of the day, the simple needs of traffic on Military make the thing turn before too long and stay turned for a decent duration, despite the fact that it is, as I say, hosed.

However, this early in the morning, the wait is longish‒there’s much more Hillsboro than Military traffic‒and then when it does change, the change is very brief.  This, at least, demonstrates that it’s not merely a problem of the signal, i.e., it’s not just that the walk sign is not lighting up while the system is otherwise processing things as it is supposed to process them; in other words it’s not just an indicator light problem.  No, the actual walk signals’ input and activation systems (north and south directions) on the west side of that intersection are not functioning.

I had to cross, though, so once the light turned green for traffic in my direction (and once I was reasonably sure the guy in the eastbound truck on Hillsboro, who was going way too fast coming up to a red light, was going to stop before the crosswalk) I scuttled off to cross the street.  But the light turned after the one car each going north and south passed, and it was red before I was much more than halfway across the street (and green for cross-traffic) even though I walk rather quickly.  So, if anyone works for Broward County in the division that manages such things, or knows someone in that division, please let them know this thing needs fixing.

I’m not sure how one would go about alerting them to the problem.  I suppose there might be some phone number or email system online.  I often toy with the thought of deliberately getting hit by an oncoming vehicle while crossing that street and, assuming I survive, explaining that the signal was broken.  It would be making a point and chastising reckless drivers at the same time.  It would also give me a break‒figuratively and perhaps literally.

I doubt I’ll do that.  I tend to be much less careful about entering crosswalks than I used to be, though.  I figure, if I have the right of way and get hit by someone driving inappropriately, well, that might kill two birds with one stone‒or two anthropoid idiots with one vehicle.

I doubt I’ll kill myself using traffic, though I suppose I might act on an impulse if the circumstances were just right.  It’s just generally rude to the innocent drivers out there‒people commuting, all that stuff.  I’d much rather do something quieter and less messy and more polite.  I’m working on it.  I’m reasonably clever and creative, so whatever I choose from among the options I’m considering, it will probably be both effective and not too messy.  Unless I change my mind about avoiding that.  My mind is not my friend, in many ways, so I can’t be sure it will always stick with my preferences.  After all, I’d prefer not to be stressed and angry and depressed and insomniac and in pointless chronic pain, but, oops, it’s all there.  I would rather be reasonably happy and together and have friends and my family and have all of us be reasonably healthy.

I would also prefer you all to have a good day and a good week.  Look after yourselves and those you love; you can’t count on anyone else to do it.

mad morning moon

*I did not succeed.

**I’m not behind a plow***.

***Or “plough” if you prefer the British spelling.

****They do not call it the Rising Sun…or even the Rising Moon

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“Although I laugh, and I act like a clown…”

It’s Friday, and I’m sitting at the train station, writing this on my laptop—by which I mean I’m writing it on my laptop computer.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this knows that, when I say I’m writing on my laptop, I mean I’m using my laptop computer, not that I’m doing some bizarre form of self-decoration by writing on my actual lap, and then—presumably—recopying it onto the web sometime later.  That makes little to no sense.  Nevertheless, I feel compelled to clarify that when I say “laptop” I mean “laptop computer”.  I try to make it into a joke—I do this with a lot of things that I find it impossible not initially to take literally—and it is indeed funny sometimes.  However, it is not simply my choice to try to be jokey.  I cannot resist thinking that way, it seems.  At least, I don’t tend to be able to resist it.

I brought my computer with me because I didn’t walk back to the house (which is not my home) from the train after work, and I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning.  I was a bit physically wiped out yesterday by noon.  I was also psychologically wiped out, even more than usual, to be honest.  I started the day ever so slightly giddy after having walked to the train station—I’m a person who responds well to accomplishments, and I also tend to get good endorphin rushes (apparently) from endurance exercise.

I guess in a way my “crashing” is probably like coming down from any kind of drug—you get a rebound effect.  So, even if the endorphins and enkephalins or whatever are endogenous, if you get in a state where you have a high concentration of them—or, rather, a high degree of activity in nerve cell groups that are associated with those neurotransmitters—when it stops, the overstimulated postsynaptic nerves are going to become more inactive than they were at baseline.

I’ve noticed that I often have this sort of experience with comedy.  If I’ve been watching lots of funny videos, for instance, afterwards I’ll often have a powerful come-down feeling, and actually get depressed—more so than I am at baseline, I mean, which is pretty flipping low.  This used to happen to me especially badly when I would read through my former Dave Barry collection.  He was so funny, so consistently, that by the time I’d read very much of his stuff, I was apparently strongly prone to shift the other way, and sometimes got very depressed afterwards.

Maybe the opposite of this phenomenon is why so many people like sad stories and sad songs.  If you listen to a particularly heartbreaking song—it would probably have to be a good one, of course, if it’s going to elicit particular emotions—and feel very sad for the duration of the song, maybe afterward you get the equivalent of an upward rebound.

This doesn’t seem as persistent or prolonged in most cases—the sadness from a song or similar, I mean—as does the potential for laughter from good comedy.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never noticed any tendency to get happier after feeling sadder from a song (or a story).  Then again, I don’t tend to be happy in the first place.  Once my brain gets depressed, that tends to be a self-reinforcing process, like a hurricane forming over the ocean when it’s hot at the end of the summer, which becomes a self-sustaining cycle.

I’ve used that metaphor for depression before, and I’ve even mentioned it here, I think.  In a sense, I could just characterize my tendency toward depression by thinking that I’m just a tropical ocean late in the summer.  How lovely.

I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish by writing that stuff, honestly.  I guess I’m probably not actually trying to accomplish anything other than “writing today’s blog post”, which is what I am usually setting out to accomplish when I start writing every day.  I won’t be writing tomorrow, though.  I have the weekend off, and that’s good.

So many little things stress me out, and I don’t know why.  I have a present for my daughter’s birthday—really, a collection of presents—and I need to write out the card I have and finish boxing things in the box I have, and tape it up and address it and bring it to the nearby post-office and send it away, but even the thought of writing the card—deciding what to “say” and how to put things, even though I’ve written millions upon millions of words in my time, and my daughter is not a harshly critical audience—and then of actually going to the post office and going up to send the package are just so inducing of anxiety that I tend to put it off.

It’s weird because I know it’s not a big deal.  I’ve done many much harder, more stressful things in my life.  Yet, even thinking about it and writing about it fills me with tension and stress.  It’s really quite pathetic.  I hate that part of myself.  Which makes it pretty much like every other part of myself, come to think of it.

Anyway, I haven’t started writing any new fiction, of course.  I idly searched through Amazon for spiral-bound, top-flipping writing pads, imagining that, if I got something handy and convenient in which I could write with pen on paper, the “old-fashioned” way, maybe I’d start writing some new fiction.  I’ve tried to do analogous things to myself many, many times in the past.

It doesn’t work; I don’t think it ever has, for me.  I write fiction if and when I’ve decided I’m going to write fiction, and when that’s the case, it doesn’t need to be on any particular, special device or surface.  I wrote two novels and a novella while I was in prison, for crying out loud.

Maybe I’ve stopped writing (fiction) just because I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.  I don’t sleep well at all—it’s so bad that I hardly even talk about it, because it’s just the same fucking thing all the time, anyway.

I don’t have any real joy in the work I do, I don’t have any real friendships, certainly not with anyone with whom I spend any time other than at work.  There’s nothing that I do for “fun” other than watching YouTube videos and—to a steadily diminishing degree—reading nonfiction (a rapidly shrinking pursuit) and fiction (all but completely gone).

I found a meme yesterday that I guess I’ll share here, showing the difference in what it looks like from outside to be reading, and what it feels like from inside, to be reading.  That used to be abundantly true for me.  Reading was probably my single favorite thing ever—and not just reading fiction, obviously.  I’ve always said that the written language is by far the single greatest invention of the human race.  I have encountered no reason to change that assessment.

reading

But now, steadily, I’m losing the joy of reading, and I have been for a while.  There are no dragons or rainbows or other mystical and mythical things going on in my head, like in the picture.  Reading, for me, is just a desert (but not a dessert, alas) for the most part.  Even nonfiction isn’t that interesting—the good stuff I liked I’ve read quite a lot about, and I have reread my favorite books on various subjects over and over.  None of it is engaging any more.  I force myself to do it, because without it, I don’t even know what I am, let alone who I am.

But I can’t really seem to read fiction of any kind anymore.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it to the end of this month.  I don’t truly expect to make it to the end of this month.  And I honestly don’t very much want to make it to the end of this month.  I’m reminded of the lines from a Beatles song:  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.  I would hate my disappointment to show.  There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear…”

Several people in the office—or, well, three of them at least—are on vacation at the moment, and I guess that’s good for them.  I honestly wish them the best of times.  But I don’t know what I would even do or want to do if I took time off.  I can’t think of anything fun that I would want to accomplish or experience.  And, frankly, the prospect of trying to make arrangements for going somewhere and doing something is so stressful and intimidating that even thinking vaguely and nebulously about such a non-specific trip or vacation makes me feels so tense I’m surprised you cannot hear me vibrating.  Maybe you can.

What I need is a dirt vacation*, I think.

Oh, well.  It’ll come quite soon, I suspect.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, necessarily, except that it would be worth feeling nothing simply not to feel so stressed and depressed and lonely and so bloody tired all the time.  It’s just a regression to the mean, if you will—and the mean is zero, or vanishingly close to zero**.

Have a good weekend.

*That’s like the proverbial “dirt nap”, but it lasts longer.  Ha.  Ha.

**This is somewhat related to the fact of why perturbation theory can work in things like quantum electrodynamics.  Most positives are canceled out by negatives, leaving finite answers to things like path integrals and so on—a converging, rather than a diverging, infinite series.

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Meet the new month…same as the old month?

It’s the first of September (in 2023 A.D., in case anyone is reading this far enough in the future for that to be unclear and yet interesting) and it’s a Friday.  I’m at the train station again, waiting for the train.  I thought about walking to the train this morning, but I was just too tired.  I didn’t walk last night, either, because it was quite rainy, and that was annoying.

I’ve had persistent digestive sensitivity this week since my bout on the weekend, and particularly starches and things like that seem to be giving me lots of trouble.  So, I’m going to try to keep them to a minimum.  That also tends to make me feel physically better in general (though it does seem to lead to lowering of my baseline mood).

It’s a bit of a frustrating conundrum, that foods that let me feel physically healthier and more capable lead me to be more dysthymic and depressed.  Sometimes, though, I think I prefer plain depression to tension/stress/anxiety.  At least with the former, I can, if I find the time, try to take a nap.

I’ve been trying to find books to read, and it’s becoming ever more difficult.  Fiction is almost impossible‒even the silly light novels aren’t able to hold my attention, though maybe if there were a new installment of a series I’d already been reading, it might be okay.  But I read those things within a day, even when I don’t have much free time.  And none of them seem enticing at all.

Worse still, even nonfiction is getting difficult.  I’m in the “middle” of a comparative slew of books‒three or four about computer science/hacking/AI, another about the mathematics of probability and statistics as applied to daily life, one about the history of the sugar industry and the effects that has had on global health (not good ones), two broad physics books, and just general stuff like that.  I have no new physics books that interest me, though I have a few of which I haven’t read much, yet‒I’m in chapter 2 of the Feynman lectures on Physics, which is wonderful, of course, but even the great RF can’t seem to hold my interest.

I can’t even read my own stories, and that’s usually an escape route for me.

I also haven’t found music to be interesting, though yesterday, for a very brief while, I listened to a bit.  But that waned quickly.  I certainly haven’t played anything in quite a while.

If I can’t listen to music, and especially if I can’t read, then I really don’t see any point in continuing.  I mean, I’m obviously able to write this blog, but I can’t seem to write fiction anymore.  Or, at least I have no desire to write it.  And there’s only one movie that I haven’t seen that I really have even a modicum of interest in seeing.  But I’m not that interested in it, to be honest.

Frankly, writing this blog feels pretty boring right now, and I’m sure that reading it can’t be very gripping.  I don’t think I have anything to say that I haven’t said a godzillion times.  If anything, the only message I’m truly trying to convey‒the only one I care about trying to convey‒is a futile one.  It certainly hasn’t done what I dreamed it might do.  I have little to no hope that it will ever succeed.

Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention before that we slid right past another potential palindromic recording number sequence yesterday.  It seems (surprise, surprise) that the universe is not going to send me any messages regarding whether I should continue living or not.  Or else, it’s sending me a message by not sending me one.  But, of course, the universe doesn’t actually care about me one way or the other, nor about anyone else.  It just is, as far as I can see*.  It is simply a magnificent desolation, to quote Buzz Aldrin.

And here I am, a tiny little speck of that vast emptiness.  I’m much less magnificent, but certainly, I am a desolation.

Oh, yeah, I guess this is technically the beginning of a holiday weekend in the US.  Labor Day, apparently, is Monday.  It doesn’t matter much to me, nor does it make any difference.  I work tomorrow, and we will be working Monday.  We don’t tend to take those kinds of holidays off.  I guess that’s fine; I don’t have anything enjoyable to do if I take time off.  I wish I could sleep.  Then I might enjoy having free days.  But even when I’m mentally and physically exhausted, I have trouble sleeping.  When I try to lie down for little cat naps to rest my back, setting a timer for 19 minutes, more often than not I get up before even that much time has passed.

I’ve also stopped sitting through any full cycles of the massage chair I bought a while back, because it doesn’t do anything for my back and leg pain anymore, so sitting in it is just frustrating.

To add further insult, when I sweat, everything smells like mildew, like fungus (to me anyway) and that’s one of my least favorite smells in the world.  I try to wash my clothes (and myself) very thoroughly, and I use Lysol and similar in between.  I think maybe it’s just Florida being a fungal paradise that makes it such a struggle.

I hope this is my very last “first day of the month” blog post.  It probably won’t be my last post of all, not even of this week.  I expect to write one tomorrow, since I’m working tomorrow.  But, great Caesar’s ghost! it’s daunting.  It’s got to be even worse for all of you.  I do hope, though, that you have a good weekend, and if you live in the US that you have a good holiday.  Please, let someone out there have a life worth living, in and of itself, for its own sake.

desolation

*Which is, in principle, about 40 some odd billion light years at most, given the finite speed of light, the time since the last scattering surface, and the expansion of the universe.

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When virtue’s steely blogs look bleak i’ the cold wind

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and it’s also the last day of August in 2023, to which I say, “Good riddance.”  What a crappy month.  The effects of the hurricane have all but completely vanished from here in south Florida, apart from the fact that, at relatively low altitudes, you can still sometimes see streams of fast-moving clouds.  They’re going roughly east-northeast now, as the direction to the distant hurricane’s center has changed.  At ground level, however, and especially during the day, we seem to have lost the wind, and now the air is dead again, humid, and quite hot.

Just sitting at the train station early in the morning, I keep thinking that insects‒probably mosquitoes‒are landing on my neck, but when I reach back to brush them away, they’re just beads of sweat.

I’m slightly annoyed about myself and other things this morning.  I awoke early, even for me, and after lying about for a few hours,  I got up, did some dips, and took a shower and all the usual stuff.  I could’ve walked to the train, I suppose, but I plan to walk this evening, and the weather is just disgusting right now.  Anyway, I recently discovered that there’s a Tri Rail related Uber coupon that gets you $5 off each way (only 2 times a day) when getting a ride to and from the Tri Rail station, so I decided to use that.

The youngish driver, in a Tesla, got there quickly, and we were making such good time that I thought I might even be able to get on the very first train of the day, with a minute or two to spare.

Then, we got to the last turn onto a main street just before the station, and the light was red, and there were three or four cars waiting to go on the cross street, but then they went, and the cross-traffic was then nonexistent…and the driver just sat there and waited for the green (there is no “No turn on red” sign at this intersection).  Now, I’m not comfortable enough talking to strangers to feel fine with saying, “Hey, traffic’s clear, you can go right now.”  So, I just kind of fidgeted in my seat.

Then, when we arrived at the station, the first train was approaching and the gates had just come down, so without sprinting around them and across in front of the train, I couldn’t make that one.  Even if I had run to and up the stairs, across the bridge, and then down, I think there’s almost no chance I would have made it.  So, I walked up along the near side of the track, grumbling, punching one of the pillars as I passed (mainly just to hurt myself a bit, since I was mainly angry with me) and watched the train arrive and then go away.  Now, I’m sitting waiting for the next train, which comes half an hour after.

As I said, my anger is really directed at myself.  I mean, yes, it would have been good for the driver to pay attention and realize he could turn right…but why do I care?  I wasn’t planning to catch that train in the first…

Oh, wait.  They just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed “ten, fifteen minutes” (not 10 to 15 minutes, for reasons I’m hitherto unable to guess).  So it really would have been better to catch the earlier one.  I wonder how much an Uber or Lyft to the office would be.

***

Well, I won’t say it’s cheap, but it’s cheaper than a cab would be, and my driver was right there at the station, so I’m going.  You might think that it’s nice that I can afford to do this, but I really can’t.  However, I have no one on whom I need to spend money, and I have no plans for the future, so it’s not as though I’m trying to save anything.  I might as well just burn it all up.

I’m so tired of being stressed out and irritated.  I wish I could just smile and not worry about things.  You would think that if, at root, someone doesn’t care if he lives or dies‒and indeed, leans toward preferring the latter‒it would be easy enough just to be sort of Zen/Taoist in attitude, but that’s not the case, at least for me.

Perhaps it has to do with the intellectual versus the emotional aspects of a desire/drive.  Someone who lacked a basic, emotional survival drive might very well intellectually want to live and yet be calm, at ease, unflappable, perhaps like Hannibal Lecter as portrayed in the books.  He’s not afraid of dying, or even really of pain, but he enjoys his life (such as it is) and wants it to continue.  Whereas I, intellectually, don’t enjoy my life, and I don’t think much of anything I do or say or experience matters at all, and yet every little thing feels like a four-alarm fire, like a call of “General Quarters”, like there’s an enemy at the gates of the city.

Yesterday, during the day, I wished, wished I had a gun, so I could shoot myself, even right there in the office, and fuck trying to be polite and not disturb other people.  It’s not as though other people make even minor, simple, easy efforts to avoid causing me distress.  I thought that I probably wouldn’t shoot myself in the head‒partly because I would worry about a poorly aimed shot causing brain damage but not killing me, but also, partly, I think it would be too big a hurdle to clear based on that biological drive to survive, which is hard to overcome.  Maybe I’m just a coward.  I’m okay with that possibility.

Anyway, I figured I might go the Van Gogh way and shoot myself in the chest or belly or whatever.  That would be pretty gnarly, if you ask me, and I’ve always thought it was a real ballsy way to do things.  No painless and quick death there, even back in Vincent’s day.

Of course, I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t know anyone from whom I could get one on short notice.  So I ground through the day feeling like my spirit was crawling with metaphysical parasites, stressed out beyond any reasonability.  I mean, come on, I’ve literally dealt with life and death situations many times, often on a daily basis, more than I would be able to count!  Why does my stupid present daily life get to me so much?

Probably because it is such a stupid, pointless daily life.  The fact that I bother with it at all, when there is quite literally no point to it, or to me anymore, is probably what makes it so stressful.  Or maybe, after everything I’ve been through, I have some weird form of PTSD‒that’s fashionable, right?  I have no idea.  I don’t feel like I have something like that.  I just feel…weird.  Which I guess is appropriate, since I am weird.

***

And now I am here at my destination, at which I’ve arrived even earlier than I would have if the second train had been on time.  That’s a nice euphemism, isn’t it?  That would be a nice way to think of dying before your time, don’t you think?  “He arrived at his destination earlier than expected.  It was very thoughtful and pleasant of him.”

Well, anyway, tomorrow begins September, a far better month than August, the month of the equinox and of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.  It’s a month in which it might be worthwhile to sell Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses and head off on the quest to throw a cursed item into the Cracks of Doom, ending at least one particular evil forever.

We’re approaching another potential palindromic recording number possibility today (already).  I don’t think there will be many more chances for one to come up.  Even if one occurred at this stage, I don’t think I would pay attention to it.  It’s like when you flip a coin to decide whether you’ll go off a diet or something, and it comes out a certain way, and you realize that, no, you’re going to go the other way, anyway.  It’s a good way to test yourself and find out what you really wanted to do in the first place.

What I want you to do, if you’re willing and able, is to have a good day, and to appreciate the ones you love and who love you, and to spend time with them if you have that opportunity.  Just spend time with people who are willing and able to spend time with you, and who matter to you, and to whom you matter.  If you are lucky enough to be with the people you love, don’t take that for granted.  That’s my advice/request, for what it’s worth.  I’m not known for my wisdom, but that’s the best I have right now.

TTFN

vincent in the museum

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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No bootlaces to be tied by this Monday’s child

Well, it’s Monday again—the 21st of August—and today I am writing this on my mini-laptop computer, as I said in my Saturday post that I would try to do.  So, at least some of my intentions do end up happening in the world, if they are minor and mainly inconsequential.

Of course, most of what anyone ever intends, or does, or does not do, is from any kind of serious perspective inconsequential.  One can also make the argument that, since pretty much everything is inconsequential, then everything is consequential, from the corollary or converse or obverse or whatever the term is of Dash’s point in The Incredibles*.  And, to stick with Sci-Fi/Fantasy worlds, the 11th Doctor more than once made the point that, in all his travels through time and space, he’d never met anyone unimportant.

So, congratulations, your decision about what to have for breakfast—and whether or not to have anything at all—is just as important to the cosmos at large as any decision that might be made today by any head of state in the world.

Does that make you feel important?  In what way?  Or if not, why do you think it doesn’t?

[Sorry, somehow that felt like the proper moment to pretend to be a cartoon-style psychotherapist.]

Speaking of psychotherapy and its targeted problems, I missed yet another potential stop-code among the recording numbers in the verification system on Saturday.  As the day started, with the first deal, we were coming close to a potential palindromic sequence, and we had two deals in quick succession, so it seemed we might just land on it this time (although there was never very much of a chance).

Anyway, there was then a long gap between deals, and we blew right past the next potential one by well over a hundred by the time we made our next deal for the day.  There won’t be many more opportunities between now and my semi-planned final takeoff date.

Even if a palindromic number sequence were to come up, I’m not sure what I would do about it.  I don’t truly believe in any kind of mystic notion relating to numbers, I just find them mildly amusing to play with, and so gave myself this notion of an “abort code”**.  But if such a number came up now, I don’t know that its occurrence would sway me one way or another.

In any case, I’m the only one who would know, since no one at work seems to have even the slightest clue that I feel self-destructive in the first place, let alone that I set myself little escape hatches or potential self-messages to give up on ending things.  It’s not for want of wanting to get the idea across to people—without being unnecessarily melodramatic or intrusive, anyway—but I don’t seem to be very good at crying for help.  I guess that’s a pretty big weakness.

Still, if a palindromic number sequence were to come up sometime between now and, say, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, I think I would just find it a curiosity.

I think I’m going to start to phase out even the few little things I’ve been doing to try to improve my mental health to whatever limited degree I am able to do it.  As regular readers will know, I stopped taking any form of anti-depressant, since it wasn’t working for me at all, and the side-effects were annoying.  I think I’m going to stop even trying to improve my sleep anymore.  Talk about tilting at windmills; I haven’t been sleeping any better than I used to, and I certainly don’t think my mood has improved.

But if it has, it’s done so in a tiny, miserable little way, which in some ways could be a curse.  It’s a bit like taking a disease someone has that’s killing them and pulling back its intensity just enough so that they can stay alive indefinitely, but not enough to make them feel any better or be any healthier.

Come to think of it, it’s not a bit like that at all; it’s exactly and literally that.

[Brief side note:  I’ve noticing that my laptop is very laggy—at least, my laptop computer is—as I’ve been using it today, especially once I activated the auto-save.  I don’t know why it’s especially slow at this point.  I haven’t upgraded it to Windows 11, since I worry that it wouldn’t handle the change that well, and I don’t like unneeded change myself if I can help it.  Also, I don’t really think that’s the problem.  It was never meant to be a speedy and powerful computer, since I got it just to write stories and blog posts.  Oh, well, maybe it’s just that I haven’t used it in a while.]

So far I’ve resisted the urge to get an Uber to the train station; my plan is to try to force myself to take the bus to the train, and then on the way back this evening I intend to try to walk back to the house from the station.  The only real impediment to the walking is the heat; the exertion itself doesn’t intimidate me.  The potential for added pain is sometimes a concern, but I think I’ve adjusted myself, shoe and knee-brace wise, in ways that keep that stable, so the walking doesn’t make things worse.  Knock on wood, if you do that sort of thing.

Soon it will be time to close out the first draft of this post and head for the bus stop.  I guess I’ll try to listen to some podcast or other on the way.  I don’t have any real interest in listening to any of the audio books I have.  I don’t have much, if any, interest in reading any book books, frankly, digital or paper.  Even non-fiction is getting unworkable, and I’ve long since lost my ability to engage in fiction almost entirely.

I’m also getting bored with the Euchre app game that I play, and with the Sudoku app that I play, and frankly, with everything else.  YouTube is getting boring, the various news sites and blogs I try to read can’t seem to catch my attention or lift my spirits.  Nothing seems to be working, and the days are getting shorter now, so to speak, so the seasonality to my mood is heading into worse territory.  This whole game is getting more uninteresting by the moment.  In the words of the WOPR from the movie War Games, it seems that the only winning move is not to play.

But of course, once you can choose your move, you’ve already been forced to start playing.  It’s all rather unfair and unkind, but that’s reality for you.  You get squeezed into the game without being consulted (since you cannot be consulted until you’re already in the game) by people who were themselves squeezed into the game without being consulted, all the way back to the beginning of the whole thing.  So, I guess none of us should feel too bad if we fail to live up to some expectations or ideals or something along those lines.

That’s enough half-assed philosophy for today.  I hope you all are starting what is going to be a good week, and that you have reasonably good weeks from now until the end of your days.  Why not?  I might as well hope for that for you.  You deserve it as much as anyone does, and probably more than most (from my point of view) since you are people who read.

*When his mother told him, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” he replied with, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”

**Though, in sense, it should be considered an anti-abort code, like the process needed to turn off an auto-destruct sequence for a spaceship.  Why would so many imagined futuristic civilizations make spaceships with self-destruct systems, anyway?  Are they all carrying state secrets of some kind?  We don’t put autodestruct systems into cars or trucks or trains or planes or even warships, tanks, and fighter jets.  It’s a weird thing to do.  I suspect it’s usually just a rather ham handed plot device, and once it happened prominently in one story, other stories mimicked it.

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The sobering fact of a drunkard’s walk of a blog post

It’s Saturday morning now, for future reference, for people who aren’t reading this entry when it is first posted, but at some later date.  I’m sitting at the train station as I write this.  I may finish it before the train arrives; on Saturdays, the trains come only once an hour, much less frequently than during the week, so there’s more idle time to wait at the station, and I write pretty quickly.

I’ve been writing all my posts on my smartphone lately, but I think I’m going to try to remember to bring the laptop back with me from work today.  It’s getting to be too much of a pain to write on the phone, and I write so much more smoothly on the computer.

I just realized that I still have my walking clothes from yesterday in my backpack.  When I got back to the house, I was pretty beat, and I didn’t even think to unpack them.  It’s okay, I spray them and dry them in front of a little fan during the day, so they don’t really smell, but it’s very annoying.  At least they don’t weigh much.  I vaguely thought about unpacking them during the middle of the night, during one of my oodles of nocturnal awakenings, but the thought obviously didn’t stay in my head.

I really didn’t feel well yesterday.  The whole day, I had full body aches and soreness, as if I were fighting a systemic infection of some kind, and I even developed a very slight fever‒only about half a degree Fahrenheit over my usual temperature (yes, I did check my temperature, since I felt as if I were getting sick).  Of course, I was going to come to work today even if I were truly ill, unless it was bad enough for me to be hospitalized.  If I missed one weekend, I would have to make it up by working two Saturdays in a row, and I cannot tolerate that possibility.

I can barely tolerate going to work at all, but then again, I can barely tolerate being at the house, either.  I can barely get through anything at all, and only the force of habit‒and the terrible stress and tension that goes with deviating from habits and expectation‒keeps me functioning.

I guess that’s what the gods did to Sisyphus to keep him rolling that stupid boulder; every time he started to falter and think it was futile, which it was, he probably felt terrible stress and anxiety, and the only way to assuage it even slightly was to keep pushing the stupid thing.  So, it’s either steadily elevating anxiety or perpetual futile behavior‒or death or some other kind of breakdown, I guess, though those were not an option for Sisyphus.

I may have mentioned it before, but I sometimes think that Prometheus had it better than Sisyphus.  He felt more pain (probably) but at least he didn’t have to be an active participant in his own punishment.

Speaking of anxiety and repetitive tasks, I occasionally wonder how often on any given day I feel the need to check and make sure that I still have my phone, my keys, my wallet and everything in my pockets.  Dozens at least.  Perhaps, occasionally, hundreds.  I also can’t stand still without either flipping a pen in the air (four turns per flip) and catching it or rolling dollar coins on the backs of my fingers.

Oh, by the way, I just got on the train.  I didn’t have quite enough time to write the whole post before it arrived, though maybe I would have been able to do so with my laptop.  I definitely need to try to remember to bring it with me today.

It’s all rather pointless, of course, but then again, so is everything.  Even our sense of law and order is weird, when you get right down to it.  I mean, why should I feel obligated to follow local, state, federal, and Constitutional law, let alone international law?  I do feel like I should follow them (see above about anxiety-driven behavior), but from an ethical point of view it’s very hard to see that I should have any obligation to follow those codes and rules that predated me, and in which I had no say, which were enacted by people who may as well be another species from me.

Some of the people who made the laws probably meant well and were doing the best they could to try to keep their society functioning, while others were probably merely self-serving, responding to lobbyists (or the equivalent) and fads and whims.  They would not have been thinking deeply about moral and ethical concerns for their present and future, but rather were engaged in the usual primate dominance maneuverings of the naked house ape (genus Homo species, possibly misnamed, sapiens), which are so similar to those of the baboon and the chimpanzee.

The notion of a social contract has always been a bit of a farce, from my point of view.  To have an actual contract, both (or all) parties have to have agreed to it, and for it to be morally, if not merely legally, binding then they have to have entered into it without duress.  One cannot, ethically, be born into a contract, any more than anyone can sensibly be born carrying the guilt of the deeds of their ancestors or antecedents‒thus the absurdity of the notion of original sin.  The famous teenage statement, “I didn’t ask to be born” is an entirely legitimate point.

I don’t know how I got into this tangent path.  I guess it’s a sort of free-association thing, or perhaps a proverbial drunkard’s walk.  I wish it were more therapeutic for me, but hopefully it’s at least sometimes interesting for you readers.

Speaking of that, I noticed that WordPress is apparently offering the option of creating a paid newsletter‒I guess it’s meant to be a bit analogous to what some people are doing on Substack and the like‒as a way for people to make some money with their blogging.  Presumably, WordPress would take a small cut, which seems only fair.  I think it’s all a nice idea, and paid services are often more pleasant than those that use advertising, at least if the advertising is intrusive.  I don’t mind banner ads and sidebar ads, but ones that pop up and block the screen make me never want to go back to a site again.

Still, there are only so many subscriptions a single person can have‒although, when paper magazines were still the thing, I sometimes felt that my parents wanted to test the upper limits of that claim.  They loved reading those magazines, and my father would accumulate vast piles of them near the foot of his chair.  I think they would have been avid consumers of online media‒actually, my father probably was.  He was a computer guy by profession, and was always ahead of me on that front.

It’s rather funny to imagine anyone paying to read my blog.  It’s a lovely fantasy‒hey, maybe more people would read it if they had to pay to read it‒but it seems unlikely.  Very few people pay even to read my books or stories, though on Kindle they are cheaper than a cup of Starbucks “coffee”, and they are more convenient.

Well, anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and this has really been a wandering, meandering post.  I don’t even know what I’ve been writing about.  But, hey, if you want to support me monetarily, since I don’t have a Patreon or a Ko-Fi account or a WordPress paid newsletter thing, just buy one of my books.  Or buy one of my short stories, even‒they’re just 99 cents.

Enough self-serving tripe.  I’m no good at that kind of thing.  Have a good weekend if you can, everyone.  I will try (and almost certainly fail) to do so as well.

arthur drunk