ASD

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“Pull me out of the air crash…”

Well, it’s been a short while since I posted here.  I intended‒vaguely‒to write a post on Friday and then Monday (which was yesterday), but I had a surprise situation happen that I haven’t really discussed with anyone yet, though I might have mentioned it on Threads.

It seems at least some of my underlying distress was evident to some people at work‒I certainly know that I’ve been feeling like I’m coming apart at the seams, and at times in between the seams.  So, on Thursday morning, my boss somewhat quietly came to me and “suggested” that I take a bit of time off.  He suggested 5 days, but if I had come back tomorrow, there would be too much backed up work, so I got it down to 4 days (plus Thursday afternoon).

He said he could tell that I was really getting stressed out and irritable, and that I needed a break; I hadn’t taken any non-sick time off since my mother died.  In and of itself, this was truly kind of him, and that’s completely in character.  On the other hand, he doesn’t understand me all that well.  It’s hard to blame him; I’m a weirdo, after all.

Anyway, he suggested all sorts of absurd things, like getting a hotel room on the beach, drinking cocktails, getting laid, and so on.  Imagine that:  me getting laid on short notice!  I wouldn’t have the comfort level with strangers even to pay to have sex with someone, let alone to pick up or be picked up.  When he made those suggestions, I started to giggle hysterically‒it was a sound that worried and sort of even frightened me‒and I had to suppress it pretty quickly, because if I didn’t, I knew I was going to start to cry.  In any case, I left the office at noon and went back to the house.

As for the beach…

Well, I did do some biking, trying to get used to riding so I could do more, and after riding around the local area a total of about 9 miles on Friday, I decided on Saturday to ride out to the beach and (of course) back, about six miles each way.  It was quite a ride for only my second day back on the bike, but I managed it.  Then I walked down to the beach and saw that at least every human in the western hemisphere was there, so there was no way I was going to remain for long.

I didn’t bring beach gear anyway, having no intention of swimming.  The waves on the Atlantic coast make swimming at the beach there irritating.  The beaches on the Gulf of Mexico are much more pleasant.  Also, I’m about as fond of sand as is Anakin Skywalker.

So, I stopped at a 7-11 for some Gatorade, drank it, and rode back.  Then, on Sunday I biked to the train station and back, which is only about 10 total miles, but it was harder than the day before, probably because I hadn’t fully recovered.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I took a very long, 12-mile walk.  I wore spandex braces on my ankles and my left knee, and these seem to have helped a lot.  I do have a minor blister and a half on my left foot, but otherwise there were no real ill effects.

I probably look as though I partied in some fashion, because I am pretty sunburned.  That’s okay; for some reason, sunburn doesn’t really hurt me much.

So, anyway, I at least got some exercise.  I bought junk/comfort food for a few meals (deliberately) but even my old comfort foods are becoming unappetizing.  That would be okay with me.  In fact, yesterday I ate only a total of around 1000 calories, despite my long walk, because I just wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t even finish all that I “cooked” myself for dinner yesterday.

Being off from work has been at least somewhat fruitful for me, in this at least:  that I have worked on improving my physical condition and have tested my endurance a bit.  Otherwise really, what mostly happened was a harsh, undiluted confrontation with just how empty my life is.

Work is in some ways the most positive part of my current existence; I have to be productive to be worthy of staying alive, and I can interact with my coworkers in ways that are couched in work-related situations.  It is far from fully positive; the noise alone is terribly frustrating.  But then again, I’m pretty much a net negative wherever I am, so it’s hard for me to be judgmental.

When I am at the house, I am fully immersed in how alone I am*.  And things like being at the beach just cement that even more for me.  I do not feel like the same species as everyone else out there.  I don’t know what I am or should be‒I’ve had great past success in all the ways I thought were success, but that all just blew up in my face in the end.

Honestly, I was more than half hoping for a heart attack or some other health crisis or life-threatening occurrence while I was biking and walking over this surprise long weekend.  Perhaps it would have been good to be hit by a car.  One thing I did note was that there are a lot of tall buildings with balconies down along the beach.  That’s something at least a bit interesting.  The bridge over the intercoastal, unfortunately, is rather low there, so it’s not much use.

In all honesty, speaking as a physician about myself, I think what I needed was not a “vacation”.  What on Earth would such as I do on a solitary vacation other than be solitary?  Instead, I would probably recommend that I be hospitalized, if that were available, or at least get some intensive kind of treatment.  But of course, I don’t have insurance, and whatever my boss might think about my finances, I don’t have the wherewithal to pay for much of any medical or psychiatric care.  I also don’t have the mental wherewithal to seek out any such help.

I am finally getting an autism assessment this Friday, and I’m slightly anxious about it.  I fear that it’s going to be utterly negative, and that I’m not autistic, I’m just a defect.

I do find that, even when I try to lurk around autism based sites and feeds and so on, I feel that I still do not fit in with any of them.  Maybe if I get assessed and it’s positive, I will feel differently.  I don’t know.

In any case, I am back to work today, and if I survive until tomorrow, I will punish you all with another stupid blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*I did have a very nice phone call with my sister on Sunday night.  That’s always enjoyable.

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I could a blog unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course‒Valentine’s Eve, if you will.  I don’t mean to imply that every Thursday is Valentine’s Eve (which would imply that every Friday is Valentine’s Day).  No, no.  For the sake of any future archaeologists who might be trying to piece together tattered bits of our civilization, among which is this blog post*, I’ll point out that Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th (every year, without even any breaks!), and today is February 13th.  I’ll also point out that I am probably the only one who would think of it as Valentine’s Eve.

As you may be able to tell, I have nothing about which to write, today.  Don’t worry (as if you would), that won’t stop me from writing.  But I am distracted by mental exhaustion and rather severe pain that’s been bothering me and exacerbating my depression all week.  I know that my depression is not dependant on or caused by my chronic pain‒I know this because it predates it by a good twenty years‒but Batman knows it doesn’t help.

I mean, think about it:  you have dysthymia (aka chronic depression, with dips into full-on major depression), probable undiagnosed ASD with all its associated difficulties, you had a congenital heart defect (also called an ASD!) requiring open-heart surgery at 18, and now you have chronic back pain from a disk rupture/tear and “failed back surgery syndrome” for about 20 years (so every day for 20 years has been dominated by pain), and your career is wrecked, you’ve been to prison, you have no social life, no friends (outside of work), no romantic attachments for more than a dozen years (after having been divorced after your marriage of 15 years and then having only one, short and ultimately rather catastrophic, relationship after that) and you strive for self-improvement‒which you stubbornly keep trying to do, because you’re stupid that way‒but each time run into the barriers and obstacles and quicksand of your mood disorder, chronic pain, and probable “neurodivergence”, sending you what feels like three steps backward for every one you took forward.  Why would you not want to give up?

What, other than foolhardy stubbornness (and literally mindless biological forces), could drive someone to keep going and keep trying when there is no point, no goal, no reward, no aspirations, and no significant amount of even transient joy (though there is some)?

Whatever it is, it’s associated with such a high degree of tension that I cannot even sleep at night without waking frequently and early as if I were a soldier in the jungles of wartime Vietnam or something.  It’s really stupid.  I’m very irritated by and with myself.

But I have not yet been able to find effective solutions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any‒the potential solution space might just be very large, and the subspace of workable solutions much smaller‒but it also doesn’t give any reason to be convinced that there are effective solutions.  There may be no answers, there may be no “right” way to go.

Oh, well.  What was I writing about…or, rather, what was it about which I was writing?  I don’t know.  Valentine’s Day, future archeologists (perhaps virtual beings?) trying to find clues to the attributes of our civilization, the pointlessness of continuing to live without connection or companionship or activities, no full escape from pain (ever), no good nights’ sleeps, all these weird things were matters about which I wrote above.

Enough.  I’m annoyed by myself; I can’t even imagine how annoyed you readers must be.  Really, I can’t.  My apologies.  I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.  Nothing, really, and possibly nothingness***.  But I have nothing else to write right now.  I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*This, of course, raises the question of how future archaeologists would even be able to see my blog without having already understood much of our civilization.  After all, unlike paper artifacts such as books and magazines, every written thing on the internet and web requires functioning computer systems, including processors, storage, internet protocols, languages from html to Java, C+, Python, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, I don’t know what, as well as all the necessary hardware.  This is something people who say stupid things like “online is forever” don’t seem to grasp:  if we lose electrical power or some other process interferes with electronics, all the data on the internet is useless.  Hard copy books can decay of course, but that is much slower; they are much more self-contained stores of information, much less contingent.  That’s something about which to think, as the world approaches the brink**.

**Yes, I did that on purpose.

***That was a deliberate sentence fragment, used to convey a sense of drama and intensity.  I don’t know if it worked.

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I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.

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The universe is rounded at the tip–i.e., it’s pointless

Well, here I am again.  It’s Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I don’t know what, if anything, I have to say, but there it is.

Oh, but I do want to give some follow-up that I forgot to give yesterday:  Dorian, the gray cat I’ve fed for quite a while, has not come back again since that one night he returned last week as I mentioned.  I haven’t seen any trace of him.  If I were a superstitious person, I might imagine it was a ghost that came back that one evening to say goodbye.  However, he was quite solid; I gave him a pat, and he even ate some food.

Also, it would take quite a bit of evidence and logical argument to make me even seriously consider the possibility that ghosts are real.

Other than that, nothing much is new with me.  Of course, there are things going on in the world, but there always are.  It’s a little bit like saying that there are molecules always moving in a still glass of water.  It’s true, of course, and it is part of why water has the properties that it has, but the behavior of any particular molecule is inconsequential.  The things that are happening in the world are parochially interesting, but H. G. Wells’s Martians wouldn’t give a shit, nor would anyone else in the universe.  And, of course, the universe itself really doesn’t notice.

So much has happened in the world since it began, and the number of details that are available after even a hundred years is tiny.  It’s also very difficult to know what historical events actually affected the shape of subsequent happenings.  Sometimes, people just notice things and people and events that are loud.  But loud does not equal important, though they can overlap.

I’m almost done‒87% according to Kindle‒with the last light novel in that series I mentioned before*.  Once it’s done, I’m not sure what I’m going to read, or what I’m going to do if I can’t find anything to read.  I imagine doing my random flipping and reading a section at a time in my various science books, or just getting on the various preprint servers and skimming through random recent scientific papers, or of course using Brilliant to review and improve my science and math, or getting on Babbel and actually starting to learn some more languages.  But though these things ought to be interesting, they just aren’t.  Everything is boring.  Of course, such boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and is probably more symptomatic of dysfunction in the mind behind that eye than in the things being seen.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself in the short term.  I mean, if the office is open, I am going to work tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll write a blog post then, though I make no promises.  Maybe I’ll start sharing links to my books on Threads and Blue Sky and all that, like I used to do a long time ago.  I doubt anyone will buy them, but who knows?

I don’t know.  Nothing really means anything to me.  Everything is pointless, but I am especially and particularly pointless.  I guess that’s that for today.  I hope you all have a good day and then a good weekend.  You’ve earned it, after reading my morose musings.

*Actually, after writing the first draft of this post I finished it.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

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And I looked, and behold a pale cat

Well, I have some relatively good news, which is why I decided to write a post today instead of just leaving it:  Dorian, the light gray cat, has returned.  Well…he was back last night, at least, though this morning he was nowhere to be seen once again, which is itself somewhat unusual.

He was a bit scraggly, with some traces of dried blood around his fur on the side of his head and neck, but it didn’t look like it was his blood.  He actually looked lean and healthy, moving very much like the hard-ass stray cat that he is.

I’m guessing that he got into a pretty big fight at some point‒he seems prone to them‒and then hid away somewhere while he recovered his strength.  Then, that pale grey shadow took a new shape* and grew again.

I think stray cats, like defective and damaged people, don’t like to show any weakness to those around them.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are unable to show their weakness, even though they may crave acceptance and support.  There are good, sound biological motivations for this in stray cats and other mammals; showing weakness or injury can invite further aggression from other cats and even encourage predators.

Of course, human males (or anthropoid creatures living among humans, such as I) are no exceptions to that tendency.

It’s also been said that, in many ways, people on the autism spectrum are like cats, at least in some ways, and I can see the point, though it is an oversimplification.  Still, it leads me to speculate that, sometime in the relatively deep past, perhaps two separate subspecies of humans (maybe the legendary Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons) existed, one being more naturally ultrasocial, the other more constrained but with other capacities that aided their survival.  We know that Neanderthals, for instance, had bigger brains than so-called modern humans, but the structure appears to have been slightly different.

Perhaps it’s the genes from such a separate subspecies that led to some people having ASD or other versions of “neurodivergence”.  To be clear, I don’t know that there’s any good evidence that this is the case.  I did encounter at least one study that looked for markers known to be associated with the autism spectrum and the DNA residua of Neanderthals present in people of European descent.  There seemed to be some correlation, but I didn’t think it was particularly impressive.  So there’s not a lot of data to support the hypothesis.

It would be nice‒in some ways‒to think of oneself as just a different kind of human, not as something alien.  But I think that’s probably a silly dream for me.  I do not belong here in any serious sense; I am an alien, a mutant, a replicant, a stranger.  And to humans, of course, a stranger is presumptively an enemy unless and until proven otherwise.

Anyway, Dorian was back last night, but gone again this morning.  We’ll see if he returns.  There are other cats who come around.  But, of course, there is no real affection from most of them.  They come to me opportunistically, because I put food out for them.  I am useful to them.  Similarly, I am often useful to humans in the world.  I have many skills and abilities, so I have frequently found that people like to have me around to help them get things done.  But eventually, the negatives of my presence outweigh the positives, and people go away (or send me away).

I don’t blame them.  I want to go away from myself, though I have never had any desire to be anyone else.  I would prefer oblivion.  Or maybe I would just prefer rest.

Speaking thereof, I slept almost four hours last night, and of course, I awakened and couldn’t go back to sleep in the wee hours of the night, and I am now at the office finishing this post.  I don’t look forward to the weekend‒there’s nothing good about it‒but at least I can collapse and try to recuperate.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything next week, or just leave everything be.

I feel perched on the borderland between life and death, and the Undiscovered Country beckons.  It must be really great there, because no one who goes ever comes back.

*To be honest, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the old shape.

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…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.

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Pulling a trigger warning

[Seriously, I talk about suicidal thoughts and ideas of methods, as well as self-harm here, and I don’t want to trouble anyone who might be “triggered” by this…I do enough damage to people who are even figuratively close to me, and I don’t want to do that even more, so if this will, or even might, upset or worsen your mental state, please don’t read any more of it.]

I was a bit hypo-manic yesterday morning or something; sorry about my little tangent fest.  Today I mean to keep things shorter.

Work has been hectic and too up-and-down for easy tolerance lately.  Today is payroll day, so I’m going in early to get that done, but it will be chaotic and urusai and stressful no matter what.

I used to be able to deal with stress, not by avoiding stressful things but by not letting things bother me, by keeping things in perspective, by having good enough personal support systems in place, by having a good philosophical outlook, by meditating, what have you.  No longer.  The person I used to be is dead.  His remains are just sitting here and rotting, as you would expect from an unburied, unpreserved corpse in a hot, humid climate.

I hate my life.  Honestly.  Seriously.  I am trapped in this idiotic universe full of even more idiotic creatures and things, of which I am a prime example.  There is, of course, a way to escape, but to avail oneself of it requires courage, and I haven’t yet been able to work that courage up.  I’m trying.  I’ve come close.  It’s only a matter of time.  A natural 20 may be a relatively hard “saving throw”, but it will happen eventually.

It’s funny, but it occurred to me lately‒thinking frequently about such matters, as I am‒that it would be easier for me to shoot myself in the gut, sort of Van Gogh style, than to shoot myself in the head.  It’s hard to say why, exactly.  I have “played” Russian roulette once, and though I did pull the trigger (barrel in mouth, aimed as carefully as I could), I didn’t go for a second turn.  I just cried by myself in my stupid old apartment.  And that was before I even went to jail or prison for trying (cluelessly, it must be said) to help relieve the suffering of other people experiencing chronic pain.

I came to a realization when I responded to something someone on Threads said‒about just wanting to be shot in the head‒by saying that I would rather take it in the gut, because it would be slower and more painful.  I realized that I really would find it easier to shoot myself in the belly than the head.  Perhaps it’s because I could then experience the process and the pain.  Maybe it’s because it would give me a sort of chance to change my mind at the last minute or something.  I don’t know.  I suppose at some level I’m still a coward.  Anyway, I don’t own any guns anymore, so it’s a bit moot.

Weirdly enough, I doubt that I would be able to stab myself in the gut, let alone do anything like seppuku.  This is probably at least partly because one has to apply the force oneself, whereas with a gun, the bullet rockets out quickly and without hesitation once the trigger is pulled.

Using fire would be hard, too.  I know that I’m able to burn myself deliberately, because I do it from time to time (twice, yesterday) but it’s always at least a little startling how much it hurts, at least for an instant.  It can actually be almost invigorating, especially when some surprising little phenomenon happens, such as something in your skin giving a little “pop” when hot metal touches it.

A whole body process would be quite intimidating, though.  I have enough flammable liquids to do it, but I think that would be most appropriate for some sort of public statement of a death.  I’ve thought of going to sit out in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse (where the finishing blows to my life were delivered) and immolating myself, but you want to make sure you’re committed completely before trying something like that.  Otherwise it would be very embarrassing.

Maybe the best way, by some measures‒other than actual medically provided euthanasia, perhaps with some combination of high-dose valium, fentanyl, and digoxin‒would be hypoxemic asphyxiation, when you would just sort of go lightheaded and “faint” and, if you’ve done it right, just drift away.  I gathered the equipment for this not too long ago.

But of course, if you’re interrupted, or you accidentally dislodge your apparatus while losing consciousness, you could just get brain damage from hypoxemia and not even die.  To be honest, I don’t know how much worse my brain could possibly even be than it is now, but it’s a fact of reality that things can always get worse, even if it’s not true that they can always get better.

It would be good if something (not someone) else took it out of my hands.  Every time I start getting better from a respiratory infection I feel disappointed.  Where is the pneumonia that will develop over top of my URI and usher me away from this shit hole of a universe?

It’s a cliché that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.  It isn’t easy.  But I’m working on it.

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Maybe it’s signal. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s Maybelline?

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I don’t know that I have anything of use or substance to say, or anything to say that isn’t mostly just noise.  Perhaps I’m just some peculiar source of radio static in the background of the universe.  Or perhaps…perhaps I’m just pretending that what I do is unplanned, when in fact everything is calculated and subversive.

Ha!  I wish.  My brain doesn’t work like that, and I’m not sure anyone else’s does, either.  Even John Von Neumann had to develop complex mathematics and sophisticated models to deal with the limited degree of uncertainty in highly simplified versions of one-on-one poker.  If he was so intrigued by what he‒possessing perhaps the highest general intelligence of which history is firmly aware‒could not fully model, then this is strong evidence that no one, now or ever, has really been in control of anything.

Of course, game theory has advanced since Von Neumann co-invented it, and it is certainly useful, but it is clear that, at best, it deals in probabilities and tendencies.  There is no Asimovian 2nd Foundation Hari Seldon psychohistory that can figure out the specific events of whole galactic civilizations well into the future, and I doubt there ever will be.

Of course, if we want to be trivial, we can predict the far future with some degree of confidence:  Eventually, unless our knowledge of the universe is deeply mistaken*, as entropy increases inexorably, new stars will stop forming, old stars will burn out (even red dwarfs), black holes will evaporate, and the universe will be a thin haze of elementary particles.  Indeed, if everything eventually reduces to massless bosons (e.g., photons) then in a very real sense, time will literally have no meaning, since photons, being massless particles, do not “experience” time.  From their point of view‒to speak very figuratively‒their entire existence is instantaneous.

Of course, going on to the very far future, given the nature of probability, new universes may arise.  Something like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology may be the way things happen, or there may merely be a Poincaré recurrence of the universe.  Or maybe, as I’ve speculated previously, time is not one way, and our future might also be the future of another, far distant “big bang” but for which time/entropy increases in the opposite direction.

Also, of course, if civilization and intelligence persists and grows, which is not a small “if”, then who knows where technology will develop?  Our descendants could conceivably develop the capacity to do cosmic engineering, literally shaping the large-scale development of the universe, or even making new ones.

But I suspect they still will not be able to micromanage perfectly the interactions of innumerable agents in complex systems.  Some limits are fundamental, and I think this may be one.  This comes down to something related to my “Elessar’s First Conjecture/Theorem”, that no complex, intelligence can ever fully understand itself in detail, because to model a given complex system requires a system of greater complexity, which itself will need to be described, leading to an infinite regress.

And, of course, we know that in complex systems, in which interactions are stochastic and multivariate and nonlinear (and thus exhibit chaotic development) the specifics of future happenings will be unpredictable since to know them perfectly, we would need an infinite number of significant digits**, though in some cases‒like entropy‒we can make general predictions with high confidence.  

This is part of why “planned economies” fail, and almost certainly always will, unless they are stupendously lucky.  In any case, such luck will not last, just as neither strength nor good purpose will last in the presence of the One Ring.  This is also why most complex conspiracy theories are simply laughable.

People derive their models of the world to too great a degree from our ubiquitous visual entertainment, which has been around long enough to be deeply self-mimicking and self-derivative.  Gunshots and explosions don’t behave in real life the way they do in action movies, but action movies (and shows and videos) take their models of the world from previous action movies, much as an AI’s model of human speech and interaction, if derived from the internet, is going to be increasingly contaminated by the products of other AIs, and may end up veering far away from anything reminiscent of human interactions, at least if left to its own devices.

Maybe that’s an advantage of written fiction over movies and TV and other videos; it’s not presenting a simulation of some version of reality, it’s telling you a story, describing things, but you have to imagine them.  Meanwhile, if all your fiction is in words, your physical intuition of the real world‒and your psychological and sociological and economic intuition‒would be derived from real events, not the Machiavellian machinations of Manichean movie-based manipulators.

That was an interesting stream of consciousness, if I do say so myself (and I do).  Who could have predicted it?  Not I.  And I’m the one who wrote it.  Which goes to my point.

Please try to have a good day.

*This is always possible in principle, but for many aspects of cosmology, our credences can be justifiably high.

**I sometimes say that while knowledge can vary greatly, ignorance is always infinite.  This can be proven with a single, simple example:  the digits of pi.  There are an infinite number of them, and no matter how many we calculate, there will be an infinite number we don’t know.  Ditto for e and any other transcendental numbers, let alone all the other real numbers that have no specific designation, of which there exist an uncountable infinity.  And this is just one place where infinite information dwells, of which we will always have only finite knowledge.