Anxiety

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What shall we do now?

Well, it’s Wednesday now, and since I have no appointments for X-rays or anything similar, I am heading on in to the office.  It’s continued to be a hectic time, and today is supposed to be the day on which we finally begin to do business in the new office, though many things have been moved during the day over the last few days.  I would have thought that the uprooting and shifting would have made working more difficult, but we’ve had very big days, especially yesterday.

It’s good I guess, but it’s annoying, because it means I’m very stressed out by more than one thing.

I’m still quite beat, by which I mean I’m so very tired and worn down and exhausted.  I told the boss yesterday that this last week plus had been one of the top five hardest weeks of my life‒and I pointed out the various other horrible weeks I’ve had so I could try to put it in perspective for him‒but I really don’t think he quite got the point.

I think my inability to convey how I feel, or the tendency for it not to show, as well as my own inherent tendency toward a kind of nihilistic stoicism, means that people don’t really know or at least don’t understand when I’m feeling truly horrible.  I’ve said before that this is why the line from Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage resonates with me so much:  “And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear…”

I don’t even feel I’m at some breaking point anymore; I think I’m already broken, but I’m hobbling along because of inertia, holding the remnants of me together with paperclips and twine and baling wire.

Anyway, I’m exhausted.  I wish I could get back into writing or drawing or creating songs and doing music or studying more science and math, but though I have had passion for all those things at various times, there is only so much one can do to produce creative things in a vacuum, with nearly no feedback or appreciation, before one gives up.

Van Gogh had a similar situation, I guess (not that I am comparing my ability with his) in that he produced many brilliant works of art, but only one was bought by anyone in his lifetime and no one but his sibling appreciated his ability.  And, of course, finally, he shot himself in the torso and died from the wound not long after.  I can sympathize very much, even with his choice to shoot himself in a way that would not be immediately lethal.  It’s both a fear thing‒a lethal shot is scary to do‒and a form of self-punishment and self-hatred‒one doesn’t feel that one deserves an easy death.

I don’t know what I, myself, am going to do.  I’m just too exhausted from my current situation, and from the feeling that I need to use the bathroom 24 hours a day.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I’m very tired, as I said, and it’s only early morning.  But, of course, my sleep is even worse than usual because of the whole bathroom urgency and flank pain thing.  Ah, whataya gonna do?

I hop that what you will do is have a good day.

***

Addendum:  Well, I’m at the office, and even though the Wi-Fi was supposed to be still active this morning in the office, it seems the movers, such as they are, took the router over with them.  My phone’s mobile hotspot function doesn’t get good enough reception here, and so far the public Xfinity Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have any ability to do adequate data, so I cannot get anything done at the office.

Why did I bother to come in?  Well, of course, that was largely because I couldn’t sleep and there was no air conditioning at the house, but I also like to get a head start on office stuff.  I’ve even finished the last of the series’ of “light novels” with which I was trying to distract myself, so I can’t even count on any reading to help me.

I apparently will not have a closed area in the new office where I will be able to be at least partly cut off from the noise and all.  I wish I had just stayed at the house today, and maybe never left again.  I don’t even have a guitar here anymore, because I gave away my black Strat.  That action was one of those “gesture” things, to be honest, and I was hoping someone would pick up on the point of it, but either they didn’t recognize it, or‒more likely‒they don’t really much care.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  There are very few people for whom it would actually matter if I die.

I’ve finally been able to get the Xfinity thing working a bit, so I should be able to post this.  After that, I don’t know.  There’s just too much for me to deal with right now.  I wish I could just go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this life.

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It’s Saturday now

And I’m in the office.  I haven’t come to the office this time, of course, I’ve just been here since yesterday, as I noted in my confusing and single-paragraph post yesterday evening.  I slept at the office, on the floor, and it was just as comfortable in many ways as if I had been at the house.  True, I couldn’t shower, but I’ve buzzed my hair down to 1/4 inch after seeing how it looked after I was in the hospital, and so it’s impossible to tell just by looking that I’ve not showered.  I usually have deodorant and other toiletries at the office, but those are already moved to the new office now, so I’m going to need to go over to the convenience store and get some deodorant and mouthwash this morning.

As for the house, well, there’s a reason I don’t refer to it as home.  It’s not a home to me.  I haven’t felt like I have a home since before I went to FSP.  No, it’s just a place I can hide for a while at a time, and not have to interact with anyone, and where it’s just my stuff inside, such as it is.  But I don’t feel at home there, I don’t feel comfortable, it’s just a place I’m existing.  I don’t even have a real chair there, though I have a piano bench and a folding metal chair tucked into a corner.  When I’m at the house, I just recline on a pile of pillows on the futon on the floor.  It’s good for my back in the short term, though after I stay there for a while it tends to backfire*.

Everything in my existence orbits around pain.  I guess it’s no irony that one of the two songs I have had memorized on piano for decades now is the Police’s King of Pain (the other is Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles).  Maybe it’s because I memorized that song that my life took on its current aspect.

I don’t really believe that, of course.  That’s absurd, magical thinking, and there’s no evidence that it’s the way the real world works, except through confirmation bias and the like.

Right now it still hurts to urinate, with spasms up in my right side and flank, which lingers a little even in between.  It’s nothing compared to the acute onset of the issue, but it’s still there.  And my back and hip and leg pains haven’t ceased to exist out of some strange courtesy.

I’m overwhelmed, and not in a good way.  There is too much happening in my head and around me right now, too many stupid little, annoying changes, too many deeply unpleasant surprises, too much chaos and randomness even in the day-to-day routines.  I am overwhelmed.

I used to be a person who could accomplish things, at least partly because I had people around me whom I loved and for whom I wanted to make things good as much as I could.  I cannot do good for myself.  I cannot live for myself.  But I used to be able to do good and make good things and relieve suffering.  I’ve saved people’s lives and even helped ease people’s deaths when it was appropriate.  Some of the most copious thanks I’ve ever received were from the families of patients who had died.  I was told by one family that, before he died, their 96 year old father/grandfather said I was the first doctor he’d had that he felt that he could trust.

Now look at me.  Or rather, don’t look at me.  I’m disgusting to start with, with my teeth that used to be good but have been ravaged by years of pain killers and prison and then just an inability to have the energy to take the very good care of them I used to take.  Also, I’m currently crying, and there’s snot on my face.  I don’t look great at the best of times anymore, and certainly no one is going to want to look at me now.

I’m caught in the pincers of some kind of weird metaphorical tweezer.  I cannot stand the thought of trying to change my situation; the idea of moving, of trying to change jobs, of trying to find something, is literally horrifying–imagine needing to wade through a swimming pool filled with roaches and centipedes and maggots and other larvae, above which soars a nearly-opaque cloud of mosquitoes, all female.

But staying where I am, doing what I’m doing, is just as horrifying, and now there are a bunch of new stressors, not the least of which is my fresh, new pain problem, which hopefully will be temporary, though it isn’t gone yet.  I guess a week is a relatively short time, and maybe I’m expecting too much, but it’s a fucking huge level of discomfort, and I don’t have the mental resources to deal with it, not on top of everything else.  Why I am I continuing to endure my already-existing chronic pain, my anxiety, my depression, all the other things associated with my hitherto undiagnosed ASD, and then now dealing with newly discovered problems?

I’m overwhelmed.  I cannot summon the will to make a change, or even the conviction that I ought to do so, because I cannot really think straight.  I cannot imagine what to do.  I don’t know that there is any way at all to escape, except by dying.  And I am always afraid.

You might think that after having pain every day for decades and having lost basically everything that ever mattered to you and for which you had worked so hard for so long you wouldn’t have any need to be afraid anymore.  What do you have to lose, after all?  But fear is not a rational thing, it’s not the conclusion of a thought process, it’s an emotion, one in which nature has invested heavily, and having pain after pain for a long time, of various kinds, can cause a “learned-helplessness” reaction related to depression, but even then, fear doesn’t go away.  One is always afraid of yet more pain.  One is afraid of facing another day with the same old pain.  One is a afraid that one is going to live a long, long life and never for one day of the rest of it not be in significant pain.  One is afraid that one will also be alone for the rest of that long life, with no comfort and little joy.

I don’t know what’s going on.  I mean, I’m writing this post, of course, that’s going on.  But I don’t know what else.  I’m falling apart, I think.  I’m breaking down.  Like I said yesterday, I can practically smell the melting plastic and circuitry in my mind.

Whatever.  Nothing I do or say matters, nothing I am matters.  I don’t know what I expect to happen because I’ve written about this.  I feel a bit like Frodo crying out for his friends in “Fog on the Barrow Downs” after they’ve been separated, but the only answer I will probably get will be from some foul undead spirits.  There’s no Tom Bombadil out there to come rescue me.  I wish there were.  And I could really use Elrond’s healing power, or even Aragorn’s.

That’s enough.  Go on, go read something else.  No one wants to feel miserable, and that’s how I tend to make people feel, so you should probably find something comical or at least entertaining to explore, and just try to have a good weekend.

*Honestly, no pun intended.  I didn’t even notice it until the editing process.

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A nameless Friday blog post

It’s hard to believe, but something truly obvious didn’t even occur to me until yesterday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave the office.  I was really worn out and tired and grumpy, and I said to my coworker, who was very kindly giving me a ride to the train station, “If I were a sane person in a civilized world, I wouldn’t even have come to work at all this week.”

That’s when I thought: the people at the hospital probably didn’t expect me to go back to work this week.

Meanwhile, this has been one of our busiest weeks in a very long time at the office, and the office is in the process of moving to our new location, and I had to iron out the details of the records from Monday and Tuesday, which were a bit off, and then I had to do the payroll on Wednesday all while having the busiest day of this very busy week so far.

Yesterday was not quite as hectic as Wednesday for me, but on Wednesday I had kind of maxxed the pain med dose so I could get done what I needed to do.  Not so on Thursday.  I want to make sure not to overuse the meds in the short term, since I don’t know when a really bad spasm might happen.  Of course, I’m not taking my usual aspirin either, per recommendation, nor any other go-to NSAIDS, so things are complicated.

Anyway, the meds situation wasn’t what I wanted to discuss.  I just wanted to note how pathological I must be to have not only come right back to work after being discharged from the hospital, but to have applied pressure to get me discharged Tuesday afternoon.  I can’t believe that I even said I would sign out AMA* if I had to do so.

But I am basically on my own; if I don’t work, I don’t eat, so to speak.  Even that is misleading, though, and is not my real reason, which is that I have to be productive or useful to someone, in a way that I accept, or else there is no point to the fact of my continued existence.

I mean, I know no one wants to be around me or to have me around them for fun and pleasure; the copious evidence for that is glaring and even blinding.  But I am capable of being useful in quite a few different ways; even my misautonomy doesn’t force me to deny that I have gifts that can be productive and useful and even sometimes beautiful.

So, if I can’t be useful, well…what’s the use of me?  If I were not at work, what would I be doing but lying around in my one room (plus bathroom) with a malfunctioning AC unit?  

Meanwhile, I still haven’t made my follow-up appointments or any of that.  My sister has offered to help, and I think I’m going to have to take her up on that, though she’ll have to be doing stuff from long distance and second-hand and I still find the process daunting.  It’s really quite pathetic.

And if not being useful is a feeling like being in an intergalactic void, it’s even more horrible to feel like I’m a burden or even an inconvenience to someone else, especially someone who really matters to me.  That’s a failure worthy of fire.

Also, I am tired of being in pain.  Everything in my life centers around pain.  I suppose it should have been obvious for quite a while, but at least since the time I was sent to be a guest at FSP West, pain has been the central fact, the only consistent thing, about my existence.  Now I’ve just added another color, another flavor, another timbre and type of pain to my usual mix.

I suppose one could almost call it refreshing as a change, or one might if it weren’t just absolutely overwhelming at its peak, and none too pleasant when it’s at a lower level.  And while, if one’s pain is in one’s back and legs, it is possible to rest them to some degree, you can’t really rest your urinary tract when it is where the pain is focused.  If you try to drink less, you’ll only make the primary problem worse, but of course, drinking more (hopefully to get the stone to pass) does mean more of the acute discomfort in the meantime.

Why am I doing any of this?  Why am I continuing?  It’s certainly not out of any sense of my personal value.  I’m just a maggot-ridden turd lying by a dirt path in a humid, stagnant, pollen laden drizzle that doesn’t refresh anything or allow anything but mold and fungi and coprophagic organisms to grow.  I’m so tired.  I have no purpose, and I am so tired.

Anyway, this ought to be it for this week.  I don’t think there’s a plan for the office to be open tomorrow.  If it is, by rights I ought not to come in anyway.  But since the alternative is just lying around by myself, and since I’m stupid, and I don’t live in a civilized world, and I am certainly not sane, if they open the office, I will probably be here.  If so, I’ll probably write a blog post.

Until my next post, whenever it is, I truly and sincerely and urgently hope you all have objectively good days and nights and everything else.  If my words have the power to make anything real, that is what I would want.

*Against medical advice.

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You blogs, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and here I am writing another blog post to prove that yesterday’s was not a fluke nor a false flag nor any other term beginning with “f” other than perhaps “fair play”.

By the way, I may have previously used the Shakespeare-based title above‒it’s just so easy to make, and I’ve always loved that line from Julius Caesar‒but I don’t care.  It’s too perfect for my current circumstances to miss the chance now.  I mean, blogs and stones?  Come on!

I’m on my way to the office, and speaking of stones, I am far from being over the process of having, let alone passing, my kidney stone.  I’m trying not to overuse my pain meds, largely because they tend to have diminishing returns, and I want them to work when I really need them.  Also, they are quite…well, constipating.  Now, it’s true that I didn’t eat all that much over the course of the early part of this week, and of what I did eat, much of it didn’t stay down.  Still, I went Sunday through Wednesday without doing anything but peeing.

I have been doing a lot of that of course, deliberately.  It is not pleasant.  The pain is not like it was Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday, but it still doesn’t let me forget.  And, of course, we’re moving office this week, and that adds extra hecticity*.  

I don’t know how much you all would want to hear (that I haven’t already said) about what went on in the hospital.  I did talk about it a great deal yesterday.  I suppose I’ll play it by ear and just bring up things that occur to me as interesting.

I have not yet made my follow-up appointments, but I need to try to do so today, if I can.  Even writing about it makes me feel very tense and anxious.  I know there’s no good reason for feeling anxiety and resistance toward such things, but at least now I know something of the cause:  It has to do with ASD, with possibly some pathological demand avoidance, but also just with associated, fairly severe, social anxiety.

But I have to try, and I want to try.  I’ve been rather impressed by the hospital and its associated staff and attending physicians and their network and such, and I would like to get myself plugged into their system if I am able to do so.

They seem quite generous and caring as a tendency and policy.  They do everything from providing free meds for when you go home to getting you a Lyft if you don’t have a ride.  I think that’s pretty nice.

It was oddly nostalgic, being in the hospital.  Well, I suppose it’s not so odd.  I spent much of my earlier adult life in and around hospitals, from med school to residency to medical practice, nineteen years in total.  I guess I miss it.  It was nice working with intelligent, disciplined, professional people at all levels and being able to relieve and even prevent suffering, all while getting a good amount of intellectual stimulation in the form of understanding and solving complex problems.

I don’t expect that I will ever do it again, though.  There are ways, I am sure, to fight to try to get my license back and so on, but it’s not the sort of process for which I have any avidity.  When civilization falls apart, as it appears to be about to do, I can perhaps find a time and reason to lend my skills to the survivors, if I am one of them, which seems unlikely.  Otherwise, I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for supporting the world as it is.  Humans have revealed themselves over and over‒by and large‒to be inadequate to tasks that require actual cooperation and consideration and compassion and humility.

It’s ironic that humility is so challenging for humans.  Given how profound their limitations and failings are (despite undeniable strengths, as well) you might imagine that humility would be easy.

But somehow, the default setting even of those who try to be humble is to characterize themselves as absolutely worthless‒which from a certain point of view is always true, but which misses the point of real humility.

Humility is not self-hatred or self-contempt or self-destruction (from which, to some, the only rescue is through some imaginary supernatural being); it is a recognition that one is and will always be limited, capable of error, and incapable of being perfectly objective about oneself and the nature of one’s existence.  With such self-knowledge, one will tend to be better able to make good choices about oneself and others.

Maybe I should try meditating again, to try to keep myself calm when possible.  It might help with my serious social anxiety.  It would probably also help me to get less upset over the idiocy of the current administration**.  And perhaps my mind would then be more useful overall.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and try not to get too upset, yourselves.  The world is going to end soon, but that has always been the case‒it’s just a matter of time scales.  On other scales, even a single mayfly’s life is practically eternal.

TTFN

*I think I made that word up, but it seems too good not to use.

**It would be nice to administer a fair amount of current to the members of this US administration, though‒alternating current, with enough voltage and amperage to cause serious discomfort, but not enough to kill them…at least not quickly***.

***See?  Upset.

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Nothing very interesting

It’s Friday.  I wish I could feel happy about that.  I can remember back in high school, especially, when I would look forward to Friday, because my friends and I would probably be getting together at one of our houses to play role playing games over the weekend.  Other kids might sometimes abuse certain drugs (usually nothing worse than marijuana) but we just abused coffee.  We were often up waaay into the night.

I was almost always the first one to wake up even after a long night of gaming.  I was also the first one in my house to wake up during the week.  I guess one could see the shadow of where the insomnia tree was growing already, but I didn’t know to recognize the signs.

In college, I would often go downtown on Saturday to the city center where there were some shops and stuff, just to wander around (though there was a pretty good comic book store there).  For a while, I would go to temple downtown on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

Anyway, enough reminiscing.  The good days of the past are not going to return, so whatever.

I’m on my way to the office as I write this, though editing and posting will take place after I get there.  It’s already way too humid down here, such that I sweat just while standing still outside.

We’ve been packing some things from the office and so on to bring over to the new place.  Yesterday, I gathered my science books and my black Strat (see below) at the office and put them in a big, industrial garbage bag.  I was planning to bring them to the dumpster, but my boss asked to take the guitar and stuff for either his brother or cousin, who apparently has only an acoustic.  So, he took that yesterday.

I still haven’t brought my science books to the garbage yet, partly because they are heavy, and I have been having particularly bad issues with my chronic pain this week, as you may know if you’ve read this.  Also, the dumpster was ridiculously full.  It seems we’re not the only people moving.

Actually, I would have thrown away much more of my stuff, but much of it is little things people gave me over time that I never would’ve gotten for myself, like Funcopop(?) figures or whatever you call those.  One doesn’t throw away things that were gifts‒that would be rude.  One of those figures is of Hannibal Lecter, and he would not approve of me being rude with him especially.

Anyway, that’s it.  No more delusions that I’m going to play guitar at the office anymore‒there isn’t even going to be a space for me to do so.  Also, no more deluding myself that I will actually read the various science books ever before the end of my life.  It would be cool, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  I don’t expect (or hope) to live much longer, honestly.

Oh, I got a box of syringes delivered yesterday, with needles, in case I want to try the idea from yesterday (nothing drug related, for those of you who don’t go back and check it out).

It’s all a bit frightening, these ideas of how to complete my personal arch of time.  I’ve said before how hard it is to override the idiot biological drive to avoid injury and pain and death.  That’s probably why so many suicides are associated with alcohol and other psychoactive substances.  Maybe I should take up heavy drinking.

That’s not likely to happen.  When I drink alcohol, it seems always to lead to my chronic pain worsening afterward.  Neurochemical stuff is probably involved, a reaction of my nervous system with a rebound after the alcohol.  Anyway, I’ve never been much of a drinker.

I can’t think of anything else about which to write.  Nor to sing, not to draw, nor to play, nor nothing else.  I know, that was technically a sentence fragment, just now.  Sue me*.

If I come to the office tomorrow, I’ll probably write a post.  I apologize again to all those dedicated readers who keep hoping for something interesting or good or amusing or whatever in these posts.  I’m out of fuel, out of ammo, out of pocket, out of this world, and out of my mind.

I hope you have a good day.

*That was not a sentence fragment.

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No songs or pictures, just pathetic words of despite and destruction and despair

Well, it’s Tuesday.  I think my stunt (or whatever you might call it) yesterday has failed miserably.  I don’t know why I’m surprised, let alone disappointed.  I’m either just not good at that sort of thing, or I’m just not worthy of that sort of thing.

I don’t know if that quite made sense just now.  I’m apparently very bad at getting my feelings across, on top of the fact that, a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure specifically what I’m feeling.  They’re just a bunch of swirling, overpowering sensations that don’t ever seem to show on my face or in my voice.

Anyway, I have no subject on which to speak (so to speak) today, and it doesn’t really matter, because I seem incapable of conveying anything important to anyone for whom it could possibly matter.  It’s fine.  As Thomas Covenant said (before he ever went to the Land) this is what people are like:  futile.  He would change his point of view on that after many grueling and heartbreaking yet inspiring experiences, but I think he was onto something.

I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for Lord Foul in those books.  Part of this was just because he was so eloquent‒I’m a bit of a sucker for a good speaker‒but especially after I learned that he was trapped inside the arch of time, inside the Land, and he literally cannot possibly die or be permanently defeated while trapped there.  He hates everything in the Land and its world not just because it’s his nature to hate, but because he is trapped by and with everything there, potentially forever.  So if he is ever to be free to go anywhere else‒even to die‒he has to destroy the arch of time and thus that world.  It is personal to him, of course‒he’s not called the Despiser for nothing‒but it needn’t be.

Anyway, I am not trapped in the arch of time, or at least I’m not constrained from ever dying within it.  Or maybe my own arch of time is just that span of moments that began at birth (or conception) and will reach its other end at my death.  If that’s the case, I wouldn’t need to destroy the arch, just…complete it.

This is all metaphorical bullshit, I know.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t have any misgiving that any of that could be real.  But the stories were good, at least the first two trilogies; I’ve never finished the last 4 books.  There is no denying that The Lord of the Rings is better, and much more inspiring and uplifting.  But the Thomas Covenant books do a better job of capturing the horror and despair and terror of not just fighting evil, but of being evil.

That’s probably why it appealed to me.  My innate tendency is to be, well, perhaps not evil, but destructive.  I feel terribly angry so much, so often, and I just want to break and burn this world, this life, that is so bloody uncomfortable.  But I know that I don’t have any business hurting other people, almost none of whom are ever deliberately hurting me.  So I bottle it up and try to calm it, and I don’t act on it.

But like I said in my reversal of Nebula’s last line to Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, I wasn’t born to be a dad, I was born to be a destroyer.  I’ve just always tried to fight against that, and I have in some small ways succeeded.  I even swung things in the other direction at times, becoming a doctor and a dad.  Of course, I eventually failed miserably at both of those things, as usual, but I did some good in the meantime.

And there is one being I have a proprietary right to destroy.  I just need to quit the foreplay.

Anyway, this has been weird, I suspect, but what else is new?  I hope you all have a good day.

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Six songs to try to express a little bit of how I am doing

I don’t have the energy or will or “spoons” to write much today.  I’m just about ready to tap out.  My “executive function” is so low that I think the only thing I’m capable of executing is myself, and even that is difficult.  I certainly don’t have the capacity to act to save myself.  I keep trying to express just how fucking horrible I am doing, but I don’t think it’s coming across.  I guess it doesn’t matter much.

Anyway, today I figure I’ll embed some songs I’ve recorded myself performing that do something to convey my difficulties.  Some are originals, some are covers.  I don’t know if they will work, either.

It doesn’t really matter.  I don’t have the will to take any action about anything.  I can only do what I do every day, automatically, and I am getting closer and closer to being unable to do even that.  I think I’m pretty nearly completely out of gas, and I am basically only a burden to the world.  It doesn’t help that we’re moving offices this month, which I hate, but that’s just a little insult to add to the injuries that are leading to the end of things.

Anyway, here are the songs.

It’s not a perfect expression or set of expressions, but it’s about all I’m capable of, even after a weekend “off”.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve basically given up.  I’m so tired already and it’s just Monday morning.

I hope you each have a great day, individually, and that you all have a great day, collectively.

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Dolly on the trolley found a seat, by golly

It’s Friday, and I am not expecting to work tomorrow.  In fact, I think if I were asked to work tomorrow, I would have to refuse.  If someone tried to coerce me with a gun to my head, I would probably just tell them to pull the effing trigger.  I might just try to fight them, frankly, and force their hand, because if someone threatened me with deadly force, I wouldn’t feel any real compunction about doing my best to kill them, instead.

My point is, I’m not going to work tomorrow unless lives depend on it (which seem quite unlikely).  Even then, it would very much matter whose life was in the balance; there’s a moral triage that would need to be done.  There are people whom I would not be willing to put myself to any significant effort to save, even if I were the only one able to do it.

That’s not true of most people, though.  Despite my talk in yesterday’s post, I wouldn’t be inclined to let any of the vast majority of people on the planet die just so I could avoid going to work.  But there are people about whom I would consider it a lovely opportunity, if it happened.

This is all so stupid, I’m sorry.  It’s just an absurd notion, though I know that sometimes one can imagine physically unlikely situations in order to clarify moral concerns, such as in the truly blunt thought instrument of the “trolley problem”.  I think that scenario is so absurd and contrived that I have a hard time taking it seriously when I hear or read it.

I mean, how did I come to be put in charge of this trolley lever?  I certainly didn’t ask for the responsibility.  And then there’s the whole “fat person” variation, where you can push a heavy person onto the track to stop the trolley, saving the 5 people down the way.  But if a trolley can be stopped by one person, however large, then how could it have the power to kill all 5 people working down the track?  Is that one person literally larger than five track workers?  And are the track workers really so oblivious that they can’t see or hear the trolley coming?  It can’t be going very fast, since kinetic energy scales as velocity squared, and if it was going very fast, the heavy person wouldn’t stop it.

Also, what about the people in the trolley?  What about the driver?  Are they all just oblivious?  If I can see the problem, why can’t the driver?  If the heavy person is pushed and stops the trolley, will it derail?  How many injuries and potential deaths will be caused by the sudden, catastrophic stopping of the trolley?  And where are those responsible for the scheduling and routing of these trolleys?  And where is the foreman (foreperson?*) responsible for scheduling the track work?  Why am I being thrust into a situation where I need to fix their failures?

More importantly, how did I get sidetracked (ha ha) onto the stupid trolley problem?  What is my idiot mind doing today, anyway?

I’m so beat right now.  We’re going to be moving offices within this next week, and I hate the process of moving and the need to adapt to a new place.  It’s so irritating and stressful.  It would be one thing if there were compensations of some kind‒not monetary, but perhaps an improvement in my commute.  Unfortunately, the new location is barely different from the old, just a block or two away.

I also have accumulated a fair amount of stuff in the office.  I’m tempted just to throw all of it away, including my guitar, my science books, my drawing supplies, all of it.  It’s all just going to lie fallow, and will simply act as a constant reminder and reproach about all my various failed endeavors, which are legion.

Yesterday morning, I forced myself to pick up and strum around on my guitar at the office and sing.  I literally had to force myself.  I got bored after about three or four songs, though it was nice that I didn’t need to look at the chord sheets or anything for most of them.  The tuning didn’t require much adjustment, which points toward how consistent the temperature in the office is.

And here I go again, just meandering in my thoughts, not giving any kind of consistent output.  I’m not sure if any of this even makes sense.  It’s almost like free association, as in the old Freudian style psychoanalysis.  I suppose this blog provides a slightly pertinent data point about just how useless that endeavor was, since doing this has clearly not helped my mental health (well, maybe I would be even worse otherwise, but at the very least it has failed to get me into a healthy mental state).

Okay, that’s enough idiocy.  I’m past 800 words, and I doubt more than one or two people will really read this whole thing (you have my admiration, oh intrepid souls).  I hope you all have a good day, a good weekend, and as good an every day after that as you can.

*I raise the question because I’m led to understand that, in its origins and original use, the word “man” was sex/gender neutral, and just referred to a person.  I may be wrong about that, though.

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It’s the end of the month as we know it

It’s the last day of April in 2025, which means tomorrow is the beginning of May.  This is also the last day of the official Autism Awareness Month, and tomorrow begins the official Mental Health Awareness Month.

That last term is a bit odd.  If mental health is the norm, we don’t really need to be aware of it, except perhaps to be thankful if we have it (I certainly don’t).  It’s the lack of mental health‒you know, mental illness or even mental injury‒that we would like to be aware of and make better.  But I guess some people feel that’s too stigmatic or negative or something.

I think that’s silly.  Do we euphemize cancer?  Not really, not when we’re dealing with it seriously.  All the cancer awareness things slap you in the face, and they more or less say, it’s cancer, take it seriously, we want to fight it.  But what does it mean to be aware of mental health?  We don’t want to fight that, we want to fight for it.

I’m aware of mental health as a concept, of course, though even there, things can be a bit nebulous.  I guess health in general is just the notion that things are functioning more or less as they are supposed to function.  But that allows a fair bit of leeway.  It’s also somewhat relative.  If it were “normal” to be as healthy as Captain America, for instance, Usain Bolt might be considered a bit sickly, and most of the rest of us would be functionally disabled.

It’s hard to convince oneself that the average person, in America, at least, is as mentally healthy as one would like them to be.  I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising.  Mental health (or the relative lack thereof) is measured largely by its interactions with the surrounding civilization, and that has been changing quite rapidly, from any kind of evolutionary standpoint, especially in the last few centuries, and especially in the last few decades.

Small wonder our brains/nervous systems often don’t function optimally in this realm.  The human (and humanoid/replicant/changeling/alien) brain is remarkably adaptable, but it is not a blank slate upon which just anything can be written at will.  There’s plenty of hardware that’s specific to certain kinds of functions, and there are read-only aspects of the operating systems and even the user interface (which we call consciousness when it’s combined with something akin to the Windows task manager).  We can’t rewrite the firmware yet, and we may never be able to do so.  We have trouble even changing current programs or loading new ones.

Well, that was an unplanned digression…which may be a redundant term.  Are planned digressions even truly digressions?

I was mostly just thinking this morning about what such a pair of months might mean to me.  Both of them are pertinent, since I have issues relating to both “awareness” subjects.  But so many of the things I see shared, particularly about “mental health”, are things I already know, but which have obviously not been adequate to improve my mental health.

Heck, I remember paying real attention in high school in our psychology lessons, reading all the abnormal psychology stuff, knowing that there was something off about me, but not seeing any good answers.  Of course, this was in the 80s, in a public high school, so the material was pretty simplistic and out of date even for the time.

I also used to own books about psychology, self-hypnotism, self help, lots of related stuff.  I didn’t know what it was with me, but I knew that I was strange.  I was pretty good at pretending to be “normal” in a sense, but a lot of even that was just me owning and sometimes exaggerating my odd habits as if they were normal things.

It helped that I was known to be smart, and also that I was raised to be polite and not to be mean or cruel or condescending to people.  That was pretty easy; while I was good at some things, there were many things with which I had difficulty, and I knew that only too well.  I still don’t feel very comfortable riding a bike, for instance, and many athletic pursuits requiring agility have always been hard*.  I also was truly abysmal at dealing with girls/relationships.  I had no idea how really to interact in any kind of would-be romantic way, nor to recognize if someone liked me, nor to let anyone know that I liked them.  I’ve not grown out of that problem.

Anyway, so I’ve been dealing with issues of mental health for as long as I can remember, including a time when I was really quite young and I almost made myself unable to talk after getting upset about some interaction and telling myself that I just wouldn’t talk anymore.  When I finally (after several hours) decided to talk again…I almost couldn’t do it!  I really had to force myself, and almost panicked before I finally was able to squeeze out some words.  That was frightening.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that to anyone before.

So, anyway, I’ve been weird my whole life, and I’m no less weird now, but now I am alone, and I have lost pretty much everything I worked very hard to get or be or create as well as nearly everyone I care about most**.  I recognize that it’s not impossible that good things will happen for me in the future.  But I can see pretty clearly that it’s really unlikely.  What could lead me to think otherwise?  Only some profound delusions could do that, and though I cannot rule out delusions in myself, if I have them, they are not of the optimistic variety.

Geez Louise, this is such a pointless post‒just like my pointless life.  I need to wrap it up and be done already.  I hope you have a good day.

*It turns out at least some of this was related to my congenital heart defect, which was discovered when I was 18, and for which I had open heart surgery in the summer after my freshman year in college.

**By this I mean they’re not around, and most of them don’t want to be around me, not that they’ve died‒except my parents, of course, but that was basically natural.  Still, there was a long stretch when I didn’t even interact with them.  It wasn’t as long as the time since I last saw my own children, but it was still very painful.

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How long should one keep smacking the bottom of that bottle?

I made it through Monday again, it seems.  It wasn’t particularly easy.  Starting in the morning, I developed a nasty, unilateral headache that I couldn’t seem to get to go away.  I finally left the office at lunchtime and went back to the house, where I mostly laid around and tried to sedate myself, with some success.

The headache didn’t really start to fade until around midnight, so I didn’t have quite the rest I might have desired, but at least I got some rest.  And now, only a faint residue of the headache remains.

It didn’t feel like a typical migraine, which I have from time to time‒thankfully not very often‒but almost more like a bad, unilateral sinus headache.  Hopefully, it has pretty much run its course now.

It might be nice if there could be a situation in which one could go through some period of painful illness, but then come out afterwards with one’s prior, chronic pain somehow eliminated.  Of course, that’s not likely to happen in real life.  It certainly hasn’t happened to me.

It is true, apparently, that a bad measles infection can effectively wipe out prior immunities, making one vulnerable to diseases to which one had previous resistance.  I suppose that might even be a boon in someone with an autoimmune dysfunction, though it would be difficult to time the infection just right.

I’m not aware of anyone having tried such a therapy, and I don’t think it’s something I would recommend, even if it were workable (which it really isn’t).  Better just to keep vaccination for measles and other preventable illnesses going and look for other avenues to treat autoimmune disorders.

As for what else to discuss…I’m coming up empty here at the moment.  Actually, it’s not just at the moment, is it?  I’ve been squeezing the dregs out of the mustard bottle that is my life force for a long time now.

Sorry, I know that’s a terrible metaphor, but I don’t feel that I’m really worthy of anything fancier.  Anyway, I’ve certainly spread that condiment out over a lot of sandwiches (that’s my continuing the rotten metaphor, with a sandwich representing a day).  But there’s hardly anything left in there, and there are no refills available, as far as I know, and now I’m really just going through the motions.  There’s just a dribbly little, watery remnant, with no flavor left and very little color.

I really pushed that one to the crumpling point, I fear.  But I hope I at least got my point across.  If I didn’t, that would be a real shame.  What a thing not only to have used a truly lame metaphor but to have it fail to do what one intended.  What a tragic joke that would be.

It wouldn’t be very tragic, of course‒it’s hardly anything of consequence.  But still, it would be sad.

I’m really tired and wiped out, even though I went back to the house early yesterday.  Well, I mean, I did just say that my headache didn’t really start to go away until about midnight, and as per my usual self, I was awake today well before three in the morning.

I know, I know, this is all so boring and repetitive!  I’m very sorry.  I wish I could be telling you all about a new story I’m writing, or about my return to a past story, or about some new music I was learning or writing, or even some new drawings I might have done.

Heck, I’d like to tell you I was making progress in studying quantum mechanics and general relativity or differential geometry or computer programming and computer science in general.  I wish I could tell you (and do so honestly) that I was learning more Japanese, or refreshing my Spanish or learning Russian or German, or even French, all of which languages are interesting.

But I’m not doing any of those things.  I’m not doing anything creative or productive or even just distractive (that’s probably not a formally recognized word, but maybe it is).  I don’t have the energy to do anything creative other than this, if this even counts.

Of course, I go to work and do my job, and that’s all well and good as far as it goes, since I don’t like being a burden to people.  But that’s as good as it gets, I think.

I don’t know what else I can do.  I’m just a mess.  I feel like a tattered and smeared old wrapper from a cheap, fast food hamburger.  I suppose some of the smeared matter on the wrapper might be mustard, if we want to keep the metaphor‒or simile, in this case‒consistent.

Well, my train will be here soon, so I’ll bring this to a close.  I hope I haven’t been too much of a downer.  If I have, well, take comfort in the fact that you are only reading these thoughts.  You don’t actually have to experience them.

Please try to have a good day, and try to have better thoughts than mine.