ASD

by

Blog Post for 1-10-2025, Friday

I’m going to write a very brief post today, just since I didn’t write anything yesterday.  I was out from work with a rather severe exacerbation of pain, from head to toe.  I actually thought about just sharing here an embedded or linked connection to my “bad cover” of Hurt, by NIN/Trent Reznor (and which was so achingly covered by Johnny Cash).  I shared it directly on Instagram, partly just to see if it was possible to share whole longish “videos” there, and it was.  So I shared from there to Threads and Facebook, TWFKAT*, and BlueSky and so on.

I think I’ll embed that video here below, or rather, I’ll link to the YouTube video.

Anyway, then I just tried to lay down and rest, and I dosed myself up with stuff to try to help diminish the pain and to help me sleep (I didn’t really get any more sleep than usual, unfortunately).

You know what, I think I’m also gonna link to one of my own original songs on all these various new social media sites with which I’ve been halfheartedly dabbling.  I’ll link that here, too.

As for why I’m in so much pain, well, the abrupt shifts in weather haven’t helped.  Also, I tried a new form for my ab exercises, since I’m always trying to find ones that reduce my pain, but this one backfired.

Then, I had such a stressful day at the office (payroll, loud and chaotic noise, tinnitus acting up like a diamond tipped drill driving from one side of my head to the other, people acting like idiotic children) that at one point I beat myself in the forehead with my fist so often and so hard that I gave myself a mild case of whiplash and possibly a mild concussion.  I certainly felt loopy afterward.

Unfortunately, there was nothing immediately life-threatening, so, as Bob Seger put it, “here I am, on the road again”.

Anyway, I’m off work this weekend, and I’m still quite sore and whatnot, so hopefully I’ll get some rest but will also have the gumption to walk some.

Meanwhile…I guess I hope you all have a good weekend.  “Like and Share if you agree.”

*The Website Formerly Known As Twitter.  Presumably because of an overabundance of musk, my feed on that site is no longer showing any posts here on my site.  Right now, I can’t be arsed to try to figure out how to fix it.

by

There is no title–just a lease. Ha ha.

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m on my way into the office again, since we are open today.  And therefore, as I warned you, I am writing a blog post.

I have no idea what I’m hoping to gain by doing this.  I have no clear notion even of what in principle could be gained from this.  However, I am a creature of habit, as well as of compulsion and desperation, so, well, I’m doing this.  I also try very hard to be a man of my word, though I probably fail as much as anyone does at that.

I don’t really have much news to discuss.  There’s little percentage in discussing the actual news, i.e., events from around the globe, since in the modern world saying something online that someone disagrees with is tantamount to being a revolutionary religious heretic in their eyes, endangering not only the world but the souls of the unborn.

Of course, one of the expressions that most irks me in this vein is when people say that someone is “destroying their existence” or something along those lines, by what they’ve said.  This is obviously nonsense.  I try very hard not to say unkind or hurtful things to people‒courtesy is the lubricant of civilization, after all‒but mate, if I wanted to destroy your existence (and acted on that want) you would not be complaining about it; you would not exist.

This is part of the stupid conflation of words with violence, an idea that can only really be held by those who have little experience with real violence*.   I’m sure I’ve discussed that here before, and it doesn’t really bear repeating.

Yesterday morning, I had a little bump up in my mood and energy level, which I didn’t understand, but I also didn’t really question at the time.  Maybe it was because the holidays are over or something, I don’t know.  Maybe it was because a reply I made on threads got hundreds of likes‒which surprised me‒or because a deliberately stupid joke I made in response to another thread got a decent number of likes and no fewer than two people posting gifs of famous scenes of people saying “Boo”.  That made me chuckle, because it was more or less exactly the response for which I was hoping.

I don’t like to think I’m that shallow, for such things to significantly give me a boost, but who knows?  This stupid human body and limbic system with which they saddled me has all sorts of bugs and hacks and workarounds that just piss me off.

Anyway, such online responses are very temporary and shallow for me, enjoyment wise.  And yet, alternatively, when other people actually contact me directly via social media, in most cases, my immediate response is stress, tension, hyperalertness, anxiety, etc.  And in me, any form of fear quickly sublimates into hostility and battle-readiness, usually in a very literal sense.

I often have to take hours and hours before I can reply to a simple greeting through one of the various messengers (even ones that aren’t obviously bots trying to sell something or other, which I ignore) and sometimes it takes me days.  Even ordinary SMS messages can be stressful.  When I hear the text alert on my phone, my usual reaction is either “What do you want!?” or “Oh, shut up, will you?” before I even know who sent the text.

Even positive texts from friends and family, perhaps in response to my own holiday greeting texts sent to them, cause tension, even though I’m glad to receive them.

I suppose one could call it anxiety, but that’s not exactly the way it feels‒though maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Anyway, I just feel at a loss whenever anyone tries to communicate with me, especially if I’m mentally engaged in something else.  I feel as though I’ve forgotten entirely what one is supposed to do in such situations, but I know that I’m inclined to say or do stupid things.

So, I have to pause and think and give my brain time to digest the fact that someone has messaged me.  Somehow, it always feels as though it is a threat‒ironically, it can be more threatening to receive messages from someone I like than from someone I don’t, because those are people whose opinions about me matter to me, at least in principle.  And I know I always screw up relationships with people who matter to me.

It’s even stressful to see when I have comments here‒but please don’t let that dissuade you!  I want comments, I appreciate them, just don’t take it personally if I take a long time before responding to them.  I won’t say preparing to respond is as bad as trying to work up one’s nerve to walk across hot coals, but maybe it’s analogous to preparing to jump into a very cold lake.  Even if you know that, once you get used to it, you’re probably going to enjoy it, every time there is a kind of “stage fright”.

It’s analogous with physical contact for me.  I have no skill with how and when to initiate physical contact with someone, whether comradely or romantic or whatever.  This skill I have never been able even to begin to acquire, let alone to master, though back in the day I got pretty good at faking my way through seeming to feel natural with verbal interactions at least.

This probably has been a large contributing factor in my dolorous and limited romantic history.  Even when with someone with whom I wanted to be intimate, and who I knew wanted to be intimate with me, I have near-paralytic difficulty starting anything, even something minor like a touch on a shoulder.

Part of that is an automatic warning in my head that says, “Danger, danger, you are making a mistake.  There is no way that anyone, least of all this very special person, could want you to touch them in any way, let alone to do anything further.  You are disgusting!  Don’t inflict your slimy touch on someone else, especially not someone about whom you really care.”  Well, it’s words to that effect‒it’s rarely thought out explicitly, it’s just the uncrystallized, supersaturated feeling those words convey that tends to get in my way.

Oh, and I also tend to get pretty tense when someone touches me‒even if it’s a significant other, sometimes, and even though, in the right situation, even a minor touch can be soothing‒because I feel like I don’t know how to react and I’m sure I’ll screw it up, and anyway, they’ll be in danger of catching cooties** if they touch me.  And, of course, a lot of the time I don’t really want to be touched.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but anyway, my temporary boost yesterday lasted only a few hours.  I didn’t sink to as low as I had been on Thursday, but after all, if you’re treading water, it may seem for a moment, due to the chaotic action of the waves and maybe a random burst of extreme effort from you, that you have risen higher above the surface of the sea…but you will not stay elevated.  You will sink back down to the level of whatever passes for neutral buoyancy, after briefly dipping lower.  And, of course, unless you reach shore or a passing boat finds you, sooner or later, you will drown.

That is, unless you’re lucky enough to be eaten by sharks.

*Or perhaps those who have suffered brain damage due to real violence, but those people can be cut a lot of slack.

**Figuratively speaking.  I don’t have lice (which is what I am led to understand the term “cooties” originally meant) nor any other literal contagious infestation or infection.

by

And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale blog of thought

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).

I’m heading in to the office already this morning.  It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day.  We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early.  I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.

It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day).  In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices.  The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck.  The only places open were gas stations and our office.

Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday.  This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself.  But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.

It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year.  Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?

In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term.  I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all.  It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well.  They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.

My thought was this:  I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver.  I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach.  This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.

My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.

When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station.  I was already exhausted.  I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight.  Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier.  However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.

So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain.  I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes.  And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.

And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year.  I’m alive, and I’m not happy.  I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me.  I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.

Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too.  How lucky for you and for me, right?

yippee.

Well, my train’s about to arrive.  I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already.  Yeah, right.

TTFN

*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal.  Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal.  I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.

by

Oh what a tangled web weaves itself

Good day, everyone.  It’s now the last Saturday before both Christmas and Hanukkah in 2024.  The office is open today, and I am on my way to work (quite early, because, you know, it’s me, and I don’t sleep very well).

Sometimes I wonder if writing this blog, in which I basically share my random thoughts, is somehow narcissistic.  Maybe it’s just because narcissism is in the news so much lately, especially with regard to politics*, but I do worry about it.  After all, when one is as gifted and skilled and brilliant and creative as I am, there’s always a danger of losing one’s truly exceptional humility.

I’m kidding, sort of to make a point and sort of just because I like to screw around with things that way.  Don’t worry, an overabundance of self-love has rarely been an issue for me.  Sometimes I pretend to be egotistical, mostly for amusement, and in my teenage years, it also helped stave off my already developing self-loathing and depression a bit**.

Still, with all the people on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, etc., to say nothing of podcasts, and blogs such as this one, and so forth, one might think that the modern world is beset by a pandemic of narcissism.  I think this is not correct, however.  Although there are divas out there, I think there are more innocent reasons for a lot of what we see.

Humans‒bless ‘em‒are extremely social critters.  They are by far the most social of primates, and really, given the power of language and shared “fictions”, they are the most social species the planet has seen.  They are highly interdependent, and they must not merely cultivate but tend to and nurture many relationships.

When a creature’s survival is strongly dependent on certain behaviors, those behaviors tend over time to become pleasurable; they can even become part of play, and creatures will engage in them purely for their own enjoyment.  Many predators, for instance, will hunt and kill even when they don’t need to do it.  (That’s right, plenty of other animals in the world kill for pleasure, sorry to break anyone’s illusion that this is a feature (or a bug) solely of humans.)

Of course, with ultra-social creatures who need constantly to reinforce existing interpersonal threads as well as to cultivate new beneficial ones and to prune detrimental ones, the exchange of goods or even favors cannot possibly be enough to satisfy.  There’s just not enough time and only one body each to go around.

But when one can share information (even seemingly pointless or banal information) with multiple others, one can develop and strengthen numerous threads, cultivating them even from afar, and one can make oneself seem a useful potential connection for others who are themselves useful, and with minimal cost.  After all, information shared is not lost from its source, it is merely reproduced.

Take a moment to ponder that last sentence‒that fact is a big part of what makes life possible at all.

Anyway, now people can share thoughts and jokes and amusing pictures and helpful tips and even serious, high-level expertise, with millions and even billions of other people, and they can get rapid feedback as well.  Of course people are going to do it, especially since it can even be “monetized” in an almost baroque/rococo**** arrangement of fictions and networks, real and virtual, all interacting in astonishingly complex ways, each entity operating entirely under “local” pressures, which change from instant to instant depending on all the other forces at work, spontaneously forming into a structure of tremendous complexity, a thing not merely unplanned but probably unplannable.

So, although narcissists can thrive online, I think they are a minority, and they seem often to self-destruct.  I think most of the various personae telarum are just humans (and other somewhat similar creatures, like me) responding to instinctual drives and enjoying the process.  One should not think of them in the same way one does those dangerously insecure narcissists who seek great political power.

*Though politics has always been a great bastion of narcissistic pathology.  Not everyone who wants to try to contribute to governing their community, state, nation, etc., is a flagrant narcissist; some are surely well-meaning and even humble.  Nevertheless, the field of politics attracts narcissists like the priesthood attracts pedophiles.

**I don’t remember how old I was when I first experienced true depression, but I know that I first started having suicidal thoughts no later than my first trip to music camp (which I loved, by the way, but the separation from all my usual settings didn’t help my depression, which makes sense if I truly do have the second version of ASD***).

***The first ASD, which I definitely had, was an Atrial Septal Defect, a congenital heart defect that required surgical correction when I was 18.  The second, rather amusingly to me, is Autism Spectrum Disorder, the criteria of which I very likely meet, though I have no official diagnosis.  This overlapping of acronyms‒because there are far fewer combinations of, say, 3 letters than of 3 words‒is an example of a problem inherent in all forms of data compression.

****Barococo?

by

But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

by

No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.

by

When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

by

O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

by

Desperate but not undaunted

This may be short, but I thought I’d share a bit of info since I brought the general topic up earlier this week.  Just this morning, while I was getting ready for work (and indeed, just as I was about to brush my teeth) the idea for a story popped into my head.  This happens a fair amount, as I think I’ve said, with weird little scenarios triggered by something that’s been going through my mind or that I see, and they coalesce into the root of what might be a possible story.  Well, since I had spoken (so to speak, ha ha) with all of you about this earlier, I decided to pause my oral hygiene routine briefly and go write the story idea down in the notebook function of my smartphone.

I don’t want to overreact or to ask anyone to get their hopes up.  That latter bit would be utter hypocrisy.  It’s always difficult to say what will come of a story idea, or even the shape it will take‒just look at Outlaw’s Mind*, at how much it changed and improved (to me) from its simpler beginning.

I’m writing all this on my phone once again, by the way.  And the fact that I’ve written at least the roots of this story and most of this week’s posts on my phone leads me to toy with the idea of writing a next story wholly on the phone.  I know, I know, I’ve gone back and forth about hand-writing stories versus word processor/laptop computer versus phones, and I got all those notebooks and pens and everything, thinking that I’d write HELIOS in long hand, and now I’m thinking of the opposite.

This is an example of the workings of a desperate mind, one trying, scrambling, scrounging, looking for answers to getting back to writing, or music, or trying to help my chronic pain, or my insomnia, or my depression, and whether or not to pursue the possibility of an ASD diagnosis (not the heart kind‒I know I had that).  I’m trying to find something that has some meaning at all for my life to persist.

I guess that means I haven’t given up yet, but that’s more a matter of habit than anything else.  I am extremely stubborn, and I have trouble letting go of a process once it’s a habit.  Maybe that’s the ASD doing its thing, assuming it’s there.  Maybe I’m just dysfunctional and odd and alien.  I suppose those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, writing about this idea got me thinking of potential scenes and events for the story I mentioned above, so please forgive me if I space out a bit.  Just wait a moment or two; I’ll be back**.

That was kind of fun.  It could be an interesting story, this new idea.  We’ll see if anything happens with it.  I wouldn’t put serious money on the possibility, and I certainly don’t recommend holding your breath.  But if I were to write a novel or novella on the phone, the portability would be a big plus.

That reminds me of those old “palm pilot” things people used to have, the little personal data notebook digital things, with the plastic styluses.  Some people thought they were so cool using those things.  They were always so geeked out about them and seemed to look for excuses to get them out all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; if someone was just having a great time, enjoying using a brilliant piece of then-new technology, then have at them!  Enjoy!  Why not be happy with a new, useful tool, especially if it’s a cool tool?

At least some of the people who ostentatiously used the “personal data assistants”, though, were mainly status hungry.  I get it (though I may not grok it).  Humans in general tend to be status hungry; for ancestral humans, in-group status could have a big effect on reproductive opportunities (and even just basic survival chances), so any genes that pushed toward such behavior would tend, ceteris paribus, to be at an advantage, locally (i.e., in that particular gene pool).

But it is rather bizarre to watch from the outside, and instances of the phenomenon vary between the amusing and the contemptible, with many a superposition of the two.  It still happens today, of course.

Humans also haven’t shown any sign of ceasing to select status hungry people as the ones they follow, even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest and so much bias that makes such people unreliable in the long run.

Oh, well.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because in the truly long run there will be nothing but random elementary particles and forever-expanding spacetime, if the current understanding is correct.

Or, of course, there could be even worse alternatives.

There’s probably no possible horrible situation that couldn’t in principle be made even worse.  Even Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” could be made even “worse” just by adding more people to the situation, each one of whom is in the worst possible misery they can be.

I suppose that fact implies the theoretical possibility of its opposite:  the best possible well-being for everyone.  Why does that feel so much more unrealistic?  Well, I could get into some of the potential reasons, many involving the biological necessity and crucial importance of fear and pain.  But that’s for another time, or you can read a bunch of my blog posts here and on Iterations of Zero.  I’m sure you can find my thoughts on the subject.

Aaaaand that’s enough meandering.  You all hopefully are going to have a good weekend.  I am tentatively scheduled to work tomorrow, but we shall see.

*Seriously, go take a look.  If you like it, why not buy some of my published stuff?  And then tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

**Ha ha.  That’s a trick.  You can’t tell when or for how long I spaced out while writing, unless I tell you, or put a space or row of asterisks in the body of the writing.  I could begin a sentence one day and finish it years later.  It’s a bit like listening to a studio recording that had overdubs and one person doing more than one part.  You hear it all at once, but that’s not how it came to be.

by

Two-day Tuesday posting streak

I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday.  And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.

As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen.  Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.

It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway.  It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.

I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius.  I could even cite some evidence.  For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay.  Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.

In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist.  I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere.  People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people.  It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.

I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember.  Probably not very much.  I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.

In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona.  I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart.  I remember a particular formative event in this arc:  I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***

Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have.  I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers.  However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me.  I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem.  But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.

So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on.  I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness.  I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world.  If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today.  It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do?  I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration.  So, you know, no big deal.

*Conjecture:  The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information.  Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.

**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.

***His term, not mine.  I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends.  Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.