ASD

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With purpose to be blogged in an opinion of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit

     Hello and good morning.

     Yes, I am continuing to indent the beginnings of my paragraphs, and it still is not a whim.  I’m not ready to reveal why I’m doing it; that’ll depend on how it works out for me.  But if any readers are interested enough to speculate, I will let you know if you get it right.  It’s not really important or consequential, but neither is anything else from a sufficiently broad perspective.

     I was awakened very early this morning, even for me (I’ve noticed that a lot of the time I do a quick gasp or exclamation when I wake up, as if startled that I still exist or that the world does), by a combination of needing to use the bathroom* and a particularly severe exacerbation of pain, which continues even now.  I have no idea what made this exacerbation happen.  Yesterday, my pain was just at its baseline level, and while that’s not pleasant, it was basically that to which I have become‒out of necessity‒accustomed over the course of more than twenty years.  With adequate, slightly higher than recommended, doses of combined OTC pain medications, I can keep it to the point where I’m reasonably functional.

     Then shit like this happens and I start hoping that they’ll stop the flow of illegal fentanyl by making OTC fentanyl legal.  I’m being unrealistic there, of course; I was on a prescription fentanyl patch for years, and though it did keep my pain suppressed enough for me to function, it never eliminated it, and it had various long-term side effects on hormones and on neuropsychological function, so I stopped it unilaterally.

     Anyway, that’s all boring ancient history.  The bottom line of the point I was making is that I am not likely to be as chipper today as I was yesterday.  Yesterday I even tried to make some intellectually stimulating use of social media by going back and starting to watch/rewatch the videos on Numberphile from the oldest one on.  I got to the second video before I saw that Veritaseum had released his own new video about “the biggest misconception in physics”, discussing Emmy Noether’s theorems on symmetries and conversation laws, showing how, and why, on cosmologic scales, there is no conservation of energy.

     It’s a fascinating video.  Veritaseum always does good work and explains things very well, and of course, the more airtime Emmy Noether gets, the better.  Part of the substance of her story is how she showed where Einstein and Hilbert were missing some things, and it’s not just anyone who could understand let alone correct the insights of those great minds.  Watch that video, if you have any interest in the subject.

     From there I jumped to a guest lecture he (Derek Muller, who created Veritaseum) was giving at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics about AI and education and prior predicted revolutions in education.  I haven’t quite finished this because work and other things interfered and intervened.

     I have to admit that sometimes I think about trying to set this blog up as a subscription-option-available site, or to open a Patreon associated with it, or to start a Substack or something, so that I could try to make a living learning and thinking and writing and discussing and educating about various things**.

     Some people have been able to do it.  I doubt anyone would even be willing to pay tuppence (figuratively speaking) for my stuff, though.

    Anyway, by watching educational videos I was trying to avoid getting caught up in interacting with Threads (and to a lesser extent other social media) because while I’ve certainly had enjoyable interactions there and have found useful services, like the place I got evaluated for ASD, I never really feel like I have or am interacting with friends there.  When I do feel like I’m getting some degree of connection, I suddenly become awkward and feel I’m overstepping or being cringeworthy or just being too weird, which I probably am.

     I should give up on ever having any new actual friends, let alone any kind of relationship or pseudo-family or any such thing.  I just don’t seem to have the knack, though that fact makes me almost unbearably sad.  And, of course, my pain is showing no sign of diminishing, at least none that I can detect.

     If any of you think it could be doable‒in a practical sense, not just in a “physically possible” sense‒for me to make money on my nonfiction writing (or even audio or video), since the fiction writing hasn’t worked out, let me know, please.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep writing this, like this, as this, until either I am able to get my pain under better control or I give up on that possibility.  Also in the meantime, my “social” interactions with almost everyone will continue to be a bit like being in orbit around Mars or Jupiter and trying to make friends back on Earth.  Actually, those interactions could happen with as little as 3 minutes lag time due to the finite speed of light, so maybe Saturn or even Neptune would be a better metaphor.

     TTFN

*This is not a BPH thing; it has been this way all my life.

**I could name it after my short story collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, since it would probably be pretty eclectic.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.

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Eddies in the flow of reality (but that’s not his sofa)

It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.

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I was out sick yesterday

It’s Friday, and I apologize, but I did not write a blog post yesterday (Thursday).  I also did not go into the office yesterday.  I was feeling a bit on the mend Wednesday morning, but by the evening, I was totally wiped out, and yesterday morning, I realized that I did not really have the strength to go to the office.  So I stayed at the house.

Believe me, I would have preferred otherwise.  I don’t really like the room where I live.  The only really positive things about it are, it’s where my stuff is, for what that’s worth, and it’s where I can’t randomly have people intruding on my time and energy.

It’s a bit of a paradox, or at least it’s a state with competing/conflicting forces and pressures acting upon it.  On the one hand, I am very lonely, and I really wish I had friends with whom I could speak and interact comfortably, and with whom I could do fun things.  But on the other hand, social interactions have just gotten more and more stressful for me over time, and I always feel like every relationship of any depth, that I have ever had in my life, I have screwed up, and that any future ones will likewise fall apart and fill me with regret will make my depression and loneliness even worse.

I’ve said it here before, but I am most certainly not convinced that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  There should be caveats about that skepticism, though, since simple answers are almost always incomplete.  The answer to that issue can depend very much on how one lost one’s love.  If one lost it because of basic force majeure, something beyond anyone’s control, it might not lead to a state of absolute regret, and is much less likely to engender (or worsen) self-loathing.

But if one loses love because the person one loves, and to whom one is dedicated, decides that one is just not worth it, that they don’t want to be with one anymore despite years of time together, because one is…challenged by various issues‒well, it can be hard to blame the other person for wanting to leave, or to blame anyone else for wanting to leave, and so it can be all the more devastating, making an already tenuous self-image ever worse.

And of course, romantic relationships are intrinsically difficult.  They are also very important in many ways, though I suppose that in a brutally “red in tooth and claw” world they would be a luxury at best.

I don’t know what point I’m making.  How did I even get on this subject?  Oh, right, I was discussing the fact that I don’t like the room in which I live but that at least I’m relatively free from having other people interlope without my invitation.

The prospect of moving somewhere else also feels too stressful to contemplate, frankly.  Again, this sort of stuff is easier if one has friends and loved ones/companions.  Even if they don’t contribute to a process, just having someone with whom to be able to relax is beneficial.

I didn’t realize how lucky I was in my young life to have been the third born of three kids, so I always had people older than I looking out for me.  I also stayed in the same school system from kindergarten through senior year of high school.  Then I stayed with a new, basic friend group through college, and that was helpful, especially since they were all people with similar interests and intelligence levels.

Then, of course, after college I got married and (apart from medical school) my wife was basically my “special interest”.  I think that’s sort of the way I am, at least about friendships and romantic relationships (though there is a very small sample size of the latter).

So, I didn’t really seek out or desire any serious other friendships while I was married.  Unfortunately, that meant that, once my wife “broke up” with me, I didn’t really have anyone around for support.  But there were people who were more than willing to take advantage of the things I was good at and who relied on the fact that I was not good at recognizing manipulations and ulterior motives and so on.

Then, of course, I ended up being a guest of the Florida DOC, precisely because I was such a handy sucker/fool.

I don’t know why I’m going into all this nonsense.  I don’t think it’s likely to achieve anything, except to convey the fact that I know I have gradually lost a lot of good things that I had that made me able to tolerate and even enjoy living in the human world.  But I didn’t know they served that function, and now that they are gone, I don’t know how to do it on my own.

Oh, well, it’s not like anyone is guaranteed any good things when they’re born, and even most of the things we think of as “rights” are not really something any part of nature lets us take for granted, apart from death itself.

On that upbeat note, have a good day, please.

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No April foolishness in this post

I am not making any jokes or or otherwise messing about in an “April Fools” sense here today.  I despise “pranks” of the sort that people tend to pull on April Fools’ Day, and think people who do them should be castrated/spayed/neutered immediately.  No, I’m not kidding.  Maybe I wouldn’t ever actually carry out that sort of penalty‒I am a bit of a softy sometimes‒but that is my urge when even merely contemplating such deliberate, quasi-malicious trickery.  Actually, that’s my restrained, milder response.  Most of the time I feel murderous at pranks, even when I’m not the target.

It’s the start of a new month, and I am not enthusiastic about it.  Still, it’s not as though I can do much to avoid it.  It’s one of those stupid, inexorable things in the world that make it so often so repugnant.

I think I’m going to try to avoid discussing updates about my ongoing “plan” from now on.  It just seems to make other people upset or sad or concerned, but it doesn’t actually motivate any kind of active response of any kind.  It’s like the memes say, when someone’s mental illness‒especially suicidal thoughts‒is made open and discussed, such people are avoided, they are called “attention-seeking”, they are told to toughen up or stop complaining, to smile, to get out and exercise, to seek support of friends and those who love you‒as if those weren’t the very people you want to avoid burdening or inconveniencing.

It’s only after someone actually commits suicide that people start saying things like “I wish I could have done something,” or saying that they didn’t know, that they didn’t see it coming and so on.  But of course, they had warning, they had information, if not awareness, and they could have done something.  But they figured it was up to the person having the trouble to seek help.  As if someone whose brain is not functioning properly has the wherewithal to help themselves, especially when they are on their own and have no local support system whatsoever, and other issues including chronic pain, insomnia, and neurodevelopmental issues.

They might as well tell someone with liver failure to just buck up and for crying out loud get back to using that liver to cleanse the various toxins from their blood and to process their food and maintain the biliary system and all that goes with the liver, when it’s the liver that is failing.

I’m not saying that all people are like that, of course.  There are people who definitely try to do what they can.  They are few and far between, however.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  And I am certainly no one’s idea of a worthy cause, to be honest.  So I guess I shouldn’t feel snippy about the fact that there’s no way for me to be rescued.

I don’t know what else to write about, otherwise.  Maybe I shouldn’t write about anything.  Maybe I should just quit writing.  Maybe I should quit trying to pretend that anything I say or do is of any importance or even interest.  It’s a bit pathetic.

I’m just tired.  I’m tired of trying to “fit in”, tired of trying to pretend to be positive, tired of trying to pretend to be healthy so that I don’t inconvenience other people too much.  It’s all bullshit.  I’m not healthy, I’m not happy, and I haven’t been in years.  I see no positive future for me.  There is only an ongoing stretch of years, decades, who knows how long, alone, depressed, in pain, an outsider, an alien, a stranger, who will die alone in the end.

I have often been the one providing support for others throughout my life.  I always tried to be there for people.  I volunteered in various places, tutored and helped out first other kids and then younger people, and of course, I went to medical school and became a doctor.  Even in prison I worked in education, trying to help other prisoners get their GEDs.  Maybe some part of me was thinking that was an investment‒that if I tried to be and do good, to help others, when it was my time to need help, I would be worthy of getting it, worthy of rescue.

Of course, that’s not how the universe works.  If anything, when left to its own devices, the universe rewards selfish assholes, at least in the short term.  In the long term, everyone dies anyway, good or bad, and how much a person suffers in the meantime is in no way dependent upon how good or evil a person is.  And there is no credible reason I have ever encountered to suspect that matters will be set right in some form of afterlife.  It’s all just futile and maddening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Obviously I’m very grumpy, and I’m still sick (though maybe slightly less so than yesterday), and I don’t want to deal with anything!  I want to rest.  I want to escape.  There’s nothing for me here.  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.”  Or at least, I ought to go.

I don’t know.  I am at a loss.

I hope you all are doing and feeling far better than I am and do.  Please try to have a good day and a good month.

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It seems appropriate that coughin’ and coffin sound alike.

It’s Monday again, though I know of no one who asked it to be.  I am not going to write much today (I suspect) because I am quite under the weather‒I’ve been dealing with some form of bronchitis that started Friday, and I’m not feeling much better yet, though my oxygen saturation seems good, and I have no fever (but then again, I am always on NSAIDS and acetaminophen, so it’s hard to be sure I haven’t just suppressed a fever).  By rights, I should probably not be going into the office today, but my coworker is out of town until tomorrow, so basically, I’ve got to keep the office running.

I do have masks to wear, and I don’t just mean fun and/or scary ones.  Neither do I refer to “autistic masking” which is what many autistic people do to fit in with other, neurotypical people.  Lord knows I’ve always tried to fit in, and I definitely put on “masks” and tried to shape myself to please those around me.  I feel almost that my autism presented a little more the way it does in girls than in “traditional” autistic boys, at least as discussed by other people with autism.

Anyway, I’m not really doing this blog as a venue via which to discuss ASD.  That must be the case, since I didn’t even consider the possibility before the last few years, and this blog has existed for much longer.  I suppose it might be interesting for someone (but not me!) to look back at my older posts and see if there are any hints about ASD in the way I write or discuss things.  I doubt that I’m interesting enough for anyone ever to do that, though‒I certainly don’t find myself interesting enough.

It may go without saying that I did not play guitar or go for any walks except to the convenience store this weekend.  I was mostly just laying around and trying to rest.  It’s a bit annoying that I still didn’t sleep well, and only stayed asleep for a while under the effects of delta 9 gummies and 2 Benadryl.  I slept a little more than usual, but of course, it’s not really restorative sleep.

I wonder what it is about the autistic brain that leads to the tendency to sleep poorly.  Is it atypia in the hypothalamus, or are the effects on the amygdala leading to hypervigilance which is consistent with my tendency?  I don’t know for sure how well the neuroscience of autism is progressing, but I guess I could get on Google Scholar and/or check the preprint servers.

Anyway, I think I’m pretty much done for right now.  I’m really very tired and worn down.  I guess I’ll be talking to you all tomorrow, though it’s less likely that you’ll be talking to me.  In the meantime, if you’re able, please try to have a good day.

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I can’t think of a Shakespeare based title right now

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer instead of on my smartphone, because yesterday when leaving the office, I felt like carrying my laptop computer with me.  That’s it.  There’s no better reason than that.  I was still in a lot of pain, but since trying to be careful with my back wasn’t making any difference, I figured the extra load of a pound or two couldn’t matter much.  It didn’t, as far as I can tell.

I don’t have any subject about which to write at the moment, and that’s beginning to get troubling, though I’m not entirely sure why that should be; certainly, it’s never slowed me down before.  I can always seem to write, the way some people can always seem to talk, and the good thing about writing is that I can go on and on about whatever subject I choose, just indulging myself, and I don’t have to stammer to a stop at some point because I realize that no one nearby has any interest in—and often no idea about—whatever I’m trying to discuss.

For the most part, people try to be patient with me, and for the most part, I try to pay attention to when people are obviously getting bored.  But it’s nice not to have to worry about it.  Anyone who isn’t interested in what I’m writing simply doesn’t have to read.

My pain is slightly less intrusive this morning.  I can move a bit more easily than yesterday without having to stop and hold still for a bit every time as if I’ve been stabbed or something.  It still hurts, but then, it always hurts.

I kept having an idea go through my head yesterday—it’s not a new idea—about possibly trying to write a new story, starting and finishing entirely on my smartphone using Google Docs.  I don’t know whether I would enjoy it or not, or if I would even do it; currently I don’t so much as have a candidate idea for a new story.  And, of course, those of you who have followed this blog for a while will recall that I recently wrote a new novella, called Extra Body, but that after an edit or two I lost interest in it and just published it here.  If you haven’t already, you can read it here.  If you like it, maybe you’ll look into some of my other stories.  Heck, maybe you can share and maybe tell some friends and followers.

Still, the prospect of writing a new story, which ought to be at least a little exciting, is just a dull and even an unpleasant thought to me, because I would expect to put in the effort of writing and then have barely anyone read what I wrote and have to watch it just sit out there, pointless and inert.

So, I don’t know if I’m going to write anything.  I guess I could look through my old story ideas and see if anything jumps out at me.  I haven’t had any new story ideas in a while, or at least, I haven’t written any down that come to me (they still do come).  There doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it.

My coworker is going to be away tomorrow and Monday because it’s his wife’s birthday and they’re going on a short trip, so it’s going to be slightly more stressful than usual at work.

I don’t understand it, really.  Who, as an adult, goes on a trip when they have a birthday?  I don’t recall ever going on a trip for my birthday, to be honest.  I don’t think I would want to do so, but even if I did, I don’t think it would happen.

I don’t have anyone with whom to go on a trip nowadays, or frankly, even with whom to go to see a movie or watch a TV show or whatever.  I’m actually very lonely, but it’s not as though I’m just able to make friends with just anyone and just start hanging out with someone.  The process of meeting someone new and getting used to someone and being comfortable making plans with another person is very difficult and ridiculously anxiety-provoking even to contemplate.

It’s very much a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.  And so, I’m just blah, just a dust mote floating in nothingness.  Unfortunately, it’s not a free-fall kind of nothingness, so there is net gravitational force on me at all times, and that causes my various pains to continue to act up.

I’m sure it’s probably nothing that I don’t deserve.  Goodness knows that I’m hard for other people to get close to, or even to tolerate, since I get so awkward around other people and have such a hard time feeling any common ground.  Also, I’m pretty fucking weird.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I don’t think I’ve said anything that’s of any use to anyone, except perhaps as a way to pass a few moments’ time on our mutual path to oblivion—or, as David Mitchell put it, “Whiling away our finite time before the grave.”

He says this at approximate time stamp 10:15 in the linked video.  It’s worth watching; it’s quite funny.

I don’t know if I’ll put a picture here or do a Shakespeare-based title.  I guess you’ll already know the answer long before you read this part of the post, won’t you?  I envy you.  I wish I’d already decided.

I guess beggars can’t be choosers.  And we’re all beggars here, when you get right down to it.  No one was born because they deserved to be born, so to speak; you can’t earn your existence before you exist.  You can’t choose your parents/genes, your place of origin, your time of origin, or your developmental influences.  And if you could choose, the odds of you (or anyone else) choosing wisely seem pretty low.

In the meantime, just…try to have a good day if you can.

TTFN

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“…the only thing that’s real.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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