ASD

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2 kinds of ASDs and an NTD called SBO all considered by a pitiful SOB

It’s Friday, and this weekend I am not working, which right now seems like a highly positive thing, because starting yesterday in the middle of the day, I suddenly had a huge flare-up of my back/hip/leg pain.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  I’m always trying to see if I can tease out (and test) the causality of such occurrences, but of course, it’s a tricky business, with so many possible variables.  I wondered if it was something I ate‒I had a specific type of food in mind, that I had not eaten for a while‒or was it partly because of my severely poor sleep the night before?  What was it?

It was frustrating in more than the usual sense because, after having walked to the train that morning and not having any problems from it or the previous few days’ longish walks, I was planning to walk in the evening again.  Unfortunately, I did not feel up to such a thing when the time came, so I took an Uber to the house‒after getting some comfort-oriented ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery*, a place I’ve not visited in over a decade‒and then another one to the train this morning, since I still feel rotten.

It’s noteworthy that, when I am in more severe pain than usual, my willpower to resist indulgences that I want to resist gets quite a lot weaker.  I suppose that trying to compensate for and deal with the pain diverts mental resources that would otherwise be pointed toward self-discipline.  I had a big hot pastrami sandwich for lunch yesterday and then that ice cream, but they were both far less satisfying and pleasant than I would have expected.  I don’t think I’ll ever get either one again.

I’m always trying to think about my back pain and the things that trigger and assuage it and so on, and occasionally‒though for the most part it’s all well-trodden ground‒I come upon some possible connection that I hadn’t seen before.  Yesterday, while thinking about my then-present back pain, I thought back to my childhood leg pains, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  When I began having my current problems (about 20+ years ago), they first presented as a recurrence of the kinds of pains that I had as a child, quite similar in character.  This led to various investigations to look for neuromuscular or myopathic processes, but I had no myopathy**.

Having more recently researched connections between autism spectrum disorders (which I might have) and congenital heart disease (which I certainly did have‒Atrial Septal Defect, secundum type‒because I had open heart surgery for it when I was 18), it yesterday occurred to me that there might be other associated anomalies.

I think it was while I was browsing biomedical news related to neurodevelopmental stuff on a site that’s linked with phys.org (which is a science news site that I enjoy and recommend) that I saw something about neural tube defects related to autism spectrum disorders.

Neural tube defects (NTDs) occur when the neural tube‒the embryonic infolding that creates the cavity that becomes the sort of scaffold and center of the spinal cord and central nervous system and its supporting structures‒fails to close completely on one or both ends.  It’s mainly to prevent these that potentially pregnant women in the modern world are encouraged to take daily folate supplements.  NTDs can be utterly catastrophic, producing forms of anencephaly and various types of severe and lifelong neurological impairment, or they can be comparatively mild, all the way down to spina bifida occulta.

neural tubeadjusted

That latter term describes the situation when, at the very lower end, the spinal bones and what not are not completely closed at the rear.  The “occulta” part refers to the fact that there are no noticeable external findings that show the presence of the incomplete closure.  The most commonly affected portion of the spine is in the L5 and S1 vertebral bodies (lumbar and sacral, that is) with somewhat incomplete rear closure.  These findings are, according to what I have read, not always noted on MRI unless it is looking for them specifically.

diagrams of sacral spina bifidaadjusted

It is noteworthy (to me) that when my back was investigated, including “provocative discography”, I had not just a bulging disc but a full thickness tear in the L5-S1 intervertebral disc, going all the way from the outer edge to the nucleus pulposus.  Imagine one of the pieces of Freshen Up gum, with the goo in the middle of each stick up gum, but torn inward from the edge so that the central liquid leaks out.  That’s the sort of thing I had.

annular-tearadjusted

And it was in the rear of the intervertebral disc, just where any SBO might have left poor structural support.  No one noticed SBO in my back when they were working me up, but they weren’t looking for it, nor even looking at the bones in particular.  No one (including me) suspected any skeletal issue.  And SBO can be very occult, and may present, conceivably, with only very minor, hard to notice changes.

I haven’t yet mentioned that one of the findings that can be associated with SBO is bed-wetting.  I had trouble with that, in addition to my frequent and rather severe childhood leg aches, far later than my siblings…in fact, I never heard of either of them having that trouble at all.

It turns out that the correlation between congenital heart disease and SBO is quite high as such things go, more so than either condition’s correlation with autism spectrum disorders.  Of course, most people with congenital heart problems do not have neural tube defects, and vice versa, but the existence of one involves a prevalence of the other that is quite a lot higher than in the general population.

So, though I cannot arrive at any firm conclusions, I know that I had congenital heart disease, I have lifelong neurological and psychological attributes that seem (to me) to be consistent with what would have been called Asperger’s Syndrome before about 2013, and I had symptoms (and signs) that could very well correlate with the presence of a minor form of Spina Bifida Occulta***.

Also, of course, my physical findings when my back was investigated for a resurgence of leg pain in mid-adulthood are consistent with a structural weakness in the posterior region of L5-S1, such that my disc damage or injury was markedly worse than most I’ve seen in patients with whom I’ve been associated, or in descriptions of disc disease.

Alas, I no longer have, nor have access to, my former radiographs of any kind, nor medical notes or surgical notes.  I could be incorrect in this assessment of possibility, and I certainly don’t put my credence very close to 100%.  But I think I’ve nudged myself at least past the 50% point.

Whatever the case, I have chronic pain now, and I’ve had surgery in my back and implanted matrix with bone growth factor there and a titanium cage, so it’s probably all too messy ever to discern if there used to be a very minor case of SBO in the past.  Until and unless someone develops a means of scanning the past such as the Father invented in my book Son of Man, which uses complex time (and a phenomenon I made up) to be able to scan the past of quantum fields without running afoul of the uncertainty principle, I’m unlikely ever to know with anything close to certainty.

I’m convinced that our firm credences of any of the facts of reality can never actually be 100%‒I personally don’t even consider “I think therefore I am” to be completely valid, since even my consciousness might be part of some much greater mind’s imagination…though I suppose in that case, it would still be valid to say that “I am”, just that what I am would be different than what I seem to myself to be.

But for all practical purposes, it’s reasonable to go with Descartes, though.  Most other aspects of reality are, as he pointed out, less certain than we often suspect them to be‒except when they are more certain than we expect them to be.  

I hope I haven’t bored you too much with these thoughts.  They seem interesting to me, of course, but I recognize that’s no guarantee that anyone else will find them anything but mind-numbing.

It would be nice if I could find a way to get better answers than I have on questions of personal neural tube defects or neurodevelopmental disorders, but even textbook findings of such disorders are somewhat misleading, because we don’t have MRIs (or similar) of everyone in a population and symptoms or signs to correlate with findings.  Indeed, almost by definition, the MRIs and CTs and X-rays of people with such issues are going to be those with the most obvious and glaring findings.

Oh, well.  Reality is often disappointing.  But at least thinking about these things is momentarily engaging.

I won’t be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I hope you all have as good a weekend as you can have‒which you will, since whatever happens will be what has happened, and will not be subject to change once it has (It’s always the best, and the worst, of all possible worlds, in a sense).  So, I guess it might be worth it not to worry about it too much.  But, of course, you also don’t have any choice about whether you worry about it or not, once you’re worrying about it****.

Even if there are “many words” a la Hugh Everett, you still only will experience one version of your life.  The fact that another of you might have it better (or worse) has no bearing on your experience in any given Everettian branch, unless it’s possible for the wave function branches to interfere again after decoherence, which is, in principle, possible, but so vanishingly unlikely that it seems not worth considering.

Enough!  Please have a good weekend.

*It was disappointing.  My tastes seem to have changed over time, perhaps due to Covid or perhaps to other matters, but some things I used to like don’t seem to please me anymore.  In this case, that’s probably just as well.

**Myo- for muscle and -pathy for “something wrong with”.  It’s a fairly basic term that reveals almost nothing beyond its prima facie meaning, but it sounds impressive because of the Latin.

***I should note that leg pain is not part of the traditional symptom list of SBO, but intermittent leg weakness is definitely a part of it‒and my leg aches were associated with some radicular type symptoms, such as apparently being associated with notable temperature change in the affected extremities.  At least, it was notable by our family dog, Ernie, who would often unerringly come and lie on my affected leg when I was in pain, just in the right place, as if to provide warmth and comfort.  He was a good dog!  Anyway, disorders rarely exactly follow the textbook descriptions.  As I’ve often said, diseases don’t read the literature.

****Rush were simply wrong; you cannot choose free will.  It either is or it isn’t, but that’s not up to you.

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No bootlaces to be tied by this Monday’s child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If I have veil’d my blog, I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself

Hello.  Good morning.

I really wished that this would be the Thursday blog post that I would title with the unaltered Shakespeare quote, “The rest is silence”, which is Prince Hamlet’s last line before he dies.  Then maybe I would share a brief clip from the video for the Radiohead song No Surprises, the part where Thom Yorke sings, “I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide, and no alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  Silent.  Silent.”

Unfortunately, this will probably not be my final fit nor my final bellyache.  I certainly still feel compelled to write this today.  I woke up quite early, as usual, and lay in my room just staring about, wondering if there was any excuse I could give for not going to the office, and whether staying at the house would be in any way better than just going in.  Neither seemed to be the case.  So, finally, I got up, showered, and decided to take an Uber to the train very early.  In fact, I arrived just as the first train of the day was pulling into the station, though I made no attempt to catch that one, since it was functionally impossible.

And now, here I am, sitting and sweating and writing.

A weird thing did happen as I was getting ready to go this morning.  I put in my earphones and pulled up YouTube Music and chose my playlist “Favorite Songs”, with YouTube doing its little self-promotion about some new, unrequested service it now provides or something, in which I had no interest.  Anyway, I tapped the “shuffle playlist” option, and the song/video that came up first was my own song, Schrodinger’s Head.  But the song that began playing was none other than the aforementioned No Surprises.  It continued to play, overtop of my own song’s logo and screen, even when I backed up to the beginning of the song.  It didn’t correct itself until I’d skipped to the next song and then came back, at which point it was my own song that started playing.

That’s a strange glitch.  Does it mean that the program loads “video” and “sound”, at least in YouTube Music, as two separate processes?  I usually just go for the song rather than the video option (when that’s available), but I have always guessed that doing so simply involved the suppression of the video portion of the file in some sense.  But I’ve not ever seen a mixed song and video from different sources.

Not that I’m bothered.  It’s far from insulting if a Radiohead song presents as if it were my own.  Well, it might be insulting to Radiohead, but not to me.

Anyway, I didn’t actually listen to either song at the time.  I realized that what I really wanted was actual silence, and just leaving the earphones in but not playing anything is the closest I can come to that.  Of course, tinnitus means I haven’t experienced full silence for about 15 years, at least not in my right ear, but I can try to come as close as possible.

My pain wasn’t as bad yesterday during the day as it had been on the previous two days, and that’s definitely a good thing, though now it’s acting up more severely again.  That’s not really anything new.

As I stood outside waiting for the Uber, the air was as usual in the morning lately:  stagnant and still in addition to being hot and humid.  But far up and away to the east and south were high clouds, and there was rather frequent lightning to be seen, then and when I was riding to the train.

We used to call that “heat lightning” and I think people imagined it was something different than usual lightning, but my current understanding is that it is the same electrostatic phenomenon, merely much higher in the air (where I suspect the resistivity is lower, though I may be wrong about that…in any case, there would be more cosmic ray bombardment to seed ionization paths for lightning to follow).

Of course, one never hears thunder from heat lightning.  Maybe that’s because it’s so high and far that the sound is thin even to begin with, since sound travels more slowly and less effectively through less dense media.  And then, of course, as it hits the lower atmosphere, trying to enter a denser medium (with faster propagation speeds) it might be unable to penetrate.  Indeed, there might* be a phenomenon analogous to total internal reflection, the process that, among other things, allows fiber optic cables to work with essentially no signal loss.

When light is traveling through a dense medium, like glass or diamond, in which it moves much more slowly relative to its speed through air or vacuum, and it comes to an interface where it would pass out into a much less dense medium‒where it would travel much more quickly‒if it strikes at too shallow an angle, it will not exit its current medium at all, but will instead fully reflect, effectively without any loss.

My first thought was that it was the opposite situation for sound traveling from high, thin air to lower, much denser air.  But then it occurred to me that it’s not the density of the medium that directly causes total internal reflection, or any refraction, really.  It’s the differential speed of propagation that causes refraction and total internal reflection**.  And sound travels more quickly through a denser medium, not less quickly, whereas light does the opposite.  So, comparatively slow sound in thinner, upper air, coming to denser, lower air, might reflect if it arrives at a shallow enough angle.

It’s somewhat like being below the surface of a pool.  We know that sound travels much better and farther in water than air, but if your head is underwater, you may not be able at all to hear people talking who are standing near the pool, and you might not even be able to hear loud ambient music (unless a subwoofer is in contact with the ground/floor and thence to the pool).

I think I’m more or less on track with this as at least part of the explanation for the fact that one never hears the thunder that accompanies very, very high lightning.  Of course, some of it could simply be ordinary attenuation, since the intensity of sound falls off as the square of the distance (as with light, also…this is one of those physical facts of reality that is directly caused by the geometry of three-dimensional space, nothing more esoteric and nothing less profound).  But that doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for why one never hears the sound of “heat lightning”.

Well, that’s enough ado about nothing for today.  It’s more than I expected or wanted to write.  I mostly just wanted to write some form of goodbye.  But the horrible, terrible, inexorable pressure of habit and routine in someone with a particular type of nervous system can be nearly as potent and irresistible as the laws of reflection and refraction and geometry.  I can only seem to escape such habits when I am forced by external circumstances to do so, but then new habits and routines‒compulsions, really‒take the place of the old ones.  I try to procure useful habits when I can, but one cannot entirely pick and choose such things.

I fear my only escape will happen when I actually die.  Of course, if time and space are fixed and super-deterministic, then even that might not actually be an escape.  As far as my experience goes, it might just lead to me starting over at the beginning, like a video being played on a loop.

Nietzsche actually used that notion (obviously not based in Einsteinian concepts, but it doesn’t have to be) as the basis for a thought-provoking question:  if you knew for certain that, once you die, you would then live your life over and over again exactly as it happened this time around, how would you change your current and future behavior?  Is your life now one that would horrify you to repeat infinitely, or would it be okay?

Inquiring minds want to know, I guess.  Or maybe not.

TTFN

no surprise

*This is just me speculating in real time.  If anyone knows the correct answer, please let me know.

**Thus the frequent demonstrative analogy used to teach about refraction:  a row of soldiers marching side by side coming at an angle to a place where they leave hard, firm ground and enter deep mud, which will tend to change the angle of their movement.  Alternately, one often encounters the story of a lifeguard running across the beach to save someone drowning, needing to judge the best place to enter the ocean to minimize the overall time taken to reach the swimmer.  Too much time in the water slows the lifeguard too much, too much time on land makes the path longer, and thus also slows the lifeguard.  The lifeguard’s path of least time turns out to be exactly analogous to what light does when refracting through differing media.  A brilliant, “for-the-layperson” account of the quantum mechanics behind this is given in Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

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Aqua sea foam shame and be all a pile of cheese

Okay, well, today I’m writing this blog post‒or at least I’m beginning it‒at the train station, having walked here, since I hadn’t done that walk yet this week.  Of course, I’m soaked with sweat and I will probably be in a lot of pain today, but I’ve been in a lot of pain anyway, so I might as well get some exercise.

I’ve had a terrible time with respect to pain, even worse than usual, lately.  Yesterday, after taking three aspirin and two Tylenol at once, about half an hour later‒and for all of less than twenty minutes‒my pain faded briefly away, and it was ecstasy.  It was better than a holiday and a great book and a good movie with one’s favorite person.  Then that effect went away and the pain resurged back to prior levels.  It’s quite frustrating, almost a tease, though I don’t think anyone or anything is actually, deliberately doing any teasing.

And of course, though my coworker was back yesterday, he did that same thing where, even if I just say that I feel tired and worn out, he says that he knows how I feel.  I want to say, “No.  You don’t.  Even assuming your current pain is as bad as mine, try having that for more than twenty years, try losing practically everything that was ever important to you partly because of that pain.”

I of course really don’t want him to do any of that.  I hope his pain steadily decreases and his life improves and his family prospers and so on.  I don’t think I would wish my subjective experience on anyone else, though I know to a near mathematical certainty that there are many people whose lives are far more unpleasant than mine.  Still, mine is unpleasant enough, and I don’t recommend it.

I keep wanting to warn people at the office that I really don’t feel that I’m going to survive for much longer.  That’s what I’ve been feeling particularly strongly over the past few days.  I also feel grumpy and angry and hateful and spiteful, so I dislike my own self more than usual, which is saying something indeed.  But if I say to others that I don’t think I will survive much longer, the few people who take it seriously‒locally, anyway‒are the people with whom I don’t really feel a connection at all, and indeed, are the people I find most irritating (which is unfair to them, but I can’t seem to do much about it).

It’s a bit analogous to this blog, though the analogy is very weak.  I air my depression and pain and despair here, hoping either to be told some new information and ideas or to receive some form of help, either from without or from within, but after a while, if you keep writing about the fact that you feel miserable and your pain is worsening and you have thoughts of killing yourself‒but you haven’t actually killed yourself or tried to kill yourself yet‒people stop taking it very seriously.  I suppose that’s not completely irrational or at all unfair, but it is rather frustrating.  It really makes everything one does feel even more futile than it would have felt otherwise.

That’s part of what makes me think I should just give up on blogging, and on anything and everything else.  I should stop blogging, and I should also just recognize that I am not going to do any more music, nor will I write any more fiction, nor will I do any more drawing or singing or anything else creative.  I will not master General Relativity or Quantum Field Theory to the degree I would like to, which is to a near-professional level.

And I will certainly not make any new friends or develop any new romantic relationships; I will not have any form of new life or family.  I won’t achieve anything else of value in my life, I won’t ever see or rekindle my closeness with any of my old friends, and they are surely all quite happy about that.

I should just stop trying.  I should stop blogging, I should put away, give away, burn or otherwise eliminate all the hallmarks of foolish pipe dreams, I should stop getting new books or manga, cancel my cable and internet and streaming services and Amazon and all that and just let go.  I’m hanging on by my fingernails, anyway, and it’s damned uncomfortable.

Sorry this post isn’t much fun.  I don’t recall the last time I did a post that I thought was probably fun for anyone to read.  I’m even sort of dozing off while writing this, even though I’m now on the train.  I can only imagine how boring it must be to read.

Anyway, this is all almost certainly a waste of my time and of yours.  Sorry.  I hope it hasn’t been too dreary.  Thank you for reading it, in any case.  I really appreciate your kindness and patience.  I wish I could be more worthy of them.

All apologies

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It’s Mon the Day, callooh, callay.

I think I misspelled those borrowed words from Jabberwocky, but since they were just nonsense words anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter.  I’m being sarcastic, anyway.  It’s certainly not any kind of frabjous day for me, or if it turns out to be, I’ll be very surprised.

I had the weekend off, as you know‒which unfortunately means I’m going to be working six days this week‒and now I’m getting ready to head in to the office.  I’m strongly tempted to get an Uber to the train station rather than waiting for the bus.  It’s wasteful, of course, but it’s easier, and the heat outside means even walking to the bus stop would leave me disgustingly sweaty.  Maybe I will take an Uber.

***

Well, I didn’t take an Uber, I took a Lyft, because when I first looked at the Uber app, it was reading a price that was more than twice the usual rate.  I don’t know why; perhaps all their drivers were engaged already and the app automatically adjusts for supply and demand.

Anyway, it was a decent ride, but even waiting for the few minutes in front of the house for the Lyft left me copiously sweating, and I still am doing so at the train station, just sitting here on the platform.  I sometimes wonder if I’m profoundly ill in some way‒physically, I mean‒to be sweating so much at relative rest.  But if I’m that sick, why don’t I have more trouble on those days when I walk eight miles and whatnot?

I do feel physically quite a bit like crap, but a lot of that is just because of all my chronic pains.  Hips, knees, back, ankles, plantar fascia, belly‒when all these things hurt most days, it’s hard to muster a lot of energy.  It wears me out.

I wish I could go home.  By that, I don’t just mean going back to the house and skipping work.  I don’t consider that house “home”.  It’s just a place I go to sleep (a little) because I have to go somewhere.  I mean, I wish I could go back to where I grew up, where I had family and friends.

Of course, someone else lives in the house in which I grew up, and the city in which I grew up‒Pontiac‒is not in terrific economic shape.  The junior high and high school and at least one of the elementary schools I attended are closed, and are more or less abandoned.  Their likenesses live on in Mark Red and in The Chasm and the Collision, but only in my mind, really.

You probably couldn’t guess from reading those books that the schools were based on the ones I attended.  That’s fine, of course, from a narrative perspective; I’d prefer people to think of their own schools when reading the stories.  That’s more fun.  So the descriptions are at least a bit vague.

Anyway, I’ve veered off my point (how unusual!), which was just basically that there’s really nothing left of my home for me.  Nearly all the people I knew there are long gone, and even the company Pontiac Motors (a subsidiary of GM) is no longer in business.  The Pontiac Silverdome is also gone.

I’d still like to go back there, of course, though I know it would be bittersweet, and I entertain a fantasy of doing so in a fairly radical fashion.  But I don’t see myself being able to, for instance, go on a vacation there.

No, I would have to uproot and abandon my present life, more or less, and I don’t know how I would be able to start anything new elsewhere.  I don’t think I would be able to make any new connections, and I’m unsure of my ability to reestablish any old ones‒I’m very unpleasant and asocial, and I’m weirder even than I used to be, so I don’t think I’d be able to live with anyone else…or rather, I don’t think that anyone else would be able to live with me.

I really don’t see any available exit or escape, and I can’t really imagine any kind of rescue or help.  I also don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids in person again.  That is the worst thought.  But I have no capacity to try to push the issue.  I don’t deserve them, anyway.

I wish I would collapse and just fall apart, do you know what I mean?  It will happen to everyone (and everything) sooner or later, anyway.  It would be nice if it were sooner, because I am tired of trying to continue, but I’m not built well for doing much of anything else.

I’m really, really tired.  And it’s just Monday morning.  The work week is just getting started.  I hate my life, I hate the world, I hate myself.  At least, I hate aspects of the world, and my life is a shambles, and I’m extremely tired of myself.  He’s such an annoying person.

All right, that’s pretty much enough for today.  I’m about two and a half stops from my destination, and I have nothing very interesting or useful to say, so I’ll start wrapping things up.  I feel very much that the world is inundated with some kind of caustic, disgusting effluvium, everywhere I go, so that everything in the world is tainted and not worth enduring.  But of course, no matter where I go, there I am, so it’s most parsimonious to think that the effluvium of disgust I find wherever I go is so seemingly ubiquitous only because I carry it with me; I am its source.  I’m not being saturated by the stink of the world, I’m saturating the world with my own stench.  It’s repulsive.

This is metaphorical, of course.  I bathe regularly and wash my clothes and all that.  As far as I can tell, I don’t literally smell bad.  It’s more of a spiritual fume of some noxious variety that I exude.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem prone to getting used to it.

Enough.  On that cheerful note and thought, I bid you farewell, and wish you a happy day and a happy week.  For goodness sake, look out for your family and friends.  And hopefully they will look out for you.

silverdome old photo

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There’s got to be some kind of kvetch

It’s Friday, and I’m standing at the train platform, writing this post on my smartphone, waiting for the second train of the day to arrive (I’m hoping it’s not delayed).  It’s a very exciting, jet-setting sort of life that I live, I know.

It’s unbearably humid this morning, and once again, I’ve started sweating copiously just from standing still outside.  I don’t think it was ever this bad up North where I grew up, except perhaps a few days of the summer every now and then.  Down here in south Florida, it’s like this for a good chunk of the year.

I had a particularly rough night last night, sleep-wise; by which I mean it was worse and more fragmented than usual, even for me.  I don’t think I got so much as a single hour of uninterrupted sleep, though over the course of the night, if you string all my sleep together, I probably got a few hours in total.  So, I’m a bit despondent to start the day today.  What else is new?

I had a bad day, mood-wise yesterday.  It was somewhat worse than usual, in the sense that I felt almost completely shut down inside, empty except for malignant self-hate.  Yet, I think all that showed on my face was a blank expression.  I’ve often, in the past, wondered how it is that people cannot see how horrible I feel, when it feels like it’s screaming out of my every pore.  But I guess my emotions don’t show on my face or in my voice.  I try to make them show here, but that doesn’t seem to do me much good, either.  It feels a bit like trying to use active sonar from inside a whirlpool; no recognizable message seems to get out to anyone, even though one is screaming and shouting and about to be dragged into the abyss.

That’s consistent with a “meme” I saw on Facebook yesterday that I downloaded.  I’ve made a slight adjustment to it, and I’ll share that version below, but it reads, “This is what depression looks like”.  Below this, there’s a gridwork of nine black and white pictures of smiling faces…but they’re all faces of well known people‒such as Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, etc.‒who have killed themselves or died in ways more indirectly related to depression.  I didn’t recognize every face on it, but the gist was obvious to me.

The train was five minutes late, again.  This is not horrible, of course, but it is still symptomatic of the slipshod ways in which our society functions.  It would be one thing if it happened only comparatively rarely‒even once or twice in a week might be tolerable‒but it’s running late more often than it’s on time.  When one considers that trains were one of the reasons that coordinated times from place to place were put in place, leading to GMT and ever more careful chronometry, the people running the system should really be ashamed of themselves.  The fact that they are not‒if they are not‒is something for which they should be doubly ashamed.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  (I have my ideas, but most people probably wouldn’t endorse them.)

I had a halfway decent day pain-wise yesterday, but my back seems to be trying to make up for le temps perdu this morning, so far;  my right lower back and hip feel like they’re full of broken glass at the moment.  Again, what else is new, right?

Oh, by the way, if anyone out there is affiliated with Google or Microsoft or any of the other software companies, could you send them the message from me that they should please stop doing updates on their systems which make cosmetic changes that don’t improve functionality but that, if anything, make their systems more awkward and clunky and kindergarten-like?

For instance, the new download process on Chrome on desktop is not better; it’s actually worse than before, keeping track of downloads at the top of the screen and showing progress with a weird little twirling symbol that looks like a casino chip.  It makes me feel like I’m gambling about whether my download is actually going to work.  The old system had downloads showing at the bottom of the screen, which made sense.  You could see the things you had downloaded there, at the bottom, until you were ready to clear them or open them.

Also, this irritating tendency to round all the corners of search bars and input areas and all that bullshit is just pathetic.  It’s inefficient.  You don’t see rounded corners on books and the like, because in media that use print, those shapes don’t make sense!  They’re wasteful of space, they’re inefficient, and they look dopey.  The only books with rounded corners are ones with thick, cardboard pages that are made for babies and toddlers, who might be prone to poke themselves slightly with a hard corner of a book.  But you cannot poke yourself with the corner of a search bar on a computer or phone screen.

If the average person needs such daycare center style safety corners on digital material, then maybe the average person has no business using digital material.  Maybe such people should try to work their way up to Little Golden Books before trying to get online.

But, of course, I don’t think the average person actually does want or prefer such nonsense.  I think the average user is quite practical and hardheaded (in a good way).  I think these idiotic changes are produced by lazy software engineers who want to be seen to be doing something to justify their pay, so they do visually obvious things that they imagine are aesthetically pleasing.

It would be better if they could improve real bugs*, of which there are always plenty.  But that would require serious mental effort and work, and when updates would happen…no one would notice any obvious difference most of the time.

Of course, that really is the way updates ought to be.  Functions that work shouldn’t change.  The update should be more like an effective vaccine or other preventive medicine:  you don’t notice its effect really, because the main effect is that you don’t get sick when you might otherwise have done so.  All that people will experience when using a well-updated system of software will be a normal period of use, but with fewer occasions of frustrating dysfunction.

Speaking of frustrating dysfunction, that’s it for me, today.  Regrettably, I can’t say that’s it for me forever, though I guess that’s possible.  I don’t work tomorrow‒I won’t work tomorrow‒so at earliest, I’ll be back on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

depression2

*Perhaps some of them are, of course; I should give credit if it’s due.  Perhaps most of their work produces results as I describe which are invisible because they simply correct former dysfunction, but then the developers and engineers feel that they have to do something to show that they really did update the system, so they make cosmetic changes as well.  Maybe it’s the equivalent of people getting stickers and pins and stuff when they’ve been vaccinated.  But, oy, it’s annoying.

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.

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There is no gravity–the universe is just warped

Here I am again, at the train station, waiting for the train, writing a blog post on my smartphone.  I didn’t walk this time, because by yesterday afternoon, I was getting extra stiff and sore again, and that could well have been because I walked the 7 miles I walked yesterday in my hiking boots.  Ironically, they may well have been causing me more trouble when “hiking” longer distances.  It’s rather discouraging; I like those boots.

Today, I’m wearing the new shoes of my other type that were supposed to have arrived the day before but only got there yesterday during the day while I was at work.  I didn’t walk in them yet because I’m still in a bit of exacerbated pain.  I’ll physically rest for today, then walk again tomorrow.  The good thing is I seem to be mostly past any tendency to blister.  Thank goodness for small favors.

So, basically, the thing I look forward to‒practically the only thing‒is doing more walking.  I guess that’s a reasonably good thing as far as it goes; it’s better than looking forward only to one’s next martini or one’s next hit of heroin.  But it’s still pretty dissatisfying.  I really hate my life.  Everything stressed me out.  I’m tired.  I want simply to stop.

It doesn’t help that my coworker who shares some of my duties is still out of the office, though I don’t know if he will be out today (I hope not, since it’s payroll day).  What I mean is, he was out yesterday and Monday.  So, I got called in on Saturday and since then (actually, since Friday) have been doing more work than usual‒while in more pain than usual‒for the last 4 work days.  Even before that, I was already at the threshold of cashing it all in.  So, I’m not exactly working toward a more positive outlook.

There’s a defective announcement sign (that I wrote about the other day then deleted from the final draft of the day’s post) cycling away with a moderately distorted message obviously meant to be the same as all the other boards.  I recognize the similarity of its garbled stuff with the intended message.  If I knew the system and its programming, I could probably figure out what’s wrong and possibly even fix it.  But it will likely take the Tri Rail people a while to get to it.  Only yesterday did they apparently fix a malfunctioning check-in kiosk, the one I used to use regularly, that’s been just off, without power, for well over a month.

I guess all these things take effort and money, but it’s frustrating.  I look around at our society and see the deterioration of infrastructure, and the diminution of what little pride we seem to take in running things well.  Even with a reasonably well-rounded system like the Tri Rail, it seems the trains are late almost as often as they are on time.  And, indeed, my train was supposed to have arrived by now, but it has not, and there’s no sign of its light approaching.  On the tracking software website they offer, there’s not even any indication that the train is coming.

Okay, just now its light is becoming visible.  So it’s not too very late…only about 5 minutes.

I don’t understand how it happens that, when they make their own schedule, they can’t seem to keep to it even the majority of the time.  It’s like at work‒our hours have been the same for years, but people can’t seem to get them right.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the boss doesn’t enforce them, or apply any penalty for being late or for staying late.  I can’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it.  Of course, everyone encounters unexpected things from time to time.  But if it happens regularly, frequently, then probably the person to whom it is happening is partly causing it.

I can’t, of course, hold it against my coworker that everyone in his household is sick‒including his one year old daughter.  It happens, and there is only so much people can do to avoid it.  But people who are late to work nearly every day are just getting up and/or leaving their houses too late.  The correction to this is obvious, and one should really be encouraged to enact it, rather than be indulged.

Oh, well, the world is shit, or at least the human world is.  And the average person is going to get more and more mentally lazy as LLMs and the like do more of their “thinking” for them.  I’m not convinced that these things in any sense actually think or create, but then again, there are plenty of humans who don’t convince me that they think.

I guess I can’t hold it against the computers.  They didn’t make themselves.  Neither did the humans, of course, but at least many of them have access to resources with which they could make themselves better.  The fact that, for the most part, they do not make themselves better I hold as a defect or failure on their part.

I can say what I want about them, in any case.  They don’t read, so they’re unlikely to ever encounter my criticism.

Well, that’s eight hundred plus words, now, so I’ll start drawing to a close.  I wish I could do that overall, honestly.  I wish I could just lay me down to sleep, as the old nursery rhyme prayer says.  And if I should die before I wake, well…that wouldn’t be so bad either.  It wouldn’t break my heart.  And I doubt it would break anyone else’s heart, though a handful of people might be temporarily slightly sad.  And people at work would be in a bit of extra stick for a while.  But for them, in that, I have only a little sympathy.

And the rest of the world can go to Hell, which is what it’s steadily doing to itself, anyway.

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.